Bulletin 7, January 18, 2024
This Bulletin is published by the Campaign to Ban Ads for Gambling, a group of individuals interested in securing legislation to ban advertisements for gambling, just as has been done for tobacco and cannabis.
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In this Bulletin:
1. Follow Us on Instagram
2. Status of Bill S-269
3. Gambling ‘Responsibly’ is No Solution
4. Commercial Determinants of Health and Gambling
5. Subscribe to the Bulletin
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1. Follow Us on Instagram
Ban Ads for Gambling has started an Instagram account that summarises key points of each Bulletin to reach a wider audience and increase subscriptions to our Bulletin and to the web site. Please follow and share: https://www.instagram.com/banadsforgambling.ca
2. Status of Bill S-269
Bill S-269, which aims to control gambling ads, seems stuck in the Senate. Senators Deacon and Cotter, its sponsors, report the Senate has been bogged down with debate on urgent bills sent by the Commons for approval by the government, and there simply has not been time to complete second reading so the Bill can be sent to Committee.
The senators think the situation will not improve substantially for the first part of this year. We are now looking at alternatives, in the hope we can somehow get the matter before the House of Commons in a government-sponsored bill. We will advise you through a new Bulletin when we have some good ideas how to proceed quickly.
3. Gambling 'Responsibly’ is No Solution
The renowned journal The Lancet has published an article in the January issue about legislation and regulations restricting gambling in many countries. It concludes that almost every country takes the approach that is so common in Canada, namely to tell people to gamble, but gamble responsibly.
The head-note states:
“More than 80% of countries worldwide now legally permit gambling. Harmful gambling was recognized as a health and wellbeing issue in most of the analyzed jurisdictions, but near-exclusive focus was given to individual-level harms rather than to wider social and economic harms, or harms to others. Most of the proposed prevention measures focused on individual responsibility. Gambling policies worldwide are changing, but addressing gambling as a public health issue is not yet translating into comprehensive policy action across jurisdictions.”
The article notes:
“Harmful gambling was recognized as a potentially serious health and wellbeing issue in most jurisdictions (21 of 25 studied). However, individual framing was predominant and system framing of gambling-related harms was almost absent. In all cases, individual-level harms were foregrounded compared with harms to concerned significant others and wider social and economic harms.”
It concludes:
When gambling is made legal, the responsibility for preventing harms lies not only with providers and gamblers, but also with legislators and regulators who permit gambling within their jurisdiction and govern all characteristics associated with its provision.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(23)00221-9/fulltext
4. Commercial Determinants of Health and Gambling
Most of us are familiar with `social determinants of health’ – the factors which are most critical to maintaining a high standards of health – good housing, reasonable income, a healthy diet, an absence of violence in daily life. When those standards are not met, good health fails and expensive medical procedures are needed. To ensure medical costs are reasonable we need to address the social determinants of health, something we are now failing at in Canada, as homelessness grows.
A new term is now entered our vocabulary – commercial determinants of health.
Here’s the way an article, also in The Lancet describes the term:
“Although commercial entities can contribute positively to health and society there is growing evidence that the products and practices of some commercial actors—notably the largest transnational corporations—are responsible for escalating rates of avoidable ill health, planetary damage, and social and health inequity; these problems are increasingly referred to as the commercial determinants of health. The climate emergency, the non-communicable disease epidemic, and that just four industry sectors (ie, tobacco, ultra-processed food, fossil fuel, and alcohol) already account for at least a third of global deaths illustrate the scale and huge economic cost of the problem.”
Gambling could easily be included as an industry sector where large corporations off-load the costs of its activities to the public.
The Lancet notes:
“This paper, the first in a Series on the commercial determinants of health, explains how the shift towards market fundamentalism and increasingly powerful transnational corporations has created a pathological system in which commercial actors are increasingly enabled to cause harm and externalize the costs of doing so. Consequently, as harms to human and planetary health increase, commercial sector wealth and power increase, whereas the countervailing forces having to meet these costs (notably individuals, governments, and civil society organizations) become correspondingly impoverished and disempowered or captured by commercial interests. This power imbalance leads to policy inertia; although many policy solutions are available, they are not being implemented. Health harms are escalating, leaving health-care systems increasingly unable to cope. Governments can and must act to improve, rather than continue to threaten, the wellbeing of future generations, development, and economic growth.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)00590-1/fulltext
5. Subscribe to the Bulletin
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