O (Dear), Canada
Health Canada gets desperate and begs for social media influencers to propagate dogma
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by Dave Cross
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Health Canada says: “Health Canada is responsible for helping Canadians maintain and improve their health. It ensures that high-quality health services are accessible, and works to reduce health risks.”
The organisation has come in for a lot of criticism in the past. For example, it has been slammed for allowing the natural health products industry to get away with making baseless claims and to be sold without research looking at side effects. Others have accused it of secrecy surrounding the testing, manufacture and use of drugs sourced overseas.
While the legality of vaping has changed in Canada, Health Canada’s position hasn’t. It still considers vaping products “to be harmful”, although (probably begrudgingly) “not as harmful as smoking cigarettes”. Also, “there is clear evidence that exposure to nicotine adversely affects cognitive function in the developing brains of adolescents.”
It hopes that the new legislation will be extended to help knock the ‘cool’ out of vaping. Because, err, ‘the kids’. Marion Wright, executive director of Rideauwood Addiction and Family Services, is hopeful: “It will lose its coolness [with young people], especially if there are more restrictions put on it and something else will probably pop up.”
A spokesperson from Health Canada told Global News: “Canadians look for information from a variety of sources, and youth in particular are more likely to engage with other influencers beyond government, or health professionals.”
As a consequence, the government body is looking to hand out a contract to a company that can provide them with a handful of popular social media content creators. These “influencers” will be tasked with getting young people to attend Health Canada events and share its information about harm vaping.
The campaign will target 15-24 year olds, which poses the question: “How does Health Canada define an adolescent?” It will also produce riveting promotional materials for kids to marvel at in school – because they really enjoy the patronising and being told what to think.
At this stage it isn’t clear if this action seeks to replicate the work of Tobacco-free Kids in the United States, a fact-free organisation that focuses on spreading dangerous lies about vaping, and was disseminating misinformation through satellite social media accounts during the vote to ban flavours in San Francisco.
New Nicotine Alliance UK’s Sarah Jakes said: “Seriously? ‘Not enough people are interested in Health Canada’s feed so let’s recruit others to spread the propaganda’. You couldn’t make it up.”
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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