Health promotion in Canada: 25 years of unfulfilled promise

Commemorations of the Ottawa Charter have become a bit of a growth industry in Canada. Health Canada organized a Tenth Anniversary Symposium (Potter, 1997) followed by a case study reviewing progress prepared for the Fourth International Conference on Health Promotion in Jakarta in 1997 (Health Canada, 1997), there was a 21st birthday event and series of publications both in Quebec (O’Neill et al., 2007a) and at the IUHPE Conference in Vancouver (Jackson and Riley, 2007; IUHPE, 2007) and most recently a well-attended session to mark the 25th anniversary at the 2011 CPHA Conference (Tomm-Bonde and Kirk, 2011). In addition, there have been two editions of Health Promotion in Canada (Pederson et al., 1994; O’Neill et al., 2007b) and a third edition is due out in Fall 2011. Together, these three books give a comprehensive and evolving view of health promotion in Canada and document the many good things that have happened. It is not my intention to try to summarize all that has been said elsewhere, but rather to cast a personal and critical eye over what I see to be the general failure of our federal and provincial governments to fully adopt and implement health promotion, and thus to realize the population health benefits that could and should have been achieved.