Starting on May 31, 2010 (the World Health Organization's 23rd annual World No Tobacco Day), Errol Povah made his way from Victoria, B.C. to Nanaimo, then Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, then south to New York City... a total distance of about 6,300 kilometres.  Doing a marathon a day (mostly walking, but some running), six days a week for six months, it was late October/early November when Povah, making his way along Highway 7 in southeastern Ontario, inadvertently missed Kingston by just 70 kilometres or so.

Little did he know, at that time, that, almost 6 years later, he would miss Kingston again... this time, by about 4,000 km.  Why?  Well, because his outstanding life-long contribution to tobacco control -- and, most notably, his goal of seeing Big Tobacco out of business -- wasn't considered worthy of an invitation to and/or attendance at the so-called Tobacco Endgame Summit that occurred in Kingston on September 30 and October 1, 2016.

Now, some people (yes, even some of his fellow anti-tobacco activists), after learning of Povah's goal (you remember... to see Big Tobacco out of business), might think, "He's crazy!  We can't possibly have a guy who belongs in an institution (perhaps even in a straight jacket) attending our conference; what ever would 'the establishment' -- and/or the mainstream media -- think?"

Well, Povah has spent most of his life not giving a damn about what either the establishment and/or the mainstream media think... and focusing much more on getting the job done, whatever that job might be!

With all due respect to the 85 "leading health experts" who attended the summit, Povah deserved to be there too!  After all, Povah -- president of Airspace Action on Smoking and Health, the world's leading all-volunteer anti-tobacco organization -- has been calling for the total eradication of the tobacco industry (including all illegal tobacco operations) from the face of the planet for more than 10 years now.  That call was mostly inspired by a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- on his own dime -- to protest a tobacco industry convention in 2005 (followed by a similar trip, in 2008, to Bangkok, Thailand)...which was, we suspect, long before many of the above-mentioned "leading health experts" had even thought about the tobacco "endgame".

"Frankly, I think the Tobacco Endgame Summit used the word 'endgame' extremely loosely; I don't consider "5 by '35" (the 5 representing the 'target' percentage of Canadians who will still be using tobacco products...by the year 2035) to be an endgame strategy at all!", Povah said.

"Based on that strategy -- and assuming current and future percentages (of the population that smoke) and tobacco death tolls are all proportional -- tobacco will still be killing about 10,000 Canadians each and every year, 20 years from now!  Not exactly what we would describe as an endgame!"

Airspace, meanwhile, has a couple of (completely legal) strategies that will, when enacted and enforced, achieve something far greater than "5 by '35" -- dare we say, the real endgame -- and not just in Canada, but globally.

Stay tuned.