From left to right, Les Hagen, Executive Director of Action on Smoking & Health, Neil Collishaw, research director for Physicians for a Smoke-free Canada, NDP MP Don Davies and Flory Doucas, co-director of Quebec Coalition for Tobacco Control, call on Health Canada to crack down on the explosion of lifestyle advertising of e-cigarettes during a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Nov. 20, 2018.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
In the 1980s, Mary Ann Collishaw, age 8, was on a walk with her father in Ottawa when the pair spotted a huge billboard promoting cigarettes. Her father, anti-tobacco advocate Neil Collishaw, pointed to it and predicted, “One day half of that sign will be a warning against smoking. And one day there will be no more tobacco ads.”
At the time, Mr. Collishaw was a public health policy analyst whose battle against Big Tobacco had acquainted him with the industry’s ability to dodge and weave around government controls. But it was consistent with his optimism and determination that he foresaw the eventual end of tobacco marketing – and a major reduction in the number of smokers around the world.
Today, his oldest daughter Rachel Collishaw says she and her siblings were never specifically warned at home not to smoke themselves. “He didn’t have to say it. We just knew. … He even sent Granny outside to smoke when she visited.”
Mr. Collishaw, a demographer who used the power of statistics, science and his personal charm to fight the tobacco lobby, died at home in Ottawa on Oct. 10, after a 19-month battle with small-cell bladder cancer. He was 77.
Neil Edward Collishaw was a baby boomer born in London, Ont. on Dec. 1, 1946. His father, Edward, an elementary school teacher recently discharged from the Royal Canadian Air Force, had immigrated to Canada from Lincolnshire, England, at age two and grew up in Wyoming, Ont., near Sarnia. His mother, Ruth Pearl (née Ross), grew up on a Prince Edward Island farm and was descended from Selkirk settlers, a group who fled the Scottish Highland clearances and were brought over by the Earl of Selkirk in 1803.
Mr. Collishaw’s parents met in Hamilton, where his mother had a wartime factory job. They came from large families but settled on six children of their own, starting with Neil, who was born shortly after the war. The household filled a large rambling house in London that eventually received an addition and grew to include a neighbouring residence to better accommodate the chaotic comings and goings of their children, relatives and paying boarders.
Staying close to home, Mr. Collishaw studied chemistry at the University of Western Ontario and then switched to the university’s brand-new sociology school after failing out of science. Social sciences proved a better fit, and after graduating on the dean’s list in 1968, he took a master’s degree in demography, the study of population behaviour.
During a summer job in the flavouring department of the local Silverwood Dairy ice cream plant, he met fellow UWO student Barbara Varty, a French major who worked upstairs in the ice cream bar section. They married in the spring of 1968 and stayed in London long enough for Mr. Collishaw to complete his master’s degree before taking a job at the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges in Ottawa. His wife became a government translator and editor.
For several years Mr. Collishaw worked with government lawyers defending the new laws, then moved his family to Geneva in 1991 to manage the World Health Organization’s tobacco control office for eight years.Courtesy of family
In late 1971, the couple moved to a Paris boarding house for a year so Mr. Collishaw could learn to speak French at the Sorbonne. Their first child, Kevin, was born months later.
Back in Ottawa, Mr. Collishaw joined a team at the federal Department of Health and Welfare studying long-term factors that affected Canadians’ health – including smoking. The work was reported in 1974′s radical Lalonde Report that argued good health was a function of lifestyle and environment as well as medical care.
Mr. Collishaw’s life work began several years later with his transfer to the Health Department’s Bureau of Tobacco Control and Biometrics in 1981 at a time when 38 per cent of Canadians smoked. Using his training in chemistry and statistics, he oversaw research into the effects of tobacco on the human body, and compiled Canada’s first statistics on the number of Canadians who died annually from tobacco-related disease – about 29,000 in 1979. (With a much larger population today, Canada’s annual tobacco-caused death rate was about 48,000 by 2017.)
While he generated a stream of papers about the dangers of smoking and spoke freely to reporters, there was little done with his work until Conservative Health Minister Jake Epp took a personal interest in the late 1980s. Mr. Collishaw worked for two years with the parliamentary committees fashioning the country’s first meaningful tobacco legislation.
The Tobacco Product Control Act, restricting cigarette advertising and packaging, along with NDP MP Lynn McDonald’s private member’s Non-Smokers Health Act (that had spurred the conservatives into action), was passed in 1988. The advertising restrictions triggered charter rights challenges by the tobacco industry that eventually resulted in their overturn by the Supreme Court in 1995.
“But the die had been cast,” Mr. Collishaw explained in a 2023 video review of his life. “Epp said, ‘if we pass this law, it can’t be unpassed. The world is going to change.’ And he was right.”
For several years Mr. Collishaw worked with government lawyers defending the new laws, then moved his family to Geneva in 1991 to manage the World Health Organization’s tobacco control office for eight years.
“It was pretty much the same job I had in Canada, working on tobacco policy,” he recalled in his video. “Except now my beat was the whole world. … And the budget was way smaller than I had in Canada.”
With only a secretary and one research assistant, Mr. Collishaw began collecting tobacco-use data and building alliances within the WHO, international governments and anti-tobacco groups. His research indicated that smoking had killed three million people in 1990, and projected annual deaths would reach 10 million in 2020 if nothing changed.
When the WHO’s legal team initially resisted helping draft his Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Mr. Collishaw set out to work alone, studying the creation of other international conventions, including treaties on child labour, to lay the groundwork for an agreement that would eventually bring together more than 180 countries.
As North American and Western European nations cracked down on tobacco, the smoking industry began focusing on emerging markets. Mr. Collishaw moved around the world warning of the growing health crisis related to smoking and advised governments on drafting legislation to fight back.
It was during this time in Geneva, that Heidi Rathjen of the Quebec Coalition for Tobacco Control met Mr. Collishaw at a conference in Kyiv, a city overrun with cigarette billboards and bus ads.
Neil Collishaw with Heather Crowe, a non-smoking Ottawa waitress who fought for compensation after she received a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. She blamed decades of second-hand smoke for her illness. Mr. Collishaw helped Heather Crowe win a financial settlement and then recruited her as an ally in their fight for smoke-free workplaces.Conseil québécois sur le tabac et la santé
Speaking at a recent memorial service, she said, “Neil’s kindness, open-mindedness, thoroughness and experience with NGOs proved handy as he worked to encourage and empower governments from the Eastern Bloc to tackle the tobacco industry.”
By the time the WHO’s tobacco treaty came into force in 2005, Mr. Collishaw and his family had returned to Canada, where he joined Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada (PSC) as research director in 2000. It was there that he met Ottawa waitress Heather Crowe, who was fighting for compensation after a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. A non-smoker, she blamed decades of second-hand smoke for her illness. Mr. Collishaw and colleague Cynthia Callard helped her win a financial settlement and then recruited her as an ally in their fight for smoke-free workplaces.
Because the Non-smokers’ Health Act only applied to federal workplaces, the majority of Canadians had no legislated guarantee of smoke-free environments beyond local bylaws and voluntary workplace compliance. “There was zero protection of workplaces in 2003, and 14 jurisdictions had to change,” Mr. Collishaw said.
He and Ms. Crowe met with politicians across the country, starting with a visit to Nunavut in 2003, where they sat with Indigenous elders.
“When I used charts and graphs … people’s eyes would glaze over. You need the truth from science, but we also needed a story and Heather had a story,” he recalled.
By the time, Ms. Crowe died in 2006, 90 per cent of provinces and territories had smoke-free laws in place. By 2009, the entire country had legislation in place banning smoking in indoor public places and workplaces, so Canadians no longer needed to depend on piecemeal municipal bans for protection.
While working for PSC, Mr. Collishaw lent his expertise to government lawyers working on appeals of the new Tobacco Act and a team that won a $13-billion judgment for Quebec smokers in 2019.
One group that didn’t take his advice was Health Canada when vaping products began to appear in 2004.
“Vaping is the great shame of Health Canada,” he said before his death. “In 2018 it passed the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act which, based on no evidence, made vaping legal … and now we have 500,000 young people who vape but never smoked. We have a whole new epidemic on our hands.”
His younger sister Ruth Ann Collishaw remembers that even as a child, he looked out for others. “In his quiet, patient, reasonable way, he was always pushing an agenda of some sort that would lead to good things for everyone.”
At the end of his life, Mr. Collishaw was somewhat less patient. “To truly end the tobacco and vaping epidemics, we have to attack the tobacco and vaping industries, and we have to win. If we are to deal with this venomous creature, chasing tails will no longer suffice. We have to cut off the head of the snake.”
Mr. Collishaw leaves his wife, Barbara; children, Kevin, Rachel, Mary Ann and Laura; two grandchildren; five siblings; and dozens of cousins.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.