Table 1.

Staff expert perspectives on the public health department’s key areas of influence and strategic assets (strategic positioning).

Area of Influence/Strategic Asset	Public Health Perspectives (Evidence of Strategic Positioning)
2008 Ontario Public Health Standards	“So under the standards that actually relate to healthy eating and active living, our staff were influential in ensuring that food systems policy got included in the standards.”
Regional planning	“I managed to capture [regional planner’s] attention who was the planner with the lead on the Regional Official Plan…Knowing he was a planner, and knowing the role of planners all along, we had made efforts to get to know them.”
Municipal planning	“So, we thought, ‘We’ve got to start getting our heads around land use policy’, right? Because we think we have a toe in the door with planners to influence this.”
Regional decision making	“I wouldn’t underestimate the amount of resources that we put into influencing this…Because it was something that the Region had direct control over, [so] we put more effort into it because we had that sort of inside avenue to decision makers.”
Community support	“I think what then happened is we realized the other asset we had was huge community support, and huge partnerships with community players …so we really turned to them.”
Regional policy options	“We had somebody who was trained as a land use planner at the time working in Public Health and that had been a strategic and intentional thing because we had wanted to influence land use policy.”
Regional planning (policy language)	“We became one of the stakeholders and were actually providing input into the Official Plan and were responding to comments that were coming from the public. And we had an opportunity to review and comment on the various edits.”