David Clement is the North American Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center

This week Sweden edged closer to officially becoming “smoke free.” According to the World Health Organization, that is a smoking rate lower than 5%. At 5.3%, and on the current trajectory, it’s not a matter of if Sweden becomes smoke free, but when. As one would expect, Sweden is the only country in Europe where lung cancer isn’t at the top of the list for cancer mortality.

In Canada, by contrast, lung cancer is the leading cancer killer. Canada has set an ambitious target of cutting the amount of smokers to less than 5% by 2035, which would mean going from 4.6 million Canadian smokers in 2022 to fewer than 1.8 million Canadian smokers in 2035.

A noble goal, then.

However, as anyone who is a smoker and has tried to quit will likely attest, quitting smoking is extremely difficult and not always a case of quitting cold turkey.

Therefore one way to encourage quitting smoking includes transitioning to products that are less harmful than traditional cigarettes.

Unfortunately however, Ottawa, at every step, has made it harder for smokers trying to quit through a myriad of bad policies.

Take nicotine pouches. Despite the fact that they are 99% less harmful than cigarettes, according to German researchers, Health Minister Mark Holland has restricted available flavours to just mint/menthol, and banned pouches from being sold alongside cigarettes.

The cognitive dissonance here is rather astounding. In Holland’s view, corner stores can be trusted to sell cigarettes, specifically not selling them to minors, but they can’t be trusted to sell an exponentially less risky product like pouches? There is a long list of former health regulators who agree that these are useful as a quitting tool, including the former head of the U.S. FDA Scott Gotlieb, saying “we have to embrace them and offer adult smokers modified risk products”.

The hypocrisy of course isn’t limited to pouches. It also includes Ottawa's approach to vaping.

Ottawa seems hellbent on following through on the promise to ban vape flavours, despite the fact that vaping is 95 per cent less harmful than smoking, according to Public Health England. Their research shows that given its success, public health messaging should encourage smokers to make the switch, not make it harder.

South of the border, a nationally representative longitudinal study of over 17,000 Americans showed that adults who used flavoured vaping products were 2.3 times more likely to quit smoking cigarettes when compared to vapers who consumed tobacco-flavoured vaping products. Continuing the war on vaping all but ensures Canada will never meet its 5 per cent target by 2030.

And it doesn’t end there either, unfortunately. Heat-not-burn products, which heat tobacco rather than combust it, have been shown to reduce the harm of intoxicants by around 90 per cent when compared to cigarettes.

The USA’s FDA has gone as far as to authorize marketing these products as a product that “significantly reduces the production of harmful and potentially harmful chemicals”.

However, the Canadian government is not making that transition easy for Canadians either. Rather than lend an encouraging hand to those who would like to be a part of their ambitious 2035 goal, the government taxes these products the same way they do traditional cigarettes.

The purported use of “excise stamps” — in actuality a sin tax— on traditional cigarettes is to discourage people from purchasing this harmful product, and of course to raise money for the government. However, if it is proven that heat-not-burn products reduce harm to the smoker and potentially acts as a way for people to transition towards quitting smoking, then the purpose of the tax no longer makes sense.

The current excise sin tax demands a minimum of 50 gram excise stamps. This tax means that tobacco in a twenty-pack of heat-not-burn units which weighs 5.33 grams is taxed the same amount as a package containing 50 grams. That means Canadians are paying this sin tax at nine times more than the regular rate, and three times more than a pack of twenty traditional cigarettes.

How can Canadians looking to switch to a less harmful product or who wish to quit smoking rationalize such a cost? It would certainly seem to run counter to the Canadian government’s attempt to curb smoking by 2035.

At the end of the day Canada has to make a decision: do we want to follow Sweden’s lead and meet the target we’ve set for ourselves or not? The playbook for success is there, but only if we have the willingness to see what is right in front of us.

David Clement is the North American Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center.

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