The smell of cotton candy and blue raspberry wafted outside the Château Laurier in late November as Canada’s 44th parliament opened its first session nearby — and no, there wasn’t a fair in town to celebrate.
Instead, dozens of vapers — enough to displace sidewalk traffic in front of the grand hotel, directly across from the temporary Senate chambers at 2 Rideau St. — were gathered to express their discontent about Health Canada’s push to ban aromatically sweet varieties of vape pods for consumer purchase.
In June 2021, Health Canada made known its intentions to regulate the sale of flavoured vape products, looking to narrow the variety of fruity and sweet vape options down to plain tobacco and mint/menthol.
The planned regulation was driven by concerns about youth uptake of flavoured products.
The public consultation period lasted 75 days, during which a parliamentary petition against the proposed regulations gained 16,370 signatures, and more than 25,000 feedback submissions were received by Health Canada.
As the public consultation period ended on Sept. 2, the ongoing federal election campaign at the time halted any progress on the potential new rules around vaping. But as the new parliament launched last month and regulations were once again on the table, Rights4Vapers — a consumer group opposed to the planned vape-flavour restrictions — held a rally to protest the Nov. 23 speech from the throne.
“The whole entire goal of Rights4Vapers is to have balanced regulations, where the needs of people who are quitting smoking through vaping products and keeping it out of the hands of minors is looked at equally when it comes to building regulations,” said Maria Papaioannoy, a Rights4Vapers spokesperson. “Currently, smokers are not even part of the discussion when it comes to the current set of regulations and the trajectory that they have taken.”
Moves toward federal regulation come shortly after Nova Scotia provincially banned flavoured vape products in April 2020, with New Brunswick following suit in September 2021. Both provinces say these steps were taken to curb youth interest in the practice.
Despite a new iteration of the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act becoming law in 2018, which prohibits the promotion of nicotine products among other regulations, Health Canada has reported that vaping among youth doubled between 2017 and 2019. Additionally, according to a 2020 survey, 14 per cent of youth aged 15-19 said they had used a vape in the past 30 days, unchanged from 2019.
But Rights4Vapers, including several demonstrators at the Nov. 23 protest, said the focus on preventing youth from using vape products is causing collateral damage among those trying to find a less harmful alternative to smoking.
“When I quit smoking, it was important to get away from smoking; I didn’t want something to remind me of cigarettes,” said Barrington Anglin, a vape user at the rally who found flavoured vapes to be an effective tool in quitting smoking. “My ultimate fear would be that people are either going to be dissuaded from vaping, or a lot of vapers are going to end up going back to smoking, which kind of defeats the purpose.”
Papaioannoy passionately agreed. She advocated for flavoured vapes to be seen as a form of harm reduction that draws smokers away from combustible cigarettes, saying every addict in the country should be respected and not minimized.
“Why are smokers treated differently than any other person that has an addiction? Why do we need to let smokers settle?” Papaioannoy said. “(It’s like saying), ‘Oh, you know what, you’ve already liked the smell of burnt tar, then you need to be able to get the burnt tar smell in a safer way.’”
Health Canada acknowledges some of these concerns but did not offer any clarification on how potential regulations will be augmented to satisfy the concerns of those observing the increase in youth vaping and recovering smokers.
“Health Canada has identified the availability of a variety of flavours as one of the factors that has contributed to the rapid rise in youth vaping, despite existing restrictions on promoting flavours,” Health Canada said in an e-mail statement. “Health Canada is also aware of the role flavours can play in helping people who smoke transition from smoking to vaping products as one alternative source of nicotine that is less harmful than cigarettes if they switch completely to vaping.”
Alex Riehl – Capital Current – 2021-12-20.