Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to address you on Bill C-32.
I would like to thank the chair and all the committee members for giving us the opportunity to tell them our point of view about this bill, which is so important for the health of our young people.
My name is Melodie Tilson. I'm the director of policy with the Non-Smokers' Rights Association. My organization has played a major role in tobacco control in Canada for more than three decades, and I myself have been working in tobacco control for the past 19 years.
The Non-Smokers' Rights Association strongly supports the amendments in the Tobacco Act contained in Bill C-32. Bill C-32 would put an end to tobacco advertising in print publications, a practice that resumed in 2007 and that has proliferated in the past year. My colleague is going to show just a few of the samples that we've collected from the veritable mountain of tobacco ads that have appeared over the past year or so.
A key objective of the Tobacco Act, to protect young persons and others from inducements to use tobacco products, is “being undermined with the current provision allowing advertising in publications with 85% adult readership”. As research by University of Regina business professor Anne Lavack shows, significant numbers of impressionable teenagers remain exposed to tobacco promotion.
Based on 2005 readership data from the Print Measurement Bureau, Dr. Lavack found that advertising in a single issue of People magazine in Canada, for example, reaches half a million youth readers aged 12 to 17, or about 20% of the youth population of this age. Advertising in the Canadian edition of Time magazine reaches about 200,000 adolescents aged 12 to 17. Even more troubling is the extensive advertising of tobacco products in entertainment weeklies across the country. These publications clearly target teens and young adults and are available free of charge in hundreds of locations throughout major Canadian cities.
The bottom line is that limiting print advertising to publications with an 85% adult readership results in substantial promotion of tobacco products to vulnerable young Canadians. We commend the government for recognizing that this loophole must be closed.
We also commend the government for understanding the importance of dealing with flavoured cigarillos. This product is clearly being marketed to youth and young adults, and with remarkable success. You heard already from Mr. Glover that sales have increased exponentially in recent years, growing eightfold in just six years to 400 million units.
Perhaps most disturbing is that flavoured cigarillos are being consumed by youth who would otherwise not have considered smoking. If this population of youth smokers were covered by the definition of current smokers in our major national surveys, smoking rates among Canadian youth would increase by five percentage points, from 15% to 20%.
I see that we've all brought a lot of samples for show and tell, but I'm going to pass around a few cigarillos, and I invite you to just open the cap and smell them. They really do smell like candy or Kool-Aid and nothing like a tobacco product.