Bill S-5 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Tobacco Act and the Non-smokers’ Health Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

Part 1 of this enactment amends the Tobacco Act. In order to respond to the report of the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Health entitled Vaping: Toward a Regulatory Framework for E-Cigarettes, it amends the Act to regulate the manufacture, sale, labelling and promotion of vaping products and changes the title of the Act accordingly. It also amends certain provisions of the Act relating to tobacco products, including with respect to product standards, disclosure of product information, product sale, sending and delivery and product promotion. The schedule to the Act is amended to add menthol and cloves as prohibited additives in all tobacco products. As well, it adds new provisions to the Act, including in respect of inspection and seizure.
Part 1 also makes consequential amendments to the Food and Drugs Act and the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act.
Part 2 of this enactment amends the Non-smokers’ Health Act to regulate the use of vaping products in the federal workplace and on certain modes of transportation.

Tobacco Act

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, a couple of thoughts come to mind. First is that the whole idea of plain and standard packaging is not new. Other countries in the world have done this. My colleague made reference to France. Australia has kind of led the way.

Within the last couple of years, an enormous amount of consultation has been done by this government. Legislation has been brought in and some goals have been established with respect to reducing smoking. Obviously, the government is very much concerned and wants to get fewer Canadians, young Canadians picking up the habit of smoking. Most of the different stakeholders, and I suspect there would be a consensus from most, believe that moving toward that standardized packaging is good. The member seemed to conclude that. It appears she is not in opposition to this.

She raised concerns with respect to contraband cigarettes. I see them as two different issues. I do not see the direct correlation, and one of her colleagues made reference to that. Maybe that is one of the issues we could advance to the standing committee where no doubt the committee would have more time to deal with it.

My question is specifically on standardized packaging. Do the Conservatives believe we should be moving forward with this? The New Democrats have been very clear. They support it and they want to see it move forward.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, in his comments, my colleague reinforced the point I made in my speech. He said that some people believed this would work and that other jurisdictions had introduced this. However, is it going to work?

The government needs to state very clearly how much it predicts the plain packaging initiative will reduce demand, how much the cost of implementation of this framework will be, how it will deal with the issue of a potential increase in contraband, which we need to study as well. It also needs to talk about some of the findings that have come out, especially the report that has been published in France. The French health minister has said that plain packaging does not lead smokers to stop smoking.

Again, I would go back to the thesis of my speech, which is helpful questions for committee. These are questions that as legislators and regulators we should answer prior to introducing a regulatory framework so we can go back to our constituents and say, if as the Liberals claim, this will reduce the incidence of tobacco usage, this is how much the government expects it to be reduced by, this is the data it relies on, and this is the framework it will use to reduce contraband consumption.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, as the health critic for the NDP, it was incumbent upon me to do extensive research on the bill. I want to assure the member that there is credible peer reviewed evidence on this subject.

Fourteen separate studies on the impact of plain packaging in its first year in Australia were published in a special supplement to the BMJ. That research found that after the laws were implemented “there was a "statistically significant increase" in the number of people thinking about and making attempts to quit smoking.” Other key findings included that plain packaging reduced the appeal of packs, particularly with adolescents and young adults, the legislation had not increased the consumption of illicit cigarettes, and plain packaging had encouraged smokers to think about and attempt to quit.

My hon. colleague kept referring to France as some sort of evidence that plain packaging had no measurable effects on smoking rates. That legislation was only implemented in France in 2016, so it has had maybe a year and a half to evaluate it. That is not enough time for the French government to truly understand the implications of its legislation.

Does the member agree, given the experience of Australia, which is the longest period of time we have since 2012 with legislation, that we should proceed with this legislation confident in the fact that it will definitely have an impact on smoking rates, particularly among young people, even if we cannot measure the exact amount?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the point of the legislation is to say that we would like to reduce it to this amount and that this is how this regulation is going to do that. That is kind of what we do here. If we are going to spend taxpayer dollars on implementing a regulatory framework, where there will be staff required and all sorts of different things to do this, it is kind of ridiculous if we cannot exactly measure it. Why would we do something if we cannot measure it?

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague wanting to have a good discussion based on data and not simply just, as she said, a knee-jerk reaction to regulate and ask questions later. We need to have a more significant discussion about contraband tobacco and its influence in this country. I have heard from industry that it is aware of more contraband tobacco factories in this country than legal ones.

The question is not only who, but whether our policy response in terms of enforcement is woefully inadequate and why that is. The government is asking Canadians to trust it, asking us as their representatives to trust, that plain packaging will make it better. However, there are different factors here than in France or Australia. Contraband tobacco is one of them. Taxes and the cost of them is another. Any time one has a higher cost, it is going to push more to the illegal market.

Does the member think there needs to be a better case made by the authorities as to why we have this problem, and whether we are taking into consideration a problem that already exists and may actually be magnified by this legislation?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with many of the points my colleague has made. Again, this is why part of the discussion at committee needs to be around that whole measurement framework. My colleague from the NDP made some good points as well that there are bodies of research. I read one study showing there might be a correlation between how people perceive the taste of nicotine products in plain packaging versus regular packaging.

The point I am trying to make is that we just do not have a lot of data on that in the Canadian context. How are we going to do that once this comes into force? I know the Liberals have a majority government and this is going to pass, but as the opposition party, I would hope the government takes suggestions in terms of the need to put in place a framework to measure whether this works or not. I am concerned that without those side pieces of research, of the enforcement of contraband products, it might not. I might be wrong, but that is what the committee study is for. I hope the government really has a hard think about that, so that we are not coming back here in five years saying that it did not work.

I am not sure if the legislation has a parliamentary review component built into it. This is perhaps something that the committee could include if it does not right now.

I also wanted to thank my colleague from Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola for his previous intervention before I spoke around the CRA's enforcement procedures for contraband cigarettes. With the introduction of this potential regulation, it is a timely discussion to have. We should perhaps be putting more enforcement around that. That would also perhaps lead to a reduction of tobacco usage in Canada.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak to the bill. Before I get started, I want inform the House that I will be sharing my time with the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.

Today, I would like to talk about the bill from three perspectives. I want to talk about the present rate of smoking, whether plain packaging will work, and the relationship between tobacco use and marijuana use.

I am going to start with the present rate. I have some good news. Smoking has been on a downward trend for about 50 years. That is the case. Over the last 10 years, we have seen the usage rate drop about 10%. I expect we will continue to see this as smoking becomes less and less culturally acceptable.

Why are we discussing this here? One of the reasons I got into politics is that I often think the government takes on things that it has no business taking on. This is another area where we have to look at whether the government even has a responsibility to worry about whether Canadians are smoking.

In Canada, we have public health care. It is not necessarily administered by the federal government, but a big part of our budget does end up getting transferred to the provinces. I know in my own province, 50% of Alberta's spending is spent on health care. Therefore, because of all the money we collectively spend on health care, we then collectively get to infringe upon the freedoms of others and say, “No, sorry, you cannot do that.”

Fortunately, we do not throw people in jail for smoking, but we do exert a lot of social pressure and some legal pressure to ensure that people are not smoking. In my own life, I do find that smoking is a filthy habit. I have several people close to me who smoke. I give it no credence whatsoever. I have no problem publicly shaming them for smoking, and even people I do not know very well. I must say it is part of Canadian culture. If somebody is overweight, people definitely do not say anything about it. However, if somebody smokes, it seems to be fair game to tell them that it is a filthy habit that they should give up. That is entirely the case.

That social pressure, that legal pressure, and the fact that we have public health care, all three of these things seem to be working to reduce the rate of smoking in this country.

As I said earlier, in the 1960s, and I was not around in the 1960s but I have read a few things and my notes tell me, about 50% of Canadians smoked. Today, I am told it is about 13% of Canadians who smoke. I would say that whatever we are doing seems to be working.

Then we come to the plain packaging that is being introduced by the current bill. Will plain packaging work? If we listen to the NDP members, they say it will definitely work. What does working look like? What will success look like? If we are seeing a downward trend in the percentage of the population that is smoking, then after we introduce plain packaging we would expect to see a significant, sudden decrease. We would expect to see this trend line going in one direction, and then with the introduction of plain packaging we would expect to see a blip, hopefully in the downward trend. That has yet to be seen, and I do not think that we are going to see that.

The other thing about plain packaging that I would like to point out is that from the examples of the plain packaging that I have seen, I am pretty sure that I could make a plain package on my home printer. That is going to be a gift to the contraband community. In the province that I come from, the province of Alberta, contraband is not as big of a deal because there is not a lot of tobacco being grown in Alberta. The contraband tobacco that does come to Alberta comes from far away.

The contraband that I have heard of in Alberta is typically packaged in the plain packaging. It is typically in a package that has no identifying marks on it whatsoever. Unlike in other jurisdictions where contraband is often seen in a plastic bag, in Alberta it seems to come in plain packaging. Therefore, plain packaging will be a gift in that now if we see someone with plain packaging we know immediately it is contraband, whereas if everybody has plain packaging we will not know what is contraband.

This overlaps with the marijuana debate that we are having here, and I am not sure who I got this from but someone sent this to my office and put “Tobacco” and “Marijuana” on either side of it. What is interesting is that the person points out that the plain packaging or even the shape and size of tobacco, the appearance of cigarettes, these kinds of things, are all highly regulated by the government, yet when it comes to marijuana there does not seem to be any interest in regulating what, how, or why this product is going to be consumed. Granted, I know that marijuana is consumed in more ways than just smoking, but it is interesting that in this Parliament we are debating the legalization of marijuana and putting in higher restrictions on cigarettes.

One of the other interesting things, as we are debating this and the government seems to be supportive of this particular bill, is that the government is bringing in plain packaging for cigarettes yet does not have any kind of advertising or packaging rules around marijuana. This particular picture shows me some of the examples of the marijuana packaging, which looks like candy packaging, and then it shows a picture of cigarettes. I do not know if it is the same in every province. In Alberta, flavoured tobacco is illegal, but I know that the tobacco packages are the most disgusting things one has ever seen, and 75% of the package is covered with a health warning label. The example here is a picture of someone's mouth with their teeth rotting away. I think that would be more effective than plain packaging. Then there is an example of the marijuana packaging, which has no health warnings on it and does not seem to have any indication that this might be affecting people's health.

Interestingly, marijuana may have even more detrimental effects to one's health than tobacco. Tobacco affects one's physical health. Marijuana may also affect one's mental health. However, the government has been silent on the warnings that are going to be on the packaging. It says that there will be some level of branding allowed.

We have seen that members of the Trailer Park Boys and the Tragically Hip have all signed on as ambassadors for marijuana branding, but the Marlboro Man has long been outlawed in this country. It is interesting, for the sake of consistency, that we would be working on that.

Another so-called sin tax area that we deal with is alcohol. Again, there are fairly strict guidelines as to the advertising of it, yet there does not seem to be anything when it comes to marijuana. Therefore, it seems that we are very much moving quickly in one direction with one particular item and totally in another direction with another item. This strikes me as odd, particularly given that I like to think that the free market has a lot of benefits. The free market gives us everything that we need. I would say that we need to allow the free market to flourish, but I again go back to the fact that we have public health care in this country so we have the right to impose upon each other these health restrictions.

I look forward to seeing what happens to the bill at committee. I understand my party will be supporting it being sent to committee. I certainly hope that the folks on that committee take into consideration the present rate and the declining rate, that they look at the effects that plain packaging will have on the contraband world, and that they will consider the current government's direction with its marijuana legislation and in some way try to keep it consistent with other products in this country.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have been sitting here thinking about this debate and recognizing that I owe cigarettes big thanks for my activism through life. When my dear grandfather was taken from us with lung cancer from smoking cigarettes when I was five years old, I became so rampant in my objection to smoking that I stole cigarette packages out of my mother's friends' purses, blew out matches, and did all manner of things to stop people from smoking. I am grateful that the statistics quoted by our colleague show that Canadians are smoking less, and clearly not due to my activism.

I want to pursue what we might know about how Health Canada will pursue the problem of smaller amounts of nicotine delivered by a different system. We do need this legislation. We need to regulate, but do we know enough about the downstream risks of vaping? I wonder if he could comment on that, either on behalf of the Conservative Party or for himself as a member of Parliament.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things I found very interesting in my own research on vaping and its ability to get people to quit smoking is the fact that we really do not know at this point what the downstream effects of vaping are. Anecdotally, vaping seems to help people quit smoking. That is a big positive.

I will go back to the beginning of my speech, where I talked about the government's involvement in people's lives. I always ask, does the government really have anything to do here? I would put that forward as well. Some people come down on it and say that if we do not know what is going to happen, we should definitely regulate it. We know it helps people to reduce smoking. We do not know its long-term health effects. Given the fact that we have a public health care system, we seem to think that we should regulate it.

Let us pull back for a moment and see what comes in. If we can work hard to get people to quit smoking by the use of vaping, let us allow that to happen. Let us get out of the way until we know what the real results are.

[David Tilson, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the debate on the topic throughout today, particularly my colleague's comments, and there appears to be a conflict between Bill C-45, which is the cannabis bill, and Bill S-5.

Governments, provincial and federal, as well as organizations have spent a lot of money trying to stop people from smoking. We get into vaping, contraband, and a lot of these topics. All of these things are out of fear for our health, whether we are talking about illegal contraband, packaging, or health, when people go to a doctor or have surgery and have to sign something saying whether they smoke and when they stopped smoking.

In Bill C-45, it is almost like we are encouraging people by legalizing cannabis. The provincial governments will be selling different types of products or sending it out to have other people do it. Is there a major contradiction in the philosophy of these two bills?

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Speaker, that was precisely what I was trying to do, lay it out that Bill C-45 and Bill S-5 seem to be going in two opposite directions. I am asking the government for some consistency on this.

When it comes to a good cigar, however, there is something to be said about adding life to years rather than years to life.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from across the way said very briefly that vaping helps people get away from smoking addiction. There is no doubt that it has a very positive impact for many smokers. Would he acknowledge that, particularly for young people who are being enticed to get involved in vaping, there is a very high risk that vaping at an earlier age could ultimately lead to more young people eventually quitting vaping and picking up cigarette smoking, who would not have done so if vaping was not there?

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Speaker, this is where we get into it. Vaping has not been around that long. I was about 22 years old when vaping became a thing. The first time I saw vaping, it was some 12-year-olds who were giggling like crazy. They had bought electronic cigarettes at the corner store, and they thought it was hilarious that they could buy these things but they could not buy those other things.

I will grant the member that it is a possibility, for sure, but at this point we do not know. I do not think that it is going to be a great issue. I would rather kids smoked vapour than an actual cigarette. Again, the government is searching for a problem.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to add my comments to the debate on Bill S-5, an act to amend the Tobacco Act and the Non-smokers’ Health Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts. After reading that very long title, people might be wishing to go back to the days of the Conservative government, when we had very catchy phrases for our particular pieces of legislation.

There are three components I would like to focus my comments on. One is vaping; the second is the intended plain packaging; and the third is the issue of flavours. If there is a little extra time, I might have some general comments on public health and the approach it is taking.

In May 2015, there was a unanimous report from the health committee. I was on the committee at that time. We worked hard, and we said that we needed a regulatory framework on vaping. We presented 14 recommendations to the government in May of that year, looking forward to the government's response. The report was unanimous and said that we needed a regulatory framework. As we know, there was an election a short time after that, and the government of the day did not have the opportunity to respond and move forward.

I find it interesting that this was in the mandate letter of the minister when the Liberals were first elected way back in the fall of 2015, a few short months after this unanimous report was presented with recommendations, and it has taken almost three years to get this particular piece of legislation to the stage it is at now. It speaks to how long it actually takes the government,when it sets something as a priority in the mandate letters, with a lot of the background work already done and a consensus within the House, to get what it says is a priority to the table. There are recent articles showing how ineffective the government has been in passing legislation, especially on something that has pretty solid support, such as the framework on vaping.

The government can never leave things simple, and it had to add a number of other issues to this piece of legislation, which I will talk about a little later. With regard to vaping, it is absolutely appropriate that there be some structure around it. Things like prohibiting the sale to minors, prohibiting promotion of vaping products that appeal to youth, and submitting information to Health Canada are all sensible pieces of moving this forward.

I know that some of my colleagues have mentioned this, but it is important to note. The member for Cariboo—Prince George, as many know, is in hospital right now, and all of us in the House wish him a very speedy recovery. It speaks to his dedication and passion for what goes on in Parliament that he has been watching the debate and sending messages to all of us as we are coming up for our opportunity to speak, asking whether we have seen a certain article or whether we are aware of this or that. I want to say to the member for Cariboo—Prince George that we wish him well. He should make sure he gets enough rest because he said he was going to look for a better balance.

I will bring to the attention of members the article he sent. It is very recent, from January of this year, and it is entitled “Teen baseball player’s stepmom calls for stronger vaping regulations after his death”. He was 14 years old. He was found collapsed in the bathroom with some vaping products beside him. Of course, his death cannot be directly attributed to them. The story is about his going to the hospital and how he died shortly thereafter.

However, it is enough to raise a caution. It is enough to say it was a young man who was exposed to a product, so there certainly are some things that we need to perhaps look at and watch from there, which really speaks to the fact that we might have a regulatory framework that is in place to provide some protection, but there is an actual need to continue the research.

I do not think anyone has talked to this particular issue. Right now it is a bit of a no man's land in terms of people selling products that are illegal, but here is a recent study that talks about the importance of research and knowing what is in the products that people are vaping. It links chemicals in flavoured e-cigarettes to a respiratory disease that is called popcorn lung. Right now people need to be very cautious because there are no controls in place in terms of what they are actually inhaling.

This says:

A chemical found in the vast majority of flavoured e-cigarettes tested by researchers in a new study has been linked to severe respiratory disease. The study out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, released Tuesday, tested 51 types of flavoured e-cigarettes and refill liquids, known as e-juice.

It was actually a couple of years ago.

“ln our study we focused on flavours we feel are appealing to children and younger consumers,” the study's lead author Joseph Allen, assistant professor of exposure assessment science, said. “Flavours like Waikiki watermelon, alien blood, cupcake and cotton candy.”

The researchers said the flavouring chemical called diacetyl was found in more than 75% of the products tested.

This goes back to popcorn factories where people working there were getting a debilitating respiratory disease, bronchiolitis obliterans, and it is known as the popcorn lung. It is very serious and often can require a lung transplant—an irreversible lung disease.

What is concerning about that is smoking damages the lungs over a long period of time, but the effects of diacetyl and the creation of popcorn lung is much more rapid and much more concerning. It can be ingested, but when it is inhaled into the lungs, it is certainly a problem. We know it is in e-cigarettes. In the U.S. there are more than 7,000 flavours on the market, many of them containing this. Health Canada has not yet regulated e-cigarettes, so that is a word of caution for people who are using the product.

This leads me to the flavours issue. One of the things that our government committed to in the last Parliament was to ban the flavours that were appealing to youth. I know there were chocolate, strawberry, and banana flavours that were on the market and very appealing to youth.

At that time we had a pretty significant discussion and debate about menthol. There was a suggestion that we should also ban menthol, and the decision at that time was that menthol had been in cigarettes for many years; it is a product that is legal in Canada; it is a product whose risks adults who choose to smoke are aware of. They have chosen and used menthol cigarettes for years, and we thought it was unduly unfair for the government of the day to ban menthol.

I notice in this legislation that the new government has decided to go ahead with that. Perhaps members need to hear from people, especially adults, who had a lot to say about that issue, when a different decision was made in the past. I certainly agree with the issue around the strawberry, chocolate, and banana tobacco, but menthol was something we did consider.

There is not a lot of time, and the plain packaging is the final area that I want to note. We hear that it might be very helpful. We hear that it has not made a difference.

Coming from British Columbia, I did not realize how much of an issue contraband tobacco was until I came to this House and heard from my colleagues from Ontario. It was a pretty consistent conversation we had. The other thing is that, for the first time in my life, I saw these bags of contraband tobacco. Of course the Canadian government policies significantly impacted the contraband tobacco industry. There needs to be a very thoughtful conversation in committee on that particular issue.

In general, we support this going to committee. We think there are a few areas that perhaps need some additional consideration.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the area about which I would like to ask a question for the hon. member is with regard to youth. I have worked with youth for 20 years, and I have seen youth pick up smoking for various reasons. Sometimes it is because of stress, and stress has led to smoking. There are all kinds of reasons that youth actually start smoking. However, I would like clarification from the member on this idea of packaging, which was the last topic she spoke on. We know thousands of dollars are spent on how we market and package products so they gain the attention of young people. There is no doubt in my mind that attractive or glitzy packaging does that.

Would she not admit there is no question that the packaging has an impact on the purchasing of these products, and commend the government for moving forward in this regard?