Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to the Lung Association and the Canadian Public Health Association. We appreciate your being here.
We see a lot of concerns being expressed by many of our presenters here about renormalization of smoking. We've made such great strides in reducing smoking in Canada, and it looks like great peril seeing that reverse with a whole new generation of young people taking it up through e-cigarettes. I thank the Canadian Cancer Society for some of the vivid ads they made available to us, showing the pitching of advertising to children with visually distinctive packaging. I gather we're all on the same page with the witnesses before us. We've talking about banning sales to minors or controlling sales and controlling the sites of sales. There seemed to be a little bit of a difference of opinion on that one.
My big concern is the combustion of chemicals, and I don't know if the Canadian Lung Association can help us with this, and we don't have medical experts per se at the table today, I gather. So propylene glycol and vegetable glycol, as I understand it, are used in inhalers for asthmatics. The Lung Association would probably know that. But they're not combusted; they're just used as part of the propellant, and so on. When we burn these chemicals, I mean even simple ones like propylene glycol, what kind of compounds are we getting as a result of high temperature combustion?
Now with the flavours that might be an improvement for ingestion, what kind of breakdown complexities might there be when you heat them at high temperature into component molecules, and what kind of risk do those impose? I wonder whether the Lung Association can help with that. I note with some alarm from these studies in the EU that they make note of formaldehyde and other known carcinogens like acrolein found in equal amounts, as high in the smoke as in some cigarettes.
Also, although there are fewer particles than in cigarette smoke, they're also finer particles, and finer particles can be immensely more harmful than larger particles—or at least there are concerns that they may.
So I don't know whether you can help us with that.
I'll first of all go to the Lung Association. Are you aware of any information on the breakdown comments of these combustible products?