Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Honourable members, thank you for your invitation to present our views 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.
I am the research director at Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. Although I'm not a doctor, I have been working for 35 years in the area of tobacco control. I worked at Health Canada in the 1980s and at the World Health Organization in the 1990s.
Bill S-5 will legitimize what is currently a grey market for vaping products. It will give some clarification that facilitates the introduction of plain packaging and will make a small number of other important advances for tobacco control. Sadly, however, the bill, as currently drafted, contains unnecessary risks to public health. If these flaws are not corrected, we predict that the bill will create more problems than it solves.
The fundamental flaw in the bill is that it opens the door too wide for the promotion of vaping products. One consequence of legalizing vaping products is whether it will invite tobacco companies into the Canadian market with new vaping products. They do not participate now in the grey market.
Royal assent on this bill will be the starting gun for the race to sell as many of these products as they can, using every marketing tool that this law will hand them. The bill hands them too many such tools. As currently drafted, it will allow them to advertise on television, radio, billboards and retail outlets, social media, direct mail, text messaging, contests, and giveaways. Once again, girls in skimpy outfits could be sent into bars to offer samples to patrons. We have seen the same companies use these same tools to recruit and addict previous generations to nicotine.
Our recommendation for minimizing this risk is simple: restrict advertising for vaping products the same way it is restricted for tobacco, which, you will remember from your review of Bill C-45, is also under the same types of restrictions that are in place for cannabis. Permit only information and brand advertising advertisements and allow that only in a very few places. Even if the marketing rules are the same, vaping products will still enjoy a marketplace advantage over tobacco products as they will be sold in branded packages with lesser health warnings and without taxes. We are not alone in making this recommendation. Most major health organizations also suggest that vaping products be subject to similar restrictions.
In response to these concerns, the Senate adopted the amendments proposed by the health department to give the government regulatory authority to curb advertising of vaping products in case things went wrong. A few months later Health Canada issued a consultation paper on the types of regulations it was considering, and these were a throwback. They were very similar to those that the tobacco industry used to govern itself in place for cigarettes in the 1960s and 1970s.
Restricting television advertising to certain times of day, billboards to certain distances from schools are not good enough, and we know this from bitter experience. No one should be encouraging a consumer product that has a better than 30% chance of addicting people to lifelong use. Regulations cannot put the advertising genie back in the bottle. We need to restrict advertising for vaping products now, not later; and we need to do it strongly, not weakly.
If this bill passes as currently drafted, Canada will be virtually alone in allowing such liberalized rules for promoting vaping products. Most OECD countries that allow vaping products to be sold apply similar advertising restrictions to those that exist for tobacco. Only the U.S.A. allows largely unrestricted advertising for vaping products, and what has this meant for young Americans? Well, I think the title of the December 2016 press release from the U.S. Surgeon General is the answer: “Surgeon General Reports Youth and Young Adult E-Cigarette Use Poses a Public Health Threat”.
Now I turn to another flaw in BillS-5, one that could be described as a serious omission.
While opening the door to vaping products and their advertising, Bill S-5 fails to start closing the door to other tobacco products. Bill S-5 legalizes vaping products in the hope that they will offer some reduction from the harm that tobacco causes. It's a nice hope and I hope it comes true, but it's still only a hope. To guarantee that harm will be reduced, we need a plan to get rid of the conventional cigarette.
A few months ago the U.S. pushed forward with its vision of how to ensure that the benefits of less harmful forms of nicotine use were accompanied by a reduction in the use of the most harmful forms. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a comprehensive harm reduction framework in July 2017 in which they plan to reduce the amount of nicotine in conventional cigarettes as a way of shifting smokers to less harmful forms. Because of particularities of American law and regulation, the FDA is constrained on how it can regulate cigarettes and they have chosen nicotine reduction because basically the law doesn't allow them to have any other options. But in Canada we do—you do, as legislators.
We can follow and improve on the American lead by creating a harm reduction framework that aims to reduce the supply and demand for cigarettes by using a range of approaches. These might include cap and trade programs, financial incentives, performance requirements, and other modern regulatory tools. The government has set a goal of achieving less than 5% tobacco use prevalence by 2035, “less than 5 by 35”, but so far it seems to be less of a plan and more of a slogan. However, there is now an opportunity through Bill S-5 to establish a harm reduction framework that will ensure that legalizing vaping helps reduce smoking.
Here are some key changes that we are proposing in very much summary form: expand the purpose of the act to include reducing the burden of disease, preventing addition to nicotine, and achieving the minister's goal of less than 5 by 35; expand the scope of the act once again to establish regulatory authority over new heat-not-burn products as well as other new tobacco products that may be introduced in the future; and impose new requirements and obligations on the tobacco industry.
We have prepared detailed suggestions for how these changes could be introduced during clause-by-clause review of the bill, and I will be happy to share our suggestions with you later on.
This committee can greatly assist in achieving the goal of less than 5 by 35. Don't allow Bill S-5 to be passed without the safeguards needed to protect young people and others from tobacco and nicotine industry marketing. Make sure that Bill S-5 is a step towards ending the sale of combustible tobacco products and not a way to recruit future smokers.
Thank you for your attention.