Why Quebec Vaping Regulations Do Not Go Far Enough
https://www.pittsburghparent.com/can-you-tell-if-your-child-is-vaping/
The fight against smoking, though not over yet, is mostly news of the past. According to a 2022 research report from the University of Waterloo, the number of Canadians smoking tobacco is down to 10.3% nation-wide, less than half of what it was in 2000 (24.4%). In New Zealand, the anti-tobacco movement has been so influential that the government has recently passed legislation prohibiting anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes or tobacco products.
As the tobacco industry is still coming to grips with its inevitable decline, an entirely new facet of nicotine addiction is emerging: e-cigarettes, popularly known as “vapes.”
The Government of Quebec officially designates an e-cigarette as “a device which, when activated, heats a liquid and transforms it into an aerosol that is then inhaled.” Modern e-cigarettes take many shapes and forms, and the aerosol they produce contains a variety of different substances, the most prominent of which is nicotine. What is noteworthy about these devices is that they do not contain tobacco, nor do they rely on combustion, allowing their users to choose between a plethora of liquids with exotic flavors and varying nicotine concentrations. Some of these devices are also able to deliver other substances besides nicotine, like tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) which is a psychoactive compound found in marijuana products.
Based on the same report mentioned previously, the proportion of Canadians that reported having tried an e-cigarette has increased from 8.5% in 2013 to 16.6% in 2020, though only a quarter of these cases use e-cigarettes on a daily basis. The real issue lies in what segment of the population tends to vape the most: teenagers. Research conducted in 2020 by a coordinated group of provincial bodies and NGOs in Quebec showed that the number of high schoolers (typically aged between 12 and 17) having reported using an e-cigarette in the last thirty days has grown fivefold between 2013 and 2019. This matches with the data acquired by researchers at the University of Waterloo, which indicate that over one third of respondents were between ages 15 and 19.
Vaping is appealing to youngsters for many reasons. For instance, not only can “vape juice” have numerous unique flavors (such as “double rainbow” or “banana bang”), but some e-cigarettes have become so easy to conceal that they are barely bigger than a USB drive. The result is that a 9th grader can easily start consuming nicotine by inhaling some tasty blueberry-flavored aerosol without his teachers or even his own family knowing, and this has already become a fairly common occurrence in high schools. Needless to say, as the vaping industry is desperately trying to make its products appealing to youth, vaping regulations are far more than just health warnings for the general population: they act as barriers to a new form of nicotine addiction for new generations.
So far, the biggest argument put forward by the vaping industry and its advocates is that vaping products offer a healthier alternative to traditional tobacco consumption. Although it is true that aerosols are less harmful to the user’s lungs than tobacco smoke, neither the World Health Organisation nor Health Canada have officially recognized vaping products as effective quitting aids.
The fact remains that little is known about the long-term health effects of vaping. Understanding the properties of the diverse substances contained in e-cigarette aerosols (which might include heavy metals like nickel or cancer-causing chemicals) and their effects on human health will take decades of research. An outbreak of a new type of injury known as e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury (or EVALI) in 2019 in both Canada and the United States further exposed our limited understanding of what vaping does to the human body in the long term.
While the number of teenagers using e-cigarettes is on the rise, the unknown long-term effects of vaping are cause for serious concern. Yet, this should not be the main preoccupation of health authorities. What we do know is that nicotine is a highly addictive substance, and that the increased vulnerability of high schoolers towards the appealing innovations of the vaping industry has become a reality. In this case, preventing youth from developing a nicotine addiction must be considered a top priority.
Quebec, like most other Canadian provinces, has responded to the growing popularity of vaping products by applying existing tobacco regulations to e-cigarettes. In 2015, the Liberal government under Phillipe Couillard modified the Tobacco Act (now the Tobacco Control Act) to fix the minimum age required to use e-cigarettes at 18, prevent their use in public spaces, and restrict the display of vaping products to specialty shops, among other things.
In the following years, as the number of teenagers using e-cigarettes rose and experts began calling for stricter regulation of the vaping industry, the federal government decided to intervene. Between 2018 and 2021, the Canadian federal government passed legislation that followed the provinces’ lead in applying tobacco regulations to vaping products. However, it went one step further and applied both a 20mg/ml limit on the nicotine concentration of vaping products nation-wide and a small federal sales tax on vape-purchases. Despite this, federal authorities highlight that regulation of e-cigarettes falls under Provincial jurisdiction. When it comes to Quebec, current regulations have three major shortfalls. The first is the obvious fact that it does not apply its own provincial tax on vaping products to complement federal regulations (unlike Alberta and other provinces). Secondly, the Quebec government does nothing to address the vulnerability of the teenage population to vaping products, instead opting for a universal approach across different segments of the population. Finally, Quebec’s vaping regulations also fail to limit the number of flavors available to use in e-cigarettes whatsoever.
In order for Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé to address all of these issues, it seems evident that solutions in fact lie to the west. Before the federal government even passed some of its bolder regulations, British Columbia (BC) had already announced a sweeping ten-point plan in 2019 to address the rise in e-cigarette use within the teenage population.
An 18-page policy paper from the Vancouver health authorities summarizes some of the key points of British Columbia’s multi-faceted approach to vaping regulation. Besides applying a 20% provincial sales tax on vaping products and its own limit of 20mg/ml nicotine concentration, the BC government has also established a special “provincial youth advisory committee” with the aim of raising social awareness of the dangers of vaping and designing special ads targeted for schools throughout the province. As part of a special partnership between the BC ministries of Health and Education, this committee also serves to evaluate the overall impact of the province’s plan to regulate vaping.
Still, the biggest takeaway from BC’s ten-point plan is the ban of any flavoured vapour product that does not taste like regular tobacco, which even includes flavors as mundane as mint. If this seems excessive to some, it is worth mentioning that we have already had this debate with traditional tobacco products before, and that Canada ultimately banned most “flavouring agents” found in cigarettes and cigars over a decade ago.
With all of this in mind, it is good news that the Coalition Avenir Québec announced last month that it would apply a new provincial sales tax on vaping products as other provinces have already done, next fall. On the other hand, one might ask: is this enough? If Quebec really took the threat of vaping to teenagers seriously, it would ban at least half of the most popular flavoured vaping products and come up with a plan to educate youth on the risks posed by e-cigarettes. It would be a shame to see decades of efforts to regulate the tobacco industry fail at the hands of another product which leads to nicotine addiction, and is especially attractive to youths.