Why Are We No Longer Focusing on Smoking?
Somewhere along the way, Manitoba’s public health conversation stopped being about smoking.
For decades, governments and non-government organizations, many funded with taxpayer dollars, focused relentlessly on reducing smoking rates. They used aggressive campaigns, graphic imagery, public restrictions, taxes, stigma, and social pressure to push smoking out of public life. And in many ways, they succeeded. Smoking rates dropped dramatically.
Yet, cigarettes are sold at every corner store.
The new front for these so-called public health zealots is vaping and flavours. This week, a bill introduced in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly aims to restrict the sale of vapour products to vape shops in urban areas and, potentially, ban flavours - if the Lung Association has any say in the matter.
These same folks, who preached the virtues of a smoke free world have gone off course, and in my humble opinion a bit crazy.
Instead of focusing on combustible cigarettes, the products responsible for the overwhelming majority of smoking-related disease and death, these same groups have launched what feels like an obsessive campaign against safer nicotine alternatives, while leaving deadly cigarettes widely available and largely untouched.
Earlier this spring, a coalition of tobacco control organizations descended on Parliament Hill to once again pressure the federal government into banning vaping flavours, relying heavily on theatrics, emotional messaging, and public pressure campaigns aimed at forcing the hand of the Minister of Health. The display even featured a counter claiming how many “teens” had started vaping since 2021, yet no clear definition of “teen” was provided, and statisticians I have spoken with have been unable to determine how those figures were calculated. What was notably absent from the conversation was any meaningful discussion about ending smoking itself. The focus was no longer combustible cigarettes, but nicotine in all forms. Somewhere along the way, the mission shifted. Smoking stopped being the primary target, and nicotine became the new shiny object.
Right now, multiple provincial bills like the one introduced in Manitoba, heavily influenced by government-funded NGOs such as the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Lung Association, are moving through legislatures targeting vaping products and flavours.
At the same time, nicotine pouches in Canada face some of the most restrictive access rules imaginable. Former Health Minister Mark Holland, who previously worked within the tobacco control space, used a Ministerial Order to move these products behind pharmacy counters and place them under the supervision of pharmacists. Yet combustible cigarettes, the product most directly linked to cancer, heart disease, and smoking-related death, remain available at virtually every gas station and convenience store across the country.
Canadians are being told that lower-risk alternatives require tighter restrictions than the cigarettes they were designed to replace. Make that make sense.
How did we arrive at a place where the most harmful delivery method of nicotine, which most strongly linked to cancer, heart disease, and respiratory illness is easier to access than many lower-risk alternatives? How come tobacco control NGOs are fervently trying to rebrand as nicotine control? Have we lost focus?
Flavours matter to adults who are trying to quit smoking. So does accessibility. So does affordability. These are not abstract policy discussions for the people affected by them. They are real-world decisions made by adults trying to move away from cigarettes.
Public health should be focused on reducing smoking-related harm, not waging ideological battles against nicotine itself. If the goal is fewer people smoking cigarettes, then policies should reflect that reality.
Because right now, Manitoba along with most of Canada seem to be forgetting the original mission entirely.