You haven’t come a long way, baby
The federal government recently introduced a series of draft regulations that will remove all branding from tobacco packaging as well as standardizing the physical properties of cigarettes in Canada. Anti-tobacco campaigners are applauding the proposed regulatory regime: Canadian Cancer Society lobbyist Rob Cunningham says they’re “the best in the world.” These draft regulations are founded on the premise that plain packaging and the standardization of cigarettes will make smoking less appealing. While this very premise is debatable, more troubling is that its proponents demonstrate a clear gender bias when justifying the need for such legislation.
In their defence of plain packaging and standardization, the anti-tobacco lobbyists routinely identify certain segments of society as more susceptible to marketing and therefore more vulnerable and in need of regulatory protection. The Heart and Stroke Foundation, for instance, states that “Slim and superslim cigarette packages will be banned which are appealing to young women and girls as they conveniently fit in small purses.” Along the same lines, the Non-Smokers’ Rights Association celebrates that “Tobacco companies will no longer be able to target vulnerable young women with these despicable products” (emphasis added). In an extension of this logic, Health Canada explains that the new regulations will ban packages that “evoke ideas and connotations of feminine glamour and slimness and attractiveness. These slim packages are usually female branded and they are normally associated with a greater number of positive attributes around glamour and attractiveness … (such as) very delicate colours and fancy finishes.”
The message is clear: women, especially women who carry small purses, prefer delicate colours and slim cigarettes and therefore slim cigarettes should be banned to protect them. On the other hand, there is no such mention of the need to change the shape and size of tobacco products that are known to be more appealing to men, such as cigars. And despite the fact that more men are heavy smokers than women, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data, the need to “protect” men from their own choices is a lost thought. Men, as the anti-tobacco lobbyists imply, are more able to make choices free from coercive marketing forces and therefore should have their preferences respected.
A piece of legislation that specifically identifies women in need of protection is not only paternalistic but is an assault the right of women to make informed choices within the context of marketing. When we doubt a woman’s ability to make an informed choice relative to her male counterparts, we exacerbate the gender divide and set ourselves back in time.
The Trudeau government has not challenged the bias evident in the reasoning for this policy, even as the federal Liberals insist that they are incorporating genderbased analyses into all of their policies. In the government’s own words “the idea behind gender-based analysis is to think about how a government policy, legislation or spending might affect men and women” differently. While plain packaging and standardization will affect both men and women, its creators have rationalized the policy based on reducing the appeal of smoking to women specifically. The approach reminds me of when society out rightly discouraged women from smoking because it was unladylike. If the government really wants to discourage smoking across all segments of society, then its justification should not be gender based. This is, after all, 2018.
LEGISLATION THAT SPECIFICALLY IDENTIFIES WOMEN IN NEED OF ‘PROTECTION’ IS PATERNALISTIC.