Lighten up on smokers

In Ontario, it is currently against the law to smoke cigarettes on a sports field, on or near children’s playgrounds, on a restaurant or bar patio — whether it is covered or uncovered — and to buy cigarettes on a college or university campus. Those rules came into effect with changes to the Smoke Free-Ontario Act on Jan. 1.

Before then, it was already illegal to offer designated smoking areas in restaurants, workplaces and other public spaces (as of 2006), and retailers were obliged to cover up cigarette displays (as of 2008) from tobacco-minded consumers; or worse, impressionable non-smoking youngsters.

And now, the province is moving forward with Bill 45, also known as the “Making Healthier Choices Act” to take its anti-smoking agenda even further. The bill, which has already passed its second reading, would ban all forms of flavoured tobacco products — which includes menthol cigarettes — as well as outlaw sales of electronic cigarettes to Ontarians younger than 19-years-old. The absurd implication here is that young people enticed to start smoking cigarettes by fruity flavoured sticks that still taste like fruit-infused tar. Or by menthol cigarettes. Menthol.

The Ontario government’s evermore entrenched position against cigarette smoking seems to ignore the statistics that show that the smoking rate in Canada is actually the lowest it has ever been. The percentage of smokers in Ontario, specifically, has dropped steadily since 2010, according to Statistics Canada and, according to the most recent reports, hovers around 18 per cent.

The same goes for smoking among Ontario’s youth. According to the Youth Smoking Survey of 2012-2013, conducted on behalf of Health Canada, “the prevalence of youth having ever tried smoking a cigarette is at an alltime low.” The survey showed that the majority of youth who did try smoking got their cigarettes from social sources (parents, friends, etc.), though those first few puffs were infrequently of flavoured or menthol cigarettes; indeed, only two per cent and four per cent of youth in Grades 6 to 9 and Grades 10 to 12 respectively reported having smoked menthol cigarettes in the last 30 days. The only real increase in flavoured tobacco use (notably, via water pipes), according to the survey, was among youth who reported already being regular users of tobacco. Still, the overwhelming majority of young tobacco users in Ontario are not smoking, or trying, flavoured and mentholated cigarettes. And the trend is down.

The aspects of Ontario’s Making Healthier Choices Act, in relation to flavoured tobacco, thus seem to be a solution in search of a problem. Still, the province is not alone: Alberta, which made an exemption for mentholated cigarettes when it introduced legislation to ban flavoured tobacco (to come into effect June 1), will be reviewing calls to include menthol in the ban as of the fall. Nova Scotia is looking to enforce a similar ban, too, hoping to have new legislation in place by the end of the month.

Not only will this ban have little effect on a trend that is, generally speaking, moving in the right direction, but it will also force regular smokers of menthol cigarettes — about five per cent of smokers, according to a spokesperson for Imperial Tobacco — to resort to more precarious measures to access their cigarettes of choice. The province has already severely restricted where and how Ontarians can buy and smoke their cigarettes. It needn’t restrict the flavours they can smoke as well.