Pipe and Halayko: Why haven't Ontario and Manitoba boosted taxes on vaping products?

To control climate change, we won’t get far by just switching from coal to oil. To limit our alcohol consumption, swapping wine for whisky won’t do it.

And if we want to prevent the multiple health hazards of addiction to nicotine and inhaling noxious substances, it won’t work to just have people switch from smoking tobacco to vaping.

Recognizing this, governments in Canada and around the world have enacted policies to limit vaping, particularly by young people and non-smokers. But Ontario and Manitoba are the only provinces currently passing up an opportunity to increase taxes on vaping products — to the detriment of both citizens’ health and provincial coffers.

The federal government has enacted useful measures, such as restrictions on marketing, caps on nicotine content, product warnings and price measures, along with the introduction of restrictions on flavours. One such measure is a collaborative vape excise duty on e-liquids, which enables provinces and territories to add their own duty equivalent to the federal levy.

The policy not only increases the price to help limit consumption, but governments get added revenue they can use for education programs to further reduce use. It’s a win/win for governments and citizens’ health.

Except Ontario and Manitoba haven’t bought in. They are the only provinces that haven’t announced a partnership or levied their own tax. This leaves their young people with easier access to vape products, which can retail for as little as $10 for a starter pack.

Vaping, or using e-cigarettes, means inhaling vaporized e-liquid products that contain nicotine and a variety of flavourings. Compared to smoking, vapers do benefit from not inhaling smoke and particles from burning tobacco, but the active ingredient is still tobacco-derived nicotine, as offensive and addictive as that in cigarettes.

Inhaling a heated chemical soup poses serious risks for lung health, and it will take some time before those risks are fully understood. What is clear is that toxic ingredients with known adverse health impacts are delivered by vaping. And research is beginning to reveal a link between second-hand vape exposure and symptoms of bronchitis and shortness of breath, so it seems that children and family members aren’t safer around a vaper than a smoker.

Unfortunately, while smoking rates have declined, much of the positive public health impact is being lost by increases in vaping. In young people, the uptake of e-cigarettes has outpaced the decline in smoking rates in recent years. In 2021, almost half of young adults and nearly one-third of teenagers over 14 reported having tried e-cigarettes in Canada. In a 2021 survey of Ontario youth, more than half of middle- and high-school students said e-cigarettes are easy to obtain, even though their sale is illegal to those under 19.

By refusing the tax, Manitoba and Ontario have just made it easier than everywhere else in the country to purchase vaping products. That means more young people and others will become addicted to nicotine and fall victim to its health hazards.

Since taxes on tobacco have been shown to generate revenue and reduce smoking, we can be assured similar benefits would be created from this vape tax. Research shows price hikes to e-cigarettes will discourage price-sensitive youth from getting started and hooked.

Young adulthood is critical to forming healthy habits. The lungs are still growing and developing, making them particularly vulnerable to damage from vaping and increasing the risk of future chronic lung and cardiovascular disease. The collaborative federal-provincial vape tax is just one tool in a comprehensive strategy needed to reduce nicotine use among youth, while also encouraging existing smokers and vapers to quit.

Today, we look back 60 to 100 years and wonder how it was possible that smoking became so pervasive and fashionable, with disastrous consequences for population health. Let’s not repeat our mistakes by simply turning tobacco smokers into vapers, leaving future citizens appalled at our carelessness.

And let’s not have Ontario or Manitoba be the places with the worst records of all.

Dr. Andrew Pipe is a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa and is one of Canada’s foremost experts on smoking cessation. Dr. Andrew Halayko is a professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba, the Canada Research Chair in Lung Pathobiology and Treatment and in 2002 founded the Biology of Breathing Group at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba.

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