Sabine Benoit is the Canadian Policy Associate at the Consumer Choice Center.
Canadians expect that doctors and non-profit organizations have their best interests at heart and are driven by data and research. Unfortunately, some doctors and non-profit organizations breach that trust with Canadians, and one of those times came in the form of a press conference held on Parliament Hill recently. The Quebec Coalition for Tobacco Control, made up of various organizations and, at this press conference, included a doctor, stood in front of Canadians and demanded that the Minister of Health ban vape flavours to help save the children from vaping. The problem is that the data and the analysis they presented were wrong.
The doctor who was present at the press conference started his comments off by stating that the rise in the use of e-cigarettes (or vapes) among youth is a new and rapidly evolving challenge. Health Canada itself disagrees: the government’s own statistics show that youth vaping is on the decline. The latest results of the Canadian Health Survey for Children and Youth show that in 2019, 13.2% (299,000 people) of youth aged 12 to 17 years reported vaping in the past 30 days, and this number had declined to 7.2% (174,000 people) in 2023. That’s an almost 50% decline in youth vaping in the four years leading up to 2023, which clearly shows youth are choosing not to vape rather than ramping up their vaping use.
One implication from the press conference was that flavours exist only to lure children into using nicotine and hook them onto the cigarette pipeline for life. This is an oft-used scare tactic rolled into an exaggeration. Adults benefit immensely from flavoured products, with a study with over 15,000 participants finding that adults vaping flavoured e-cigarettes had 230% higher odds of quitting smoking altogether. The Quebec Coalition should consult another doctor, Dr. Collin Mendelsohn, who has stated that by not reminding vapers of the taste of tobacco, flavours are more likely to keep people off traditional cigarettes.
A representative from Physicians for a Smoke Free Canada stated that the chemicals used in flavourings are not tested for their safety for inhalation. However, according to one EU report: “To date, there is no specific data that specific flavourings used in the EU pose health risks for electronic cigarette users following repeated exposure.” One thing we definitely know for a fact is that smoking hurts the human body, and allowing smokers to inhale vapes that are at least 95% less harmful than traditional cigarettes, and that will help them eventually to quit tobacco and nicotine products altogether, should be obviously a good idea.
A representative from the group Actions on Smoking and Health rounded off the comments by first stating that vapes are part of the tobacco industry’s “addiction trap” and accused the government of conspiratorial corruption by saying, “Who is the government working for, the vaping industry?”
That last quote is rich, as it is being stated in front of organizations that get their own funding from the government and use it in a circular lobbying scheme that sees taxpayers paying the government to lobby itself. The problematic practice of taking money from the government in order to lobby the government puts actual civil society organizations in a bad light. Over 84% of the money that the Physicians for Smoke Free Canada used in 2023 to operate and lobby the government came from the government itself. As for the Action on Smoking and Health, a quick charity search shows the majority of their money in 2025 is coming from abroad, and in 2023, a whopping 94% of their funding was from the government. Who exactly are they working for, then? It does not seem that the answer is Canadian consumers who are desperate for a way to stop smoking cigarettes.
The scourge of misrepresenting data in a way that might make adults have to continue to smoke or turn to the black market, where things are not regulated (and which helps fuel organized crime), is the real rapidly evolving challenge, not flavours. It is undeniably good news that these choices exist for smokers and are products that the government should be promoting. Youth numbers are down, and what youth really need is to have their parents alive to raise them. Continuing to call for regulations on flavours and tobacco harm reduction will result in the real tragedy that youth will have to face as they lose their families to smoking, while the government implements regulations based on the undemocratic practice of circular lobbying.
Sabine Benoit is the Canadian Policy Associate at the Consumer Choice Center.
