Opinion: Canada’s nicotine policy needs a little principled pragmatism

The goal should be to make the legal tobacco market work better than the illicit one. Canada needs to regulate the market as it actually exists, not as we wish it were. Photo by KAYLE NEIS/Regina Leader-Post

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In the early 1990s, Canadian governments learned the hard way that public health policy cannot ignore market realities. High cigarette taxes, however well-intentioned, fuelled a booming contraband trade that threatened to overwhelm the legal market. In 1994, Jean Chrétien’s government made a difficult but pragmatic choice to cut tobacco taxes as part of a broader anti-smuggling plan. It reflected a simple truth: when legal markets stop working for consumers, illicit ones take over.

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That lesson is staring Ottawa in the face again. Today’s illicit market is complex and accessible. It extends far beyond the trunk-of-the-car cigarette smuggling of the past to include unauthorized nicotine pouches, illegal high-nicotine vapes and a sprawling network of online sellers. What once required effort is now easy: with a few clicks, unregulated products are delivered to doorsteps faster and more conveniently than through any legal channel.

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When the easy choice for a consumer is the illegal one, the safeguards of the legal system begin to collapse. Age verification becomes a suggestion rather than a rule, product standards become a mystery and taxes go uncollected. Legitimate retailers are undermined while organized crime fills the vacuum.

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The heart of the problem is a policy framework that refuses to acknowledge the world has changed. We are trying to jam 21st-century products into a 20th-century box. Federal policy currently forces nicotine pouches — a non-medical product consumed by adults around the world — into a restrictive medical framework. By forcing these products behind pharmacy counters, we’ve made it harder for a smoker to buy a reduced-risk alternative than it is to buy a pack of cigarettes at a gas station. This bottleneck doesn’t stop people from using the product: it simply hands the market to unregulated sellers who don’t care about the rules.

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The problem is compounded by a taxation system that has become nonsensical. We currently tax modern, nearly tobacco-free products by total weight rather than actual tobacco content. Worse, a federal “50-gram minimum” applies even to small-format products. In practice, this means we are taxing a tiny tin of modern alternatives as if it were a massive pouch of loose tobacco. Doing so creates an artificial price floor that makes legal, regulated products significantly more expensive than untaxed, illicit versions. Mandatory annual inflation adjustments to tobacco taxes only compound the contraband trade’s government-mandated competitive advantage.

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No serious person proposes a free-for-all. Youth access needs to be restricted and product standards enforced. Right now, however, Canada has the worst of both worlds: a legal system too rigid to function and an illicit market expanding without constraints.

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From freezing alcohol excise taxes to removing the federal fuel charge, the Carney government has shown it can pivot when that’s what real-world pressures demand. Nicotine policy deserves that same level-headedness.