Last year, about 6 weeks before Canada and the world became gripped with the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s Council of Chief Medical Officers of Health (CCMOH) issued a collective statement related to the highly-transmissable vaping variant of the older tobacco pandemic.
The occasion was, like today, Weedless Wednesday.
On Wednesday, January 22, 2020 the CCMOH issued their third joint statment on “Nicotine Vaping”. In it, they called on governments to shift their approach to vaping so that these products were used only as a way to end nicotine use. They specified about two dozen “regulatory and policy recommendations that we believe are necessary to be taken by federal, provincial/territorial and municipal governments to address this rapidly emerging public health threat.”
In the past year, virtually all governments have strengthened controls on the vaping industry.
In the past 12 months, seven (Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, PEI, Saskatchewan), and three territories (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) as well as the federal government have advanced regulatory controls on e-cigarettes. Two other provinces (New Brunswick and Quebec) have also indicated their intention to do so.