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What happens when governments announce targets to achieve important public objectives, but then fail to develop adequate plans to achieve them? Or when their plans for achieving these targets are side-swiped by later events? Or swept aside by subsequent administrations? Stewards of the environment have faced these challenges and have developed a system to improve...
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Over the past months Canadians have heard the views on vaping regulations of Concordia University economist Ian Irvine. Recently the Globe and Mail’s business editor gave space to his opinion that taxes on vaping products should not be so high as to discourage people from using them and that governments should do more to encourage smokers who...
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Raising the minimum sale age for tobacco to 21 has emerged as a highly recommended measure for tobacco control systems. This blog reviews the history of Tobacco 21 measures and the research that has been conducted on the effectiveness of this measure at reducing tobacco or e-cigarette use by young people. (A downloadable version is...
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The new year is a common date for governments to peg for implementing regulations or new rules. This year is no exception, with new tobacco control provisions kicking in this week. Other regular New Year’s changes will be price increases set by tobacco companies. This post reviews these events — with related and updated fact...
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In mid-August, Imperial Tobacco again raised prices on its tobacco products. As shown in the price list circulated to retailers and pasted below, they are now charging from $2.50 to $4.50 more per carton in Ontario. Price increases in other provinces have not yet been located, but they are usually imposed at the same time....
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There may be a very important sleeper among the suite of measures to address youth vaping announced by the British Columbia government yesterday. One of the regulations introduced by minister of health Adrian Dix is a requirement that all vaping liquids be sold in plainish packages by mid-September. The regulation does not apply to packaging of the...
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Health Authorities have a tendency to use the first days of January and July as the moment when regulations come into force. And so it is that this week a number of changes to the tobacco and vaping regulations are taking effect. Links to more detailed fact sheets are at the bottom of this post. Federal...
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Heat-not-burn (HNB) tobacco products may look like short cigarettes, but they function in a very different way. In cigarettes, it is fire (combustion) that releases the nicotine from the tobacco leaf. With heat-not-burn cigarettes, the tobacco rod is inserted into a device, where it is impaled on an electronically-heated element which vaporizes the nicotine. These...
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It’s no April Fools. Federal taxes were increased on cigarettes today — from $28.43 per carton of cigarettes to $28.85, or $0.042 per package of 20 cigarettes. This increase was not the result of a budgetary decision this year, but because of an automatic quinquennial inflation adjustment introduced in the 2014 budget, and annualized in the 2018 budget. If...
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During last week’s investor day, British American Tobacco made public many of its estimates of legal and illegal tobacco sales around the world. Combined with official reports from countries which monitor sales (like Canada and France), and with estimates from BAT’s competitors, these help give us a picture of what is happening to the global tobacco...
