OTTAWA — A taxpayer-funded advocacy group is calling on Ottawa to follow Quebec’s contentious ban on flavoured vaping products.
Cynthia Collard, executive director of
Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada
, was in Ottawa to implore federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel to restrict access to flavoured vapes, which she said is make vaping more attractive to minors.
“Minister Michel did not create the youth vaping crisis, she inherited it, but she has done nothing in her first year to address this problem,” said Collard, on Friday. “Her first priority should be to strengthen, finalize and implement the ban on flavourings.”
She said youth-friendly flavourings not only make nicotine “attractive and easy” for young people to consume, but many are also “inherently dangerous” due to chemical additives.
Collard’s organization is part of a coalition of anti-nicotine groups urging Michel to
to restrict vaping flavours to tobacco, mint and menthol.
The restrictions were proposed two months before the September 2021 election and have since been lost in the shuffle of government business.
Quebec moved ahead with its own vaping restrictions in late 2023, prohibiting the sale of all flavours other than tobacco. The results of the ban have been mixed.
A study released in February by
Quebec’s institute of public health
found that, while youth vaping fell following the ban, Quebecers between the ages of 16 and 19 were still twice as likely to vape as adults.
At the same time, access to flavourings continued unabated through specialty vape shops, online vendors and other unregulated channels. One 2025 survey found that
had purchased prohibited flavoured products in the past 12 months.
A December 2025 report from
found that the ban has been difficult to enforce, noting the prevalence of “workarounds” like intentionally mislabelling flavoured products and bundling flavoured and unflavoured liquids.
The report said that while 170 cases of non-compliance were referred to prosecutors in the first two years of the ban, just 19 resulted in a fine, with an average processing time of 347 days.
The report also said that the fines, ranging from $2,500 to $5,000, weren’t big enough to deter violations of the ban.
Collard admitted the illicit market was driving youth vaping, claiming “illegally strong vaping products” were being openly sold less than a kilometre away from where she was speaking in Parliament Hill’s West Block.
Eric Gagnon, head of regulatory and corporate affairs for Imperial Tobacco Canada, said that Quebec’s ban on non-tobacco flavourings has been detrimental to adults trying to quit smoking cigarettes or smoke less.
“The vast majority of adult smokers who want to quit smoking using vaping want to stay away from the taste of tobacco,” said Gagnon. “They need to have at least a few other flavours to make sure that they don’t go back to cigarettes.”
Flavourless vapes may also be sold in Quebec under the current rules.
by economists at the University of Missouri and Yale School of Public Health found that vape flavour restrictions increase cigarette sales by roughly 10 per cent.
Quebec is
one of six Canadian jurisdictions
where non-tobacco flavours are prohibited, along with Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. Three other jurisdictions
— Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan — limit the sale of flavours other than tobacco and mint or menthol to specialty vape stores.
Gagnon says that the most sensible policy approach would be to permit the sale of a reasonable variety of adult-focused flavours and focus on enforcing the rules against illicit sales.
David Clement, North American affairs manager with the Consumer Choice Centre, says the growth of Quebec’s black market for flavoured vapes was entirely predictable.
“It’s a situation where you have policymakers trying to rewrite history as if prohibition works,” said Clement.
Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada is a registered charity that receives some of its funding from federal and subnational health ministries. The group was
from Health Canada in May 2020 to “address knowledge gaps important to tobacco regulation.”
Michel’s office declined to say whether she planned to implement the 2021 proposal to restrict flavourings.
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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