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David Clement: Banning flavoured vapes harms adults and does little for youth

Globe and Mail editorial overlooked contradictory evidence

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Five years is a very long time to announce a policy and not implement it, but Ottawa’s promised ban on flavoured vapes has now outlasted a health minister, a pandemic, and several news cycles’ worth of moral alarm. The Globe and Mail weighed in with an editorial on Monday insisting that the government’s stalling has gone on far too long. The case leans on frightening figures about the young, warnings that vaping leads kids to smoking, and a study of secret shoppers said to prove retailers cannot be trusted. It is, on its face, an argument built to alarm rather than to inform, and it collapses the moment one bothers to check the footnotes.

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Take the editorial’s opening point, that 14 per cent of Canadians aged 15 to 19 report having vaped in the last 30 days. This happens to be true and it comes straight from the 2022 Canadian Tobacco and Nicotine Survey, courtesy of Health Canada itself. But that figure may not be as alarming as we are being led to believe, given that Health Canada’s own data describe youth vaping for that cohort as essentially flat since 2019. The trend line being flat for a cohort that includes adults (18 ) is a curious way to argue that the sky is falling and that a ban is necessary.

David........

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