Canada’s smoking rate down

Seventeen-point-seven percent of Canadians smoked daily or occasionally during 2015, down from 18.1 percent during the previous year, according to a story by Yaël Ossowski for the Huffington Post citing the results of a Canadian Community Health Survey released last week.

The release of the survey results coincided with news that the government was looking to raise the excise duty on cigarettes from $21.30 to $21.56 per carton, and wanted drastically to increase tobacco regulation across the board.

But Ossowski pointed out that, looking at the numbers, it seemed that even without a heavy-handed government approach, fewer Canadians were using tobacco every year.

One of the reasons for this trend was to do with electronic cigarettes and the heat-not-burn devices that were presenting smokers with a healthier alternative.

And that was an initiative of the marketplace, not of government. If anything, the government of Canada had been hostile to vaping and electronic cigarettes.