(Montreal) In response to the scourge of access to vaping products by Quebec teenagers, the Minister of Health says he wants to “crack down” on distributors, but the department confirms that it still has no deadline for limiting the sale of such products to the public.
Pressed with questions in the National Assembly, Thursday, following revelations from the daily The duty indicating that it is easy for minors to obtain vaping cartridges exceeding the legal dose of nicotine, Minister Christian Dubé described the situation as “inadmissible”.
He added that distributors must comply with the law and that the government would “require distributors to obey the law”.
However, the Government of Quebec has no idea of the number of distributors of tobacco and vaping products and even less of who they are or where they are.
Currently, the law does not require any specific license to retail tobacco or vaping products and the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) has confirmed to The Canadian Press that there is currently no timeline for deploying this system.
PHOTO EDOUARD PLANTE-FRÉCHETTE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Christian Dube
“The implementation of a fee-based permit or license system for the sale of tobacco and vaping products was effectively identified among the measures aimed at reducing smoking in Quebec. No timeline has been specified at this time,” the MSSS replied in an email in response to a question posed last month about the progress of the project.
However, these are recommendations 3 and 4 of the report of the national director of public health on “measures aimed at better regulating vaping”. A document commissioned by the CAQ government and published in August 2020. It is the same document to which the minister referred in his responses to Liberal MP Enrico Ciccone.
Recommendation 3 proposes to “implement a license to sell” for vaping and tobacco products. Then, recommendation 4 adds that we could thus “reduce the density of points of sale […] close to educational establishments.
These same solutions are also included in measure 1.3 of the Strategy for a tobacco-free Quebec 2020-2025. A document written by the MSSS that serves as a guide for the government in the fight against smoking and vaping.
“Such a system would allow for an up-to-date register of outlets, which would be used to regulate the density and location of outlets and which would eventually allow the number of authorized retailers to be reduced”, can we read.
This permit requirement would notably make it possible to drastically limit access to tobacco or vaping products. It could also prohibit the sale of these products near schools.
This type of permit already exists in other provinces, including Ontario, New Brunswick and Alberta, the document states.
The recommendation was even made to the Quebec government as early as 2015 in a report by the Quebec Taxation Review Commission. It recommended the introduction of a $250 permit system to fund the fight against smoking.
In Minister Dubé’s office, no further explanation has been provided to justify that these solutions have still not been deployed. We are referring to the response given Thursday by the Minister, according to which distributors are asked to respect the law and that “if we have to put other measures in place, we will do so”.