Governments response to nicotine control is fundamentally flawed
In their bid to address youth access to nicotine products, the federal government and many provinces keep getting it wrong. Their premise is that young people come into convenience stores and therefore we should be restricted from selling certain age-restricted products. Not cigarettes, not lottery, not beverage alcohol. But the products that Health Canada has deemed to be less harmful somehow don’t belong in our stores.
First, the previous federal Health Minister banned the sale of nicotine pouches in convenience stores. At the provincial level, provinces like Quebec banned the sale of flavoured vaping products.
Nicotine pouches are now widely available online. There are websites where you can buy them in bulk. The vast majority are contraband or counterfeit. They are available in high nicotine concentrations and in crazy flavours. Needless to say, these online vendors do not worry about their customers’ ages. All governments know that it is a big problem, but they can’t seem to find a way to solve it. Instead, so that they can be seen to be addressing the problem , they focus on convenience stores.
In Quebec, a flavour ban has been hugely unsuccessful. Many vape shops have skirted the rules, and Quebec’s own mystery shops show that convenience stores have a stellar track record. The net effect is that our stores have been negatively impacted, while youth access to flavours is on the rise.
More recently, Manitoba’s proposed Bill 54 would pull flavoured vapes off the shelves of urban convenience stores while letting rural ones keep selling the very same products. It would also leave specialty vape shops untouched.
Finally, the NDP In Ontario just reintroduced Vaping Is Not for Kids, a private members’ bill which goes further. It would ban the promotion of vaping products, raise the legal purchase age to 21, pile on new taxes, restrict flavours—and funnel every remaining legal sale into specialty vape shops, pushing the products out of convenience stores and gas stations altogether.
None of these governments appear to be persuaded by the facts. Health Canada’s own mystery shops should be guiding public policy. At gas and convenience stores, they saw a 99% compliance rate. By stark contrast, at specialty vape shops, 43% were caught breaking federal rules.
Read that again: The legislation targets compliant channels while exempting the failing ones, effectively handing Ontario's entire market over to the worst offenders.
Imagine if your car insurance rates increased when you had a year with a perfect driving record. People would say that’s outrageous and irrational. You are supposed to be rewarded for a solid track record, not punished.
What’s lacking is common sense. Ontario’s bill would make specialty vape shops the only place to legally buy these products, while shutting out the convenience stores that pass inspection more than 99% of the time. It rewards the worst-performing channel with a monopoly. If the goal is keeping nicotine away from minors, that is precisely backwards. We are also supposed to believe that specialty shops are “adult-only” locations. Do they have a bouncer at the front door? Are young people carded before going in? Of course not.
At convenience stores, our compliance record isn’t luck. CICC members built and fund our ID Please age-verification training program precisely because selling age-restricted products demands discipline—carding customers, refusing minors, keeping product behind the counter.
We’re so proud of our stellar track record and our age-verification program that we are asking provincial governments across the country to make training mandatory for anyone who retails nicotine products. That’s responsible, common-sense action.
Geography only sharpens the contradiction. Under Bill 54, the same product would be banned in a Winnipeg convenience store but permitted an hour down the highway.
Politicians must realize that rules that change with the postal code don’t protect a single teenager. They just pick winners and losers among small businesses and tell consumers which store,or which town to buy from instead. And they do nothing to regulate online vendors.
Here is the part that keeps getting lost: Convenience stores are part of the solution. We are gated, responsible, inspected and accountable—the one channel where enforcement works. Politicians shouldn’t be trying to dismantle that infrastructure. They should be leaning on it.
A serious plan would direct inspection and penalty resources where the failures actually occur:Online sellers and specialty shops. It would impose meaningful, escalating penalties for selling to a minor in any channel. It would crack down on illicit and contraband tobacco products. It would set consistent rules — not a patchwork that shifts between cities, towns and store types.
Governments shouldn’t base their success on whether they can issue a tidy news release that pretends to address the problem. Instead, they should ask, “are we keeping nicotine products out of the hands of youth?” By that measure, allowing the online pouches market to flourish and stripping flavoured vapes from the most compliant retailers in the country, while the illicit market runs unchecked, doesn’t just fall short, it creates more harm.
Restrictions aren’t protecting young people. It’s turning a blind eye to the harm and calling it a win. Governments can keep chasing the easy headline, or they can do the harder, smarter thing. Enforce the rules where they are being broken and build on the one channel that has earned the right to sell these products responsibly.
