The government of Alberta finally proposed legislation regulating vaping last week. But its Bill 19 is quite simply a cop-out.
In the name of protecting children and youth, the bill mainly protects industry, and not children and youth.
Alberta is the last Canadian province to regulate vaping and now makes minimal proposals: restricting advertising and vaping locations and requiring vendors to demand identification from customers who look younger than 25 years. This bill bans sales to minors – something already done by the federal government.
What the Alberta government didn’t do, but should have done, was to make vaping products less dangerous by reducing their nicotine content and by banning their flavours.
If the Alberta government was serious about protecting child and youth health, then it would have reduced the maximum levels of nicotine from 60 mg/ml to 20 mg/ml, as Nova Scotia and the European Union have done, and as British Columbia proposes to do.