The federal government hopes that forcing tobacco companies to sell their deadly product in packages with ever-larger and more horrifying warning labels will continue to push Canadians to stop smoking or, better still, never take it up. By Wednesday, all retailers were supposed to be carrying cigarette and small-cigar packs featuring warning labels that cover 75 per cent of the package.
Since Canada began requiring tobacco companies to put warning labels on cigarette packages in 2000, there has been a significant decline in the number of Canadians who smoke cigarettes. In 2011, one in five Canadians aged 12 and older smoked. That had dropped from more than one in four in 2001. By 2010-11, nearly three-quarters of Canadians in Grades 6 to 12 said they had never tried smoking a cigarette – an increase from the previous such survey, in 2008-09, when 67 per cent said they had never tried.
Graphic package warnings are almost certainly not the only reason behind these declines in smoking, but surveys have found that smokers say they pay attention to the warnings – especially large, graphic ones – in a way that they didn’t to written warnings. Tobacco kills about 45,000 Canadians a year. According to the Canadian Lung Association, that’s more than the total number of deaths from AIDS, car accidents, suicide, murder, fires and accidental poisonings combined.
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