British Columbia’s new Vaping Products Damages and Health Care Cost Recovery Act is being sold as a way to make vaping companies pay for health-care costs. Our first question is exactly how is vaping costing the provincial health care system? We would argue that vaping is saving the health care system millions in smoking-related costs.
This is a political stunt that will do nothing to improve public health and everything to encourage people who smoke, to keep smoking and even pushing those who vape back to smoking. This has nothing to do with the people of BC, but everything to do with ignorance and lack of knowledge about Tobacco Harm Reduction.
They just want money, and Attorney General Niki Sharma has already admitted that any money collected through this Bill won’t even go to health care. It will go straight into the province’s general coffers. This isn’t about protecting patients or paying for hospital beds. It’s about choosing money over lives. And those lives are the people who smoke and vape in BC.
If the government truly cared about health-care costs, it would start with the industries that actually drive them. Alcohol kills roughly 15,000 Canadians every year and costs billions in health care, policing, and social services. Obesity, driven by ultra-processed foods, costs billions more.
NOT A SINGLE CANADIAN HAS DIED FROM VAPING!
Where’s the “Alcohol Cost Recovery Act”? Where’s the “Junk Food Accountability Bill”? There aren’t any. Those industries are politically powerful and socially accepted. Vapers are not. They’re an easy target.
Vaping exists for one simple reason: to help people stop smoking. It’s a harm-reduction tool, a lifeline for over 1.2 million Canadians who vape. Every credible public-health authority, from Public Health England to the Royal College of Physicians, and yes our own Health Canada agrees it is far less harmful than smoking , as much as 95 percent less harmful.
Yet this legislation treats vaping as if it’s the new tobacco epidemic. Vaping is not tobacco.
We celebrate harm reduction when it involves opioids, alcohol, and sex, but when it comes to nicotine, suddenly compassion and science vanish. Instead of educating people, this Bill stigmatizes those trying to make a safer choice.
By introducing a retroactive, sweeping liability law, B.C. isn’t protecting public health; it’s criminalizing innovation. It punishes the very industry helping people move away from the product that causes 48,000 deaths in Canada each year: cigarettes.
If this law succeeds, the message is clear: harm reduction is only acceptable when it fits the government’s political narrative. For smokers who want to quit, that’s not justice that’s betrayal.
Ms. Sharma, perhaps you need to step up and learn about what you are villainizing. You are using your position, your office to stigmatize an entire group of people. Shame on you. Perhaps it’s time to actually do the work. I am not a lawyer, but I can smell an ambulance chaser a mile a way, and with this Bill that is all that you are.
Do better.
