Canada (Commonwealth Union) – Many countries across the world have taken a tough stance against smoking, including banning depictions of persons smoking in the media and raising the legal age for smoking from 18 to 21. A recent study in New Zealand indicated that younger people backed a proposal to bring in a smoke-free generation. A new online tool monitoring worldwide progress on tobacco control has based itself on the principle that “what gets measured gets done.”
The Global Tobacco Control Progress Hub provides an instant image of how 180 nations are progressing for over 300 tobacco control measures, from taxation to restrictions on smoking and product labelling. Many countries have included measures such as images on lungs damaged by smoking and active advertising campaigns across a wide range of media. All are evidence-based measures seen in the World Health Organization Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, a treaty first signed in 2003 presently includes 90% of the global population. In spite of that, tobacco use is still a top preventable cause of death and chronic disease worldwide leading to over 8 million deaths annually and still going up.
Les Hagen, adjunct professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health and executive director of the tobacco control charity ASH Canada, indicated that unless there is benchmarking results, it’s really hard to hold governments accountable on the treaty implementation.
The new global surveillance platform has a series of dashboards linked to various datasets. This was formed by ASH Canada together with the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Hagen’s recent publication of the paper tracking implementation of the treaty measures from 2008 to 2018 served as an inspiration for the hub.
Canada is ranked 19th from 180 countries, a drop from 10th in 2016, with 4.2 million smokers in 2020, according to Statistics Canada. Hagen stated that to enhance that rating, the nation should go further to regulate and tax tobacco and related products, run mass media anti-tobacco campaigns and block interference from the tobacco industry.
Hagen points out that Alberta and Canada were some of the first jurisdictions across the globe to ban menthol and other flavored cigarettes, and he would like the same measures applied to flavored vaping products. “We have to get cherry and bubblegum and peach and mint out of vaping products that are targeted at youth,” he said.
He also has a problem with Canada’s cannabis laws, which permit provinces to choose whether to restrict public consumption. “The issue is one of social modelling. It doesn’t matter whether you’re smoking or vaping, whether it’s tobacco or nicotine or cannabis — to a five-year-old, it’s all smoking,” Hagen explained. “The more smoking cues a child receives during their childhood, the more likely they are to become smokers themselves.”
Hagen holds a positive view of the new Canadian regulations that will place a warning on each cigarette, not just the packaging, another world first.
The progress hub and Hagen’s research demonstrate that nations with reduced levels of income, human development and literacy, and elevated corruption rates and autocratic regimes, have a more difficult task to put in place the tobacco control treaty. El Salvador and Senegal stand out as exceptions to the rule, he said.
“By benchmarking their current progress, countries will be better able to determine where they need to apply their resources,” the adjunct professor explained. “Peer pressure can go a long way — not only when it comes to tobacco uptake among kids. Peer pressure can also encourage governments and policy makers to take action to reduce and prevent tobacco use. And this platform is a very good application of global peer pressure.”
