by: neil collishaw
here are some grim statistics. in 14 months, covid-19 has killed over 24,000 canadians. the daily death toll is about 50 per day, but that number is declining as more people get vaccinated.
here are some equally grim statistics. every year, tobacco kills over 50,000 canadians. that is over 140 per day, and it will likely be some years before the daily death count starts to decline.
just over a year ago, the world health organization declared covid-19 a pandemic. but we expect that deaths from covid-19 will continue to drop. by contrast, more than 35 years have passed since the who declared tobacco a global pandemic and yet it remains the leading cause of preventable death in canada.
it does not have to be this way. with the same collective will and determination that we see with covid-19, governments can do more to end the tobacco epidemic. although the federal government has set the goal of reducing smoking to less than five per cent of canadians by 2035, there is no credible plan in place to make this happen.
while there is no true vaccine to prevent nicotine addiction, the public health equivalent exists in policies and programs that prevent the addiction of new users, that help existing users quit and that forcibly dismantle the tobacco trade. governments have administered the initial dose of this policy vaccine, and it has flattened the curve, and by administering a more powerful policy dose this pandemic can be essentially eradicated.