Imagine a future where cigarettes are not sold beside everyday products, but displayed behind glass. Not as objects of nostalgia, but as artifacts of a public health failure we finally corrected.
That is the future Canada should be working toward. A truly smoke-free Canada would be one where people encounter cigarettes in museum exhibits rather than in their social circles, where policymakers look back on combustible tobacco as a case study in how long it can take to act on overwhelming evidence, and where cigarettes are no longer the default option for adults who smoke. Instead, these adults would be given clear information about regulated smoke-free alternatives, including heated tobacco, vaping products, and nicotine pouches, that do not rely on burning tobacco.
The idea that cigarettes belong in a museum is more than a metaphor. It is a way of reframing how we think about a product that has caused generations of preventable disease and death. We study dangerous products of the past to understand what went wrong, how evidence was ignored, and how society eventually chose a better path. Cigarettes deserve the same fate.
Decades of research have made one fact impossible to ignore. The greatest harm from cigarettes comes from burning tobacco and inhaling smoke, which contains thousands of chemicals and dozens of known carcinogens. Nicotine is addictive and not without risk, but it is the combustion that drives the overwhelming burden of disease. That distinction is the foundation of modern tobacco harm reduction. When combustion is removed, exposure to the toxic substances that cause cancer, heart disease, and lung disease can be dramatically reduced. This is why smoke‑free alternatives have become central to the global conversation about how to accelerate the decline of smoking.
Other countries have already begun to reflect this science in policy. In the United Kingdom, public health authorities have incorporated vaping into some cessation strategies for adults who smoke. New Zealand, in pursuing its Smokefree 2025 goal, has paired strong measures against cigarettes with a recognition that smoke-free nicotine products can help reduce smoking rates among adults. Sweden offers another example: as an EU member with an exemption allowing domestic sales of snus, it has combined traditional tobacco controls with access to non-combustible oral nicotine products and now has one of the lowest smoking rates in Europe. The details differ across jurisdictions, but the direction is consistent: make cigarettes less attractive and less accessible, while ensuring that adults who smoke have access to regulated, smoke-free alternatives.
Canada has made significant progress of its own. Smoking rates have fallen sharply since the 1960s, and the federal government has set a national target of reducing tobacco use to less than five percent by 2035. Since the launch of Canada’s Tobacco Strategy, smoking among youth has dropped to an all-time low of less than 2%, and vaping rates among youth have also been in decline.
Yet approximately 3.5 million Canadians still smoke. At the same time, new nicotine products that are potentially less harmful than cigarettes have entered the market, and public understanding has not kept pace with the science. Many Canadians believe that all nicotine products carry the same level of harm. When public messaging treats all products as equally harmful, the default option for many adults who smoke remains the one that they are familiar with — namely, cigarettes.
For health organizations, anti‑smoking advocates, and governments, the goal is shared: fewer people smoking, fewer people getting sick, and fewer families losing loved ones to smoking-related disease. The challenge is finding the fastest and most effective path to get there.
That is where harm reduction has a role to play. It means providing adults who smoke with clear, evidence‑based information about regulated, smoke‑free alternatives that are potentially less harmful than cigarettes, while maintaining strong protections for youth.
This is not an endorsement of nicotine. Nor is it an argument that smoke-free products are harmless or appropriate for young people or non-smokers. It is an acknowledgment that as long as nicotine use exists, public health is better served when the public has more information about the alternatives available to them.
Canada has the tools, the science, and the policy experience to move forward. The question now is whether we are prepared to retire cigarettes to the museum as we build a smoke‑free future.
