Opening Remarks Before the Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology

By Dr. Alexander Caudarella 
Chief Executive Officer 
Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction 
September 24, 2026

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

My name is Dr. Alexander Caudarella, and I am the CEO of the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, or CCSA.

CCSA is an independent, non-governmental organization created by Parliament to provide national leadership on substance use and to advance solutions to address substance use health issues.
We welcome the opportunity to contribute to your study of Bill C-31, particularly the proposal to move reviews of the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act from every two years to every five years.

Regular statutory reviews are valuable. They create an important opportunity to step back and ask whether legislation is achieving its objectives, whether the evidence or marketplace has changed, and whether adjustments are needed.

In fact, this kind of recurring statutory review is unusual among psychoactive substances in Canada. The Cannabis Act required a single legislative review. The independent expert panel that conducted that review subsequently recommended that future reviews be mandated at regular intervals and suggested five years.

From our perspective, a five-year review cycle for the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act can be reasonable — provided that a longer interval between reviews does not mean waiting five years to identify and respond to emerging issues. There is an important distinction between legislative review and ongoing oversight.

Last year, CCSA provided a submission to Health Canada’s third legislative review of the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act, which focused on compliance and enforcement. We identified several opportunities to strengthen compliance and enforcement, including:

• greater transparency around enforcement activities and outcomes; 
• more systematic monitoring of promotion, particularly online; and 
• ensuring sufficient resources to enforce the rules already in place.

Importantly, these activities can continue between legislative reviews. A move from two-year to five-year reviews may provide an opportunity to focus additional capacity on ongoing monitoring, enforcement and evaluation, helping to ensure the Act continues to achieve its objectives as the environment evolves.
There may also be value in considering how future reviews are designed and conducted, including having clear objectives and scope, transparent consultation processes, and opportunities to hear from a broad range of perspectives — including public health experts, researchers, people with lived and living experience, youth and others affected by the legislation.

Finally, the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act provides an opportunity to think more broadly about how Canada regulates the promotion of products that can affect health.

CCSA recently compared Canada's legal frameworks governing promotion of tobacco, vaping, cannabis, alcohol and gambling. We found significant differences in the protections they provide, even as promotion increasingly occurs across the same digital and social media environments.

Tobacco and vaping legislation provides relatively strong protections, particularly for young people. But those protections only work when the rules keep pace with changing promotional practices and are effectively monitored and enforced. There is evidence that youth are increasingly exposed to smoking and vaping in film and television, and on social media. It’s by addressing these types of well-known gaps in a timely manner that we will offer the best protections. 

So, while five years can be an appropriate interval for taking stock of the legislation as a whole, protecting public health requires work throughout those five years.

Working together, we can review periodically, monitor continuously and act when the evidence tells us action is needed.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.