Winnipeg MP hopes to ban flavoured tobacco

A Winnipeg MP has introduced a private member's bill designed to clamp down on novelty tobacco products that she says could attract to children to smoking.  

Winnipeg North NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis told CBC News she is most concerned about flavoured cigarillos that are sold individually.

"These are little cigarillos coming in multiple flavours — vanilla, wildberry, chocolate mint, you name it. They're packaged to look like little lipsticks or markers or crayons or glue sticks. They are sold individually. They cost a buck or two apiece," she said.

"Parents and people who are trying to teach our kids not to smoke don't even know this product is readily available."

The tobacco companies aren't doing anything illegal in selling them, Wasylycia-Leis said, so the law must change.

"When you shut one door, they find another door to come in," she said.

"They've found a loophole in our Tobacco Act, which says that you can get away with selling these little cigarillos individually, and they don't have to have warning labels on them, and they don't have to have packaging requirements. So we've got to close this loophole."

Wasylycia-Leis's bill, introduced Monday, would require small cigarillos to be sold in packages of 20 and make health-warning labels mandatory on cigarillos, cigars and pipe tobacco.

It would also ban the sale of tobacco products that include "flavouring agent[s] other than sugar, tobacco, tobacco extracts or reconstituted tobacco."