Premier Alison Redford is starting to announce her wide-ranging plan to crack down on youth smoking, satisfying the promises she made earlier this year in a survey from an anti-smoking group. She’s discussed that she will be implementing stricter policy-planning, as Redford said in Calgary. In the survey from Campaign for a Smoke Free Alberta, she committed to raising taxes for cigarettes, making it harder for children to buy cigarettes and banning the sale of addictive flavoured tobacco.
She also promised during her leadership campaign to ban smoking in cars and trucks with children. She still hasn’t clarified when it would be released. There have been many activists who have spoken out about the mishandling the youth smoking problem from the side of the government. I agree and I think that it is a huge problem in youth today, it is unacceptable that we are not taking appropriate action to actually get cigarettes out of the hands of kids. I think that another part of the problem is the fact that we obviously don’t have a good enough prevention policy if we still see that students are taking up smoking. Taxes and regulation are one thing, but educating youth on why not to smoke is an entire different approach which I think will be more effective in the long run.
What do you think? Do you think that this policy is going in the right direction?