Canada to Become First Country to Mandate Warning Labels on Individual Cigarettes

Projected design of cigarettes featuring individual health warnings. Health Canada

Canada is set to become the first country in the world to require tobacco companies to print health-warning labels directly on individual cigarettes in a bid to make more Canadians quit smoking.

Mental Health and Addictions Minister Carolyn Bennett announced on May 31 that the new health-warning requirements will come into effect on Aug. 1.

“Labelling the tipping paper of individual cigarettes, little cigars, tubes, and other tobacco products will make it virtually impossible to avoid health warnings altogether,” said a May 31 release from Health Canada.

Although the rule comes into force at the beginning of August, Health Canada says the federal government will implement the new regulations through a “phased approach that will see most measures on the Canadian market within the year” and that retailers will be carrying tobacco products featuring the new labelled cigarettes by the end of April 2024.

King-sized cigarettes—which are slightly longer than standard cigarettes—will be the first to include the individual health-warning labels, says Health Canada. They will be followed by regular-size cigarettes and little cigars by the end of April 2025.

The individual warning labels on cigarettes will carry messages like, “Cigarettes damage your organs,” according to an image depicting their projected design released by Health Canada.

Health Canada says the new labelling requirements are meant to support the federal Tobacco Strategy’s target of reaching less than 5 percent nationwide tobacco use by 2035.

“While tobacco prevalence in Canada is at 13% currently, the health care costs associated with tobacco use represent 47% of all health care costs associated with substance use in Canada,” Health Canada wrote in a backgrounder on the new regulations.

Warning Labels

The federal agency added that smoking is linked to over 40 diseases and conditions, including cancer and heart disease.

The update to Canada’s regulations on cigarette packaging comes just over 20 years after Canada also became the first country to ever implement pictorial health warnings on cigarette packages in 2001.

At the time, tobacco companies were only required to cover 50 percent of both the front and back of cigarette packages with warnings about smoking-related health issues, with one side being written in English and the other side in French.

In 2012, the federal government introduced a set of 16 new health-warning label requirements for cigarette packages. The new warnings were larger, and tobacco companies were required to cover at least 75 percent of the front and back of cigarette and little cigar packages with the labels.

In the same year, the federal government also prohibited cigarette manufacturers and importers from distributing products without the new health warnings.

The government’s introduction of the new health warnings to be placed directly on individual cigarettes will come along with several other new regulatory measures related to tobacco products, including “strengthening and updating” the warning labels already covering cigarette packages.

Health Canada says it will also be extending the “requirement for health-related messaging to all tobacco product packages” and implementing periodic rotation of the warning labels.