A national advocacy campaign to raise awareness of the immense harms resulting from the Government of Canada’s 2024 ban on nicotine pouch sales in retail settings.
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In August 2024, the Government of Canada banned convenience stores and other retailers from selling federally-approved nicotine pouches. Overnight, smokers lost easy, legal access to a Health Canada-approved Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) shown to be 99% less harmful than cigarettes. The Government justified their decision by claiming it would reduce youth access to nicotine.
Two years later, it is more clear than ever that the convenience store ban has been an abject failure. It has set back public health, punished hardworking retailers, and enriched criminal gangs, all while making no impact on youth consumption of nicotine.
Now that stores have been banned from selling nicotine pouches for two full years, we have a clear, evidence-based understanding of the policy’s results. In short, the ban has been a disaster, achieving zero positive results while inflicting significant negative consequences on Canadian society.
The ban’s consequences can be grouped into two key categories: public health and public safety. Public health outcomes include exposing Canadians to more illegal and untested counterfeit products, undermining our battle to eliminate smoking, and enabling underage access to highly concentrated nicotine products. Public safety has been undermined by enriching gangs selling illegal pouches, allowing them to invest those proceeds into other criminal activities and depriving the Government of tax revenue.
Government-approved pouches manufactured by trusted, licensed corporations have been replaced by unsafe, unregulated counterfeits distributed by criminal enterprises. These pouches may contain a wide variety of unknown potential contaminants - users will never know, because they are never inspected. And while legal nicotine pouches are restricted to 4mg/pouch in Canada, illegal ones are commonly sold in concentrations of 30mg/pouch and even higher.
It Only Takes 1 Minute
Independent convenience stores serve hundreds of thousands of Canadian smokers every day. With the pouch ban, we’ve lost a key pathway to help those customers quit. Legal pouches are now locked behind the pharmacy counter, drastically restricting their availability for many Canadians, particularly those who live in rural and remote communities. It is absurd but true that in Canada, it is easier to legally buy cigarettes than nicotine pouches. The world’s most successful countries at reducing smoking, like Sweden, have enabled pouch availability in all retail settings where cigarettes are sold.
Illegal Pouches in Stouffville, ON
Illegal Pouches in Markham, ON
The only people who’ve benefited from the Government’s ban are criminals who’ve stepped into the vacuum to massively grow their revenue by supplying illegal nicotine pouches, both online and in illicit storefronts. A five-second Google search is all it takes to confirm that it is easy to buy nicotine pouches in Canada - just not the legal ones. And of course, these criminals are more than happy to sell to minors.
The honest answer? We don’t know. The Government never had evidence to support their supposed belief that a meaningful portion of convenience stores ever sold nicotine products to youths. We have a decades-long track record of selling tobacco and alcohol responsibly and, as recently as 2025, Health Canada’s own inspection program found that over 99% of convenience stores are in compliance with the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act.
Maintaining this policy only hurts smokers, hurts honest retailers, and helps criminals. That’s why our campaign asks the question: Who’s Ottawa protecting?
We formed the ICSA to be a voice for the thousands of independent convenience store owners across Canada who want to stand up for what’s right. The Government will ignore individual small businesses but if we join together, they will have no choice but to hear our message.
To make that happen, we are: recruiting more store owners to join our membership, recruiting members to join our leadership council, participating in media interviews, issuing press releases, sharing our message on social media, speaking directly to MPs, and more.
If you’re an independent Canadian store owner, we encourage you to join us! The best way for us to create real change is to band together.
If you’re not a store owner, but you share our beliefs about improving public health and reducing the role of organized crime in our society, please let us know that we have your support! You can do this by sharing photos and videos of illegal pouches in your community with us and by reporting these vendors to police.
We would also appreciate you following and engaging with us on social media, sharing your support with us via email at advocacy@icsa-addi.ca, and writing to your MP and voicing your opposition to the nicotine pouch ban in convenience stores.
Send us images of illegal products for sale in your community
Report these occurrences to police
Tell your MP that government policy needs to change
