Vaping and smoking e-cigarettes are banned in areas where cigarettes are forbidden, following the provincial government’s changes to the Smoke-Free Ontario Act and Electronic Cigarettes Act in March.
Western University’s smoking policy was extended to include vaping in June. Jane O’Brien, the associate vice-president of human resources at Western, said Western’s delayed response was due to consultations.
“We’ve been in consultation with all community stakeholders for the last 18 months around how we were going to implement the legislation,” O’Brien said. “We have involved all the employee union groups, the undergraduate students, the graduate students, faculty, staff, members of our alumni. We also happen to have facilities like hotels and different types of external office buildings on our campus as well, so those were all part of the external consulting process.”
At Carleton University, Nancy Delcellier, the director of environmental health and safety, said the university prohibits vaping indoors.
“That same prohibition regarding the use of e-cigarettes exists at Carleton, and has for some time,” she said via email. “Carleton was the first of the Ontario universities to prohibit e-cigarettes indoors.”
She said Carleton’s policy has prohibited vaping since October 2014, before official legislation from the government was put in place this year.
“It also complies with the Electronic Cigarettes Act [from] 2015 which came into effect after our policy had already been in place,” she said.
“In addition to the regulatory context, and perhaps more importantly for Carleton, a number of the e-cigarettes do contain nicotine or other chemicals . . . an individual who is vaping indoors is potentially exposing other individuals to these chemicals,” Delcellier said. “As an employer, Carleton must do everything possible to safeguard our employees, and by extension our students. That is why we implemented the policy even before it became standard to do so.”
The federal government announced in September they plan to strengthen the current regulations surrounding smoking and vaping this fall.
According to a statement from Health Canada, the government will introduce changes to the Tobacco Act to create new regulations on vaping products.
“These changes . . . will balance the need to protect youth from nicotine addiction and tobacco use while allowing adult smokers to legally access vaping products for smoking cessation or as a potentially less harmful alternative to tobacco,” the statement said.
