After November 9, retailers will have 90 days to sell off all of their branded product

Starting next week, all new tobacco packages shipped to stores in Canada will feature plain brown backgrounds and off-white text, instead of bright, colourful logos.

After November 9, retailers will have 90 days to sell off all of their branded inventory.

"The package is like a mini billboard, and it's the most important type of tobacco advertising that remains in Canada today," says Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst with the Canadian Cancer Society.

But starting on February 7, 2020, any leftover product that isn't plain packaging will have to come off shelves.

"On the packages there'll still be the 75 per cent picture-based health warnings with the horrible effects of smoking, but on the remaining part, the brand part, the base colour for all brands will be an unattractive, drab brown," Cunningham tells NEWS 95.7's The Todd Veinotte Show.

The plain packaging has been a long time coming.

"Health organizations in Canada have been advocating for plain packaging since the late 1980s," explains Cunningham.

The real push for plain cartons came when Australia banned branded packaging in 2012, followed by Britain, France and Ireland, according to Cunningham.

He says that since it was added to the federal Liberal platform back in 2015, the change has been within reach for Canadians.

"They're starting to appear on store shelves now, and we're delighted by that," Cunningham says.

The pushback from the tobacco industry on the change has been significant, and the policy analyst says this is because they know they will lose money.

"If it wasn't going to be effective at reducing sales, they wouldn't have been so incredibly strongly opposed to it," says Cunningham. "The plain packaging is an effective measure."

Cunningham's hope is that the change reduces the amount of kids who are smoking, and prevents specific brands from targeting subsets of the population.

"There's slims and super slims packages that are targeted at women, they create images of weight loss and thinness and fashionability, which contribute to girls smoking," he adds.

The plain packaging will also prevent brands from advertising "light" or "mild" cigarettes as less harmful.

"They used different colours, lighter colours to suggest that a particular brand variant was less harmful," says Cunningham. "Those terms have been banned because of deception."

Instead, an off-white, plain and standard size font will identify the brand name and type of product.

"When a consumer asks for a certain brand they can still get it, the retailer can identify it," says the policy analyst.

Cigarette use is already on the decline, down to 16 per cent of Canadians in 2018 from 50 per cent in 1965.

Cunningham thinks the impacts of plain packaging won't be immediate, but over time the lack of advertising will reduce numbers even more.

"We have made important progress, and we can continue to do much more in terms of the objective of under five per cent tobacco use in Canada by 2035," he says.