What the law says about buying vapes online in Canada

What are the rules for buying vapes online in Canada?

A retailer selling vapes online in Canada has to verify the buyer’s age against the minimum set by the delivery province, keep nicotine concentration at or under the federal 20 mg/mL cap, and follow that province’s flavour rule — and in Quebec, not sell remotely at all, because provincial law effectively bars mail-order vaping sales to consumers there. Federal excise duty, and in most provinces a matching provincial duty, is already built into the shelf price before any of that applies, so sales tax at checkout is on top of what the product already carries.

Age, duty and flavour rules by province

Minimum purchase age, whether a province doubles the federal vaping duty, and how it treats flavoured product vary independently of each other, and none of the three follows the others. This table is generated from the same primary-source dataset behind this site’s vape tax pages, so it cannot drift out of sync with them.

“Doubled (coordinated)” means the province charges its own vaping duty at the same rate as the federal one, under the Coordinated Vaping Product Taxation Agreement.British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Saskatchewan have not joined that agreement and instead each add their own vape-specific sales tax, currently 20% in all three. For Saskatchewan, its own bulletin defines the provincial sales-tax base but refers GST questions to the CRA, without stating whether GST is charged on the vape-tax-inclusive amount or the pre-tax amount — so no combined total is confirmed by a primary source there. See the itemised per-province breakdown rather than relying on a single figure for Saskatchewan. Newfoundland and Labrador is settled: its bulletin states HST applies to the retail price plus the vapour products tax, so the two compound.

How much duty applies to an online order?

Federal vaping duty is charged per immediate container — one disposable, one pod, or one bottle — not per order and not by total volume shipped. The rate is $1.12 per 2 mL, or fraction of it, for the first 10 mL in a container, then $1.12per additional 10 mL. It has not changed since 2024-07-01. CRA’s own worked example in Notice EDN82 shows what that means once an order holds more than one item:

Both orders hold the same 25 mL of e-liquid in total, split differently between containers. In a province that has joined the coordinated duty framework, the same container count doubles the total again, because that province charges its own vaping duty at rates identical to the federal one. How the federal vaping duty is calculated works through the mechanism in full, and the vape tax by province calculator applies it to a real price instead of an illustrative one.

Is there a nicotine limit on what you can buy?

Yes. Federal regulation caps the nicotine concentration of any vaping substance legally sold in Canada at 20 mg/mL, in a store or online, in every province — a limit that does not change at the border between provinces the way tax does. A listing offering anything stronger is not a legal Canadian retail product. Nicotine strength, explained covers how that figure is expressed in mg/mL versus percentage, and why the two describe the same cap.

Can flavoured e-liquid be delivered to your province?

6 provinces and territories — New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island and Quebec — restrict retail sale to tobacco-flavoured or entirely unflavoured vaping product. British Columbia and Ontario allow flavoured product, but only sold from premises a young person may not enter, a rule written for a physical storefront rather than a delivery address. The remaining 5 — Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Saskatchewan and Yukon — add no provincial flavour rule beyond federal law. This is a rule about retail sale; separately, the federal Vaping Products Promotion Regulations prohibit promoting flavours at all, in any province, which is why this page describes what a store may legally sell rather than what any product tastes like.

Why can’t Quebec residents order vapes by mail?

Quebec is the only province where the law effectively bars remote or mail-order retail sale of vaping products to consumers, so the online stores this site compares generally cannot ship there even though the same products are sold elsewhere in Canada. That is a rule about the sale itself. Quebec separately prohibits online advertising of vaping products outright, a stricter promotion rule than the rest of the country operates under. The province still has its own excise and sales tax rates, shown on its vape tax page, for reference.

Can vape prices be advertised online in Canada?

Only narrowly. The Tobacco and Vaping Products Act defines “promotion” broadly enough to include any communication of information about a product, including its price, and prohibits it outside a short list of exceptions. A site built to compare prices avoids being promotion in the legal sense only by taking no payment or consideration from any retailer — how this site is built sets out that it does not sell anything, hold a cart, or accept payment for placement or ranking. That is also why nothing in this reference cluster ranks, rates or recommends a product: reporting a fact and endorsing a choice are legally different acts, and only the first is what this page does.

None of the above changes what something costs today, only what a retailer is allowed to sell and where. For current prices, browse the tracked catalogue of disposable vapes, e-liquid, pod systems and hardware, compare listings across the stores this site tracks, or check the price index for where levels stand across the market.