Regulations and taxes started gearing up after smoking had been in decline. Smoking prevalence is the percent of people in Canada who smoke every day plus those who smoke occasionally. Figure 1 shows a fall in smoking prevalence. Between 1965 and 1996, smoking prevalence fell from 49.5 percent to between 27.0 percent and 28.5 percent, a fall of between 48.8 percent and 42.4 percent. No one measure of smoking gives the whole picture on tobacco use.
Smoking prevalence says nothing about the number of cigarettes smokers smoked.
You may find a fall in prevalence but a rise in the use of tobacco by regular smokers. Figure 2 shows that the number of cigarettes a smoker consumed kept rising until the 1970s and then started to fall in early 1980s and stabilized in the 1990s. The CCSA's numbers are for a shorter period than mine and show some discrepancy from mine but show the same overall tendency in daily number of cigarettes smoked by smokers. I do not count the dip in the early 1990s in cigarettes smoked as a true indicator of the level smoked because official sales figures during this period were confounded by the explosion of the underground trade in cigarettes. This trade only subsided in the mid-1990s after Ottawa lowered cigarette taxes.