Not sure the logic on that works outs. On the day ads are banned tobacco companies see a drop in their costs, but no change to revenue. The price of their cigarettes neither goes up or down.

Without a price change the government can’t benefit because the tax is proportional to the price.

So tobacco companies see a drop in costs, no change in revenue, which results in increased profits.

In the future the government could increase the tax rate, and try to force tobacco companies to drop prices to compensate, which could allow governments to extract the extra profits from reduced adverts. But that doesn’t strike me as the kind of behaviour governments participate in, a little too complicated and risky. Also very likely to have unforeseen consequences as it’s unlikely that every tobacco company was spending the same proportion of revenue on ads.

Not to say that tax rates didn’t go up. Just seems unlikely to be directly linked to the banning of ads. More likely they went up just because they can keep hiking the taxes until all the tobacco companies go bust.

It's taxed beyond affordability in Canada already - at $12+ per pack, a pack-a-day smoker is spending $360/mo on smokes, which is not an insignificant chunk of change for many people. The number of people who I personally know for whom the cost was the driving factor in finally quitting is sizeable, and so it definitely works....

And it also subsidizes tobacco farmers.

They do now, but there were decades of massive profit between the ad ban and the huge taxes. In the early 90s a carton was still like $10.

You're correct, government in the USA and Australia for instance, is massively profit-taking via the taxes to the point that they are taking in more revenue per pack than the tobacco companies.