An aggressive smoking-cessation campaign at Calgary's Mount Royal University is getting a funding boost from the federal government.

Calgary Centre MP Lee Richardson announced this week the Tobacco Free @ MRU program would receive $114,770 from Health Canada.

"The Government of Canada is proud to be working with Mount Royal University and its partners to help reduce cigarette smoking among students and employees," Richardson said in a written release.

"I look forward to learning about the progress being made to address this important health issue in the months and years ahead."

The program aims to educate students and teachers about the health risks associated with smoking and inspire them to quit through on-campus interventions.

An estimated 3,000 MRU students smoke, but the project hopes to reduce the number of staff and student smokers on campus by 3.8 per cent in the next year.

Student Shane Gorman said he thinks the program is making a difference.

"I've noticed a reduction, definitely, in the past year with people in the smoking areas, for sure. I think it's just smoking isn't cool anymore," he said.

Gorman said the secret of Tobacco Free @ MRU is the aggressive nature of the campaign, in which organizers use graphic displays to convince students to quit.

MRU health educator Shermin Murji, the driving force behind the program, said Drop Dead Day is one tool that sends a shocking message.

In order to create a visual representation of how often someone dies from a smoking-related illness, participants draw chalk outlines of dead bodies throughout the school's hallways.

"We just start [walking] and count eight seconds and then we outline a dead body and we'll put a [statistic] next to it, for example, 50 per cent of smokers are gonna die because of their habit," Murji said.

"Then we'll walk another eight seconds and we'll do another dead body. So students and employees are walking down the halls and they're like, 'Why are there so many dead bodies?' and then they start to realize this is how many people, in the 30 seconds that they were walking, actually die from tobacco use."

Smoking remains the most preventable cause of disease and premature death in Canada.