Bill S-16 (Historical)

Tackling Contraband Tobacco Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (trafficking in contraband tobacco)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to create a new offence of trafficking in contraband tobacco and to provide for minimum penalties of imprisonment for repeat offenders.

Tackling Contraband Tobacco Act

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to offer my support of Bill S-16, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (trafficking in contraband tobacco). It is another example of the commitment of this government to the safety and security of Canadians.

I am pleased to speak to the merits of the bill for two main reasons. First, by creating a new Criminal Code offence regarding the sale and distribution of contraband tobacco with mandatory minimum penalties for repeat offenders and by establishing a 50-officer RCMP anti-contraband force, the government is fulfilling the commitment it made to Canadians in its 2011 election platform.

Second, by carefully tailoring the measures in the bill, especially those related to the penalties provisions, the government has created an effective vehicle to stem the tide of illicit tobacco that is washing over Canadian society.

As I will discuss, this tide of large-scale criminal activity raises serious concerns not only for Canada's fiscal health but also for the physical health of Canadians.

Before I describe in more detail the measures proposed by Bill S-16, allow me to provide a bit of context for hon. members that may help them to appreciate the gravity of the problem that Bill S-16 seeks to address as well as the careful way in which the bill has been drafted to accomplish its goal.

At the outset, it should be noted that according to Health Canada figures, in 2011 Canada's approximately five million declared smokers consumed between 125 million and 150 million cartons of legal cigarettes. Given the illegal nature of the manufacture and distribution of contraband tobacco, it is very difficult to estimate how much market share is occupied by these illegally produced tobacco products in Canada. Studies of the issue provide figures ranging from as low as 12% to as high as 33%, with significant provincial variations.

Some of the human costs associated with illicit tobacco trade have already been mentioned. The first and most obvious is the serious health risk associated with smoking, which is exacerbated by the fact that much of the contraband tobacco is of very poor quality and contains harmful contaminants.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the trafficking problem resulted from our own legally produced and less harmful tobacco products being smuggled back into Canada after they had been exported to the United States. While this still happens, although on a smaller scale than 20 years ago, the present problem is that much of the illicit tobacco being consumed in Canada was either illegally manufactured in Canada for the United States in less than ideal conditions or is made up of counterfeit tobacco products imported from abroad.

We know that smoking legally produced tobacco products is dangerous; it is even more dangerous to smoke the adulterated or contaminated products that are provided by illegal sources.

Who is smoking contraband tobacco? Here we come to another of the human costs to which I referred.

At a time in Canadian history when smoking is declining, we find that two of the groups most likely to purchase illicit tobacco products are teenagers and young adults. These, of course, are the very people we wish to most discourage from smoking at all.

In short, the illicit tobacco industry is not only supplying an existing clientele; it is also cultivating a new clientele base that will enable it to flourish into the future.

This leads me to another and more dangerous human cost associated with contraband tobacco that I wish to mention. It has to do with the respect for the law and the attitudes that allow illicit tobacco sales to thrive in this country.

In a 2009 report to the Minister of Public Safety, the task force on illicit tobacco products pointed to four reasons that illegal tobacco products are in such demand in Canada: first, the motivation of smokers of all ages to find low-cost options to satisfy their tobacco cravings and addictions; second, low public appreciation for the harmful consequences of illegal tobacco markets; third, the ease of access to illegal tobacco products; and fourth, the fact that illicit manufacturing and sale of tobacco products was not only tolerated on first nations reserves, but was an important source of revenue there.

There is something wrong when Canadians think it is acceptable to purchase an illegal product, especially when its production and distribution is so intimately connected to organized crime activity in Canada and abroad.

One of the benefits of Bill S-16, aside from curbing the illicit production and sale of contraband tobacco would be to help raise public awareness that these are crimes that will not go unpunished.

To date, law enforcement in this area has relied on the Excise Tax Act with its focus on fines and seizure of illegal tobacco products and vehicles. While there have been some high-profile seizures, I think it is fair to say that it has not stemmed the illegal trade in any significant way. Sterner measures are clearly called for.

This is especially so in light of the known involvement of organized crime groups in this illicit trade and the fact that tobacco smuggling is often accompanied by human, drug and weapons smuggling.

In this regard, it is well accepted that the effectiveness of sanctions depends on their severity, their swiftness and their certainty. Bill S-16 would ensure severity by making the trade in illicit tobacco a criminal offence. A new Criminal Code provision would therefore outlaw possession of tobacco for sale, and the sale, the offer for sale, the transport, the delivery or distribution of a tobacco product that has not been stamped in accordance with the Excise Act.

Criminal law is a powerful tool. It would be utilized by federal prosecutors who would have concurrent jurisdiction with provincial crown prosecutors to enforce this new sanction. The swiftness of criminal sanctions would be enhanced by the creation of a special 50-officer RCMP task force that would focus on the eradication of illicit tobacco trade.

As we know, better and swifter enforcement begins with the investigation and the arrest stage of criminal proceedings. With these new resourses, the authorities should be able to make a real dent in the illicit tobacco industry. Mandatory minimum penalties for repeat offenders would ensure the certainty of punishment, the third criterion for effective law enforcement.

The maximum penalty for a first offence would be up to six months' imprisonment on summary conviction or up to five years' imprisonment in the case of an indictment. However, repeat offenders in cases involving 10,000 cigarettes or more, 10 kilograms or more of another tobacco product, or 10 kilograms or more of raw leaf tobacco would be sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 90 days' imprisonment on a second conviction, a mandatory minimum of 180 days on the third conviction and a mandatory minimum of 2 years less a day on any subsequent conviction.

These are serious offences. Let us recall that they are minimums. Sentencing judges are free to go beyond them on a second, third or subsequent conviction, depending on the circumstances of any individual case.

In closing, Bill S-16 deserves the support of this House and of Canadian society in general. It would tackle a serious and growing problem that deserves our immediate and focused attention. I therefore urge all hon. members to join me in supporting this worthwhile and carefully crafted legislation.

I remain ready, willing and most desirous to answer any questions members may wish to pose.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Minister of State (Finance)]

Mr. Speaker, I found it most interesting, listening to this member speak on this particular subject.

As far as all caucus members on this side know, this member knows a lot about this issue. In fact, he has been raising it, time and time again, with all of us in different meetings. I am sure he is very pleased that we are finally moving forward on this.

It is a challenge, and he has shared the challenges in his region of Canada. We all share this; even in my riding of Macleod we face this challenge. I will never forget one evening, walking down one of the main streets here in Ottawa, walking home and seeing the trade in plastic Ziploc bags of contraband tobacco. It was in full sight.

I wonder if the hon. member can provide some of what is in this piece of legislation that would perhaps help us stop this illicit trade in contraband tobacco.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member from Macleod is very right. I have been pushing, shoving and stomping my feet with regard to our government taking some action in this regard. I know we have taken many steps, but to me this is one of the most significant steps because it now makes it a criminal offence to be engaged in the sale, delivery, distribution, transportation and possession of these illicit cigarettes.

Representatives of the confectionery industry have, I am sure, come to most of the members in this place and told us of many of their members having to close their doors because the sale of legal tobacco has now ended or been significantly reduced in their particular area because of illicit tobacco, most of which is distributed by and has been backed by organized crime.

We have outlined this and we have had questions. Children in primary and secondary school are buying cigarettes at five cents apiece, being hooked on illegal tobacco. I wish the government received zero dollars from the sale of legal tobacco. That would be a huge benefit to this country in the health care costs. However, it is a legal drug, this nicotine that we are stuck with, and we need to at least curtail its growth. We have been somewhat successful. By this illicit trade in illegal tobacco, we are now hooking children—I say “we” because we have not done enough. Our government is doing as much as it can, and this legislation would push that, but we need to do more.

With this legislation, my constituents would begin to see that they are pushing their member of Parliament, and this government has gotten somewhere.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, of course I work with the hon. member for Northumberland—Quinte West on the public safety committee, and I have enormous respect for his experience in this field.

I think the member knows from being in policing that one of the best ways to make progress is through knowledge of the community and consultations with members of the community. What this looks like to me is the same old Conservative playbook on contraband tobacco. I wonder how many consultations were done with first nations, with the provinces and with others involved in this area, before producing this bill.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the first area of consultations is with our own constituents. In the last seven years, almost every second month someone has come to me and asked what I am going to do about the people who are selling illegal cigarettes out the back door and closing legal businesses, in particular the corner stores that we all go to on a Sunday afternoon when most of the big stores are closed, where we go to buy our chocolate bars or lottery tickets or whatever we are going to buy. These stores are drying up around my area, especially the little “mom and dad” operations that are not associated with the big chains. They are the people being put out of business by the sale of illegal cigarettes.

We all know where most of them are emanating from, and I have to say it in this House that they are emanating from mostly first nations territories where somehow, some way, these illegal cigarettes are being sold. What is more, they are now being sold in our schoolyards.

This very House, in a previous Parliament, did an exhaustive study on the sale of illegal and illicit cigarettes. It is out of that study that this legislation emanates. I mentioned in my speech that there was a panel that advised the Minister of Public Safety on it; so we have done those consultations.

The time for consultations is over, and the time for action is now. That is why we ask that Bill S-16 be supported.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start with a bit of personal history. Many lives were saved in my family by my grandfather. In 1964, there was the release of the report of the U.S. surgeon general on smoking and health. It was a U.S. report, yes, but a very influential one throughout North America. That report really changed opinion on smoking in North America. Before that report, there was still a debate about the dangers of smoking, which was fueled by the propaganda of the tobacco companies against the research that was beginning to show the serious harms to health. That report demonstrated a causal link for the first time with incontrovertible evidence that there was a 70% increase in mortality rates for smokers over non-smokers and a 9 to 10 times higher risk of lung cancer.

My grandfather, whose name was John Garrison, put out his last cigarette. He had smoked since he was a kid. More importantly, he said any family member who went to his house would also stop smoking that day. He enforced that on everyone in our family. At the time, I was 13 and it made a very big impact on me. I have never been a smoker as a result of that very strong role modelling he did in the family. There were a few of my cousins who still sneaked around out back, I admit, but he saved many family members. There were many heavy smokers in my family at that time and his influence was very important. At that time, we saw the beginning of a change in social attitudes toward smoking.

A second report I also want to give credit to is the 2009 report of the Canadian Expert Panel on Tobacco Smoke and Breast Cancer Risk. This demonstrated the link between breast cancer and smoking, but it did something even more important. The report showed incontrovertibly the link between second-hand smoke and breast cancer. It was very important in changing people's attitudes about smoking, important in their accepting that second-hand smoke was dangerous, particularly for women, and that the risk of breast cancer increased between 10% and 30% for those exposed to second-hand smoke. We have seen the social mores change to where smoking has been banned in bars, pubs and restaurants, not just to protect smokers but, in fact, to protect those who have never smoked from that increased risk of cancer.

There is no doubt about the seriousness of this issue and the social concern in Canada regarding the issue of smoking. As my hon. friend from Northumberland—Quinte West said in his speech, the biggest impact we are seeing is on young people, and the biggest impact of contraband tobacco is definitely among young people. We on this side are supporting this bill going to committee because we believe that this is a serious problem and that we can change social attitudes about contraband tobacco. Again, my hon. friend made reference to that in his own speech. People need to understand the reasons why contraband tobacco has to be limited or wiped out in this country.

My hon. friend will not be surprised that New Democrats will be asking some serious questions when the bill goes to committee about the effectiveness of the measures proposed in this bill. Members speaking previously, in particular the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety, have pointed to this bill as targeting organized crime. I have questions that I know we will be asking in committee. We need to ask the experts whether higher penalties and mandatory minimum sentences actually deter people involved in organized crime. Frankly, I do not know the answer to that with regard to contraband tobacco, but I do know that the evidence in almost all other areas of law enforcement is that organized crime carefully counts the risk when it gets involved in crime. However it is not counting the risk of longer penalties or minimum sentences; it is the risk of getting caught that is calculated.

Is a mandatory minimum sentence really going to deter organized crime? Most people involved in organized crime are not the people actually transporting the goods and not the ones who are going to end up with the sentence. They are the people organizing and profiting from it. I do not really know in the case of contraband tobacco, because I am not as familiar with that, as it is not as large a problem in my own community as it is in many others in Canada.

In every other area, as I have said, we have seen the impact of mandatory minimum sentences and longer sentences. It usually happens to the little guys, as I mentioned, the people who are carrying out the orders of the organized crime syndicate, the people who, for whatever reasons, are living in near-poverty, perhaps affected by mental health problems or addiction or having problems getting by and supporting a family, and taking the opportunity that is offered by organized crime to make a little extra money in participating in the smuggling of contraband tobacco. I believe they are the people who are going to get hit with longer sentences and mandatory minimums.

One very serious question that we will be posing in committee is whether this is the right tool to get at organized crime as the government has claimed and what consultations did the government do with experts in the area to find out whether this is the right hammer to use for this nail, if I can use that analogy, which gets overused many times in this House.

Another question we will be asking is whether the government has looked carefully at sentences that have already been given out for repeat offenders in the area of contraband tobacco. We could look at the bill and it might say that for this amount of tobacco and this many offences there would be a mandatory minimum of x amount of time. What I suspect we would find, as with many other bills the government has introduced, is that judges already hand out far longer sentences than the mandatory minimums. There is a kind of perverse effect in some areas where mandatory minimums may actually have driven down the amount of time some people are spending in jail. That is for some people. They will increase the time most people are spending in jail. However, have we actually looked at what judges are doing in this area before we brought legislation in to establish these mandatory minimums?

There is a very interesting study that was done quite some time ago in Canada where the public was given the facts of a crime and asked to assign a sentence for it. In something over three-quarters of the cases, the public assigned lighter penalties than the judges had actually assigned in the cases.

Therefore, one of my questions is, after seven years of the government appointing judges, why does it not trust the judges it is appointing? What is wrong with the judges it is appointing? Does it not trust them to make decisions, in these cases where they have to establish mandatory minimums and take away that discretion from judges? We will be asking what the real situation is for sentencing at the present time in cases dealing with contraband tobacco and who is getting sentenced. Is it the kingpins of organized crime who are getting sentenced? I doubt it. We need to ask those questions, such as is this the right hammer for this particular nail? We have some doubts on this side as to whether that is true.

However, recognizing the importance of this issue, again we are supporting this to get it to committee, to try to find out from expert witnesses the best ways of tackling this problem, of keeping contraband tobacco out of the hands of our kids and of reducing the social impacts of this tobacco. I guess I can say that I cannot wait, although there are many of us who would like to speak to this bill and I am not sure that we needed time allocation to get through a bill like this. However, it is not the first time it has been used in the House

When we look at what is happening with the Canada Border Services Agency, we see enormous cuts. The government likes to tell us there have been increases in first nations policing and in border services funding. However, if we go back to year zero and calculate the increases from the very beginning, there are always increases. What we have seen in the last two budgets is reality. We have seen severe cutbacks in the funding for CBSA and for public safety in general. Budget 2012 announced a cut of $687.9 million to the public safety expenditures. The RCMP saw cuts of $195.2 million. Let us think back to how organized crime calculates: it calculates the chances of getting caught. Let us cut the RCMP. Let us reduce its ability to do enforcement work and see the impact that would have on contraband tobacco.

The CBSA saw cuts of $143 million. Those are spread across the country; when we do that it may not sound like much. According to the union, it may result in 325 positions across the country, and in British Columbia that would be something like 50 positions. Those are front-line positions. The rest of the cuts are in the back office. That sounds good. It makes us think of an accountant or someone doing photocopying. What are the back office functions in the CBSA? The union has estimated that this would cost 100 jobs in the intelligence functions of the CBSA because that is a back office function. Therefore, there would be 100 fewer people analyzing the data, looking at the patterns and trying to figure out where contraband tobacco is coming from and working on problems like that.

That was the 2012 budget. These cuts continued in 2013 and additional cuts were applied on top of those.

Most important probably in 2013 was the failure to renew the police officer recruiting fund. The issue of first nations policing was raised earlier. Cancelling that fund caused the loss of 30 front-line first nations police officers in Ontario.

In addition, the 2013 plan and priorities for public safety announced an increase of $20 million in countering crime and a $2.4-million decrease in national security. Even in its own report, the department said “That the Government Operations Centre infrastructure may be unable to support a coordinated response to large-scale or multiple significant events affecting the national interest [and] that current policies and strategies may be insufficient to address the evolution of organized crime”. The government made cuts to the funding of the fight against organized crime, the very people the government said are responsible for contraband tobacco.

One of the things we are going to be asking in committee is why not apply the needed resources for enforcement. I am going to make the same argument that is made everywhere else, and that is, if organized crime is calculating its risks, then let us make it calculate that risk at the front end by putting resources into enforcement where they are really needed.

The last speaker, and this time I will not name him, said, and I am not sure the term he actually used but I think he said that most of the contraband tobacco is coming from first nations. I met with the tobacco companies and I asked them that question. They admitted to me that they estimate that over 50% of the contraband tobacco coming into this country is coming through the Port of Vancouver from China. Often we focus too much on what is only one single source of contraband tobacco and we ignore the large one.

Why is it coming from China through the Port of Vancouver? There are two reasons for that. The first reason is that there is a huge illegal tobacco manufacturing industry in China. It is underground and it avoids Chinese taxes and regulations. Producers are already producing illegally. The second reason is that the cuts that we have made to the Canada Border Services Agency mean that not one single container coming through Vancouver port is actually opened and inspected unless there is a specific tip or piece of information about something illegal being in it.

Containers coming through Vancouver are not inspected anymore. Many of them are loaded on trains and arrive at a large rail yard in Ontario where there is one inspector for containers. While I have not been told directly, I am sure the same policies are in effect. One person cannot open and inspect all the containers. I suspect the policy in place in Vancouver is probably also in place at the rail yard Ontario: that containers are not opened unless somebody has said that X is going to be found in one. Who would say in that container we are going to find this? That would be done by those intelligence officers with the Canada Border Services Agency who are being laid off.

The situation in Vancouver with contraband tobacco is going to get worse. Probably what is most shocking about contraband tobacco in Vancouver is that it is high-quality fake. I have actually seen some of it. We cannot tell these packages from legitimate cigarette packages, including the fake excise stamps on them. They are almost impossible to distinguish. When we are trying to discourage the public from buying contraband tobacco, this is a problem.

How does one get hold of these cigarettes? I do not smoke, as I have said. I do not buy cigarettes. But I do know some people very close to me who unfortunately do smoke. In Vancouver, one can go to any number of corner stores and ask for the special or the cut-rate cigarettes and they are brought out from underneath the counter. They look just like regular cigarettes but people pay a lot less.

The other thing about those Chinese contraband cigarettes is that we do not know what is in them. As a result of being produced illegally and without inspection in China, I would hate to think what kind of things get put into those cigarettes as filler. There are probably very large health risks involved.

When we are talking about this issue we are going to have to pay attention to what tobacco companies will say is becoming an increasingly large part of the problem, and that is contraband cigarettes coming in from China. I do not see anything in this legislation that would do anything about that very large problem in terms of contraband tobacco.

A contributor to this, of course, was the Liberal Party in the 1990s. We used to have federal ports police in Vancouver. They were funded. They did inspections on containers and had people working intelligence on the illegal goods coming in.

I am going to have to include our friends down at the far end here who have been very sanctimonious on this but who have actually contributed the initial problem in the Vancouver port with all kinds of counterfeit and illegal goods by eliminating the ports police. They said to the municipalities of Vancouver and Burnaby, “It's up to you, boys. We're just leaving it to you. No funding. No assistance. You now police the port”. And so, what do they do? They maintain their highest priority, which is protecting their citizens, and they do very little in the area of the ports in Vancouver and Burnaby because it is not really their responsibility as civic police to do that.

Are there better ways to tackle this question of contraband tobacco? I believe there are.

The hon. member for Northumberland—Quinte West with the public safety committee to visit Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and Calgary. We saw some very impressive things going on in those police forces. On a very regular basis, in the case of Prince Albert a weekly basis, the police were brought together around the table with social service, mental health, addictions and child protection agencies, and a representative of the Grand Council of First Nations. They tackled individual high-risk, high-demand on the police system cases on a family basis and delivered services to those families. Prince Albert has a very impressive record for the first year of this new system, which is called the HUB system. They have reduced violent crime by 38% in a year in a community that has high rates of poverty, addiction and alcoholism. They have made very significant progress in building a better community, the most important thing, but also in reducing the demand and costs for policing and allowing them to reallocate police resources to things that we would think of as normal policy duties rather than social order kinds of responsibilities.

When we are thinking about contraband tobacco and needing police resources, which I believe we do, to do the enforcement work in this area, where are we going to find them if we do not free up resources in policing?

Our committee is working on a report that we will be done in the fall. I know that members of all parties were very impressed with this model of policing. Rather than more mandatory minimums and longer sentences for these kinds of things, maybe we need to look at that new model of policing. This would free up resources so that we could do the enforcement that would be really effective in getting at the real causes of problems with contraband tobacco and the largest problem, which I would assert is China and the lack of inspections in our port in Vancouver.

I know I am probably getting close to the end of my time. Let me wrap by saying, once again, we on this side do acknowledge contraband tobacco is a problem. We would have liked to have seen the government consult more, work with first nations communities, work with others who have been involved in this field to find what things would be really effective instead of going back to the old playbook and bringing out increased sentences and mandatory minimums as the only solutions.

In committee, we will be asking government members those questions. If they can show us the evidence that these are going to be effective, they might able to get our support. The problem is they are not effective anywhere else. They are not effective in any other area of law enforcement.

In any event, let us have that debate. Let us see what the experts say about contraband tobacco. Let us see what they suggest would be good solutions to this when we get to committee. Then I hope the government will be open to some other approaches to this kind of problem and not what we have seen too often in this House, which is, “Take or leave it. Here's the legislation. We've introduced it. You've only got, let's say, four hours to debate it. We're not going to amend it and we're going to pass it”. To me that is not the way this House of Commons should work.

I have to say to my colleagues from Medicine Hat and Northumberland—Quinte West and the public safety committee, we have tried to have a more consultative model. We have tried to work together to find common solutions. I would like to see that happen, not just in our committee, but also on the floor of this House of Commons.

My hope for Bill S-16 is that we will be able to work together on what is really effective and accomplishes what we need to do to keep contraband tobacco off of our streets, out of the hands of our kids, and from making negative contributions to our health in this country. I look forward to having that debate with the Conservatives and working with them to find the real solutions to the problem of contraband tobacco.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to my colleague's comments.

Certainly, we did have an interesting committee session. We visited various communities across Canada and listened to people about what they are doing.

I was also listening when the member talked about the cuts to CBSA. I believe the member was present when the Minister of Public Safety was at our committee meeting. I do not have his exact words, but he did say that there are no cuts to front-line officers. Therefore, I know the minister indicated they were looking for efficiencies.

I wonder how the member could suggest that the CBSA had cut front-line officers.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will say again how much I enjoy working with the member for Medicine Hat on committee. I find him to be a very sincere and dedicated MP, even though we do not agree 100% of the time. A case in which we do not agree is on the statement by the minister that there are no front-line cuts.

I will be very careful how I phrase this in the House because I cannot accuse the minister of deliberately misleading the House. However, I will say that when we met with the union and talked about what has actually happened in the CBSA, they told us about the number layoff notices that had been given out. It is difficult to square the layoff notices with the statements of the minister in committee.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca made a very thoughtful and reasoned speech. I am so delighted that I was able to hear him.

As the official opposition finance critic, I certainly am familiar with the austerity measures of the Conservative government and the many cuts it has made to various departments, programs and services. It is extremely difficult not only for ourselves, but also for the Parliamentary Budget Officer to get the details on these things. In fact, there is an ongoing court case on this matter.

I have to say how distressing it is to hear that 50% of the contraband tobacco is coming in through the port of Vancouver and that there are thousands and thousands of containers that are not inspected. I am from the city of Toronto. I see the rail yard and the thousands of containers there, and the member is telling me there is one inspector who is probably doing spot checks in reaction to problems that are highlighted.

In light of the very serious challenges that contraband tobacco has with respect to our children's health, and not even knowing what could be in contraband tobacco as the member rightly pointed out, does he believe we should have complete upfront access to all of the information about the CBSA so we can see person by person, city by city what the representation is?

As Canadians we want to be assured that we are not cutting border security services. We want to make sure that these products are stopped from entering our country. It sounds as though we should be beefing up our border security agency.

Could the member respond to that please?

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Parkdale—High Park for her compliment on my speech. Of course, I want to return the compliment on the excellent work she does as our finance critic.

I know the member is as disappointed as I am to see the party on the other side which came here dedicated to accountability vote against our leader's private member's bill that would have given full independence to the Parliamentary Budget Officer so that we could actually get at the facts. Rather than stand here in the House and debate numbers that are uncertain in many ways, with one side saying what they really are and the other side saying they do not like it, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, as an officer of Parliament, would provide that to all of us. We could then get down to debating the reality.

The other thing I would say is that we try to be very consistent on this side in saying that we do not oppose spending money on law enforcement. We think it is much better to spend it there than on lengthy imprisonment or mandatory minimum sentences. Let us spend at the front end on enforcement where we would actually build safer communities and increase the security of all of our citizens instead of just spending the money at the back end of the process by putting more people in jail for longer periods of time.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca for his excellent speech. We are friends and neighbours in southern Vancouver Island.

He talked about the front-line cuts with respect to border service agents. That is a key component as we look at this bill.

The other piece that I am looking at is the cuts that have taken place in tobacco awareness, addiction awareness and working on a preventative health basis. I am going on memory, but I believe that one of the first round of cuts was in the spring of 2006. There were cuts to tobacco awareness and addiction programs in first nations communities. There have been other cuts as well on this.

I wonder if my hon. colleague has some thoughts about a more holistic response. We have to reduce the problem of addiction to cigarettes while we also fight the contraband cigarettes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not have the figures in front of me, but I too remember there were lots of cuts in the preventative health measures. That is a great concern.

Again, I cite the example of Prince Albert, which has this hub model, where they bring addictions counsellors to the table with the police and other social service agencies. Instead of imprisoning people, let us get them into a treatment or addiction program.

The same kind of parallel applies with contraband tobacco. If we reduce the demand for tobacco, we obviously are going to make the battle against contraband tobacco easier, and we are going to have a healthier population as well.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member is a true gentleman. I can say this having dealt with him in committee. Even in his debates in the House, he always tempers his words in a way that we should be very proud of, and that every one of us should take heed of.

When we talk about trusting judges, there have been changes made to the Criminal Code for over 140 years. Penalties have changed and usually are increased.

When he says that we need to have more people in enforcement, this bill would put 50 additional RCMP officers directly on this illicit trade.

When he talks about how we do not know what is in the cigarettes, I agree with him. We know that in legal cigarettes, there are 4,000 chemicals and 70 of those are known to cause, initiate and promote cancers. When he talks about our young children smoking, he is definitely right. When he talks about second-hand smoke in relation to breast cancer and cancers among women, it is a proven fact that tobacco is one of the leading causes of breast cancer. It is young women who are actually being enticed into this terrible tobacco addiction.

There is an argument in that he says that the union says one thing and we say that the minister says something else, and who is right. I agree with him that it all depends on one's perspective.

With regard to time allocation, I do not know how to say this more strongly and yet remain within the bounds of being parliamentary. This Parliament and previous parliaments have looked at organized crime. I remember that study. I was on the committee. We talked about tobacco. We know where it is coming from.

All the good member has to do is visit my riding. In a small first nations territory of 430 people, he will see at least seven outlets on the main road and gosh knows how many on the side road. He is right about illegal tobacco coming in from other countries, but he also neglected to mention—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Order. I do not mean to cut off the hon. member, but we need to leave some time for the hon. member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca to respond.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the summary of my speech. Because there was so much in there, I get to pick and choose which things I want to reply to.

For me, the most important question is the one about numbers. He said that the minister says one thing and I say another. All of us get frustrated by those kinds of debate. When we talk about the loss of front-line officers and we talk to the union, we are talking about the actual number of letters issued by the CBSA to people saying that their job is being affected and that they may lose their job.