You have to understand that today, the only way for consumers or law enforcement to compare products is the packaging. Traffickers use old technologies and they cannot copy existing packaging. Health Canada wants to impose two things. It wants to standardize the packages; the market will have to use the same package format, and it cannot mention a brand. For instance, the text will use an Arial 10-point font, and all the brands, for instance du Maurier or Player's, will have to use it.
So there will be no way of distinguishing one product from another. This will become a blueprint for traffickers who will only have to copy that package. The government says there is no danger because we have a stamp that allows us to tell legal packages apart from those that are not legal. However, illegal packages all have that stamp on them today, and traffickers have access to it. They are not counterfeit stamps, they are the real stamp from Health Canada.
We feel that the plain packaging will not reduce cigarette consumption. A cigarette package already has a message pertaining to health that covers 75% of the package and sets out the risks related to smoking. All that is left is a 25% space at the bottom of the package where the brand is mentioned. Rather than reducing the rate of smoking in Canada, this measure will increase contraband and create a counterfeiting problem in Canada that we do not have currently. That is one of the big issues we have to face.
Australia is one of the countries that introduced plain packaging. However, since 2015, when the Australian government introduced this practice, it has had to continually invest large sums to fight the trafficking that has exploded in that country.