I certainly did.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Fast.
Pierre is correct. Indeed, the goal is twofold. It is to raise some revenue and to discourage smoking. Excess taxes are fairly effective at doing that. If you look at smoking rates in Canada, they've gone from about 25% for the adult population in 1999 or so to around 15% now. That's in the context of increasing taxes, not just at the federal level but at the provincial level as well. Generally provincial taxes are a bit higher than the federal tax on tobacco.
I think your specific question is about how effective it is and if we can quantify it. I wish I could give you a firm answer. I wish I had a very good, well-specified model so that I could say that a dollar in tax gets you this sort of decline rate. The decline rate is not an issue that is amenable to that sort of thing. There are lots of moving parts, you see. The past isn't really a good guide to the future on this issue.
For example, far fewer people who smoke, and the nature of those smokers is a bit different. You're kind of down to the hardcore smokers, so maybe they don't respond as much to prices as people did many years ago. You have different products in the market—