The reason we looked at the weight...and we thought it was rather arbitrary. I appreciate the fact that the group is trying to target all the products. The trouble is that sometimes it catches products that weren't intended.
The weight is 1.4 grams. In Europe now I believe it's 2.5 grams. That's the weight they're using in ECMA, or in the European Union. We suggested that the weight wasn't the target. From the discussion that I'm hearing around the table, it was the presence of an acetate filter that distinguished our traditional cigar products from the product you're targeting.
We thought that by describing the product so specifically, by saying that this product has a natural leaf wrapper, it has a natural reconstituted binder, it has a natural reconstituted filler.... It's not the product that I've been seeing held up here. If you were to ask if we're missing one, then what I think is very important is.... If the people from Health Canada read what they wrote.... They put in two extra bullets in clause 2, the last sentence. And it's just kind of a dangling sentence, to the industry. We asked ourselves what it means.
It says:
It includes any tobacco product that is prescribed to be a little cigar.
If that's a product they don't like, Health Canada can just say they're going to call it a little cigar, even though it falls into the definition we've just proposed.
And if that wasn't good enough, Health Canada went further and said, under proposed subsection 2.1(1):
The Governor in Council may make regulations prescribing any tobacco product to be a little cigar.
That means “any” product--one that weighs more, one that weighs less, one that's yellow--