Thank you very much.
Mr. Luongo, one of your representatives was in to see me in my office in Oakville before this meeting just to let me know what some of your issues were. He asked me to proposed section 20.1:
No person shall promote a tobacco product, including by means of the packaging, (a) in a manner that could cause a person to believe that the product or its emissions are less harmful than other tobacco products or their emissions...
He was making the case that you should be able to advertise new products that have lower risks of smoking than cigarettes. It made me do some research into nicotine. I found this research from 2016. It said:
Nicotine poses several health hazards. There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. The use of nicotine needs regulation. The sale of nicotine should be under supervision of trained medical personnel.
I remain convinced that our goal as a health committee is to get nicotine, and addiction to it, out of our society. What struck me though was that this was the Indian Journal of Medical and Paediatric Oncology. I thought to myself, India is not known for high smoking rates. I then went on and did a bit more research, and I found this from an article in July 2017:
The tobacco giant is pushing Marlboros in colorful ads at kiosks and handing out free smokes at parties frequented by young adults—tactics that break India’s anti-smoking laws...In internal documents, Philip Morris International is explicit about targeting the country’s youth. A key goal is “winning the hearts and minds of LA-24,” those between legal age, 18, and 24, according to one slide in a 2015 commercial review presentation...Philip Morris’ marketing strategy for India, which relies heavily on kiosk advertising and social events, is laid out in hundreds of pages of internal documents reviewed by Reuters that cover the period from 2009 to 2016...In targeting young adults, Philip Morris is deploying a promotional strategy that it and other tobacco companies used in the United States decades ago. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2002 found that during the 1990s, “tobacco industry sponsorship of bars and nightclubs increased dramatically, accompanied by cigarette brand paraphernalia, advertisements, and entertainment events in bars and clubs.” With cigarette sales declining in many countries, Philip Morris has identified India, population 1.3 billion, as a market with opportunity for significant growth. “India remains a high potential market with huge upside with cigarette market still in infancy.”
Did you lie to the committee when you said Philip Morris wanted out of the cigarette business?