Very quickly, I come from Quebec, from Montreal. One of the disastrous consequences of the tax rollback in 1994 was a doubling of smoking prevalence among teenagers. It went from 19% to 38% in a few years because of that, so that's disastrous.
The government predicted they would lose a couple of hundred million dollars after just one year. They've lost close to $1 billion in revenues, and right after the tax rollback strangely enough everything stopped. Yet provinces out west and in Newfoundland kept their prices high, kept their taxes high. How come there was no smuggling? Automatically, because of those high prices they should have had some smuggling transferred to those provinces. The only reason it stopped is that the tobacco manufacturers decided to provide the products to the illegal market. When they knew that five provinces rolled back their taxes, they said they'd won. They had 70% of the market in which the prices were very low and they made huge profits.
The only one who benefited from the tax rollback was the tobacco industry. It didn't drop its prices. It kept its prices at the same level. Only the provincial governments and the federal government decided to roll back taxes, and we pay the consequences. We've been working very hard for the past ten years. It took us ten years to get back to the levels we were at in 1993. So we'd better not make that same mistake.