I know Mr. Cullen is very concerned. This is one of the issues on this committee that he and I are concerned about. We have an elephant in the room, and the elephant of course is contraband tobacco and its multiple negative causes: everything from organized crime, to the government not getting its fair share of the taxes, to health issues, etc.
It was mentioned that we need to work together on this. The government recently introduced the RCMP contraband tobacco enforcement strategy, the task force, recognizing the machinery and those types of issues. I think it was Mr. Cunningham who held up a carton of cigarettes and said that currently under the law if someone is caught driving around with that in their car they could be arrested and their vehicle seized.
I immediately got a picture in my head of a lower- to middle-income-family person addicted to tobacco. We recognize that it's an addiction. A surgeon general in the U.S.—I think he was a general in the armed forces—said it's actually more severe than an addiction to heroin, and I suspect very strongly that he's probably right. So we do have good, hardworking Canadians who smoke and sometimes can't afford.... But I got this awful picture of a police car, a person trying to eke out a living--the hardworking Canadian paying taxes and all that--and a tow truck towing away their vehicle. And that's not what I want to see.
I want to see us get to the root of the problem, and to do that we need to look at the socio-economic reasons why people are manufacturing tobacco, whether it be on the reserve or somewhere else. How do we as legislators work with people like you--all the witnesses we've heard--toward that? That's the exact reason why you're here today. It's not to shove the elephant that's in the room into a corner, because we don't have all the answers. God forbid politicians should ever claim to have all the answers, because then we'd be in deep trouble. That's why we have these committees, and that's why you're here.
I guess it's less of a question and more of a statement that I'm making. There's an honest, all-party desire to work together, come together, and listen to Canadians out there. But we had to sort of cram the focus in this committee onto contraband tobacco. We are purposely leaving out the health issues, although we know how strong they are, because it's cancerous. Whether the political elements are on the reserve or in the government here, in the long run this is bad. Our children will suffer. Their health will suffer. They'll become motorcycle gang members. Terrorists will come in because it's a good fast buck--a good way to finance the bad things they're doing. We want to make sure we begin on the road to curbing those bad things from getting worse than they already are now.
So even though Mr. Damphousse and Mr. Gadbois may have different ideas, damn it, you have to work together and help us solve this problem.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.