Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here today at the committee.
My question will be for Mr. Oliver and Mr. MacKillop.
I have read a lot of documents about this, I've met with people, and it seems that we are coming to a kind of consensus, that the biggest part of contraband tobacco trafficking is concentrated in about four or five reserves in Quebec and Ontario. It involves about 80 to 90% of the illegal market. I have been told of about 100 factories that don't even have licences.
I would like to know, in concrete terms, why you don't close those plants down. Why are factories that do not have licences allowed to keep blithely operating? How is it that laws that are enforced everywhere in Canada by convenience stores and other stores are not enforced on reserves? For example, an article in the Journal de Montréal says that a young teenager can go and buy flavoured cigarillos—products made for kids—when it is now illegal to sell them in convenience stores.
Are we living in a country with a double standard—when you live on a reserve, you do what you want, and the RCMP and the Department of Public Safety can't do anything, and when you live somewhere else in Canada, if you sell flavoured cigarillos to minors, you can be caught and punished?