Mr. Speaker, I want to take but a few minutes to say a few words on the bill.
As the member of Parliament who has the honour and privilege of representing Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, and more particularly Glengarry for the purpose of this conversation, I would be remiss if I did not take a few moments in the House to express my gratitude to hon. members for supporting the legislation.
Unless members have actually seen what it was like in and around Cornwall, Ontario, at this time last year they really cannot have an appreciation of how big and how serious the issue was for our government. It was obvious to the previous government that the problem would never go away on its own and that very drastic measures needed to be taken.
I remember around this period last year receiving telephone calls in my constituency office and in my Ottawa office virtually every day from people who were telling me: "Last night there was a van parked in my driveway along the St. Lawrence River when I got home. People were loading cigarettes right in my yard". I remember people telling me: "I was sitting on the veranda. A boat came up to my house and just stopped. A van wheeled in and they unloaded cigarettes and in 10 seconds flat they were gone. They had unloaded a cargo in my yard before my very eyes in the daylight". I remember constituents telling me how the smugglers would shoot their guns to frighten them into their homes so that they could continue their illegal activity.
We saw all of that in my riding. We saw it for a long time. We saw that kind of illegal activity going on. We also know how all of it was run by organized crime, or at least the great majority of it. This was no cottage industry for a few local people. No, it was way beyond that. I am sure deep down inside all members know this as well.
To pretend that simply applying an export tax to tobacco would solve this problem is wrong, and I think members know it. To pretend that changing the colour of the cigarette and making it obvious that anything not that colour is contraband would solve the problem is also wrong. People were proudly displaying, otherwise law-abiding Canadians, in their pockets cigarette packages that were strictly made for the contraband market.
I will never forget the day when I found a package of contraband cigarettes beside a dumpster near the West Block and I brought it to the attention of the House at that time.
We all knew the contraband market was everywhere. Changing the colour of the barrel of the cigarette, plain packaging or a few other measures like those simply could not work on their own. We needed an all encompassing plan. As the centrepiece of that plan we required a reduction in cigarette taxes.
And that is the only thing that makes the plan work. Without that main element, without that cornerstone, nothing would have worked, and parliamentarians know it.
My colleagues in the Bloc know it perhaps better, certainly a bit better than the Reform members, because Quebec and eastern Ontario were affected by the smuggling much more than were some other regions.
But the country was not spared, not in the east, not in the west, or anywhere else. We heard about major seizures, even in cities like Edmonton. Mr Speaker, you heard about them yourself: seizures of smuggled goods worth millions of dollars. So, that we know.
The announcement by the Prime Minister came on February 8. I conclude by reading a bit from an article in the Standard Freeholder of February 16, eight days after the government announced its plan. That was barely enough time for smugglers to liquidate their stock of illegal cigarettes. Yet eight days later the following story was on the front page of Cornwall's daily newspaper, the Standard Freeholder :
Smuggling is down to a trickle. The volume of black market cigarettes moving through this region has dropped significantly since the federal government's crackdown on smuggling began one week ago today.
OPP Det. Inspector Chris Lewis said police have seized some smuggled smokes since the federal anti-smuggling plan went into effect last Wednesday. But the volume of contraband seized in the past week has "been quite a bit less" than the police had been accustomed to seizing in a seven-day period.
Lewis, with the Anti-Smuggling Task Force in Cornwall, could not give specific figures, but he did attribute the slowdown to the stepped-up police enforcement.
Snowmobile activity on the river has slowed down as well. Lewis said during the week there was a lot of activity from mainland U.S. to Cornwall Island but very little between Cornwall Island and mainland Ontario. This too he attributes to the stepped-up enforcement.
Then there is the quote from then Grand Chief of the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, Mike Mitchell, who said: "If there is anything moving it is just a trickle".
In eight days, the plague that had stricken my constituency had been eliminated: eight days.
My constituents experienced in a free and democratic society not even being able to leave their homes to go outside in their own backyards without being threatened by gunshots. This was not in Sarajevo, not in Mogadishu and not in Rwanda but50 miles from Parliament Hill. That is what my constituents were subjected to. That is what they had to live through for a long period of time.
To anyone who tells me that these high cigarette taxes should be reimposed like I heard yesterday I say: "Do not try selling that policy in Glengarry. Do not try selling that policy to the millions of Canadians who know the illegal activity that went on and the fact that otherwise law-abiding Canadians by the millions were no longer respecting that law".
The social contract had broken down, not the Bob Rae social contract but the Hobbesian kind, that rule by which we all agree to respect the laws of this country. That rule no longer existed as it pertained to taxes on cigarettes. When society decides collectively that the rule no longer exists, it ceases to exist. That is the reality.
Yes, we could bury our heads in the sand and say "Oh, no, no, we could have hired six more policemen to patrol a 4,000 mile unprotected border and that would have fixed it".