Mr. Speaker, Bill C-42 is an act to amend the Tobacco Act to provide a five year phased in transition period toward a total prohibition of tobacco sponsorship promotions.
The original Tobacco Act was assented to in April 1997. I was one of the members in the House at the time. I was pretty appalled by what was being done because it just was not tough enough even at that time. Here we are a year and a half downstream and we are watering the whole thing down completely.
The interesting thing is that under the original Tobacco Act the provisions were supposed to go into effect on October 1. I noted last week when we were having a debate on this subject my colleague from the NDP, the hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre, raised the question at the end of her speech about what would happen if we had not passed this bill by October 1. To my knowledge the government still has not answered that question.
I think any hon. person would think that until the bill is passed, we really should be enforcing the provisions of the act as it was passed before. I hope there are people taking steps to do exactly that.
It seems to me that it is a little bit silly, stupid in fact, for the government to continue to play fast and loose with the health of Canadians on this issue when there is already a shortage of money in the system for the sorts of diseases which are caused by smoking and are well known to be caused by smoking, such as heart disease and lung cancer. Everyone knows there is simply not enough money in the system to treat these diseases already.
In the meantime we have governments pandering to the tobacco industry. Frankly, the average person cannot help but wonder how many of these decisions are based actually on the very close connections of the Prime Minister and the finance minister to people in the tobacco industry.
I asked a question of the finance minister in the House four years ago because of his association, having been on the board of directors of Imperial Tobacco. For my level of comfort there is just a little bit too much of a close connection between the major Liberals on the front bench and the people in the tobacco industry. It is well known that the Prime Minister plays golf with people from the tobacco industry.
While this government is busy playing fast and loose with Canadians' health, other governments throughout the United States and Canada are getting tough on the tobacco companies. In my own province of B.C., our attorney general Ujjal Dosanjh just recently announced, and I have a newspaper clipping here from September 28, that B.C. was monitoring the U.S. lawsuits down in Washington state against the tobacco companies with a view to using the same argument in the lawsuit which B.C. has taken against tobacco companies.
Of course the tobacco companies argue that they contribute a lot to the coffers of the country in taxes and that is true. However, the B.C. health minister on August 21 stated “It is no secret that B.C. receives $483 million a year in taxes from cigarettes, taxes that are paid by the consumers. This amount comes nowhere near to covering the true costs to B.C.'s economy, an estimated $1.3 billion a year, to pay for the direct and indirect health and social costs paid by smokers and non-smokers alike”.
That is an enormous burden upon the taxpayers and upon the health care system when we think of it. There really is no excuse for pursuing this track of giving the cigarette companies carte blanche to continue to advertise and promote their product.
In 1993 when I was first elected, the law that was in place and which was subsequently struck down by challenge from the tobacco companies restricted the advertising of tobacco at places of sale. For example, corner stores could not put out signs advertising cigarettes and neither could gas stations. I would often get calls at my riding office. People who saw that a tobacco advertisement had appeared on the sidewalk in front of a corner store would call me. I was in a position to call the owner of the store, explain the regulations and get that tobacco advertising taken inside.
As we know, the tobacco companies were successful in striking down those provisions. Subsequent to that, we now see the proliferation of tobacco advertising on sidewalks and at gas stations. There has absolutely been an increase in the amount of smoking by young people since that time. It is beyond me completely that the government can pursue a policy that results in an increase in smoking by young people. It simply does not make sense.
Tobacco of course is harmful in more ways than if we just smoke it. We know of a certain high profile person who used a cigar for a most unusual purpose. Then of course there is chewing tobacco, which some people might choose to chew. There has been promotion of this certainly at the corner stores in the Vancouver area. There are display stands of chewing tobacco. There has been no promotion of cigars yet for the purposes mentioned earlier, but certainly chewing tobacco is on display. The advertisements make it a sexy, really upbeat sort of yuppie thing to do to chew tobacco. It is disgusting to see people spitting out their wads of chewing tobacco on the sidewalks. It is well known that chewing tobacco causes cancer of the mouth and the larynx.
This is simply moving the problem around within the human body. We really should be moving toward the total banning of advertising as suggested by the Canadian Cancer Society.
One of my colleagues from the PC Party last week read from a letter from the Canadian Cancer Society. He talked about several of the amendments and points that were suggested. It is worthwhile reviewing some of those points. I will summarize the points that came from the Canadian Cancer Society which said that amendments were needed to this bill.
One, there should be a ceiling on tobacco company sponsorship promotion expenditures during the delay period. In other words, if we absolutely have to have this delay period, please put a ceiling on the amount that the tobacco companies can spend so they cannot just blow away the bank, get all the nice tax deductions and get a whole bunch more young people addicted to the habit.
Two, during the first two year delay period, sponsorship promotion should be prohibited on the inside and outside of stores where tobacco is sold. That would take us back to before the 1995-96 era when there was a prohibition on that type of advertising. It is a perfectly reasonable request. It would not be imposing something that had not already been there before.
Three, the Canadian Cancer Society suggests that the bill should be amended so that the two year and five year delay periods begin on October 1, 1998, which was a few days ago, and end on October 1, 2000 and October 1, 2003, respectively.
At present the way it is set up cabinet can decide the starting date. If the Prime Minister is out with one of his golfing buddies and has a few extras at the 19th hole, he may decide that he is going to delay the starting date indefinitely. Even passage of this bill may mean that we never have the ban on advertising that we are supposed to have.
Four, the bill should be amended so that only events sponsored as of April 25, 1997 when the original bill was passed are allowed to continue with tobacco sponsorship promotions during the delay period. Why would that be a hardship? We have already had the bill in place for a year and a half. Let us not expand it. Let us try to keep it as contained as we possibly can.
Five, the bill should be amended so that the grandfather provision applies only to events sponsored in Canada as of April 25, 1997. This again places a target date coincident with the royal assent of the previous Tobacco Act.
Six, during the delay period, any sponsorship promotion should not be allowed to contain images of people, to be misleading, or to be conveyed through non-tobacco goods like T-shirts, baseball caps and so on. In other words, let us keep the promotion to the barest minimum instead of giving carte blanche approval for tobacco companies to go hog wild, spending an absolute fortune in the next couple of years with tax deductions and blowing their budget promoting like crazy and getting as many people addicted as they can.
Seven, the bill should be amended so that only international auto racing events are able to have tobacco sponsorship during a further delay period and not all sponsored events.
We already know that special interest groups have been able to attract support from other companies than tobacco industries in the last year in anticipation of the act coming into force on October 1. It really is not necessary to maintain tobacco sponsorship for all areas. It should be reduced significantly.
The Canadian Cancer Society has put a lot of thought into the recommendations. I did not read out all the details. I know this was read into the record last week. The Canadian Cancer Society represents a very well-thought out position on this bill. Its representatives obviously do not go golfing with the same people as the Prime Minister does. And neither have they used cigars for the purpose that other well-known person did. I would urge this House to take note of the provisions suggested by the Canadian Cancer Society.
Moving on and associated with this tobacco bill, a few years ago we were trying to deal with the amount of tobacco smuggling that was occurring. A lot of the criminal activity surrounding drugs, tobacco and so on relates entirely to the porous nature of Canada's borders. Our borders are so porous criminals can come and go at any time they like.
By the attorney general's own admission, about 18,000 criminals entered Canada last year under false documentation and were able to carry on criminal activities which would have included everything from the smuggling of tobacco, drugs and arms, to you name it. We should be dealing with these really serious problems rather than pandering to tobacco companies to allow them to make profits over the next couple of years.
In the Vancouver area, the head of the fraud investigations at Immigration Canada, Sergeant Rockwell, says that the problem of passport fraud in the Vancouver area is mind boggling. He used the term mind boggling. He estimates that the worst areas in the country are North Vancouver, which is my own riding, Surrey and Richmond. He estimates that the amount of passport fraud, allowing criminals into our country, is so large in those three areas that the communities have become blasé about it.
Just yesterday the North Shore News , my local newspaper, had a front page story saying it will no longer carry advertisements of lost passports because for eight years now it has been carrying advertisements of lost Iranian passports. It identified them as Iranian passports. There have been three or four per issue and there are three issues per week. We are talking about 10 to 12 passports a week being advertised as lost in North Vancouver.
The reason they are advertised as lost is those people sell the passports complete with the T-1000 form, is a landed immigrant form, so that they can be sent back to Iran to have a new photograph put in them and somebody can come here as a landed immigrant without any authority whatsoever.
Sgt. Rockwell tells me that on average these passports can go around 10 times before they are picked up. When an illegal immigrant comes in using a false passport, looking like a legal landed immigrant, he goes immediately to the forger and sells the passport again to recover some of the money he paid in Iran and then the forger sends the passport back to Iran again so that another photograph can be put in it and it can do the circuit one more time.
This goes on up to 10 times before the passport is so damaged that the immigration officials pick it up at the border. Then of course they say let us check on this person whose name is in this passport and on this T-1000 form. How did this passport get here? They visit the person concerned who says they lost that passport two years ago. It is advertised in the North Shore News .
As I said, the North Shore News carried the story yesterday. It will no longer advertise these passports lost because it does not want to be party to this fraud.
Every single passport, it is right there in the story, that has been advertised lost in North Vancouver in eight years was Iranian. Does it not strike anyone in the immigration department opposite a bit strange that in eight years the only people who ever lose their passports are legally landed Iranian immigrants? How strange. But in the meantime in Surrey it is mostly East Indian passports that are advertised lost, and in Richmond it is Chinese passports.
This immigration minister would do very well to start getting on top of the problem because it is those people, those 18,000 people a year coming into this country as criminals, who are getting involved in the sort of crime that smuggles tobacco that ends up on the black market, pandering and catering to this expansion of the use of tobacco that we talk about, getting our young people hooked and increasing criminal activity in this country.
It is a disgrace that while we spend time in this House, hours and hours debating a piece of legislation to give tobacco companies carte blanche to spend money, to get people on to their addictive products, we have serious problems in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver of criminals every day getting into this country through our porous borders with nothing we can do to stop them.
I am embarrassed that one of the main problem areas is my own riding and that I have been unable to do anything about it, the number of criminals, and that so easily it could be fixed.
All the immigration minister would have to do is make sure that when a new immigrant like me becomes a Canadian citizen the T-1000 form is taken out of the passport. That is all she needs to do. It is so simple. As soon as that is done the forger's power to send a genuine landed immigrant passport back to Iran, India or China is taken away. That is all it would take.
But the minister says that for sentimental reasons we cannot do that, we might upset somebody. They like to have the T-1000 form in there. I say too bad. If somebody really has to have that form in there they could have a photocopy with a big red stamp on it saying invalid or something like to take care of the problem. Really it comes down to political will.
If there was political will to address the problem it would be addressed. There is no political will on that side of the House to address an appalling situation just as there is no political will to address the appalling situation represented by this bill.
People can openly cause our young people to be addicted to tobacco. Because of this, we know that in 20 or 30 years from now there will be an increasing burden on our health care system and a lack of productivity as they come out of the workforce and have to be dealt with for heart disease and lung cancer that are direct results of this addiction to tobacco.
As has been said many times before, I realize the sad fact that in this place we know how the votes will turn out long before the debates begin. In fact, everything said here is almost irrelevant.
How sad that for all the work that was put into the recommendations of the Canadian Cancer Society, here in a letter to all MPs, not a word will be listened to, not one word will be taken any notice of because we already know how the vote will turn out on this bill. How appalling that those people on that other side can sit there. I would say a goodly portion of them are sorry that this bill is going to go through but they will stand up and vote for it because they will not have the ability to vote against it.
It is a shame to see the amount of work that has gone into this by health professionals across the country, by people who can see the dangers in the passage of this bill, to be rejected outright by a dictatorial government that will force this issue through.
I will close with one last appeal to people here. If this would be just the first time ever that they would seriously consider this on the government side, please speak with the minister to get her to hold this bill up just a bit longer so we can consider it a bit more, so we can have the Canadian Cancer Society again, so we can have concerned professionals here to convince us that we should hold it off and incorporate many of the suggestions they have made. I urge all members to vote against this bill.
