Mr. Speaker, the member's question actually relates to the statement I made earlier about the statement made by the health minister in B.C. when she said that B.C. receives about $480 million a year in taxes from cigarettes but it costs about $1.3 billion in health care costs.
If that is applying in every province, the fact that the federal government collects $2,000 million in taxes really becomes almost irrelevant when one thinks of the enormous health costs which would be several times that. If we used the same sorts of proportions, we are talking about several billion dollars in health care costs annually.
We know that tobacco still kills approximately three million people a year worldwide. It is a major killer and we really should not be facilitating the use of this product.
The Montreal Gazette had a story on August 30 concerning this bill. It said let's say a kid smokes, fresh young lungs headed for the long dirty road. Why a young person smokes may involve a number of factors, to be part of a peer group, rebellion against parents and authority figures, striving for independence, the excitement of risk taking behaviour, weight control, stress relief, and the list goes on.
So what do you do about that? If parental guidance will not work, if the slick guys at the ad agencies are a lot better at selling cigarettes than selling clean living, how do we give our young people a chance to avoid the kind of addiction that is killing 40,000 Canadians a year?
We have to pour some money into contradicting the advertising of the tobacco companies. The tobacco companies say they are not out to entice young customers to replace the ones who are dying off. I do not know how many exactly believe that, but they have said publicly that they want to help discourage that very thing.
We may well laugh at that and I admit it makes me laugh but there is a way of making those companies put their money where their mouths pretend to be. I know that Bill S-13 has been floating around this House and there has been a lot of support for that type of approach.
The Government of Canada collects about $l,000 in tobacco taxes for every dollar it puts into anti-tobacco initiatives. Frankly, that is an insult. California's proposition 99 applied a 25 cent tax to every package of cigarettes sold and used in California and it used the money for inventive anti-tobacco programs. As a result young persons and adult smoking in California has dropped.
It is a proven fact that where money has been put into advertising that discourages smoking it works and it really is a very sad commentary on the attitude of this government that it would put such a small amount of money into contradicting the tobacco advertising.