Mr. Speaker, I hope this initiative is more successful because of the two tier nature of it in preventing the cross border activities.
His government has done something else which will help reduce the incidence of Canadians buying cigarettes from the U.S., and that is its very dedicated effort to reduce the value of the Canadian dollar. The government has successfully reduced the Canadian dollar by almost 12 cents during its period in office in the last eight years. That in and of itself makes a difference in convincing Canadians not to buy cigarettes in the U.S. because they cannot afford to pay in U.S. dollars.
Perhaps in some perverse way that is part of the long term strategy of the government to not only lock Canadians in the fiscal prison, that is the low dollar, but also to prevent them from being exposed to nasty substances like American cigarettes, which are pretty bad by the way.
I wish he could comment on that because I was wondering why the government was paying so little attention to the precipitous decline in the dollar. However I realized that the government was actually trying to protect the health of Canadians by reducing the dollar to such a point to reduce in any way, shape or form incentives for Canadians to buy cigarettes in the U.S.