Mr. Speaker, this is a historic day. This is a day when Parliament has worked well and produced a piece of legislation that will make a huge difference in the lives of Canadians everywhere. It will help save people from unnecessary death, reduce costs to our health care system and enhance the quality of life everywhere. It is a historic day for all members in the House because together we have accomplished something very significant.
For me personally, it is also very fulfilling. As a member who has been here for 12 years, plodding along and trying very hard to make change step by step, to actually see a small initiative come to fruition, a private member's bill become a government bill and the power of persistence over many years with the support of many citizens gives me great faith in this place and in the whole democratic process.
I want to thank all of my colleagues from all parties for their support around this initiative, in particular the members of the health committee who worked very co-operatively. We had some very good hearings. We heard from many witnesses and produced a bill, with a few changes, that is excellent by all accounts.
It is not everything we had hoped for. In the process of reaching this great moment in our history, we had to compromise. We had to bite our tongues and agree that we would not get everything we wanted in this bill. That was the case with respect to smokeless tobacco, which was an amendment I had hoped to introduce, and also with respect to the menthol flavour still being permitted, something which the Bloc had tried to remove from the bill.
In the interests of getting this bill through before the end of the spring sitting, have it become law before the summer and to have these dangerous flavoured tobacco products and individual cigarillos which are so enticing to young people removed from store shelves before the young people go back to school in September is a victory.
There are people aside from members of the health committee who worked very hard on this. I have to acknowledge the work of the health minister and her staff for recognizing a good idea and running with it. All members of her government saw this private member's bill a year ago when I introduced it. They decided to make it an election commitment and they followed through on it.
I want to thank her and her staff and, in particular, one of her assistants, Regan Watts, who helped shepherd this bill through the process and ended up with a broken knee just before the final hearings at committee. He certainly played a valuable role in bringing information to the committee and being a go-between for the minister's office and the committee.
I also want to thank the people in the department who never get much credit for their tireless work in fighting the spread of tobacco use and trying to reduce addiction to it.
There is a long-standing branch within government that has been vigilant about trying to reduce the level of smoking among all people, particularly young people. Specifically, I want to thank Paul Glover, the assistant deputy minister, who is with the Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Cathy Sabiston, the director general of Controlled Substances and Tobacco Directorate, and Denis Choiniere, director, Office of Regulations and Compliance with the tobacco control program.
Those three people and all of their staff have worked tirelessly for many years trying to strengthen our tobacco legislation, trying to reduce the amount of advertising that takes place and attempting to figure out how to stop young people from getting hooked on smoking in the first place. As they told the committee, they made great leaps from 1998 when the smoking incidence rate among young people was about 28% to the present where it is at 15%. That took a lot of legislation, a lot of regulations and a lot of controls on advertising. However, we are stuck at 15%.
At the moment we are trying to figure out how to get unstuck and reduce that level even lower, along come the tobacco companies with their clever ways to manipulate the marketplace and entice young people to smoke by putting on the market these lovely smelling, beautifully designed, trendy products, these individual cigarillos that are very enticing and do not appear to be harmful. However, they are as dangerous as normal cigarettes. In fact, they have higher amounts of nicotine, tar and other dangerous toxins in them and they are even more addictive than regular cigarettes. Young people were trying them. Despite all of the nonsense we heard from some of the large tobacco companies and some of the promoters of tobacco products, we know that young people were getting hooked on these products.
In 2001 there were about 50,000 of these products being sold on the market. Presently, there are about 80 million products being sold in the marketplace every day. That is a huge leap. We know that people are trying them.
Young adults are the age group with the highest smoking rates in Canada. We are trying to change that and deal with this pervasiveness of the tobacco industry to try to trap young people. The tobacco companies try to get them to smoke, because then they have a lucrative group they can sell to for the rest of their lives because they are addicted for a lifetime. Addiction to tobacco is deadly. It kills. It leads to cancer. It is absolutely devastating for individuals and families. We have an obligation to stop that kind of menace in our society.
The bill before us is also a lesson in terms of citizen participation and persistence of non-governmental organizations. We would not be here today with this bill, I would not have brought forward the private member's bill and the government would not have acted if it had not been for a whole number of groups, including Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, the Canadian Cancer Society, Non-Smokers' Rights Association, Coalition québécoise pour le contrôle du tabac, Action on Smoking and Health, Northwestern Ontario's Youth Action Alliance and its Flavour...Gone! campaign, the Area Youth Coalition of Eastern Ontario which is part of the smoke-free Ontario initiative, public health unit staff who were so supportive of the youth initiatives, Sisler Teens Against Nicotine and Drugs, Manitoba Youth for Clean Air, the Manitoba Tobacco Reduction Alliance. There are many other individuals and groups who have been tireless about trying to stop the spread of these products on the market and ensure their prohibition.
That is what we have accomplished today as a result of their hard work, their determination, their wonderful campaigns such as Flavour...Gone! and advertisements that said to put an end to tobacco industry gimmicks. The Change the Rules campaign used the depiction of a strawberry milkshake with a cigarette straw to show what the industry is trying to do. I thank them all for their incredible contribution to our society.
We will continue to work on improving this law. We have a commitment from the officials in the department to continue to gather data on smokeless tobacco and tobacco chew products, to verify what the youth are telling us. Among certain segments of our population and young people in certain communities, as we have heard from other speakers, the level of using chew is very high. It is producing very dangerous consequences for the health and well-being of individuals, including serious teeth problems, mouth decay, cancer of the mouth and so on.
It is a problem that has to be dealt with. Even though we did not win that today, we have a commitment from the government to collect the data, review the information and come forward within a year with some suggestions on how we might include smokeless tobacco in the regulations so that those products are also captured by this prohibition on flavoured tobacco products.
Let us also remember that although the menthol issue may not be a big factor in terms of this whole industry, it is still there enticing people to smoke. We did not win an elimination of menthol in this bill, but I am sure the department will also keep track of information on that issue and bring forward recommendations as we proceed about how menthol may be enticing non-smokers to begin smoking and how it might pick up in terms of interest of young people once this bill is passed. We are going to continue to monitor that situation. We will be as vigilant as possible.
Today I am very excited about what this place has accomplished. We have come together over very important legislation and we have agreed with unanimous consent to put aside some of the regular procedures that a bill must go through in order to make this happen today. It will pass today and will go to the other place, where we hope it will be dealt with very promptly so that it can be given royal assent and take effect immediately.
Then, by the time young people return to school in the fall, when they walk by corner stores, they will no longer be tempted by the lure of these lovely-smelling cigarillos that look like lipstick and magic markers and appear so harmless but are so deadly.
Together we have a made a great difference. Together we will continue to save the lives of people and rid our society of tobacco altogether.