Mr. Speaker, my colleague makes a very valid point. I know this from my own family experience. I actually lost a sister to lung cancer. She smoked for 35 years and she started as a young teenager. Sadly, the majority of people who are addicted to cigarettes today and want so badly to quit started as very young teenagers. They probably thought they would just try it our and never really continue, but as we know, it is an incredibly addictive substance.
The statistic that my colleague was referring to was a study that was done in Ontario and Quebec. In Ontario a full third and in Quebec 40% of all cigarette products used in high schools were contraband tobacco. Again, we are not talking about adults; we are talking about people in high school.
This is not just an issue of young people buying cheap cigarettes or, as I said, family members buying other family members cheap cigarettes when they go across the border or getting them within Canada. This is a much larger problem.
The other issue, which is something we are finding out more about, is that because these cigarettes are produced illegally, we do not even know what is in them. We already know just how poisonous and harmful basic cigarettes are when they are produced legally; illegally produced tobacco products are laced with all kinds of additional dangerous things that we have absolutely no way of controlling.