Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the member for his openness and powerful personal experience and anecdote. It is very helpful for Canadians who are watching the debate to understand just why it is so important to address the scourge of tobacco addiction.
I am the former legal counsel to the Non-Smokers Rights Association of Canada. I spent several years working to drive up Canada's non-smoking levels, which are now the leading levels. We have the lowest smoking levels in the OECD. I am really pleased to see many changes have been brought at the federal and provincial level. For example, in Ontario, there is no smoking allowed in cars with children under the age of 12 or 14 and there are no open displays of tobacco products in our corner stores.
I want to come to a point with my colleague and ask him to sort of square it up for me. It is a question I put to his colleague earlier today. The community police in my district tell me that now it is very important to get to the 8- to 14-year-old kids before they make the wrong choices. That includes the choice to smoke.
We have differences on this side of the House with the member and his party on mandatory minimums and their effectiveness. We look for real evidence to substantiate the claims that they are working. However, I will leave that aside for a second.
I want to ask the member how he sees the government moving forward on outreach and engagement, messaging, smoking cessation, advertising campaigns, explaining to the Canadian citizenry, particularly in our aboriginal communities where smoking rates are increasing the fastest. How do we deal with this as a national government? The answer surely cannot be that we simply transfer money to provinces. How do we deal with this to ensure that we message out to continue that success?