Mr. Speaker, as I noted earlier, there is a big coalition whose members are mainly associations of retail business representatives. The coalition does a great deal of work and speaks out against contraband.
As my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue so rightly said, let us imagine a small merchant in a small community or a small village. Between 20% and 30% of his revenue is from the legal sale of legal tobacco until suddenly, he loses up to 40% of that business to illegal tobacco. That is nearly half of the 30% or 35% from sales of legal tobacco products wiped out within a few years. Earlier, people talked about numbers produced by the association of convenience store owners.
Consequently, I believe the assessment by the association of convenience store owners is entirely reasonable when they say one small merchant a day is going out of business, largely because of the problem of contraband tobacco.