House of Commons photoWon his last election, in 2008, with 58% of the vote.
Highways December 3rd, 1998
Mr. Speaker, consider this: Doug Young, former transport minister, political colleague and friend of the present minister, architect of the highway agreement, is now positioned to collect millions of dollars in highway tolls. Is there something wrong with this picture? The present minister says no, it is a good deal. Who is the minister protecting, the taxpayers or his friend, Doug Young?
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Mr. Speaker, I think the heritage minister has had too much caffeine today. I cannot fathom that question. With due respect to the minister of heritage, I think she has this confused with her flip-flop position on the GST.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Mr. Speaker, that is the question I cannot answer. That is what makes this whole exercise so bizarre. The numbers are obviously against doing what the government is doing, to try to phrase it properly.
I have some letters sitting on the desk of the member who happens to be the finance critic for my party. He sent me a little note. I think he is over in his office and one of the pages just brought it. He wants me to tell Canadians that the tobacco tax reduction is the only tax cut the present government has given the Canadian people since taking office in 1993.
In reference to the question, I am perplexed as to why the government would go down a road which is such a sorry road. It has an opportunity to do something and it is not doing it. All I can say is it has to be caving in to big business, to the big tobacco manufacturers. I do not think there is an answer other than that.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Mr. Speaker, that is the problem with the institutional memory around here. The member who just asked that question used to sit in this very seat. I hope I am not contaminated by that type of thing. All I can say is that I received a lot of letters on the GST. In 1993 I paid a huge political price on that issue.
Canadian people will pay a huge price in terms of deaths and in terms of addiction if we do not do something about this very serious issue.
In reference to the same point made by the veteran member from Regina, Saskatchewan, it is funny we were so wrong in the GST that the government just wrapped its arms around it. We do not even hear you saying anything about it, Mr. Speaker, nor any other member over there. Probably it goes back to that same person I talked about in the finance department, David Dodge, giving Michael Wilson and Don Mazankowski advice. Now he is advising the government. I wish he would go back to finance and stay away from the health minister.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Mr. Speaker, now that I know I am a nice guy I feel a lot better. We have to talk about reality in this place. We have Bill S-13 before the House that will be ruled on by the Speaker as to its legitimacy. It will do something about smoking in Canada, particularly for young people.
I ask the member to put her money or her vote where her mouth is. She should support Bill S-13 which incidentally was introduced by one of her own backbenchers who happens to be a medical doctor.
Senator Kenny went around the country from coast to coast. I have here documentation from the Canadian Cancer Society telling us in study after study of the harmful effects of smoking on young people. I have a box of letters. I will not touch it and then it is not a prop. I had to use two soldiers and a pack horse to get the letters here from my office to show the Canadian people how important the issue is.
I was first elected in 1988. I have never had as many letters on a topic as I have had on the smoking issue. I have received thousands of letters. They are going to other members in the opposition parties and to members of the government. That type of evidence suggests Canadians want something done about smoking. I will entertain other questions from the floor.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Absolutely. It is peanuts. Incidentally this would break down to about $20 million a year.
Ten million dollars would be going toward education and the other $10 million would be going toward enforcement. In other words, I guess we would have cigarette police out there.
Senator Kenny's bill would raise $120 million a year at the manufacturing level which would be about 5 cents a pack. This is so illogical I cannot believe it. But the finance department argues that it could not do that because that would break its agreement with the provinces not to raise taxes or prices on cigarettes from coast to coast. In other words, there has to be federal-provincial agreement to do that.
That in itself is a fallacious argument because what the government is basically arguing is that if we indiscriminately raise the price of cigarettes across the country we are going to get into another smuggling problem like we had in the early nineties.
The smuggling problem was addressed by the government in 1994 when it capitulated again to the cigarette giants, the cigarette manufacturers, the tobacco people. It was the single largest reduction in taxes in the history of Canada. It cut the price of cigarettes almost in half by taking away a big chunk of the tax component.
The government caved in to the smugglers at the expense of young Canadians. Because of that capitulation we have seen the single largest increase in the number of new smokers in the history of Canada ever since, year after year. It is just like a rocket taking off.
What we are saying is that the time is right to enforce that 50 cent levy per carton at the manufacturing level. Why is the time right? Because if we look to the border states of the United States we will find that we are pretty well on par with where they are in terms of price.
The smuggling issue is not going to be as big an issue as it was in the past. Although, I think what we should have done then was to enforce our own laws and get tough on the smugglers. I do not think we should have capitulated to the Mafia kings or the smugglers, but this government did.
Let us take a look at my home province of New Brunswick. In New Brunswick people are paying $3.74 a pack. That was as of September 30, 1998. If we bought a pack of cigarettes in the state of Maine today we would pay $4.10 Canadian, given the fact that our dollar is much weaker than theirs. That is another story.
In other words, in Canada we would pay $3.74 and in Maine we would pay $4.10. There would be a 36 cent difference in our favour. We have room to increase the cost to help educate young Canadians about smoking. I think the government should do it.
This is something that I have to put on the record. The tobacco manufacturers have absolutely no credibility when it comes to arguing their case. The manufactures at one time argued that there is a death benefit to smoking. They actually commissioned a study to prove this. The manufacturers said that there is a net gain in Canada if we all smoke.
Their reasoning went like this. If we smoke we are going to die younger. Therefore, we are not going to be collecting as much old age pension because obviously we will be dying younger. We are not going to be collecting as much Canada pension because we will die younger. We are not going to be receiving any health care benefits because we will be dead. Cigarette manufacturers actually commissioned that study and expected Canadians to believe it.
I go back to my basic argument. The attack on cigarette smoking can only be done in three ways. It has to hit the price, that is the tax on cigarettes, because the government can control prices through taxes. There is a direct correlation between price and consumption. Economists call that fundamental pricing theory. In other words, if the price is high enough fewer people will smoke the product because they will put their money some place else.
The second way is advertising and the third is education. In other words before we could support any tobacco legislation in the House, all three of those components have to be in the bill. Unfortunately they are not in the bill. It has been weakened and weakened badly.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
That is all but that is enough. Why will it not do something about it? That is the part that is so bizarre. We are spending $10 billion in health costs as a direct result of smoking and bringing in $2 billion in revenue.
Some people have power over the government that goes beyond our wildest dreams. I would identify those people as being the cigarette manufacturers of Canada. They are giants.
I want to give the House an example of who some of those giants are. There is the Imperial Tobacco company, which I am sure most of us have heard about. It is a Montreal based company. It is the dominant player in Canada, with a 67% share of the market. It is owned by a British company called B.A.T Industries, which again is a big multinational conglomerate.
I think hon. members will be surprised when they hear what Imperial Tobacco owns.
Imperial Tobacco Limited is Canada's largest tobacco company. Its operations include leaf tobacco buying and processing, and the manufacture and distribution of a wide range of tobacco products. Its major brands include Players, DuMaurier and Matinée. The company is also the largest seller of cigars in Canada, with brands such as House of Lords, White Owl and Old Port. I guess we have heard those names.
It is really interesting to find out that this same conglomerate owns a drugstore chain called Shoppers Drug Mart. That is pretty powerful, but it does not end there. It also owns some trust companies. Some of its holdings include the Canada Trust Company, Canada Trust Realty Inc. and Coldwell Banker Affiliates of Canada Inc. It is pretty big.
I think we would have to believe that these people have some influence on the government when it comes to legislation and what they want to see the government do. Basically they do not want to see the government do anything. If the government really did want to do something concrete about smoking it would adopt Senator Kenny's bill, Bill S-13.
This is interesting, because last week Senator Kenny's bill was introduced in the House of Commons and immediately the government House leader jumped to his feet and used every measure he could to keep this bill out of the House. In other words, government members were using procedural arguments to keep Senator Kenny's bill out of the House of Commons because they are afraid of it. They are afraid of it because this bill would do something about smoking in Canada, particularly among young people. In Canada there are a quarter of a million new smokers coming on line each and every year. Something has to be done about that.
Senator Kenny's bill would do something about that. But the government, if it has anything to say about it, is not going to allow this bill to survive the test on the floor of the House of Commons. The government brought in all of its legal minds to launch challenges against this bill, even though it was introduced by the member for St. Paul's, one of its own members. Government members are going to use every means they can to keep it off the floor of the House of Commons.
This is a strategy on the part of the government. The battle is not coming from the health minister, because the health minister is on record as saying that Bill S-13 has merit and that it is a good bill. Unfortunately, he is out-voted in cabinet. There is one person in cabinet who has more clout than the health minister, which I think is recognized by just about everyone in the House, and that would be the finance minister. The finance minister rules the day in the government and he does not want this bill to come in.
What this bill would do is put a 50 cent levy on every carton of cigarettes manufactured in Canada. This levy would be applied at the manufacturer's level. This is not a tax, but a levy.
There are all kinds of precedents which indicate that this levy is no different than any other levy imposed from time to time on certain industries. We would use the argument of intellectual rights and the 5 cent levy imposed on blank cassettes which was passed in this House a number of years ago. That is just one argument that we would use to say that a levy is indeed appropriate and that there is a difference between a levy and a tax.
The fight is coming from the finance minister. Taxation is sacred to the finance department. In other words, it wants full control of every dollar that it is capable of extracting from our back pockets. It does not want to give up any revenue or any tax points. It does not want to give up its future ability to tax.
This 50 cents a carton is being opposed by the finance minister. I want to compare this to the EI account. We have heard the argument in the House that the finance minister is sitting on a $20 billion EI surplus which goes into the consolidated revenue fund. That is why the finance minister likes it and does not want to give up control of it. It allows him to manipulate the books, balance the budget, declare a deficit free accounting procedure, etcetera. The government loves it. I guess we cannot blame the finance minister for loving it because it allows him to do a little bit of manipulation.
The government does not want to see the same thing happening with this levy at the manufacturing level. This 50 cents per carton would be used to educate young Canadians, but it would not go into the consolidated revenue fund. Therefore, the finance minister would lose control. One might ask “What would be wrong with that?” The government gives and the government can take away.
Does anyone in this House remember David Dodge? Is it not correct that David Dodge was the deputy minister in the finance department in the days of Don Mazankowski and Michael Wilson? He was certainly a senior official in finance during those years.
David Dodge is now the health minister's deputy minister. Talk about the system perpetuating itself. We have someone who in the past gave Michael Wilson and Don Mazankowski, former finance ministers, advice, who is now giving advice to the health minister.
In my conversation with Mr. Dodge he said “I would be worried about this because it means that parliament is giving up its ability to tax”. I said “Listen, I hate to disagree with you, sir, but if parliament places that 50 cent levy on the manufacturers it is also saying that we can take it away if it does not work”, which we could do. There is no argument about that. In fact, Mr. Dodge really did not comment on my suggestion that if we impose it we could take it away if it did not work.
It goes back to that fundamental argument that the finance department does not want to give up control, as it does not want to give up control of the EI fund. It is a surplus that it loves to play around with.
The health minister promised to put $100 million into education over the next five years.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Mr. Speaker, Bill C-42 is not just about tobacco advertising or the government's vain attempt to limit advertising. It is basically about the health of Canadians.
I remind the House that every year in Canada 40,000 Canadians die from smoking. That fact is supported by every major medical group in the country. It is a statistic that even Health Canada supports. It is a big problem.
To give an idea of how big of a problem it is I will use some figures that I have used before. Sometimes we have to implant a visual picture so that people remember the numbers. The number of Canadians who die every year from smoking equals the number of Canadians who died in World War II in total. In other words from 1939 to 1945 approximately 42,000 to 45,000 Canadians died. That is a very disturbing statistic. When we compare that to how many Canadians die on a yearly basis, year in an year out, it is time for second thought.
There is another way to put it in terms of those 40,000 deaths. If we had a major airline crash every day in Canada causing the death of 100 Canadians, day in and day out for one solid year, the total would not equal the number of Canadians who die in one year because of smoking. The member from Newfoundland used the word scandalous. It is scandalous. If it happened in any other jurisdiction the government would do something about it.
We could question how long the Minister of Transport would last or how long the government would sustain the pressure that would be put on it by Canadians from coast to coast if 100 Canadians a day were dying in airline crashes? They would not last long. Somehow the government is able to get away with passing weak legislation like the legislation before us.
Another interesting statistic is that tobacco usage in Canada costs us every year $3 billion in direct costs and $7 billion in indirect costs for a total of $10 billion. The government could argue that it is making money on tobacco and it is. In one year, 365 days from now, the government will have made approximately $2 billion in revenue from taxes on cigarettes.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Madam Speaker, because of the nature of the debate today, I think it might be wiser for the government to introduce that when some of the key speakers on the opposition side are not here because obviously we do not agree with it.
Tobacco Act November 25th, 1998
Madam Speaker, the point I want to make is that I will agree to unanimous consent if the government agrees that it made a tactical error in ramming this through clause by clause at the committee stage.