Finance committee  Parliament approved in the last budget the funding for the Canadian strategy for cancer control, which is an absolutely breathtaking, innovative strategy that could be a model for many other diseases. So we'll keep our fingers crossed.

Finance committee  The World Bank has pointed out worldwide that the most effective way to reduce smoking is to make tobacco products less affordable, especially to kids and to poor people. People of higher socio-economic status respond to health information and health campaigns; the way you get poorer people and kids to stop smoking is to make the products less affordable.

Finance committee  Well, let me make the point that you've been inundated for weeks on all kinds of good things that you want to fund, and we're one of the few groups that have a solution.

Finance committee  You stop the illegal manufacturing of cigarettes on Indian reserves and raise federal taxes, and that will bring in tens of millions of dollars that can fund all these good things. The technology exists to fight contraband. There have been meetings with the Canada Revenue Agency for years to work out how this can be done.

Finance committee  There is no rationale. I think a part of it was the sponsorship issue. The funds for advertising for Health Canada were sent to the Privy Council Office, and there's a whole history and story there. It's all tied up with that issue. But it's a program that's working, the mass media program.

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. This would solve huge health problems among our aboriginal peoples.

Finance committee  We're very concerned about it. We've been meeting with some of the aboriginal groups, who tell us that Health Canada has said they're going to come up with a better program, a more comprehensive program. We haven't seen it, so if that's true, if there is a better program, a more comprehensive program, we would want to look at it and that would be great.

Finance committee  I don't think there's one magic bullet. I think we have to look at all these sorts of things. In the coming years we'll see the infrastructure dealt with. We'll see more user-friendly neighbourhoods and so forth, bicycle paths and walking and we'll look at that. This is a huge issue that's going to take a number of years to resolve.

Finance committee  Yes, we certainly support the CDPAC brief that was presented yesterday. We're part of CDPAC. We work closely with them. I think we have to look at all avenues, not only infrastructure, and we shouldn't disregard the tax system. Look how well it's worked in the area of tobacco. Some lessons have been learned there.

Finance committee  I don't have that with me, but I can get back to you, or I'll send it to the committee.

Finance committee  Good evening. In our submission to this committee last year, we pointed out that with the aging population a tsunami of cancer will hit us. Cancer will become the greatest single cause of premature death by the year 2010. Cancer in the workforce will more than double over the next 30 years, resulting in staggering losses of tax revenues and wage-based productivity.