Public Safety committee  Oh, okay. The regime now, as I understand it, is such that to get a quota or a licence to grow tobacco, you need to go to this organization or licensing group and show that you have contracts with legitimate tobacco producers. We have been told anecdotally that this particular

Public Safety committee  It depends. If smoking continues to go down, the revenues will not increase, but if smoking remains the same, and if the measures to fight contraband tobacco are such that whoever is buying contraband tobacco does not stop smoking but shifts to a legal product, perhaps our revenu

Public Safety committee  I would like to pursue the point raised by my colleague. You will recall that the former Minister of Revenue, Mr. Blackburn, issued a media release saying there would be an awareness campaign.

Public Safety committee  You are well informed, madam. In fact, the agency is currently working on it. We are in discussions with other partners regarding the scope of the campaign. I'm sorry, I have forgotten your second question.

Public Safety committee  Raising or lowering taxes is up to the Department of Finance. It might be able to give you information about that. I have no idea what impact it might have. In reply to your third question about what are called inputs, there are several analyses, some of which were done by the W

Public Safety committee  We do monitor it very closely. From a compliance perspective, we do audit our licensees. We currently have 33 licensees across the country. We do a full audit of them every year, and we also have regulatory reviews, meaning that we visit them a number of times. You can be there e

Public Safety committee  We have some numbers here. If you look at 2007-08, I think the total revenue collected by CBSA and CRA together was in the area of $2.7 billion. For 2008-09, it was $2.5 billion. But we also have anecdotal evidence. If you recall, in August 2008, there was a tobacco buyout progra

Public Safety committee  Yes, I can. Thank you for the question. The main reason for the new stamp—and as you are probably aware, the legislation to implement the new stamp is before the House right now, as part of the budget implementation act, C-9—was clearly to deal with the counterfeit that we're s

Public Safety committee  Good afternoon, Ms. Mourani. When we started negotiating an agreement with RBH and Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., one of the terms was that neither the companies nor the government would identify the amounts of money that were then paid under the agreements as money that was to b

Public Safety committee  With respect to the losses and the gap in revenue for these two years, there was no study conducted to determine whether this was a result of Health Canada's policy on tobacco use or the fact that contraband tobacco had become the prevailing problem. We have no statistics on this

Public Safety committee  Thank you for your question, sir. As I mentioned in my introductory remarks, we do have an audit program that deals with the licensees. We monitor and audit the legal part of the business. Basically, we have two parts to our audit program. In one part we go in and do full audit

Public Safety committee  There are penalties and interest attached to the amount of tax that is owed, according to the penalty and interest regime in the legislation. We do make sure that when the licence comes up.... Depending on the seriousness, we do have the possibility of revoking or suspending lice

Public Safety committee  Good afternoon, and thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear today and explain Canada Revenue Agency's role in this file under discussion. With me today is Phil McLester, who is the director of the excise duties and taxes division. The