- © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
Arguing that cheap, contraband cigarettes are seriously undermining public health initiatives to constrain smoking, the 70-member Canadian Coalition for Action on Tobacco has launched a national campaign to persuade governments to crack down on the illegal tobacco market.
The measures are primarily aimed at snuffing out the supply of cheap cigarettes that are manufactured on native reserves and are increasingly finding their way onto the streets of Canada's major cities. They include a ban on the supply of raw materials — paper, filters and even raw leaf tobacco — to unlicensed tobacco manufacturers, as well as hiking the minimum bond to obtain a tobacco manufacturing licence to $5 million from the current $5000.
The contraband tobacco trade has all but gutted national efforts to dissuade tobacco use through high taxes, says Neil Collishaw, research director for Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. “The whole phenomenon of availability of cheap tobacco completely undermines the health objectives of the high price policy that we have had and have successfully enforced.”
“All of it is completely illegal, all of it without taxes at all, and now with distribution networks quite widespread in Ontario and Quebec, and rapidly spreading elsewhere, we can see our whole policy being eroded,” Collishaw added.
The coalition contends the most feasible means of shutting down the contraband tobacco trade is to attack the supply side of the equation, particularly the 10 tobacco factories located on the St. Regis side of the Akewesasne reserve straddling the Ontario, Quebec and New York state borders, and other illegal operations on Kahnawake (near Montréal, Que.), Tyendinaga (near Belleville, Ont.) and Six Nations (near Brantford, Ont.). “The key to success is to get at the source,” says Rob Cunningham, Senior Policy Analyst and lawyer for the Canadian Cancer Society.
The short-term solutions include the ban on the supply of raw materials and the multi-million dollar licence, the coalition argues. But, it adds, the permanent solution lies in structural, legislative and regulatory reforms, including a new law that would enable reserves to levy a First Nations tobacco tax, with the revenues being plowed back into social and economic projects on their reserves. Other recommended measures include implementing a tracking and tracing system that encodes all cigarette packaging to make it easier for police to identify contraband products; legislation that makes manufacturers liable if their products are seized on the smuggling market; and a major diplomatic initiative to convince the US government to shut down illegal, unlicensed manufacturing operations on the US side of the Akwesasne.