Dalton McGuinty's shameful Chinese
smoke screen

By Owen Dyer

"Canada's image is just about getting groovy, you know," noted John Lennon in 1969 during his famous Montreal bed-in for peace.

Little has changed since those heady days. Everyone still likes us because we're so unremittingly nice. Though our governments through the years have often been less than perfect, almost all Canadians take a certain pride in the quiet, thoughtful way that they — and we — have often punched above our weight in our attempt to make the world a better place.

So it's more than a little disappointing to hear that Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario, our most populous and powerful province, is now helping Canadian businesses export a deadly poison that will kill millions of foreigners — and probably drift back to claim the lives of many thousands of our own. Yet that is precisely what he is doing by including Ontario tobacco growers in his recent trade delegation to China.

The move is not only morally questionable, it makes a mockery of the work physicians and Mr McGuinty's own public health officials have been doing with smoking cessation programs and awareness campaigns for tobacco-related diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease and COPD.

EASTERN PROMISE
China is the world's biggest cigarette market, with an estimated 360 million smokers. Surveys there have shown that the vast majority of these smokers are several decades behind us in terms of knowledge about smoking-related health risks — in fact most believe tobacco is harmless or even good for them. Twenty years from now, more than half of the victims of global tobacco-related deaths will be Chinese.

But Fred Neukamm, chairman of the Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers Marketing Board, who was in Beijing with Mr McGuinty, sees things another way. "We view this as an important market," he said. "Our own domestic market is shrinking. China is an emerging market. Our main goal is to keep things stable and maintain it and establish a long-term stable basis for it."

China first bought tobacco from Ontario just four years ago, but already accounts for more than 10% of the province's sales. But the traffic is not all one way. Chinese manufacturers are trying hard to smuggle counterfeit cigarettes into Canada. These cigarettes are packaged identically to local brands.

So far, their efforts to capture a market here have failed, primarily because the unaccustomed taste of their cigarettes repels Canadian smokers. But a bit of Ontario tobacco, sold cheap without high taxes, could solve their problem overnight.

SANCTIONED CRIME?
The irony is that the Ontario government is considering raising taxes on cigarettes, ostensibly to impoverish people out of their addiction and cover for the costs of smoking-related illnesses. It seems they've forgotten how the tobacco companies bullied Canada's governments into backing down the last time they hiked tobacco sales taxes in the early 1990s.

They did it by smuggling. Even as they were urging the governments to cut taxes to defeat the problem of cigarette smuggling, they were secretly running the smuggling operations themselves. All three of the big manufacturers — RJR MacDonald, Imperial Tobacco and Rothmans, Benson and Hedges — were in it up to their necks.

I can write about this without fear of legal action because never in the history of white-collar crime has guilt been so firmly established. Thanks to good police work by the RCMP and above all the prize-winning investigative work of Montreal Gazette journalist William Mars-den, they were forced to admit their guilt and pay heavy reparations — though some might say not nearly heavy enough.

Describing the smuggling activities of just one of the big three, RJR MacDonald, Inspector Robert Davis, Officer in Charge of the RCMP Greater Toronto District Commercial Crime Section said: "To give you some idea of the impact, the more than $1.2 billion dollars in lost revenue identified during this investigation is enough money to buy two MRI machines for each and every public hospital in Ontario and Quebec."

Unfortunately that's not what happened. Instead, that Canadian wealth went towards giving Canadians lung cancer. Cigarette exports surged from about 250 million a year throughout the 80s up to 19 billion in 1993 — the year after tobacco companies persuaded the Canadian government to drop the export tax, promising that they would find alternative ways to cut smuggling.

The catch is those 19 billion cigarettes went to the US, a country where the market for Canadian cigarettes is non-existent. Everyone knew they would be smuggled back into Canada.

NO HEALTH CONNECTIONS, HONEST
After health campaigners protested the tobacco industry's presence among more legitimate Ontario trade delegates like Mount Sinai Hospital, Chris Morley, Premier McGuinty's press secretary, defended the decision thus: "In planning the trade mission, we weren't going to pick and choose which business organizations were going to come to China to promote their trade interests. We just don't think it's our position to choose who can participate. The tobacco growers already do a significant amount of business in China and they'll be working hard to promote their interests in China."

Following this logic, one might argue by the same token that Quebec and British Columbia's marijuana growers — which already do a significant amount of business in the US — should benefit from similar trade missions down south.

Today's Chinese have never forgiven the British for encouraging opium use in their country long ago. Do we really want to face the wrath of the Chinese, when a more sophisticated generation learns that we tried to foist on them a habit we ourselves wanted to kick?

Of course the ultimate irony is that this past summer, Ontario passed some of the strictest anti-smoking legislation in the country, which will take effect in June 2006. The law, called the Smoke-Free Ontario Act, bans smoking in all workplaces — effectively everywhere except one's home or outside. The government said it had to do something to stem the nearly 16,000 smoking-related deaths in Ontario and the billions of healthcare dollars spent treating smoking-related diseases. "We're taking a stand," Dalton McGuinty said at the time. "I think it is an important signal to send to everyone."