The Power Game

Liberal senator a smoking gunner

COLIN Kenny is the sort of guy you associate with good cigars. He has that permanent-tan, striped-shirt look of an executive who likes to finish off a deal with brandy and a stogie.

And indeed, he has a thermidor full of them sitting right there on the credenza of his Senate office, "as a temptation . . . to keep me honest."

Mr. Kenny, a Liberal senator, used to luxuriate in the blue cloud of an after-dinner cigar in his Ottawa den until his youngest son confronted him one day with what he had learned about the dangers of second-hand smoke: "Dad, you're killing us, you know."

That was the trigger to quit a decade ago and now, like an old lefty who becomes a virulent anti-communist, Senator Kenny, 54, has taken up the antismoking cause with missionary zeal. Mr. Kenny has been around the real world long enough to know, however, that moral suasion goes a lot further if it is backed up with hard evidence and the clout of law.

Therein the logic of S-13, The Tobacco Industry Responsibility Act, Mr. Kenny's private member's bill, which has successfully made it through the initial legislative hurdles at the Senate. It seems to have enough bipartisan backing to get through the Upper Chamber and over to the House of Commons where it may pose a politically sensitive problem for Health Minister Allan Rock, already enmeshed in tobacco-sponsorship problems.

To fully appreciate the subtleties of S-13, one needs some background. Mr. Kenny, a political organizer and then an oil-patch executive before being appointed to the Senate in 1984 as part of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau's parting bouquet, has a restless energy that is not often fully occupied by regular Senate challenges.

Mr. Kenny also retains a bit of the arrogance of the Trudeau era, both qualities that can occasionally combine to ruffle his parliamentary and Liberal colleagues. But he also has the persistence and smarts to penetrate the system and get things done. Although private members' bills that change government policy seldom get through Parliament, Mr. Kenny has already used the legislative route to force the government to convert its auto fleet to natural gas.

Now he is targeting smoking, especially cigarette manufacturers' marketing strategies and advertising. He refers to smoking addiction as the heart- and lung-eating disease that kills 40,000 Canadians a year -- the same number each year as were killed in all six years of the Second World War.

Mr. Kenny was so furious when he saw red-coated Mounties lending their image to a tobacco-sponsored tennis meet that he hauled in RCMP Commissioner Phillip Murray and had the activity stopped. Mr. Kenny also challenged former health minister David Dingwall when the minister buckled under political pressure and exempted sporting events from legislation covering tobacco advertising and sponsorship. The senator claimed he had enough votes to amend the bill in the Senate but backed off because the amendments would have effectively killed the whole bill on the eve of last year's election.

S-13 is the sequel to that bill. It would add 50 cents to the price of each pack of cigarettes, raising an estimated $120-million a year to be split between anti-smoking measures and funding arts and sports organizations that now receive from tobacco sponsorship (as well, a small amount would go to compensate tobacco farmers). Raising the price of cigarettes would also reduce smoking, and put all of the cost of compensating arts and sports organizations on smokers and tobacco companies rather than the federal treasury. Mr. Kenny has obtained the support of more than 80 antismoking organizations, including all provincial branches of the Canadian Cancer Society, which are conducting a write-in campaign to support the bill.

MR. Kenny argues that such a levy is not a dedicated tax (a no-no that would be blocked by the Department of Finance) but rather a levy to achieve "an industrial purpose." This refinement, for which he cites a legal precedent, has been procedurally acceptable to the Senate but might be challenged in the Commons.

There are other limits to private members' bills but, at the very least, S-13 may be successful in pushing the whole issue of tobacco sponsorship back into the Commons hot spot -- where the Liberal government will have to handle it with asbestos gloves.
E-mail: hwinsor@globeandmail.ca