Smoke for brains

Toronto Sun Newspaper, 13 January 1999

Will they every learn?

Egged on by anti-smoking groups, the feds, who raised taxes on cigarettes to the point where they touched off an international smuggling crisis in the early 1990s, now have a new brainstorm.

Having been forced to cut taxes in 1994 to combat out-of-control cross-border smuggling, the feds now want to raise them again.

In fact they already have. In 1996, Ottawa started hiking the federal tobacco tax once again, triggering more hikes by the provinces.

Now Ottawa is looking at special tax hikes for Ontario and four eastern provinces, to bring tobacco prices here in line with higher ones in the west and Newfoundland. Once prices become uniform across Canada, as the Sun's Anne Dawson reported last week, Ottawa would then ratchet up its taxes even higher.

The theory is this will combat smoking, especially among teens. The reality is that we've been there, done that, and it doesn't work.

This was precisely Ottawa's failed policy of the early '90s, which precipitated the cross-border smuggling crisis in the first place.

Usuriously high taxes eventually made tobacco more valuable as an illegal product than a legal one.

(Today, cigarettes are trucked from Ontario, where they cost about $3.95 a pack, to the West Coast, where it's $6.42.)

Now the feds, having failed to learn from history, want to repeat it.

Never mind that former RCMP commissioner Norm Inkster, now a private consultant, warns that raising tobacco taxes again could prompt a return to the bad old days of rampant smuggling.

Never mind that Ron Martelle, the former mayor of Cornwall who was caught in the smugglers' crossfire at the time, makes the same point. "Here we go again;" he noted, when informed of the feds' latest bright idea.

In Cornwall, extra police had to be brought in. There was a car bombing. Kids were shot at while fishing. City Hall was fired at and Martelle and his family had to go into hiding.

Now the mental giants in Ottawa are considering recreating this vicious circle of higher taxes and more smuggling.

No sale. High tobacco taxes aren't the cure. They're the disease.

And governments need to break their addiction.

Related article Quebec mulls tobacco-tax hike

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