EDITORIAL: No excuse for the delay (Quebec)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

EDITORIAL: No excuse for the delay
Source: Montreal Gazette, Thursday, 10/28/99

If there's one lesson the Quebec government should have learned from the
tobacco-smuggling debacle of the early 1990s, it's that timing is
everything. And right now, the timing has never been better to increase
taxes on cigarettes.  For the first time, a carton of cigarettes costs $15
more in the United States than in Canada, a result in part of American
cigarette manufacturers passing on to their customers the
multi-billion-dollar settlements levied against them. Yet the Bouchard
government has proposed hiking taxes by only $1.40 a carton. That is an
inadequate deterrent, as study after study has demonstrated. With the gap
between U.S. and Canadian prices widened to $15, Quebec should grab the
opportunity to hike prices by at least $10 a carton. There is no longer a
smuggling threat to worry about. When cigarettes in the United States were
cheaper than in Canada, the federal and provincial governments were
reluctant to increase taxes for fear of encouraging smugglers. Cheaper
prices in the United States allowed exported Canadian cigarettes to be
bought in the United States at a discount and smuggled back into this
country.  Canada's huge black market by 1993 supplied more than 60 per
cent of the cigarettes smoked in Quebec. Canada knows just how effective
price hikes are from its last attempt to curb smoking: daily smoking by
Canadians age 15-19 fell from 40 per cent to 16 per cent between 1984,
when a pack of cigarettes cost $2.64, and 1993, when the price had climbed
to $5.65. Faced with the huge smuggling operation, the federal and some
provincial governments chose in 1994 to reduce taxes. Today, Quebec and
Ontario have the lowest prices for cigarettes anywhere in North America -
and we have the smokers to prove it. Thirty-four per cent of Quebecers age
15 and over smoke, compared with 29 per cent for the country as a whole.
The provinces that refused to lower taxes have seen their per-capita rate
of cigarette consumption fall three times faster during the 1990s than the
provinces like Quebec that cut taxes. Quebec should not lose sight for a
second that smoking kills one in 10 adults worldwide and that high prices
are the most effective way to deter children and adolescents from taking
up smoking. More than 80 per cent of adult smokers in Canada became
addicted as teenagers. The Quebec government's failure to take robust
action on pricing makes its reluctance to enforce its own anti-smoking law
look suspiciously like lack of commitment. Having introduced in June last
year tough legislation that would curb smoking in the workplace and in
most public places, the government this week announced that while the
legislation will come into effect on Dec. 17 as promised, it just won't be
enforced. The reason for the delay in enforcement, according to the
government, is to give businesses upward of another year either to bar
smoking on their premises or to arrange for smoking areas. The government
also plans to mount an advertising campaign to persuade people to obey a
law it has no intention of enforcing for another 12 months. Talk about a
mixed message. Smoking kills an estimated 10,000 Quebecers a year, more
than the combined death toll of alcohol, AIDS, drugs, road accidents,
suicides and homicides. There is no excuse for the delay.