What are the Provinces Smoking?

Four of our Provinces have come out with law suits against the Tobacco Companies totalling billions of dollars for alleged costs to their health care systems due to cigarette smoking.

Ontario alone is seeking some $55 billion for smoking related illnesses dating back to the mid 1950s.

What hypocrites.

Not only have they known for several decades - and indeed we've all known - that cigarette smoking affects one's health, the Provinces have partnered in the tobacco trade by way of their horrendous tax levies. Ontario today is collecting over a billion dollars annually in tobacco taxes.

Plus the trade in tobacco is legal and it is the politicians who have allowed it to be so. Maybe they should be included in their own law suit writs.

Many I know have said they support the government in its efforts to squeeze money out of tobacco because smokers are a drain on the health care system. But are they?

A chap I used to work with - Del - was and probably to this day is a heavy smoker. He used to say to me that he, as a smoker, was deserving of a medal. First because of all the taxes he was paying for the privelege of smoking (i.e. he was overly supporting the tax regime) and Second, because of the nature of smokers' diseases, they died more quickly than most and thereby spared the system countless millions in lingering care.

He might be right. If you ask health care experts where the bulk of health care dollars are spent they readily admit it is on the elderly and their chronic conditions that can linger for years. By then, the smokers are long gone.

So maybe the Dels of this country do deserve a medal for their patriotic smoking.

But the Provinces do not deserve one penny in the efforts to extort money from their Tobacco partnership buddies.

As I see it.

"Galagher"