It seems obvious to me that without solving the issue of off-reserve tobacco sales, there will be no solution to the stand off in Caledonia.
I started thinking this when Shawn Brant and a small group of followers blocked off an extremely busy rail corridor in Southern Ontario and did millions of dollars of damage to the economy. I was curious as to why this blocakde could not be cleared immediately, as it seemed as though the situation was handled with an even softer pair of kid gloves than is usual under such circumstances.
My curiousity led me to google his name, and results involving his connection with Tyendinaga Mohawk Tobacco Products appeared. Some references to the Caledonia situation were also returned by the search.
When you start sifting through all the connections between the stand off in Caledonia, the main players in it, and the native tobacco industry, you might reasonably conclude that a few people are in a position to make a lot of money from this situation, and the land claim conflict is in some ways useful to their cause.
Now that the OPP is absolutely unwilling to enforce the law in Caledonia for fear of escalating the land claim tensions, we see illegal smoke shops popping up off reserve.
Perhaps the real native agenda, or at least a big part of it, is to win the right to sell tax free smokes off reserve. Perhaps that is why the offer of $125 million from the federal government to settle the land claim, which has previously been shown to be without merit, was rejected. The only way that the events in Caledonia make any sense to me is if both of these assertions are in fact, true. There is no way of knowing anything for sure unless one is capable of reading minds, but common sense can be illuminating under these circumstances.
It seems to me that the police are demonizing Caledonian activists. It also seems like the media is ignoring this situation out of a very understandable fear of politically correct backlash. It is difficult to be critical of anything that First Nations people do without opening yourself up to an accusation of racism. We have 4 more years of Dalton McGuinty as premier who has been proven to be very shy about conjuring up the ghosts of Ipperwash. Therefore, for all of these reasons, it looks like help is not on the way for Caledonia.
If off reserve tobacco sales is the real issue, then the government needs to confront it head on so there will be no motive for Six Nations business leaders to prevent the land claim from being settled. Eventually, if my guess is right, the government will act because it loses tax money every time a contraband cigarette is sold, so the financial motivation will increase over time.
Fortunately, the government can confront this issue without confronting the native community, and this isn’t even the first time this has needed to be done.
Back in the early days of the Harris government, cigarette smuggling was becoming a major issue. The government was losing a lot of tax money because of it. The Conservatives dropped cigarette taxes to make legal cigarettes more competitive with illegal ones.
Provided they were undertaken before Ontario tobacco farmers go completely out of business, similar measures would diminish the native’s trade in contraband tobacco. However, eliminating cigarette taxes would not improve the McGuinty government’s fiscal position, so I wouldn’t even recommend doing it. There are other measures that would accomplish the same thing, without the short term financial sacrifice.
Before I go on, I should point out that I am not advocating actions against legitimate First Nations interests, however, tobacco should be regulated and taxed, off-reserve at least. Illegal tobacco, like all contraband, can finance organized crime, and creates health problems without providing the financial means to deal with those health problems.
If the Ontario government eliminates the tax on cigarettes, it could recoup those dollars elsewhere with a different tax. I suggest that the Ontario Health Premium should be adjusted for this purpose.
By calculating the amount that a heavy smoker currently pays per year in cigarette taxes, and then add that to the amount that every person in the province pays for the Ontario Health Premium.
Of course, not every person should be required to pay this additonal amount, so by attaching a doctor’s written exemption to the person’s tax return, that person should be refunded the tobacco part of the premium.
This would be an extra hassle for doctors and their patients and a general burden on the health care system. However, I specifically suggested that the premium be increased by the amount that a heavy smoker would pay in cigarette taxes. All of this hassle would be worth it in order to convince the half-pack-a-day smoker that smoking isn’t worth it. The dedicated smokers wouldn’t be paying any more than before anyway. Such a smoker may not notice a couple of bucks a day, but they may notice their non-smoking friends cashing their thousand dollar refund cheques at the end of the year. Occasional and light smokers would quit in droves.
There are other benefits of embracing this plan of using the Ontario Health Premium to provide people with incentives to the right thing about their health. For example, in the future, there could be a similar levy/rebate system in place which is based on whether a person keeps his or her body weight within a healthy range. Of course, this would have to be phased in over time, because the difference between obesity and smoking is that a pack a day smoker can wake up tomorrow morning, and stop smoking, thereby becoming a non-smoker. It takes much longer than that to bring body weight into the ideal range.
Another benefit to such a plan would to shift the focus of our health care system to prevention. Taxes would be piled on to those who are a liability to the system, to motivate them to take care of their health. This is why our vices are taxed, I am merely proposing to bring this taxation into the health care system instead of doing it in stores. The government could provide incentives to doctors based on how many patients quit smoking and how many tackle their weight problems.
Taxing cigarettes within the health care system, instead of in stores, will also result in making legal cigarettes competitive with contraband cigarettes. Everyone that grows tobacco and sells cigarettes should have an equal opportunity to do so, except for on reserves where the natives should be able to have a monopoly. However, off-reserve, there should be equality.
If the billions and billions of dollars that stand to be gained if natives can somehow win the right to sell tax free cigarettes off reserve, or at least do so without existing laws being enforced, as is currently the situation in Caledonia, then perhaps other issues will be easier to resolve.
The situation is terrible in Caledonia, and it seems that the only winners so far are those who are making money off smokes. Something is going to change in the future, it is just a matter of whether the change will be graceful and born out of creative thinking, or it the change will come in the form of escalated tension and more suffering on the part of the people of Caledonia.
