Guest column: Time has come for tobacco industry accountability

Published Jul 07, 2023 • Last updated 45 minutes ago • 3 minute read

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By Andrea Seale, Terry Dean and Doug Roth

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Over many decades, tobacco companies have dug deep into their marketing toolkits to manipulate and deceive the public about their products.

They influenced perceptions with celebrity endorsements, advertising to youth, public relations campaigns overtly denying negative health effects and touting flawed research. They used misleading buzzwords with their products like “light” and “mild.”

With hefty financial resources, they fabricated a false reality, burying legitimate evidence revealing the catastrophic health impacts of smoking. They created a society of people addicted to their products, leading to vast disease and death. And they did this across the entire world.

If this sounds like an over-dramatization, it’s not. In fact, all the provinces in Canada, including Ontario, have acknowledged this wrongdoing and have filed health care cost recovery lawsuits against the country’s three major tobacco companies — Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd.; Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc.; and JTI-MacDonald Corp. — along with their foreign parents.

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The lawsuits and a class action in Quebec have resulted in these companies filing for bankruptcy protection with total claims exceeding $500 billion. That’s right — $500 billion.

The only way for the companies to get out of bankruptcy protection is with a settlement agreed upon by the provinces. Right now, Ontario is in these historic settlement negotiations with the three tobacco companies — and has been for the last four years.

What’s happening in the negotiations? We don’t know because the negotiations are taking place behind closed doors without health organizations at the table.

The settlement negotiations are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hold the tobacco industry responsible. The day of reckoning for “Big Tobacco” should be here — so let’s not waste it.

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Ontario and other provinces have ample leverage and can insist on strict measures that would forever change industry behaviour. The Canadian Cancer Society, the Heart & Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Lung Association are urging Premier Doug Ford and provincial government negotiators to ensure it is no longer “business as usual” for tobacco companies.

We believe a settlement needs to include both substantial long-term funding for tobacco control, as well as policy measures to control the industry and reduce tobacco use. The industry’s wrongful behaviour must come to an end.

Specifically, we want to see at least 10 per cent of distributions from a settlement allocated to a fund, independent of government, to reduce tobacco use. If targets to reduce tobacco use in Canada are not achieved, tobacco companies should be required to make substantial additional payments.

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We also urge other measures that include banning all remaining tobacco promotion and requiring public disclosure of the millions of pages of secret internal tobacco company documents.

We aren’t the first country to take steps to hold the tobacco industry accountable. Settlements were achieved in the United States in 1997-98 with new measures applied to the industry in that country.

Quite simply, if U.S. states can include measures to reduce tobacco use in their tobacco settlements, Canadian provinces in 2023 can and must do much better.

It’s not only our organizations that have a strong opinion.

In fact, 89 per cent of Ontarians support a requirement that a significant proportion of the funds from a settlement be used for initiatives to reduce smoking among both adults and youth, according to a national Ipsos poll conducted in March 2023.

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Tobacco remains the leading preventable cause of disease and death in every province in Canada. It kills an estimated 46,000 Canadians, including 16,000 Ontarians, each year and impacts families, communities and our health care system.

We are calling on Premier Ford and other premiers to demonstrate leadership to stop Big Tobacco, counter its wrongdoing, and ensure that comprehensive measures are in the tobacco settlement to benefit generations to come.

Andrea Seale is the Canadian Cancer Society’s CEO, Terry Dean is the Canadian Lung Association’s CEO and Doug Roth is CEO of the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada.

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