Province suits up for tobacco company lawsuit -NB
September 12, 2007
By: News 88.9 Staff - Andrew Cromwell
FREDERICTON, NB - The New Brunswick government continues to move forward in it's battle with tobacco companies.
A consortium of lawyers has been retained by the province which will argue big tobacco companies should be responsible for health care costs of tobacco related injuries.
The consortium includes two New Brunswick lawyers, Chris Correia of Saint John and Phillippe Eddie of Moncton.
The government isn't paying out any legal costs out front. Fees and disbursements will be recovered as a percentage of any amounts recovered in the litigation process.
Read
 

New Brunswick Government Announcement "No Surprise" -NB
Sept. 13, 2007
MONTREAL,  /CNW Telbec/ - Yesterday's announcement by the New Brunswick government that it has hired a "consortium" of high powered lawyers to sue the tobacco industry comes as no surprise.
Imperial Tobacco Canada can only repeat here what it has said on many occasions.
This lawsuit has nothing to do with health. It has everything to do with money. Not satisfied with taxing the industry, the government also sues in the stated hope of reaching a settlement with the industry.
The conditions that made a settlement possible in the U.S. do not exist in Canada. There is no room to increase the price of the product. The government taxes are already so high that illicit trade has reached more than 30 percent in some provinces. In any event, the proceeds in the U.S. have been used for anything but health.
The stunning fact that the government has found it necessary both to change centuries' old law and to import US lawyers and their appetite for money just to get to the point of filing a lawsuit speaks volumes about its lack of confidence in the merits of its case. The case is not about the merits. It is all about looking for a settlement. But the sad teaching of many years of experience in the U.S. is that virtually all settlement money has gone first to exceedingly wealthy lawyers and then to diverse projects that share only the fact that they have nothing to do with smoking and health.
Governments in Canada, both federal and provincial, are the senior partners in the tobacco industry and the major beneficiaries. They receive $ 9 billion a year in tobacco taxes, 13 times more than the profitability of all the tobacco companies combined. Canada is the most regulated market in the world, with regulations governing the product itself and how it is manufactured, marketed and sold. And governments have been aware for decades of the significant health risks associated with smoking. So it is bizarre that governments should now sue an industry that they themselves control and from which they pump the largest share of the revenues.
There will be no settlement from the industry such as that hoped for by the New Brunswick government. This case will take years to resolve.
The industry will fight these cases and despite the unfair laws and tactics displayed by the New Brunswick government, is confident of ultimate success. Just ask the American plaintiffs' lawyers, they have lost cases too.
Read

---

B.C. wins ruling in tobacco fight

Kim Bolan, Vancouver Sun
September 16, 2006

Court of Appeal unanimously rules that the province has jurisdiction over foreign companies

The B.C. government won a major victory Friday in its lengthy battle to get multinational tobacco companies into court over the issue of smoking-related health-care costs.

The B.C. Court of Appeal sided with the province in a unanimous ruling that says B.C. courts do have jurisdiction over foreign tobacco companies.

That should clear the way for the government's civil case against major tobacco companies on allegations of deceptive marketing, inadequate health warnings and the targeting of children in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

The companies could still try to appeal the jurisdictional question to the Supreme Court of Canada. But that court already decided last year that provinces have the constitutional right to sue tobacco companies for smoking-related treatment costs.

"This is a big win for us," Attorney General Wally Oppal said in an interview Friday. "This is another significant road block that has now been removed for us."

Oppal, a former appeal court judge, said it is important that the ruling was unanimous, making it less likely that the tobacco industry would be granted leave to appeal to the country's highest court.

"This victory means that foreign tobacco companies named as defendants in the lawsuit, as well as their Canadian affiliates, will now be required to answer allegations of wrongdoing in the courts of British Columbia," Oppal said.

Health Minister George Abbott said the ruling could mean B.C. is able to recover billions in health-care costs going back decades.

"The decision means that the multinational industry is not immune from lawsuits by the provinces to recover our health-care costs. B.C. is holding the tobacco industry accountable for its deceptive marketing practices that harmed so many British Columbians."

Kathryn Seely, of the Canadian Cancer Society's B.C. and Yukon Division, said the province is one step closer to making the tobacco companies accountable for the ill effects of their products.

"It is an important preliminary victory against big tobacco," Seely said.

She said one of the most important facets of Friday's ruling is that the court accepted that the foreign companies "directed the behaviour of their subsidiaries."

"And they are the ones with the deep pockets which means at the end of the day, if the B.C. government is successful in its litigation, there is more money or damages to draw from," Seely said.

The B.C. government's attempt to make tobacco companies financially accountable started under the New Democrats a decade ago and was continued by the Liberal government.

"All of the decisions have been positive since the legislation was pared down a few years ago," Seely said.

When the case gets to trial, the B.C. government will assert that "among other indiscretions, tobacco manufacturers marketed 'light' cigarettes as safer when they knew they were not; targeted children in their advertising and marketing; conspired to suppress research on the risks of smoking and to invalidate the public warning on the risks of smoking; and are responsible for health-care costs associated with smoking."

Fifteen senior lawyers have been representing the tobacco companies, which include R.J. Reynolds, Rothmans Inc., British American Tobacco Investments, and Philip Morris Incorporated.

R.J. Reynolds lawyer Jeffrey Kay said his client is disappointed with the ruling.

"We are considering our options," Kay said Friday.

Kenneth Affleck, who was on the legal team of Rothmans Inc., said it is too soon to know if any of the tobacco companies will decide to seek leave to appeal. And he said they may have different legal positions on the issue. "They may not all take the same view as to what is the appropriate thing to do.

"This is brand new stuff. We just got the answer back from the Court of Appeal, so we've got to think about it pretty carefully," Affleck said.

"Sometimes it is wise to apply for leave to appeal because you don't like the judgement you've just seen.

"But in some circumstances, you might decide that applying for leave to appeal just isn't going to get you anywhere ... We may decide that we've got an excellent defence in this case so let's just get on with it."

Some of the companies had argued that they were not present in B.C., meaning the B.C. court did not have jurisdiction.

But the Court of Appeal judges disagreed.

"Although particular defendants may not have been present in British Columbia, the activities alleged against the joint breach defendants are wrongs situated in British Columbia and the harm that resulted was situated in British Columbia," the ruling said. "This is enough to demonstrate a meaningful connection between the jurisdiction and the foreign defendants."

The hypocrisy of tobacco bans
Jun. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM
RICARDO ARTUNDUAGA
COMMUNITY EDITORIAL BOARD
Anti-tobacco laws are full of hypocrisy.
It is very easy to legislate political correctness, very easy to use power to restrict freedoms, but it is very difficult to think about serious solutions and be realistic about our society's problems.
If our politicians truly were interested in public health, as they would have us believe, they could start with laws that would drastically and immediately reduce the terrible consequences befalling the entire world due to global warming. But future generations cannot vote, so our politicians don't take them into account.
Or they could regulate the prescription drug market, ordering the wider use of generic drugs, or ease the entry of thousands of doctors and nurses ï¿1/2 who now drive taxis or sell insurance policies ï¿1/2 into the Canadian health-care system.
If our politicians really were as interested in our health as they claim to be, they also would, once and for all, pass "presumed-consent" legislation for organ donations. How many more patients have to die waiting for a transplant while our legislators ponder the issue?
How many murders have to be attributed to guns before a politician will propose banning them?
But they will do nothing about any of these things because they are not really interested in our health and our future. Politicians are interested only in the next election and, in this context, anti-tobacco laws sound an electorally useful note of sincerity and concern.
My grandfather smoked from the age of 13 until he was 87 and he died of an illness unrelated to his smoking habit. My grandmother used to say that she smoked at least half of my grandfather's cigarettes; at 98 years of age she is still alive. She still remembers my grandfather with a cigarette between his lips; it was part of his personality, she says.
In relating this personal anecdote, I am not saying that second-hand smoke does not increase the risk of cancer in non-smokers.
But thousands of non-smokers suffer from respiratory illnesses without having had any contact with smokers, and it has not occurred to anyone to ban the use of polluting agents in industries or in vehicles.
This is where legislators' hypocrisy lies, because the same people who propose draconian anti-tobacco measures usually are the same ones who refuse to accept any form of pollution reduction.
Some smokers die of lung cancer, but other people, smokers and non-smokers, die from many other forms of cancer that may be caused by certain foods or food preservatives, chemicals in household cleansers, radiation from television sets and cellphones or pollution. And in any case, all people eventually die of something because, despite our best efforts, immortality exists only in fiction.
The consumption of cigarettes has diminished rapidly thanks to education campaigns and a growing awareness of the risks.
An adult who decides to smoke does so in the knowledge of those health risks, as do consumers of liquor, drugs or food.
What is the cost of alcoholism, drug abuse or obesity to our society? Has any politician proposed ï¿1/2 to offer an absurd example ï¿1/2 to ban the sale of alcohol from Monday to Thursday? Or to ban the sale of junk food?
It's obvious that in a perfect world there would be no smokers, alcoholics or drug addicts, no cancer, disease or death. But this perfect world exists only in the imagination of fiction writers.
Aldous Huxley showed us that kind of utopia in his work Brave New World. Yet even there, free beings existed who refused to accept any simple mechanical definition of happiness ï¿1/2 that is, happiness born out of power and law.
It's fine that we try to make our shared existence more harmonious, but what was wrong with the way things were? What sense does it make to ban smoking on covered patios and in dedicated smoking rooms?
Don't be taken in by hypocrisy. If politicians really cared about our health, they would ban the production of polluting vehicles with poor gas mileage.
They could do so many things that would reflect a serious purpose, but banning tobacco ï¿1/2 even from places where only smokers concentrate ï¿1/2 is a smokescreen, smoke that's harmful to our health, worse than that emanating from smokers.
Read

By Anthony Oluwatoyin
Monday, October 17, 2005

You probably have it committed to memory by now, and without any effort on your part. I speak of the best piece of gross, crossover propaganda since that porn film classic with that actress who used to be on the Ivory Snow box ads.

Here it is: "Tobacco is the only product, available legally, which, if you use it exactly as the manufacturer intended, will kill you."

The claim has the status now of a New Age Universal Truth. Our Supreme Court has joined the fray, handing down, September 29, a condemning 9 - 0 decision that might pump billions of tobacco dollars into the B.C. treasury. The Court ruled that B.C. may sue cigarette companies for the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses.

The left-lib media that so boastfully bashes America at every turn, gloated at B.C.'s copy-cat initiative, modelled on lawsuits launched by various states in the U.S. against tobacco manufacturers. In the 1990s, tobacco companies agreed to pay a group of states almost $250 billion (US) over 25 years to defray smoking-related health costs.

The B.C. case is expected to be replicated across provinces. Again, the lefty media that was so cynical about national implications for public healthcare posed by a different Supreme Court ruling, earlier this summer, in favour of private insurance in Quebec, was all but urging other provinces to pile on against Big Tobacco in the B.C. ruling.

The tobacco industry that pays $9 billion in annual taxes may now have to cough up $4 billion in estimated smoking-related health costs across Canada. Not to mention 45,000 alleged tobacco deaths that will no doubt generate a whole separate class of legal action.

We got a preview, literally, within minutes of the ruling in the B.C. case. One class-action suit after another was filed in Quebec, seeking $17 billion here, $5 billion there, for "nicotine dependency", for "failure to inform" of tobacco danger....

But really, what good would the Supreme Court decision be if all smokers were magically to quit now? Where would tobacco taxes come from? And if fewer and fewer died from less and less smoking, the linkage with disease would be more and more difficult to make.

So let's match one schizophrenic slogan with another. How's this definition? Tobacco industry: the only, barely, but still legal industry, which, if it functions exactly as the government must now expect, will kill perhaps as many as 100,000 annually; incur some $90 billion in treatment costs, while also, of course, pumping trillions into government coffers.

The government must be just as death-invested as it alleges of the tobacco companies. So who will take up our class action against the government?

What's more, the tobacco ruling allows cost-recovery going back 50 years, in spite of tobacco "warnings" across that time, notices on cigarette packs about the "dangers" of smoking, smoking during pregnancy, dangers of second-hand smoke, and on and on.

B.C. Health Minister George Abbott hailed the unanimous verdict as a "landmark ruling in our attempt to hold the tobacco industry responsible for its detrimental products."

By-no-means a lefty, B.C. Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell proclaimed the tobacco ruling "an enormous victory." No kidding.

The threshold of proof is so low as to allow "aggregate action" in recovering costs. That would mean B.C. would not have to prove specific harm to each individual.

And with that dismissal of the last scrap of individual responsibility, our top court imposed the most belligerently one-sided decision short of denying the other side access to court in the first place.

So again, with the diabolical slogans and venal definitions. Government: an instrument of mass suicide by death-inducing means like tobacco, provided for that very intent.

Why stop there? Never mind the bewildering hypocrisy that shields alcohol, gambling and other vices from the fate that has befallen tobacco. Let's go deeper in the bio-social dynamic. Here's the biggest catch of them all. Definition. Women: the only natural force in the universe, which, if men respond to them exactly as God (their manufacturer) intended, will drive men to rape, plunder, even murder.

Why don't the loony-left stick that in their post-modernist pipes, and blow!

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended Universities in Canada and the U.S.
Read

October 3, 2005

Let's get something straight. The government does not want Canadians to stop smoking.

If they were serious, they could ban tobacco tomorrow, just as they ban dozens of other drugs, just as they banned alcohol during Prohibition.

Such a ban would be difficult to enforce, of course, as marijuana laws are, and as Prohibition was. But Canada's three cigarette companies would be shut down, and so would tobacco farmers, and cigarettes would be taken out of convenience stores across the country. Smuggled or home-grown cigarettes would still be available, but fewer people would smoke.

That's what the government would do if they really believed their own anti-smoking rhetoric. They don't believe it, because they are actually the senior partner in the tobacco industry.

Depending on the province, 60 to 75% of the retail price of a pack of cigarettes is tax. Tobacco farmers, manufacturers, wholesalers and convenience store retailers share about $3 from each pack, and the profit for "Big Tobacco" is about 50 cents a pack. Governments get about $7 a pack -- all profit for them, or 14 times as much as all three companies combined.

There is no industry in Canada more closely regulated than cigarette companies are. They are not allowed to advertise, or even sponsor public events; their product packaging has been expropriated by the government for shock-style messages; their product development and marketing decisions must be approved by government bureaucrats. The chief remaining function of the cigarette companies themselves is to be the party to shoulder the blame. Their job is to look evil and be called "Big Tobacco" while federal and provincial governments pocket 93% of the profits.

So what should we make of last week's Supreme Court decision to permit provinces to sue tobacco companies to recover health care costs? Not much.

It will pave the way for the actual money-grabbing suits to follow. Those suits will surely be successful, just as they were in the U.S. And, just like in the U.S., the cost of those lawsuits will be passed on to smokers through higher cigarette prices. The nine provinces that sued could avoid all the lawyers' bills and simply tack on another buck a pack in taxes. The coming lawsuits will simply continue the tradition of shifting the government's dirty work to the tobacco companies.

The model being followed here is the nearly $250-billion legal settlement 46 U.S. states came to with tobacco companies in 1998.

That sounds like a back-breaking sum, but it's spread out over 25 years, so it's just a small tax-hike. It allowed 46 preening attorneys-general to declare "victory" in the press against big, bad tobacco. But it actually was the consummation of the merger between Big Tobacco and Big Government. Those 46 U.S. states now depend on smokers to keep on smoking -- for at least 25 years -- or they won't get paid.

Two years ago, a $10-billion trial victory in Illinois by private citizens threatened to bankrupt Phillip Morris.

State attorneys-general from around the U.S. intervened in court -- on behalf of the cigarette company, desperately trying to stop Phillip Morris from going under. Didn't those private litigants understand the game? Take the golden eggs, but don't kill the goose!

Canada's governments have made the same calculation that every ruler has since King James wrote his puritanical Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, while filling his treasury with tobacco taxes: Tell people to stop smoking, but hope by God that they don't.

The Gazette Saturday, October 01, 2005

The peculiarity of the British Columbia law upheld this week by the Supreme Court of Canada is that it was designed to make it as easy as possible for the government to go after a single business, the tobacco industry. The Tobacco Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act was passed in 2000 for the express purpose of recouping the hundreds of millions of dollars that B.C. spends every year to treat smoking-related illnesses.

The law, in other words, shamelessly stacks the deck in favour of the province. It allows the government to launch an "aggregate action," meaning it can attempt to bill 14 domestic and foreign tobacco companies for costs the health system had to absorb as a whole.

Under this legislation, the province has only to prove patients treated in B.C. suffered from smoking-related diseases. It does not have to present individual smokers' cases to try to prove its contention of fault. This is a huge advantage, to the government, over the usual course of civil lawsuits, where individual harm must be found to flow from individual fault before damages can be assessed.

The Supreme Court decided it was not a problem that B.C. would not have to abide by the customary rules of civil procedure and evidence, or that damages could be assessed retroactively.

Tobacco is, admittedly, a special case. Used as intended, it almost inevitably leads to illness and death. If it were to come on the market for the first time today, governments everywhere would not hesitate to ban it outright.

But, unfortunately for governments and the public purse, tobacco is beyond the point at which any society or nation can ban it. It has been a legal product for centuries. How could any government enforce a ban? What would happen to the millions of addicted smokers?

Still, that leaves us with a huge problem: Smoking-related illnesses take more than 47,000 lives and cost $4 billion a year in medical care in Canada. Cigarettes will end up killing one in every two smokers, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.

In Canada, governments until now have taken the route of levying high taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. This can be seen, in a certain light, to be a sensible compromise. High cost has been shown to keep cigarette consumption down among youngsters, who tend to be the most vulnerable to forming an addiction to cigarettes.

But the truth of the matter is also that governments have played a hypocritical role: Cigarette taxes have helped swell government coffers. Governments not only benefit from the sale of cigarettes, they have refused to do the right thing medically and socially and try to ban tobacco. This makes them complicit.

B.C. has decided to let the courts do its dirty work for it. And the Supreme Court has ruled accordingly, and the result might well be to help bring an end to the scourge of tobacco-related illness. But what will be next? Products laden with fat and sugar? They, too, are harmful to health.

The principle of proving harm flows from a specific product or act should not have been jettisoned, even in this case.

The real story of the BC ruling clearing the way for suing Big Tobacco for Health Costs is:

To get it, 'They' had to dispense with the 3 foundations that make our Justice System even remotely democratic.

'They' dispensed with Rule of Law, Burden of Proof, and Innocent Until PROVEN Guilty.

It is no longer necessary to PROVE that Tobacco causes any Health Problems to find the accused, Big Tobacco, Guilty of being responsible for all alleged Health Problms.

The accusation alone is now enough to 'find' them Guilty.

Why did 'they' do this ? BeCause 'their' claims about Tobacco can NEVER be Proven, because their 'science' is Junk, and 'they' always knew it.

So 'they' finally did away with having to prove any of their false claims.

BUTT, this Ruling sets a very dangerous Precedent for us all.

It means that from now on, Guilt for anything never has to be proven ever again. Everybody is Guilty, and the whole Justice System now officially switches to Burden of Innocence, that is, if we are even allowed that much, with little if any chance allowed of proving one's innocence.

All it will take - is Accusation.

Does that not scare the CRAP out of all of you ?

It had better, and you had all better do something to stop it now.

Steve Hartwell
http://www.smokersrightscanada.org/