Tobacco laws should be enforced without fear or favour
It’s incontrovertible: Tobacco smoke, if used as directed over a prolonged period, kills people.
The National Coalition Against Contraband Tobacco tells us one reason why smoking is still so prevalent. In a recently study the group found that nearly 30% of the cigarettes being used near city high schools were contraband — that is, illegal and ultra-cheap. Contraband smokes cost about eight times less than the legal kind that you’d buy over the counter in a variety store.
Yet nobody seems to quite want to step out and name this problem for what it is: Cowardice, on the part of politicians, bureaucrats, aboriginal leaders and a provincial police force that will do anything, just about, to avoid enforcing the Criminal Code of Canada on native reserves.
The Internet is rife with advertisements for cheap, “Indian Smokes.” So are provincial highways, here and there. The people who sell these cigarettes are flouting the law. So are those who buy them. But it’s easier for government to look the other way.
Three months ago, provincial police in Haldimand briefly tried to shut down an illegal smoke shack along Highway 6.
The smoke shack had been set up on private property, not reserve property, against the landowner’s wishes. There was a complaint and police responded. They were met by 20 aboriginal protesters. The OPP backed off.
According to the smoke shack’s operator, Six Nations people never surrendered the land upon which Highway 6 was built, back in the 19th Century.
Therefore he was within his rights to use it as a venue for his smoke shack, he figured. The law and the current property owner’s rights be damned.
Most fair-minded Canadians deplore the continuing inequity that afflicts aboriginal people in this country.
What more of us need to say, more loudly (‘us’ in this context meaning all Canadians, whatever our race) is that the segregationist, racist reserve system is at the heart of the inequity.
The heart of apartheid in South Africa was two systems of law, with distinctions based on race. We have that in Canada.
Each time police deal with aboriginal lawbreakers differently than they would if the suspects were white, black, Asian or East European, they uphold Canadian apartheid.
Contraband smokes are a small piece of a much bigger problem, in other words. In their avoidance of the bigger problem the authorities are reduced to wringing their hands about the smaller one.
They should not.
Of course police and political leaders should avoid stoking violence. Peaceful means should always be exhausted, compromises found. But at the end of the day, the law must be enforced.
Surely there are ways of applying pressure to aboriginal leaders, perhaps financial, to persuade them to root out the illegality in their midst?
And perhaps there are means of law enforcement that do not involve the threat or possibility of lethal force? Ten OPP officers may have been outnumbered in Haldimand. Fifty big men, heavily armoured and carrying only batons and shields, might not have been.
The law exists for a reason. It should enforced, without fear or favour. Aboriginal people also have a right to peace, order and good government.
By Michael DenTandt, Owensoundsuntimes
