Government spending money to lobby itself
Campaign for plain-package cigarettes highlights problem with funnelling tax dollars
On the morning of Nov. 9, a handful of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students took to Parliament Hill to have their voices heard. These students were advocating for plain packaging of tobacco products, part of Bill S5, and are led by an organization called Freeze The Industry. They stood on the Hill with their signs and invited greater discussion about plain packaging and the tobacco industry.
At first glance, this protest looked like a bunch of passionate youth advocating for policy change in the name of public health. Unfortunately, after a little deeper review, it appears that this campaign is nothing but a stunt put on by the large and overreaching public health lobby. Freeze The Industry is a project of the Heart and Stroke Foundation. This is important because The Heart and Stroke Foundation actively receives public funds. In fact, in 2016, Heart and Stroke received $4,360,000 from Canadian taxpayers. In other words, the government is paying money to NGOs who turn around and lobby the government.
This raises the question: should the government be using taxpayer money to lobby itself through third parties? Probably not.
In addition to the Heart and Stroke Foundation funding initiatives like Freeze The Industry, there are other government funded agencies working on similar projects. What The Health? also actively participated in Freeze The Industry’s plain packaging campaign. The organization’s own co-ordinator publicly stated that What The Health works with regional public health offices to advocate issues important to public health, and to help public health’s policy goals come to fruition. Again, we have public money being funneled into third parties for the purpose of lobbying the same very government that the funds initially came from. Once you start digging into the depth of the public health lobby, you soon realize that the funneling of taxpayer funds is not only rampant, but openly encouraged. Beyond the ridiculousness of our government spending money to lobby itself, it’s important to look at what issues they are lobbying for. In this instance, these groups are advocating for the plain packaging of all tobacco products. Freeze The Industry explains that plain packaging tobacco makes these harmful products less attractive to consumers, and states that plain packaging does not increase criminal activity. When we look at the data, we find that their claims are not accurate.
We know that Australia — a country that implemented plain packaging five years ago — has actually had their smoking rates stagnate. This means that the rate in which people are quitting has approached zero. If this isn’t damning evidence against the effectiveness of such a policy, I don’t know what is. In terms of contraband and black markets, our own CBC has covered how black market sales have increased in Australia as a result of plain packaging. These metrics are critical in the fight to reduce traditional tobacco smoking. Most people agree: we want fewer individuals smoking harmful products, but we don’t need poor public policy such as plain packaging to do it. We must have evidence-based policy, not failed policy based on good intentions with terrible externalities. It is bad enough that the government is spending money to lobby itself, it is even worse that it is doing so while peddling misinformation. To make matters worse, these third parties are now actively pushing for policies that run against the aims of public health more generally. When groups like Freeze The Industry and What The Health? come out in favour of legislation like Bill S5, they are ultimately fighting against one of the most powerful tobacco harm reduction strategies we have: vaping.
If the goal is to reduce tobacco use, Bill S5’s vaping regulations stand in the way. The legislation places heavy restrictions on the vaping industry, which puts even more obstacles in front of individuals trying to quit. We know that vaping is 95 per cent less risky than traditional cigarette consumption, so why make vaping more difficult? Bill S5 goes so far as to prohibit vape companies from advertising that their product is an exponentially less harmful alternative to smoking. If our government spent less time trying to ban branding, and instead encouraged smokers to make the switch to vaping, we could see a significant drop in cancer rates. This is actually what the UK College of Physicians recommended in regards to vaping. The College of Physicians explicitly stated that tobacco smokers should be reassured, and encouraged, to make the switch, and that if the government were to do this there would be widespread public health benefits.
When we see campaigns like Freeze The Industry we need to ask some tough questions. Why is the government spending money to lobby itself? Why are they peddling misinformation about the impact of government policy? And most importantly, why are they launching campaigns that run counter to their public health goals that fly in the face of harm reduction?
If we really want to reduce smoking rates, we need to embrace harm reduction, and avoid ineffective and heavy-handed government policy that doesn’t work.
David Clement is the North American affairs manager for the Consumer Choice Center. The Consumer Choice Center accepts no public funds and is supported by private individuals and partners.