Tough Isn't It?

American tobacco growers are crying foul over a new government initiative in Canada to further protect the health of Canadians. It isn't as though there's any great mystery that nicotine in tobacco products is lethal to the health and future well-being of individuals who become addicted to smoking. No thanks to the tobacco industry which conspired long after they were made aware through their own research of the horribly deleterious health effects on smokers. As well as non-smokers incessantly assailed by second-hand smoke.

And it's a forgone conclusion that smoking affects human beings through the onset of cancers, heart problems, lung, neurological and stroke effects. Yet although stringent warnings have been forced on tobacco advertisers as well as on the packaging of tobacco products, cigarette producers have found other ways to entice people into using their products. Apart from advertising 'milder' products, they've also taken to flavour enhancements. What's far worse, some of those flavour enhancements are directed toward children.

Nothing like giving tobacco a fruity sweet flavour, or one reminiscent of candy-flavours to enlist a whole new cadre of smokers into the blissfully unaware suicide brigade that sacrifices a generation while that making whopping profits for growers and manufacturers. And American lawmakers are extremely protective of their constituents. Farmers, and tobacco farmers no less than any other form powerful lobbies on Capital Hill.

And here is Canada, not seeking a trade advantage of any kind, but attempting to protect the children of the nation from the stealthy advance in popularity of candy-flavoured tobacco products, targeted directly at young people. Foul! A new American advertising campaign attempts to colour the issue as a violation of the two countries' international trade agreement. Through discrimination against American cigarette imports.

Well, folks, this isn't roof shingles, or other types of forestry imports contending with the home market - that the U.S. Congress so adeptly steps in to countervail, as they are able to do, since no international trade agreements trump American interests - for trade advantage, through presumed Canadian government economic support or 'dumping'. This is represents a deliberate health-preservation step a responsible government has undertaken to protect its young from health disaster.

Kentucky burley-tobacco growers claim they're being swept, hurly-burly into the dragnet of flavour-enhanced tobacco, through their practise of using a flavour enhancer in the manufacturing process to cover the harsh flavour of burley. Health Canada counters with the fact that American-style cigarettes use flavourings including "sugars and sweeteners to enhance their taste", in their production methods.

And as such these tobaccos are included in the outlaw for sale of such cigarettes under Bill C-32. And, according to the spokesperson for Canada's International Trade Minister Stockwell Day, "Canada's trade obligations were taken into account", at the time that Bill-C32 was written. But, groans the president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-Operative Association, "It will eliminate an entire class of products from legally being sold in Canada."

Precisely. Live with it. Canadian youth have the opportunity to live longer, more healthfully, without it.