The Liberal Con And The Actual Facts

As someone has already pointed out if the liberals want to increase revenue ask the feds to allow them to collect taxes on cigarettes avoided by indian bands......

Colby Cosh: A (superficial) study in smoking
Posted: March 06, 2009, 7:23 AM by NP Editor

The Ontario government announced on Wednesday that it will introduce legislation allowing it to recover past and ongoing health care costs borne by Ontario taxpayers due to tobacco-related illness. Without reading another sentence, you all know that this effort will be accompanied by a corporal’s guard of the most wretched inventions and exaggerations. The news release announcing the initiative featured a quote from Health Minister David Caplan: “At over $1.6-billion annually, Ontario’s tobacco-related health care costs affect all Ontarians.” Did a little voice in your head just chirp that increasingly popular stock phrase from Wikipedia: citation needed?
The backgrounder attached to the presser repeats the $1.6-billion claim, and does provide a source: a study called The Costs of Substance Abuse in Canada 2002. 2002? All right, well ignore the fact that this number hasn’t been properly spruced up in a while. But one cracks open the study itself, only to immediately find that it contains some surprising language:
“The study we are describing here is a cost-of-illness study presenting aggregate costs, which are calculated by looking at all the external costs of substance abuse and comparing them with a hypothetical situation where no substance abuse exists. Another kind of cost estimate is the avoidable cost, which makes an important distinction between all costs generated by substance abuse and the portion of those costs that could be avoided by establishing appropriate policies and programs. The current study provides an essential foundation for other types of cost estimates such as avoidable costs and therefore makes a valuable contribution to policy making and health care planning in Canada. However, it does not measure the impact of substance abuse on government expenditures and revenues.”

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