Kinew lifts ‘veil of secrecy’ from Big Tobacco talks: advocate

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This article was published 14/05/2024 (520 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While the Tories blasted Premier Wab Kinew for talking publicly about the pending Big Tobacco settlement — and claimed he had put Manitoba’s share at risk by potentially violating a gag order — public health advocates have applauded him for it.

“The whole process has been under this veil of secrecy and that’s hugely problematic because there’s so much at stake,” said Flory Doucas, co-director of the Quebec Coalition for Tobacco Control, who has followed the litigation from the start.

“No province has ever consulted the public on what should be sought — what types of outcomes we should be looking for, what really is in the public’s interest,” said Doucas.

In 2012, Manitoba joined other provinces in a lawsuit against major tobacco companies — Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc, and JTI-MacDonald Corp, as well as their foreign parent companies — to recover the costs of providing health care for tobacco-related illnesses.

Three years later, a Quebec Superior Court judge awarded $15 billion to two groups representing Quebec smokers, which argued the companies didn’t warn customers about the danger of smoking.

In 2019, the tobacco companies were granted creditor protection and began the process of working toward a mediated settlement with the provinces. Since then, it’s been “business as usual” for the defendants who’ve been allowed to delay the proceedings, with near silence from the provinces, said Doucas, who is in Montreal.

“I find that premier Kinew’s comments were refreshing in the sense that for the first time, we got a sense that there’s a premier who actually has this on his radar and has some idea of what’s going on.”

At an NDP fundraiser May 4, Kinew told more than 1,000 attendees that “the first payments from these lawsuits are expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars — perhaps half a billion dollars.”

He said Manitoba would start to receive the money in the next year, and billions could be paid.

He promised that “every single dollar that comes to Manitoba as part of that settlement will be spent fighting cancer,” including the redevelopment and expansion of CancerCare Manitoba at Health Sciences Centre. Plans for a new building had been in the works for a decade but were shelved in 2017 by the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Pallister.

Interim PC Leader Wayne Ewasko accused Kinew of “grandstanding” for donors and playing a “political game” by violating court-ordered confidentiality and putting a “larger settlement at risk” for Manitoba.

“As a former minister of the Crown myself, we know that many things come across your desk” that are confidential, the former education minister said last week. “Until the I’s are dotted, the T’s are crossed and ink is dried, you don’t speak about it,” he told reporters.

When asked when Manitoba might expect a settlement, Eric Gagnon, Imperial Tobacco Canada’s vice-president of corporate and regulatory affairs, said he couldn’t comment.

“The negotiations are being conducted via a court-ordered confidential mediation and as such, public comment is a violation of the court order,” Gagnon said in a statement. “We and all parties are precluded from commenting. When and if a settlement is reached, it will be publicly disclosed in court filings.”

Public health advocates are troubled by Kinew’s expectation that payments will be made in installments in the years to come, Doucas said.

For Manitoba to receive billions of dollars as part of a mediated settlement, there needs to be a thriving, profit-generating industry, she said.

Right now, there’s close to $12 billion sitting in trust while a pan-Canadian mediated settlement drags on, Doucas said.

“While that looks like a huge amount of money, that’s not even enough to cover the Quebec class-action claimants, let alone the provinces,” she said.

“Based on that context, any money that’s meaningful that provinces would get with respect to claims would come from future sales,” Doucas said. “It makes provinces rely on the continued financial viability of these very companies that cause the harm in the first place, so you’re perpetuating harms,” she said. “That’s very good for industry and it’s very bad for the public interest and public health.”

The negotiations with Big Tobacco are a “one-time, historic opportunity” to better control the tobacco industry and to reduce tobacco use, said Canadian Cancer Society senior policy analyst Rob Cunningham, who is a lawyer.

“It must not be business as usual for the tobacco companies once the settlement negotiations are complete,” he said Tuesday.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca