What will it take for Canadians to rebel against the mismanagement of their hard-earned tax dollars?
Photo Credit: DoobyBrain.com

If you can’t tell right off the bat, I’m blatantly plagiarizing the not-yet-late and great Bob Dylan. But whereas Bob was talking about peace and love, I’m talking about pure old cash. That’s right. The evil force that makes our world go round (second most powerful force after gravity). You see, I’m getting exasperated folks. Unemployment rates are sky-rocketing while many individuals and businesses have been forced into bankruptcy because their money-making niche has flat-out disappeared. Governments are cutting back on social programs, dipping their hands into public coffers while denying the public of much needed community programs. Everyone’s running in the red. What is going on, we wonder. It’s a recession, we’re told. You and I both know that if I were to join the crusade of investigative journalism, all I would have to report are useless and senseless facts and figures which even the most uneducated person in Canada with a wit of common sense would disparagingly shake their head at. Not to mention a bunch of “did not return my call” and “refused to comment”. In the face of so much adversity, how can we possibly get at the truth?
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Listening to the retailers association, the RCMP and Imperial Tobacco crying the blues over black-market tobacco is like listening to the cheating husband, his mistress and the wife lamenting over getting too much sex, not enough sex, and not wanting sex.

The first is crying wolf as they benefit from the problem, the second is crying about not getting enough when they aren’t doing anything to advance their cause, and the third is crying foul when they are possibly the source of the problem.

In every province except Quebec, there is an electronic program available to the government to not only monitor tobacco purchases on reserves, but to police off-reserve individuals and make sure they don’t get access to exemptions on tobacco that they are not legally entitled to.

You see, black-market tobacco is not the only problem.  There is also the issue of tax exempt tobacco, legally obtained for the purpose of resale on reserve, and then being sold illegally to off-reserve purchasers. This adds another $1.5 billion in fraud to the $2 billion already mentioned.
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