Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd. pleaded guilty to charges involving smuggling of cigarettes in the early 1990s.

Earlier this week, two of Canada’s largest tobacco firms were handed a total $1.15 billion in criminal and civil penalties after pleading guilty to charges involving smuggling of cigarettes in the early 1990s. That’s not a whole lot different from the tax evasion that took down gangster chief Al Capone in the 1930s.
Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd. and Rothmans Benson & Hedges pleaded guilty to “aiding persons to sell and be in possession of tobacco manufactured in Canada that was not packed and was not stamped in conformity with the Excise Act,” the RCMP said.
The scheme involved the shipment of contraband tobacco in Canada to locations in the U.S. and near the Canada-U.S. border between 1989 and 1994. It was delivered to black-market distributors who brought it back into Canada for illegal sales.
That’s one way to get around the high taxes applied to the product – as long as you don’t get caught. If you do, however, it becomes a lot harder for the public to think of the corporation as legitimate.
Also this week, the federal government announced $300 million to help tobacco farmers out of operations that once literally had a captive market and made them a lot of money. The tobacco belt in southwestern Ontario is reportedly producing a little more than a quarter the volume it did just three years ago, due to plummeting demand.
The problem is there is no stipulation as to what the money goes toward – it’s simply there to help them out of some hard years.
It’s no fault of the farmers, who simply grew a one-time lucrative product. But considering this is some of the richest farmland in Canada, would it not be good to tie the money to switching to crops for which demand is growing? Otherwise, there’s the risk of this land slipping further out of production.