OTTAWA — The Province of Ontario filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking 50 billion Canadian dollars from several tobacco companies to recover smoking-related health costs since 1955.
“We believe that taxpayers should be compensated for the costs that they have paid,” Chris Bentley, the province’s attorney general, told reporters in Toronto.
Ontario follows British Columbia and New Brunswick in attempts to recover health care costs from tobacco companies. All three provinces passed legislation enabling their legal actions, an approach that was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2005.
The defendants in the case include the Altria Group of Richmond, Va., and some of its Philip Morris subsidiaries, British American Tobacco of London and its Canadian unit Imperial Tobacco as well as R. J. Reynolds and JTI-Macdonald, a Japan Tobacco unit that is in bankruptcy proceedings.
Eric Gagnon, a spokesman for Imperial Tobacco, called the government “hypocritical” for filing a lawsuit. www.Quitsmoking21days.com
“What’s happening is double dipping,” Mr. Gagnon said from the company’s headquarters in Montreal. “You’re taking a billion dollars of taxation out of the industry every year, then you turn around and sue the industry.”
Jack Marshall, a spokesman for Altria and Philip Morris USA, declined to comment. R. J. Reynolds did not respond to requests for comment, and no spokesperson could be reached at JTI-Macdonald.
Like plaintiffs in some lawsuits against tobacco companies in the United States and elsewhere, Ontario is arguing that the tobacco makers have known for decades that their products are addictive and dangerous to health but have done little or nothing to mitigate their effects and have been late to warn consumers.
In a Canadian twist, the government also charges that JTI-Macdonald, when it was owned by R. J. Reynolds, was involved in a scheme to evade Canada’s high level of cigarette taxation by shipping cigarettes to an Indian reserve that straddles the border with the United States.
Those cigarettes, the government says, were immediately smuggled back into Canada. The company and some of its former executives await a criminal trial.
JTI-Macdonald’s bankruptcy filing followed a court order granting Quebec 1.36 billion Canadian dollars in back taxes related to the scheme.
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