Litigation

Holding the tobacco industry accountable for its illegal activities, whether through criminal charges or civil suits, serves a number of public health objectives. These objectives include acting as a deterrent to prevent industry misconduct in the future, and, affording victims, including governments, the opportunity to recover financial losses caused by misconduct.

To download the complete document, click here. Based heavily on documents from Canadian tobacco companies, this report by one of the world’s foremost experts on tobacco advertising, explains in detail the tactics used to sell a deadly, addictive product while denying consumers basic information.

One of the most spectacular developments of the last few years has been an unprecedented wave of lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Though suits by individual smokers (or their bereaved families) have been a fact of life for tobacco companies for several decades, the 1990s saw the emergence of a new kind of lawsuit,...

Please note: This document pre-dates trial-court proceedings in the Tobacco Act case. On Dec. 13th, 2002, Québec Superior Court rejected all elements of the tobacco industry challenge. See J.T.I. MacDonald v. Attorney General of Canada. The stakes are high Tobacco industry products cause more deaths than accidents, suicide, alcohol and AIDS combined. Both the World Health Organization and Health...

As widely reported in the media today, a U.S. district court judge has ruled in the tobacco industry’s favour and thrown out a Canadian government lawsuit with respect to an alleged conspiracy to smuggle cigarettes into Canada in the 1990s. But contrary to what some commentators have suggested, the June 30th ruling by Judge Thomas J. McAvoy...

RECOVERING TOBACCO-CAUSED PUBLIC EXPENDITURES FROM THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY: Options for Provincial Governments Eric LeGresley, Legal Counsel Smoking and Health Action Foundation March, 1998 RATIONALE FOR COST RECOVERY Cost recovery is about fairness. Government of Canada studies calculate tobacco-caused losses for Canadian society at $15 billion per annum,(1) and combined federal and provincial tobacco taxes at only about $3.5 billion. Quite...

GOVERNMENT ACTION ON TOBACCO’S COSTS David Sweanor, Senior Legal Counsel, Smoking and Health Action Foundation, July 1997. There is considerable interest among Canadian governments in looking at ways to force tobacco companies to cover some of the costs associated with their products. British Columbia has already publicly announced its initial steps in this process and other...