Three Cartons Per Week!?

Ah, provincial budget season. A magical time when the local media works itself into a frenzy, pouring over copies of their precious budget document.

Who won? Who got screwed? What does every local organization have to say? Don’t worry fair reader; everything you wanted to know and way, way more will be addressed.

Allow me to pick out one item from the budget that is perhaps, if not the most important story, the most entertaining. Part of a long line of sin-tax hikes laid out in this budget that will allow this government to round out its income is a restriction on the number of tax-free cigarettes that can be purchased on reserve lands.

Until now, treaty-card holders could purchase up to three cartons, (that’s 600 cigarettes,) per week without paying those ridiculously high tobacco taxes. This has been reduced to one carton per week.

Naturally, the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN) is up in arms. Vice Chief Morley Watson said the decision will cost First Nations businesses millions in lost revenues.
“This is Indian Agent mentality,” he said in a FSIN news release. “The old Indian Agent would tell us how much grain, wood, fence posts and other goods we could produce and provide for our families.”

At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive, who the hell smokes three cartons of cigarettes a week?

Let’s do the math here. 600 cigarettes every week, (or 24 packs,) rounds out to about 86 cigarettes a day. That’s three and a half cigarettes an hour, assuming you never slept. Allowing for a little more than six hours of sleep a night, that number is closer to five cigarettes an hour, or a cigarette every 12 minutes on average.

Is cutting that back to one cigarette every 36 minutes really that tyrannous? This seems a little too reasonable to be labelled as “Indian Agent mentality”. Especially since these numbers only apply to tax-free cigarettes. On taxed cigarettes, the amount treaty card-holders can buy is still infinite.

The FSIN makes other, more valid claims about the government’s “serious infringement on Treaty Rights without the benefit of meaningful consultation” in this case. It’s true that the Province has extended its authority beyond its jurisdiction, since treaty lands are under the authority of the federal government.

But really, three cartons? Even a two-pack-a-day smoker would still have ten packs left over by the end of the week. I guess that’s where the affect on First Nations business comes into play. These extra packs can be sold to non-treaty card-holders for a profit. Is that really the spirit behind the tax-free cigarette allotment?

There are plenty of things that First Nations people have to be angry with the provincial government about. Cutting back on cheap smokes is not one of them.