A commentary by a Pender Island resident.
In a recent column, Trevor Hancock said “the tobacco industry is a truly lethal and evil industry that needs to be stamped out.”
Absolutely, no argument from me.
But let’s come close to home as I raise a contradiction.
According to a report by GPI Atlantic, smoking costs British Columbians an estimated $525 million annually in medical care costs, and an estimated $904 million in productivity losses due to the premature deaths and excess disability of smokers.
The report also says that the health-care costs for treatment of tobacco-related illness are estimated to be $2.3 billion each year.
Additionally, smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in British Columbia, causing up to 6,000 deaths in the province each year, killing more people than all other drugs, motor vehicle collisions, murder, suicide, and HIV/AIDS combined.
And as a user of medical services over the past nine years (six surgeries, one round of treatment for cancer) I can report that the first question asked before each diagnosis was “do you smoke?” Answer: no.
So, I have absolute faith in the statistics. The total annual bill for tobacco-related health-care costs paid by the provincial government is more than $3.7 billion.
And here’s the contradiction: across the street from Victoria city hall is the headquarters for British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, aka BCI.
It was set up by way of the 1999 Public Sector Pension Plans Act to provide investment services to British Columbia’s public sector pensions plans, including teachers, health-care workers, education support workers, college instructors, municipal firefighters, to name just a few of the nearly 30 organizations who are clients of BCI.
According to the investment inventory, it has $124.25 million invested in the tobacco industry. Certainly, there is the direct harm to the customer caused by tobacco but there are documented cases of terrible working conditions for the people who plant, tend, and harvest the tobacco, thousands of them being women and children.
There is but one shareholder in BCI, the provincial government. The minister of finance holds the single share. The CEO of BCI has the status of a deputy minister.
The minister of health spends billions dealing with disease that is directly attributable to tobacco, and just down the hall the minister of finance does nothing to insist on divestment in tobacco stocks.
Teachers and tens of thousands of other public employees contribute monthly to the pension plan and an unethical industry scurries around the various regulations to market a known carcinogen to unsuspecting teenagers.
I’ve tried over the past 20 years to have BCI divest, and at one point was told “no” because the returns on tobacco are so high.
Such madness and politicians wonder why we’re so cynical.
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