Lowering taxes on cigarettes the easy way out

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Last week, Ottawa lowered taxes on tobacco in a move to curb cigarette smuggling across Indian reserves. By altering the excise and export tax scheme, the federal government hopes to stop the flow of contraband by making cigarette trafficking unprofitable.

Ottawa also placed additional police patrols at key locations along the international border to catch the traders in the act. While that may strike some as a positive, well-conceived plan to solve the difficult task of trafficking and capturing the contraband smokes and those who move them, it misses the whole point entirely.

The problem is not the movement of contraband across the international border. It's the movement of contraband through one key location, the Akwesasne Reserve. If Ottawa really wants to stop the bulk of the flow of illegal cigarettes, they should station the police at the point where the law is broken 70 per cent of the time - on the reserve.

Manipulating tax laws to make it less profitable to smuggle smokes merely bows to the Mohawk insistence that this is a sovereignty issue. It is not.

Raiding traffickers on the Akwesasne reserve near Cornwall, or on the Kahnawake and Kanesatake Reserves near Montreal, would not generate an Oka-type stand-off. That crisis, which erupted in 1990 over the threat of the seizure of Indian land, was about Native sovereignty. But the trafficking of cigarettes, or cocaine, or alcohol or firearms, all of which have moved through Akwesasne at one time or another, is not about Natives sovereignty. It's about making easy money.

If the RCMP rushed onto the reserve to raid the homes and storehouses of cigarette traffickers, it's unlikely that the women, children and Elders in the communities would get out and block the approaching police lines as they did at Oka. Very few people at Akwesasne benefit from the trafficking industry because the profits that traffickers make stay in their own pockets.

In fact, the majority of people at Akwesasne live in fear of speaking out against the trade. Threats of assaults and property damage are a daily event for some. Others can't even live on the reserve for fear of their lives. The only people who would take up arms against a police incursion would be the ones that stand to lose, the ones that hoard the profits and keep reserve members in line through fear - the smugglers.

Chretien should have ordered the RCMP onto the reserve to halt the smuggling

if he believes those territories are the chief sites of contraband movement. Instead, he doubled the number of anti-smuggling agents along the international border on the St. Lawrence River at enormous expense. He bought the line of the trafficking Mohawk "sovereigntists" who use Akwesasne's geographic anomaly to their own advantage. Ordering that "no go zone" does little more than put the smugglers on alert and the police in a position where they cannot do their jobs.

Ovide Mercredi is partially right in saying Ottawa's "one-law-for-everyone" solution is short-sighted. In this case, it does not address the problem that actually generated smuggling in the first place - poverty on the reserves. But there is a strong case to be made for putting non-Aboriginal anti-smuggling forces on the reserve to enforce Canadian law.

As one Mohawk Elder said, a sovereign nation respects the laws of other nations. If the Mohawk people are the sovereigntists they claim to be, they should understand that the time has come to respect the rights of the many, both on and off the reserve, and stop the trafficking at the source.