From: Winnipeg Free Press
By: Tom Oleson
It is 171 miles, or 275.14 kilometres, if you prefer, from Winnipeg to Pipestone, a small community in southwestern Manitoba. That’s a fair drive, even by Prairie standards, but the Dakota First Nations community of Canupawakpa wants to make it worth your while.
At least, more specifically, it wants to make it worth your while if you are a smoker, or, to make it even more precise, if you are a smoker of tobacco. Tobacco is heavily taxed in Canada, and pretty well anything else you can smoke that’s worth smoking is taxed even more heavily in terms of the time you’ll probably spend in jail if you get caught with it.
At a rate of 22.5 cents per cigarette, which is just the Manitoba provincial tax on tobacco, that’s cheap at twice the price when you compare it to the time you’ll spend behind bars if you get caught with a little bit of marijuana after the federal government’s omnibus crime bill gets run through Parliament and makes life safer for all of us.
The Dakota Canupawakpa First Nation, however, is about to do something about this — well, at least the tobacco part. It, along with the Mohawks who run an international tobacco-smuggling ring out of their reserves in Ontario and Quebec, has never signed a treaty with the federal government, which, according to Chief Frank Brown, makes Canupawakpa a non-treaty First Nation and puts them outside Canadian law. They can govern themselves without federal or provincial interference, they say, although that does not discourage them from accepting up to 49 per cent of their income from the federal government and the Canadian taxpayers with whom they have no treaty.
But they are entrepreneurs in their own way. Because they have no treaty, they believe — and why should anyone doubt it — they can get the same deal with cigarettes that the Mohawks get: “Their territory connects with my territory,” says Chief Brown, although it does not, of course, connect geographically; one assumes he is speaking metaphorically.
There is nothing metaphorical, however, about the money involved. A carton of cigarettes in Manitoba costs about $102, and that price includes $45 of provincial sales tax. The Dakota First Nation plans to sell them at one third of that price, and use its profits to fund its proposed new casino. If they could figure cheap whisky into the equation they would have the trifecta of pleasurable vices.
Don’t hammer any of those nails, so pale and so slim, into your coffin just yet, however. Have just one more cigarette if you must, but don’t figure on saving any money by buying it in Pipestone. By my calculations, which are often incorrect, by the way, it would cost the average motorist about $25 in gas to get to Pipestone and about the same amount to get back to Winnipeg. That’s about $50, in case you are simple-minded, which is not much more than you would save on the cigarettes. The government, which taxes gasoline almost as heavily as it taxes tobacco, makes money either way. How is it that governments always win and voters always lose?
