From: Gangsters Out Blog
The smugglers’ commodity is tobacco, mostly ready-rolled cigarettes, boxed and branded but untaxed, uncontrolled, and being sold a
t barely one third of the legal price, particularly in Canada where taxes are much higher. The problem has been growing since it took off in 2008. The Canadian government claims to have seized to date 252 million contraband cigarettes and 4.3 million untaxed cigars, but believes that is just the tip of the illegal tobacco mountain.
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The Oka Crisis ended with a retreat by the authorities and advice to police forces to go softly on native relations. Fast forward three years to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and many of North America’s big tobacco companies relocated their manufacturing plants to Mexico’s cheap labour market. The result? Members of the Indigenous community acquired their equipment cheaply and went into the business themselves, setting up on the reservations, theoretically not subject to US or Canadian domestic law. The theory was that the cigarettes could only legally be bought by reservation-dwellers; the result was a contraband explosion.
