Why does Ottawa pay groups to lobby … Ottawa?
Last Friday, anti-vaping activists took to Parliament Hill and called for the resignation of Minister of Addiction Ya’ara Saks. They said they’ve been waiting 14 months for the minister to “strengthen controls” on vaping and she has not delivered. Their main grievance is that vaping products are flavoured, and they repeated their call for all vape flavours to be banned.
This would be a huge step backward in harm reduction. According to the anti-vapers, vape products should only be tobacco-flavoured. On its face this is ridiculous. Why make a product that doesn’t contain tobacco taste like tobacco? And from the standpoint of smokers trying to quit, which many vapers are, why would the government want to limit vapers’ access to only one flavour — which tastes like the product they are trying to quit altogether?
Even stranger than these organizations’ logic, however, is the fact that they’re heavily funded by the very government whose minister they would like to see resign.
Physicians for a Smoke Free Canada, for example, is almost entirely funded by Ottawa and provincial governments. Last year, 85 per cent of its funding came directly from government. In 2020 and 2021, 97 per cent did. There is nothing necessarily wrong with organizations getting government funding, but when the money is used to aggressively lobby government for policy change, ethical questions need to be asked. Why is the government, in other words taxpayers, paying people to lobby itself? And why are certain policy viewpoints getting public support and not others?
Circular self-lobbying not only wastes taxpayer money, it also subverts democracy and erodes the concept of charity by killing charities’ independence. And it is fraudulent: it skews the public debate and political processes by masquerading circular self-lobbying as genuine civil society activism. A group of concerned doctors trying to altruistically convince Canadians to stop smoking is in reality an organization that in 2022 paid one full-time and one part-time employee a total of $104,382 in taxpayer money to lobby the government.
Government-funded NGOs and non-profits need government money because their issues don’t have widespread public support. If they did, they’d be able to fund-raise off that support. But in 2023 Physicians for a Smoke Free Canada, for instance, could only raise eight per cent of its total budget from receipted donations (with another seven per cent from “other sources,” leaving 85 per cent from government.)
Vaping isn’t risk-free. But it is much less risky than smoking — Public Health England says 95 per cent less risky. And clinical trials have shown it is a more successful quitting tool than the nicotine replacement therapies that have been on the market for decades. Research from Queen Mary University in London shows that vaping is about twice as effective as gums or patches in quitting smoking.
And flavours are a main reason vaping is a successful tool for quitting. Morethan two-thirds of vapers use vaping flavours other than tobacco-flavoured, and for good reason. They increase the likelihood of quitting smoking entirely. According to researchers at the Yale School of Public Health, vapes that aren’t tobacco-flavoured more than double the likelihood of quitting smoking.
Around 40,000 Canadians die each year from tobacco-related illnesses. Our smoking rate, though it has fallen sharply over the decades, is still about 12 per cent. You’d think an organization pushing for a “smoke-free Canada” would want to encourage more adults to access products that are exactly that, smoke-free.
Government spending money to lobby itself is perverse. The Institute For Economic Affairs in the U.K. calls the organizations that do it “sock puppets.” Should we, as taxpayers and adults, be actively funding individuals and organizations who want to police the choices we make? Absolutely not. This nefarious practice of circular lobbying needs to be ended, if not by this government then by the next.
Originally published here
