MONTREAL—Cécilia Letourneau has the low, smoky voice of a lounge singer, and it’s not for no reason.
Letourneau has been smoking for 45 years. She’s made “countless” attempts at quitting, all to no avail.
“Each time I tried to quit and it didn’t work,” the 65-year-old Rimouski, Que., resident suggested. “You suffer a loss, which rattles your self-esteem.”
Letourneau is now one of the lead plaintiffs in a massive class-action civil suit against Canada’s tobacco titans that began in Quebec Superior Court on Monday.
The $27 billion suit is unprecedented in Canada and the biggest in this country’s history. JTI-Macdonald Corp., Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., and Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc. are the defendants.
After nearly 14 years, many delays and interim court judgments, the historic case is finally before Justice Brian Riordan.
There are actually two suits being heard, representing the roughly 2 million Quebecers who are hooked on tobacco or have suffered related diseases, such as cancer or emphysema.
The smokers say the industry misled them, withheld critical information and minimized the risks associated with tobacco. It has also targeted children, they claim.
The industry is mounting a vigorous defence. It’s not denying the risks of smoking, as in the past. Rather, it now says it’s impossible not to know the risks and that an individual’s responsibility must be taken into account.
Failing that, the industry also says the federal government should be held to account, since it has played a central role in the companies’ regulation, from packaging to distribution.
Letourneau, 65, said she started smoking about the same time she started to work. “To smoke was in fashion,” she declared. “I chose to smoke to show I was ‘in.’”
She spoke of the glamorous cigarette advertising at the time. “It was a free choice, but really I was programmed by an industry that made me captive to the product.”
She is simply unable to quit, she says.
Unlike Letourneau, 67-year-old Jean-Yves Blais, another plaintiff, has suffered lung cancer and emphysema. Like her, however, he says he can’t quit.But tobacco companies argue that no one today can say they are unaware of the dangers of smoking.
“It’s been a number of years, 40 to 50 years, that the dangers related to smoking have been known,” said Suzanne Côté, lawyer for Imperial Tobacco. “And the people who decide to start smoking, or continue smoking, must assume the consequences of a choice they made.
Before the judge, Côté said that despite the ubiquitous and graphic warnings that now adorn cigarette packages, “tens of thousands start smoking, even in 2012.”
Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst with the Canadian Cancer Society, said there were no package warnings before 1972 and even then they were weak. The industry has also opposed stronger warnings, he added.
“It was the people who began smoking in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s as kids, who later had emphysema. The health effects were not known,” Cunningham said.
He also said the majority of people start smoking before they’re 18, when they can’t be expected to have the same level of awareness. In addition, he said the industry has used misleading advertising to undermine the warnings.
The suit will force the industry to testify under oath about these allegations, he noted, “so their internal secret documents will become public for the first time ever.”
In the U.S., the tobacco industry has been forced to pay states for health-care costs. Some provinces in Canada are pursuing the same path.
It could take two years for the Quebec civil case to run its course, and even then appeals are inevitable.
