Why Are Children Working in American Tobacco Fields?

The air was heavy and humid on the morning the three Cuello sisters joined their mother in the tobacco fields. The girls were dressed in jeans and long-sleeve shirts, carried burritos wrapped in aluminum foil, and had no idea what they were getting themselves into. “It was our first real job,” says Neftali, the youngest. She was 12 at the time. The middle sister, Kimberly, was 13. Yesenia was 14.

Their mother wasn’t happy for the company. After growing up in Mexico, she hadn’t crossed the border so that her kids could become farmworkers. But the girls knew their mom was struggling. She had left her husband and was supporting the family on the minimum wage. If her girls worked in the tobacco fields, it would quadruple the family’s summer earnings. “My mom tends to everybody,” Neftali says. This was a chance to repay that debt.

Saskatchewan Budget 2013: Alcohol, Tobacco Taxes Raised To Eke Out Balanced Budget

REGINA - Drinkers and smokers will pay more and businesses will have to wait longer for a tax cut so that Saskatchewan's budget can stay in the black.

"I'm sure the two-pack-a-day smokers will not be pleased," Finance Minister Ken Krawetz said Wednesday before he tabled the 2013-14 financial plan.

Contraband tobacco bill sets mandatory minimum sentences

The Harper government has introduced legislation to set mandatory minimum prison sentences for trafficking contraband tobacco.

A new 50-officer RCMP anti-contraband force is also being created to target illegal tobacco sales.

The new bill, introduced Tuesday afternoon in the Senate, creates a new Criminal Code offence for trafficking in contraband tobacco. The maximum penalty for a first offence would be six months imprisonment for a summary conviction and five years in jail for an indictable offence.

Native cigarettes are now a problem for Western provinces, too

Chief Frank Brown of the Canupawakpa Dakota Nation doesn’t smoke, but he swears by the Mohawk-manufactured cigarettes on sale at the Dakota Chundee Smoke Shack near Pipestone, Man. “We did our research and the provincial [name brand] cigarettes have a lot of chemicals in them,” he says. “We think our smokes don’t have the cancer that the province’s cigarettes do.”

Whatever the supposed health claims put forth by Brown, the Manitoba government isn’t listening. In mid-November, officials seized 90,000 contraband cigarettes, which were not authorized for sale in the province. The next day, Dakota Chundee, which doesn’t sit on reserve land, was open again, crowded with non-Aboriginal buyers.

The raid, and subsequent reopening of the smoke shack, is the latest in a growing frontier war between First Nations and western provincial governments. Unlike in Ontario and Quebec, where the booming Indian tobacco business has also been linked to gangs, not to mention billions in lost taxes, Indian cigarette sales haven’t been an issue in the West. That’s changing as western bands turn to smokes to not only fill their coffers, but to assert land claims, too.