Native Cigarettes Canada is a family-owned business that sells a wide variety of indigenous smokes. They use locally-sourced burley and flue cured tobacco to create their high quality cigarettes which offer an authentic taste and experience. These smokes also lack the additional chemicals found in most commercial brands, making them a healthier alternative for smokers. Buying these smokes supports indigenous communities and helps to ensure their economic success.

The government’s goal is to discourage smoking by maintaining high tobacco taxes. But this policy is creating a new, unintended problem: it’s encouraging people to buy illegally low-taxed cigarettes from a contraband industry that involves Aboriginal Canadians to a significant degree and also feeds other criminal enterprises like drug trafficking. Responding to this threat requires increased law enforcement and challenging Aboriginal authority, neither of which is a financially or politically palatable option for governments.

In the end, there may be no easy way out of this impasse. But there are some promising signs of progress.

The Legal Landscape: Native Cigarettes and Canadian Regulations

The biggest smuggling issue involves the Akwesasne reserve near Cornwall, Ontario. That area straddles the US and two Canadian provinces, each with different police forces, as well as their own Indian Bands. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has documented that the tobacco manufactured on reserves and intended for sale to status Indians is being resold without federal excise tax to non-Aboriginal customers, either in roadside smoke shacks or through organized crime networks off reserve. This arrangement increases the availability of cheap cigarettes to all consumers, including youth who are the greatest threat to a sustainable future for the Indigenous tobacco industry.