Money from Big Tobacco to fight cancer in Manitoba

Manitoba is getting hundreds of millions of dollars from a decade-old lawsuit against Big Tobacco in the next year and will use it to fight cancer — starting with a new headquarters for CancerCare Manitoba.

Premier Wab Kinew surprised more than 1,000 attendees at an NDP convention gala Saturday night with the news.

“The first payments from these lawsuits are expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars — perhaps half a billion dollars,” Kinew said during his keynote speech at RBC Winnipeg Convention Centre.

“I want the best cancer treatment in the world to be available for Manitoba,” said the premier, who talked about his father’s death from pancreatic cancer, and how every Manitoban is impacted in some way by the disease.

“I want to make a solemn commitment to you that every single dollar that comes to Manitoba as part of that settlement will be spent fighting cancer,” the premier said. The funding will go toward redeveloping CancerCare, as well as prevention, treatment, drugs, clinical trials and research, he said.

Manitoba announced in 2012 it was joining other provinces in suing major tobacco companies to recover the costs of providing health-care services for tobacco-related illnesses.

The tobacco companies are facing $500 billion or more in lawsuits from 10 provincial governments that want to recover the costs of treating tobacco-related diseases. They’re the largest lawsuits in Canadian history, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.

The provinces sued Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc, and JTI-MacDonald Corp, as well as their foreign parents. The lawsuits pursued claims “for unparalleled wrongful industry conduct that for decades has addicted youth, has caused vast devastation through disease and death, and has contributed considerably to the crisis in the health care system,” the Canadian Cancer Society says.

Kinew said his government was briefed on the settlement after taking office and is waiting for details, but indications are so far that Manitoba’s share is in the billions, with an “initial payment” of up to $500 million later this year or in early 2025.

The settlement money is helping the NDP fulfil a campaign promise that if elected it would build a new CancerCare building to expand cancer services at the Health Sciences Centre.

Since it opened in 2003, the CancerCare building has been full. A new building had been planned a decade ago to expand cancer screening, early detection, and treatment as well as capacity for clinical trials.

That plan was nixed in 2017 by then-premier Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives in an attempt to balance the budget.

CancerCare currently spends operating funding to rent space from other buildings on the HSC campus to deliver care to patients, while the lot where the new headquarters was supposed to be built sits empty to this day, the NDP said during the campaign.

Kinew told reporters Saturday night that they’ve not made any formal plans for the new building, but it will be at HSC and that he wanted to state up front that the Big Tobacco settlement money is earmarked for it.

Tobacco use remains a leading cause of cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and death in Canada, killing 46,000 Canadians annually, the Canadian Cancer Society says. It points to recent data showing 12 per cent of Canadians aged 12 and over are current smokers — a long way from the federal target of less than five per cent tobacco use by 2035.

Groups such as Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada have said Canadian jurisdictions should introduce measures that would force tobacco companies to wind down their businesses, such as New Zealand, which passed a law to ban — for life — the sale of tobacco products to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2009.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca