by CHRIS BARRY
Photos by JASON FELKER

Poor, misunderstood Imperial Tobacco. What is a struggling tobacco giant to do when the whole world has you pegged as a monster, when your own government refers to you and your ilk as merchants of death, as irresponsible, greedy, corporate miscreants with zero regard towards the health of your deathly loyal customers? When pesky class action lawsuits are crippling your brethren to the south, when soon you won’t even be able to advertise your fine products under the guise of arts sponsorship anymore, when the media - whom you can no longer influence with your big ol’ advertising budgets - feels overwhelmingly justified in condemning you as the insidious villains that you very well may be? Such a cross to bear. What do you do?

Well, you could start by launching a national media campaign to give the public the real facts about your industry and take a few moments to explain your side of the story. Let folks know you’re not really so bad, that you’re just a business like any other and deserve to be treated as such.

But wait, you’ll still need a hook. Maybe you could start by mentioning that only about 40,000 Canadians die of smoking-related illnesses each year, and really, if you stop to think about it, that’s not all so terrible. How many of these people deserved to die anyway? Nobody ever thinks about that. How many of these dead smokers used to beat their wives, or abused their children, or were responsible for television programming over at Global? Maybe by killing off some of this scum you were actually doing society a favour. Does Clifford Olson smoke? Svend Robinson?

Aw, but you know this hook ain’t going to work. Those sanctimonious bastards in the media will just twist your argument around and, as always, do their best to make you look like the devil. No, you’ve got to think of a new approach. But it’s not easy. Better go out and hire some of the brightest minds in the Canadian PR industry to think up a cool spin for you. Sure, these hacks are expensive, but, for the time being at least, you can still afford the best.

No free smokes

Which is, more or less, how it came to be that I wound up with an invitation to come experience a whirlwind tour of the Imperial Tobacco plant in St-Henri in December. As part of the company’s new resolve to be "pro-active" with the media, Imperial’s insightful public relations professionals decided it would be a good idea to open the doors of their factory to pretty well any journalist with a desire to scope out the inner workings of the joint for themselves. This was going to be a big landmark event, they promised, because it would be the first time in the company’s history that anybody from the public was going to be allowed to tour their facilities. And how exciting is that!?

Well, all right, not very exciting at all. But sad truth be told, I’ve nothing much better to do with my time, and hey, the invitation was promising two free meals over the course of the day, and surely, I reasoned, they would be trying to bribe some favourable press by handing out free samples of their very excellent products. How dull could a day being led around a factory be? Small penance for a couple cartons of butts and a full stomach, I figured.

Oh, but friends, I figured very, very wrong. Walking around a factory all day watching machines stuff tobacco into cigarette papers is plenty dull. Spectacularly dull, I would go so far as to argue. Not to mention having to do it in the constant company of various straight-assed Imperial reps barking the equivalent of, "You see, you see, we’re good corporate citizens" at you for a solid six hours. Such good corporate citizens, in fact, that we were all immediately informed upon arrival that nobody was going to be getting any free samples because the Allan Rocks of this world had made it illegal for them to do so. Great.

The wonder that is tobacco

After an 8:30 a.m. breakfast and a hearty welcome speech from Imperial CEO Bob Bexon, I and a handful of other anglo journalists were taken into a boardroom and given a 45-minute lesson about the wonder that is tobacco by some stuffy old suit who seemed to know everything one could ever hope to know about smoking - including, by the way and to his great credit, that tobacco use can be addictive and, as some still stubbornly claim, might even be hazardous to your health. I figured we were getting off easy with only a 45-minute lecture, because the old coot was plenty passionate about his subject and easily could have gone on for much longer about the advantages of Canadian tobacco over the Virginian variety, the mechanics of cigarette assembly and exciting new revelations concerning filter fabrication.

When they finally collected us to go snooping through the plant, my group got paired up with all the other clowns from the English media who’d bothered to show up. I guess most of the national press had already attended Imperial’s tours of their Guelph and Aylmer, Ontario, plants the day before, because there weren’t a whole lot of us, which was bad, as it made it close to impossible for me to escape my chaperone and find refuge up near the buffet and wine tables. And, I admit, not unlike Bart Simpson on his class field trip to the Springfield box factory, as the day progressed escape was increasingly on my mind. But the enthusiasm of these other journalists more than made up for our small number and my growing despondence.

These no-nonsense reporters were asking tough questions like, "Do you think if you added a little Turkish tobacco to one of your blends that this would make for a more enjoyable smoking experience?" with the utmost sincerity, like this actually meant anything to anybody. Of course, almost everybody else worked for publications like Tobacco Growers Quarterly or the Canadian Chemical News, not to mention the proud and lucky pundit assigned the all-important tobacco beat for the prestigious Aylmer Express, so I don’t know, maybe this was a relevant question for their readers. But me, I was looking for dirt, I was there to bring these parasites down, baby - or barring that, at least to come away with a few free smokes.

Remembering Peter Jackson

Yet the Imperial reps had a set answer for almost everything I asked. Even when we were passing the area where they produce their Peter Jackson brand and I jokingly quipped, "Oh yeah, Peter Jacksons, I forgot about those. When I was a little kid I used to steal those from my aunt, BEFORE SHE DIED OF EMPHYSEMA AT THE AGE OF 59!" they had a response, albeit not a very good one. "Yeah, we don’t sell a lot of those," the rep told me, I guess to alleviate any concerns I might have had that too many others will also die early deaths from choosing to smoke PJs.

Later, at the designated question period, the Imperial suits were making a big deal to some Radio-Canada television broad about how much they abhor even the simple thought of dépanneur owners selling tobacco products to minors. When I piped in and suggested that this was completely illogical from a business perspective, that they can say whatever they want but were full of shit to pretend they don’t benefit financially from the current loose enforcement of the relevant laws concerning minors and tobacco, and were, by extension, indirectly ensuring themselves a new generation of loyal customers, they responded by insinuating I was simply callous for not buying into their horseshit.

After a while of this nonsense, the suits started greeting most of my questions by first sighing, and then politely offering up the party line about whatever it was I was asking them about. Eventually I gave up trying to get anything interesting out of ’em. I’d been among their ranks for a solid six hours by the time we got to question period, and honestly, by this point all I could think about was getting the hell out of there. The whole experience was a little creepy to begin with, and after all those hours in confinement I was seriously starting to bug hard for a smoke.

Nothing to hide

Of course, it should come as no surprise that Imperial has got their lines for the press down pat - a lot of thought has gone into this campaign. The primary objective behind this event was to prove to the world that Imperial Tobacco has nothing to hide, that a simple romp through their plant would prove to the skeptical that, unlike American cigarette manufacturers, Imperial does not, has never and will never fuck with the ingredients of their smokes to make ’em more addictive. With all the nasty allegations flying around these days about the nefarious activities of their southern counterparts, Imperial is earnest about distancing themselves in the minds of the public from their Yankee soul brothers.

In fact, they are all too eager to point out that all of the tobacco used in their products is grown in Canada, that 99 per cent of those products are purchased in Canada, and in spite of all the aggravation imposed on them by those self-righteous do-gooders in the federal government, they remain one of the top 30 corporations in the country. And how important is their industry to the financial health of our nation? Well, various levels of government pulled in $5.454-billion in tobacco taxes last year, and yo, five-and-a-half-billion dollars will buy a country a lot of health care. So what’s your damage, anyway?

Essentially, Imperial is arguing that they be left alone to conduct their perfectly legal business without being hounded by government at every turn. They’re still a legal industry, after all, and depending on where you sit on the issue, the way they are handled by governments only too happy to tax the hell out of them and their customers could be construed as vaguely hypocritical. Fed up with their relentless demonization by anti-smoking groups, the media and Health Canada rabble-rousers, Imperial recognizes that as the tide of opinion continues to turn against them, they had better get cracking to polish their image or risk watching themselves get legislated out of business - which, none too subtly, certainly appears to be the objective of their adversaries.

Death to weaklings!

With respect to the threat of government someday attempting to prohibit tobacco manufacturing altogether, Imperial argues that the current six-million Canadians "who know the risks and continue to smoke because they want to" have rights too, and besides, if Imperial didn’t supply these people with 100 per cent made-in-Canada butts, these committed smokers would just purchase their cigarettes from American manufacturers via them shady native smugglers you’re always reading about. Suggest to Imperial that perhaps not all of those six-million Canadians currently smoking actually do so because they want to, but because they are addicted and physically need to, get ready to hear a lot of sighing followed by the insinuation that anybody can quit if they truly want to.

Which, by golly, is news to me. But it has got me thinking that I should probably try to conduct a séance to let my dead Peter Jackson-smoking aunt know that, although she tried to quit for most of her adult life, she obviously didn’t want to kick the habit hard enough. Either that or she was just flat-out weak, and, as any good Darwinist will tell you, deserved to suffer through a horrible disease and die at the ripe old age of 59.

But perhaps in saying this I’ve somehow missed the point of the whole public relations exercise - which was to demonstrate the nobility of cigarette production and prove to all that Imperial is cool and unquestionably on the up and up. Sure, they readily admit, smoking isn’t the healthiest thing a person can do, but tobacco is an organic substance people have been ingesting for years, and hey, ain’t nothing funny going down in this industry, kids, just producing and marketing a product that kills thousands of people every day. That’s all. No problems.

Of course, a small troupe of goofy journalists being chaperoned around a factory are hardly the experts capable of detecting any foul play going down behind the walls of Imperial. And even if there was anything suspect going down - and I highly doubt that there is, with respect to additional nicotine being added to their cigarettes, at least - it’s a pretty safe bet that said shady operations would be put on hiatus for the day of the big media tour. Duh.

Perks to die for

When I was a kid growing up in NDG, the big dream among my crowd of über-achievers was to someday land a gig at the Imperial plant, not just because Imperial has always paid their employees extremely well, but because legend had it that they threw in a couple cartons of DuMauriers with every paycheque. Thanks to those troublesome feds they’re not legally allowed to do this anymore, and these days employees have to pay close to $50 for a carton of cigarettes - apparently a source of contention for at least a few of Imperial’s 500 or so Montreal workers.

When I was overheard expressing my disappointment in having to endure this whole adventure without even scoring a few free cigarettes, one of the guys who worked at the plant discreetly came up to me and suggested I do what he does.

"Just steal them," he said. "I mean, it’s not like anything all that bad will happen to you for grabbing a couple of cartons." I suspect he meant this with respect to the potential wrath of his corporate masters should I get busted, but I’d like to believe his words apply in a more general sense. After all, what bad could possibly come from a few cartons of cigarettes in my lungs?

Oh, and for the record, I didn’t get caught - even if I only did manage to score a couple packs of "defective" DuMauriers from the reject pile, a potentially worrisome detail I only learned after said packs were safely tucked away in my coat. But as it turns out, it appears my concerns were ungrounded, each one of them sweet smokes got inhaled right down to the butt, and as far as I can tell, I’m still alive to tell the tale. :