I wrote this post last night & then decided not to post it, because it felt depressing & the last thing we want to do here is depress anyone. This forum should be an uplifting, encouraging place for friendship & community.
Having slept on it...despite my mixed feelings, I've decided to share it.
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Bob Rae is the MP in our riding. His office
(his office staff, not him personally) said specifically to me, more than once
(from early Dec 2010 through to Feb 2011)...
...that the
alleged reason Mr. Rae hadn't even personally
acknowledged or responded
at all to the topic of electronic cigarettes yet, despite my writing to him about it more than once a week for nearly 4 months straight
(now over 5 months)...was that he was
"waiting for a response from Health Canada" to several questions he & his office had sent to HC about e-cigs, and could not responsibly answer any questions about e-cigs until he had heard from HC.
Well, about the beginning of February I got tired of waiting, so I wrote to the Minister of Health & asked her. I wanted to know if HC really had received questions about electronic cigarettes from Rae's office, or if I was being lied to. A week passed; I wrote again.
Now ordinarily I wouldn't trust the Harper government to tell the truth about much of anything - they lie
so often, brazenly & without shame...and with truly shocking regularity. All governments lie sometimes, but it's no exaggeration to say that the Harper gov't has taken dishonesty to a unique & awful level. And we all know how I
(and everyone else here) feels about Health Canada,
especially now.
On February 22nd, the Minister of Health's office replied. They sent us a scanned letter, replete with ministerial letterhead & government insignia. Here it is
(I've made my full name & email illegible, but otherwise the letter is unaltered):
I'm inclined to believe the letter. Specifically because some NDP assistants had
"placed enquiries" re: electronic cigarettes with HC in December 2010...and very quickly received a response. A crappy, stupid response to be sure - just a regurgitation of the infamous March 2009 'warning' - but a response nonetheless.
(Just want to be clear...despite the above, as with the Liberals...no one in the NDP has been willing to publicly address the issue of e-cigs in any capacity, then or now. Just recently, on March 17, 2011...an assistant to NDP Health Critic Megan Leslie stated in an email:
"At this time, e-cigarettes are not a priority."
Though in December 2010, Layton's assistants did privately send us a one-page PDF filled with the most ridiculous anti-vaping crap you ever did hear...chock-full of grammatical & spelling errors too).
---
Rae's assistant said
"oh - no, no, no" when I attempted to confront Rae with this letter, and repeated the same story.
"We definitely asked them questions." "Then why does HC say you didn't? They responded to the NDP in December with a blurb from their March 2009 'warning' - which is exactly what they would have done now, if you had actually asked them about e-cigs." "Well...we're saying that we did ask them."
I then requested proof that they had submitted these questions to HC. Rae's assistant sent me four .eml files
(Outlook Express documents) totalling 7.53 kb - none of which contained any legible text, in Outlook Express or in any other program. The only contents in
three were a tiny bit of garbled hashcode. And one of them was 0 kb in size, for goodness sakes. I requested screencaps of the sent questions...or that the emails themselves be forwarded to us. The assistant claimed they didn't know how to create a screencap
(?!), and declined to forward the emails.
Three days later, Rae's assistant sent a message that was very obviously meant to be taken as a conclusion to our
"dialogue" (the dialogue in which Rae had never spoken, written or typed even one word). It included some of
the most ludicrous anti-vaping arguments we had ever seen to date
(and we've seen them all). It said that Mr. Rae was too busy...that he didn't have time to study or raise the issue. The email concluded with:
"Mr. Rae is respectfully declining to take a position on this topic."
---
You're welcome to draw your own conclusions from this true story. I strongly encourage all of us to raise awareness of electronic cigarettes & vaping in as many people as you can...and making your MP aware of them certainly falls into that category. But I've done that - oh, how I've done that - in our riding. The results speak for themselves. No one would be happier than us if you managed to get a more meaningful dialogue going with your MP. But yeah.
Fortunately, achieving meaningful dialogue with MP's isn't necessary to achieve our goals: it is encouraging indeed to know that the laws of Canada are
already entirely on
our side when it comes to our battle with HC. Most of us never really though about it, since our access wasn't being particularly threatened, not really.
But now that it is being threatened...as much as we do not want the stress of engaging HC legally...it's necessary now. Rest assured fellow vapers, this is not the end. It is the beginning of our march to victory.
Keep on vaping!! 
