I awoke this morning to learn from my radio that today is the 141st anniversary of the founding of Canada … happy Canada Day, everyone!

Apparently in a recent country-wide poll to establish the one hundred items most evocative of this great nation, the top four (in order) were the maple leaf, ice hockey, Vimy Ridge and the beaver. [The beaver? As a Brit, the first wildlife I think of when it comes to Canada is the moose … or do I mean the caribou – or indeed are they possibly the same animal? I’m confused … Wikipedia tells me that the moose is known as an elk in Europe and that a caribou is a reindeer.] Though it is mildly reassuring to discover that Her Majesty The Queen makes the list as Number 87, I note that this is sixty places below the iconic songbird (think a windswept Leonardo Caprio & Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic) we all know and love as ‘the Queen of Canada’, Celine Dion. You can tell that the world order is changing because there’s no mention of the world’s greatest rock & roll band …

Yesterday I was horrified to read of the full effects of the ban on smoking in enclosed public places, introduced just twelve months ago in Britain. This week the UK National Smoking Cessation Conference in Birmingham will be told that in the past year Britons have smoked two billion fewer cigarettes; 400,000 people have been moved to quit smoking; and that, over the next ten years, already 40,000 former smokers will have been saved from early deaths.

This is little short of a national catastrophe. At this rate the nation’s financial, pensions and health systems will soon grind to a halt – to make the world a better place for the rest of us, the last thing we need is smokers giving up cigarettes and living longer. I’ve contested the last three General Elections on a British Apathetic Party manifesto in which the first of our four policies is to mount a £20 billion publicity drive to persuade people that it is their patriotic duty to smoke forty cigarettes per day. This will of course not only contribute vast additional tax funds to the exchequer but reduce the burden of smokers to the taxpayer … not so much in the short-term, of course, but in the simple fact they will tend to die earlier. At the moment tobacco use causes only about 92,000 deaths per annum and we need this to increase to a minimum of 250,000 within five years. Obviously persuasion can only go so far – I am writing to our beleaguered Prime Minister, who has said he would welcome comments & suggestions from the public, recommending the reintroduction of compulsory free pasturised milk & packets of cigarettes for all schoolchildren over the age of three (combined in the latter case of course with an initiative to warn of the dangers of handling fire, i.e. save when lighting tobacco).