OTTAWA — National health groups gathered on Parliament Hill Tuesday to express concern over "drastic cuts" to programs to reduce tobacco-related death and disease among Canadians.

Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of disease and death in Canada, killing 37,000 Canadians and costing $4.4 billion in health-care costs each year. Canada's Federal Tobacco Control Strategy was put in place in 2001 in hopes to lower these numbers.

Although Health Canada promotes the strategy as "the most ambitious effort Canada has ever undertaken to fight the tobacco epidemic," the department has decided it is time for it to undergo a makeover, or, in other words, a funding cut of $15 million.

Organizations that spoke during the Parliament Hill news conference say this cut represents 35 per cent of the strategy's current budget.

They said the budget cut will result in a scaling back of regulatory, enforcement and research plans at Health Canada as well as the elimination of the $16-million per year Grants and Contributions program, which supports tobacco control initiatives.

"The 35-per-cent budget cut simply cannot be justified," said Rob Cunningham, spokesman for the Canadian Cancer Society. "The strategy has been working and these reductions will impede progress to further reduce smoking."

Among those speaking at the news conference was Dr. Andrew Pipe of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and a leading expert on smoking cessation, who said the budget cut left him feeling "a mixture of disappointment and dismay, bordering on disgust."

"It is staggering to me, that in a time where we recognize that the leading cause of preventive disease, disability and death in Canada is tobacco addiction, that our government is receding from its obligation to ensure that we create a community where tobacco use recedes almost completely," Pipe said.

Health Canada said smoking is at an all-time low in Canada, with smoking rates dropping to a historic low of 17 per cent.

"Our government is proud of the work we have done, and is now refocusing our anti-smoking grants and contributions program towards populations with higher smoking rates. In particular, aboriginal populations within Canada have rates as high as 50 per cent," Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq said in a statement.

Aglukkaq said: "The current tobacco program is a decade old. It has helped contribute to success, but now is the time to make changes that focus on those populations that are smoking far more than the national average."

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— With files from Sarah Schmidt