Billion With a 'B'

Today's discussion in class makes me want to follow up on the initial post I made regarding the lawsuit by Ontario against tobacco companies. The class brought up some good points.
It became apparent that a small number of US states have successfully run lawsuits against the tobacco companies, which shines a ray of hope to Ontario. Although the lawsuit will certainly take years of legal acrobatics before any final word comes out on it, the fact that it has been done with success before leads to the hope that Ontario might also be successful.
One might notice the number figure Ontario has named. $50 billion with a 'B' is a lot of money. Much more than the lawsuits in the US ran for. Why the difference? Ontario claims that this is the value of all the health care resources spent on smoking related illness over the last 50 years. The Canadian public health system means that the money used to fund the aid towards smoking related illness was provided by the tax payers as a whole, instead of the mostly private related costs as would be seen in the US.
Is the government being hypocritical? These do receive large amounts of money from taxation on tobacco products, which could arguably set off the costs tobacco related illness cause to the health care system. The taxation is also supposed to discourage people from smoking because of the high cost of buying the product. Yet, the large bracket of people we see with cigarettes poking out of the corner of their mouths are low income people, who are more likely to buy a carton of cigarettes instead of paying for their kids soccer class. The best way to discourage people from smoking is to make the product unavailable. Of course this opens up the whole other problem of illegal cigarettes.
If the lawsuit does turn out to be a success, it will be very interesting to see what sort of number figure Ontario walks away with. Anything that takes tobacco out of use is great in my eyes, but I’m not sure this is the most appropriate means of doing so.