TORONTO — In the span of a few short years, Jean-Luc Duval lost two of the most important people in his life to lung cancer. His wife Monique was diagnosed on her birthday and died on July 3, 2005 – the couple’s 40th wedding anniversary. Months of debilitating chemotherapy treatments couldn’t stop the disease, which had quietly spread and taken root in her digestive system.
Duval then reconnected with a former co-worker, and as they grew closer, they decided to live together as companions in his home in Repentigny, a suburb of Montreal. One night, she started coughing violently and he took her to the emergency room. Doctors found she had cancer in both lungs, and she died within five months.
Both women had been smokers, though they had quit years earlier. Duval, too, had smoked for several decades, but managed to kick the habit years before his wife. Duval joined a lengthy legal battle against three major tobacco companies, and in a historic ruling in 2019, Quebec’s highest court confirmed he and roughly 100,000 other Quebecers were entitled to billions in compensation for the harm they or their loved ones had experienced.
But five years later, none of them have seen even a fraction of that money – and recent court filings suggest hundreds have died in the interim. "Not only have we not received a cent, but absolutely nothing has changed," Duval, 80, wrote in French in a recent open letter to the Quebec government. "Cigarettes from these same manufacturers are sol.
