Ontario - Smoke Free next week
Ontario's new anti-smoking law takes affect NEXT WEEK. I have two things to say about it...
#1 - WOO HOO! By far, my FAVORITE move by Dalton & Co. since they came to power. This is one thing they did right by me. It's a good move in regards to the health of Ontarians, as well as financially, in that we're helping to reduce future health expenses.
#2 - BUT, even though they did something right, I think they got one aspect of it wrong. I've been hearing a lot on the news about cigar shops/clubs, and how they requested an exemption, as it's the foundation of their business. The request was denied. The government has said they won't make any exceptions. And I think this was a bad move which puts the legislation at serious risk in the future.
Why do I think it was a dumb move not to grant an exemption? Because we're going to have to spend millions in some upcoming legal challenges to the new legislation. If the Ontario government had found a way to specify these clubs in some form of an exemption clause, it would have prevented a costly legal case. And if the new law is challenged in this way, and is found to be unconstitutional, it may result in the law being further weakened. And I actually want this law to stick. We'll see what happens.
In the meantime, I give you my thanks Mr. McGuinty, for making the air around Ontario a little more breathable.
#1 - WOO HOO! By far, my FAVORITE move by Dalton & Co. since they came to power. This is one thing they did right by me. It's a good move in regards to the health of Ontarians, as well as financially, in that we're helping to reduce future health expenses.
#2 - BUT, even though they did something right, I think they got one aspect of it wrong. I've been hearing a lot on the news about cigar shops/clubs, and how they requested an exemption, as it's the foundation of their business. The request was denied. The government has said they won't make any exceptions. And I think this was a bad move which puts the legislation at serious risk in the future.
Why do I think it was a dumb move not to grant an exemption? Because we're going to have to spend millions in some upcoming legal challenges to the new legislation. If the Ontario government had found a way to specify these clubs in some form of an exemption clause, it would have prevented a costly legal case. And if the new law is challenged in this way, and is found to be unconstitutional, it may result in the law being further weakened. And I actually want this law to stick. We'll see what happens.
In the meantime, I give you my thanks Mr. McGuinty, for making the air around Ontario a little more breathable.
posted by Christian Conservative @ 10:00 p.m.
12 Comments:
At Sat May 27, 11:25:00 p.m. EDT,
Anonymous said…
With every other yahoo demanding that their Rights be protected , I'm glad to see the non-smoking majority of Canadians are gaining ground in the Courts to phase-out the toxic fumes in almost every public place.
While the anti-purfume and anti-peanut crowd were appeased in record time, I have lived with severe migrains from cigarette smoke because of the burning paper and chemical waste discharged and airborn for the rest of us.
The onus should be on the pro-smoking industry to PROVE it's healthy for you , forget the idiots that claim there is no evidence it harms people.
We used to burn leaves in the fall and Toronto's mayor Miller is against burning garbage to solve the landfill issue.
So why do smokers feel that if you dry and cure plant leaves and add chemicals ,then wrap them in white paper that's bleached with dioxins to get that colour out, that THAT'S Ok and isn't a health problem.
All the Governemnt needs to do is impose a 10 year plan with a 1/10th reduction per year of the addictive chemicals in cigarettes ,this will bring somkers off slowly and new smokers can quit easier until the industry dies out from a low consumer base.
The 1/10th reduction will have a base/year and not be 1/10th of the remaining content that's addictive, Coke-aCola had to replace the Cocain in their drink once the FDA was set up and banned the drug in consumer products.
At Sun May 28, 11:41:00 a.m. EDT,
Anonymous said…
When they take away your car, close down your favourite restaurant, and decide what foods and beverages you can buy and consume, all for your own good, remember it started with this garbage.
BTW, it takes 40 or more years of direct smoking to kill you, how long do you think it would take for indirect smoking to kill you? (And why aren't all the nonsmokers of the post-WW2 era all dead by now then? My dad was a direct smoker until the late '60s and he's still alive now in his eighties.)
I'm a nonsmoker, too, and I supported the mild form of this sort of thing when it started 35 years ago as a politeness issue, but this is now about bureaucracy getting off, and richer, and multi-multi-million dollar charities justifying their existence and expenses.
If you want to read some facts and contrary views about this, I suggest going to the junkscience.com web site.
At Sun May 28, 01:10:00 p.m. EDT,
Blake Kennedy said…
"Ah, the slippery slope argument. The favourite of paranoids everywhere."
Gimme a P!
"Take a walk in a hospital cancer ward sometime and explain that to patients, doctors, nurses, etc.."
Gimme a W!
"You mean, the cancer charities? Yeah, I feel really badly about them having an impact."
Gimme an N!
Actually, you can't, you've given them all already to andycanuck in the form of serious PWNAGE! Nicely done.
In point of fact, I'm inclined to agree with Andrew about the poor decision in not including exemptions for cigar shops and clubs. Yes, I am an occasional cigar smoker, myself. I thought the point of the legislation was to protect public health, not be overly restrictive on people who choose to gather at a place where legal activity is being conducted in the conscious knowledge that it will be going on.
At Sun May 28, 04:20:00 p.m. EDT,
Joanne (True Blue) said…
I agree with C.C. that this is by far the best thing McGuinty has done. It actually makes sense.
Except for a couple of things. Why ban cigarette smoke if cigarettes are still legal, as pesticides are, but everyone is jumping on the bandwagon to ban their use too. They are both legal products.
Second point: Are swingers' clubs exempted? If not, I imagine that won't go over well either. Of course, they can always use weed.
At Sun May 28, 04:56:00 p.m. EDT,
Anonymous said…
The one problem I have with your post is the idea that the government will save money. The financial argument is not a good one. First off, the government rakes in tobacco taxes. Second, smokers cost the health system LESS, not more. No matter how well you take care of yourself, your body will break down. Smokers tend to die before this happens. They also die before costing us in pensions and so on. I'm not saying that this is the be all and end all, but the common argument that smokers are a drain on the public treasury is just false.
At Sun May 28, 05:18:00 p.m. EDT,
Anonymous said…
Secondhand smoke:
http://tinyurl.com/a5sl3
http://tinyurl.com/jzfbn
http://tinyurl.com/efmq9
Air pollution and lung cancer:
http://tinyurl.com/g4d6f
Something on the anti-smoking industry:
http://tinyurl.com/3469e
Secondhand smoke item on heart disease:
http://tinyurl.com/gzwkw
Cancer scares, in general:
http://tinyurl.com/gbmu7
There are internal links in several of the above stories, too, that are worth reviewing.
And I'll be happy do to a point-by-point refutation of Dirk's comments if anyone likes, but what does the acronym PWNAGE stand for, Blake? I hope that you didn't just diss me.
;^)
At Sun May 28, 07:39:00 p.m. EDT,
Anonymous said…
Okay. And excuse my talking about you in the third person, it isn't meant as an insult.
Ah, the slippery slope argument. The favourite of paranoids everywhere.
Thanks for the ad hominem, there, Dirk, but you’re saying that there hasn’t been a slippery slope on this issue? It started out in the late ’70s as a courtesy issue, when nonsmokers began outnumbering smokers, to stop smoking in enclosed areas like elevators, trains, theatres etc. and wanting nonsmoking sections in restaurants. It expanded to other sites, like offices and even open-air areas. This turned into mandating larger areas to be set aside for nonsmokers (and extended to bars) culminating in, as in T.O. up until recently, requirements for separate, minimally-sized, well-ventilated smoking rooms. During all of this time, there was nothing stopping any businessman from opening a nonsmoking restaurant or bar other than their own reading of their own economic best interests. (Obviously, most thought that they wouldn’t be as profitable as smoking-allowed ones.) Businesses then spent alot of money on meeting these requirements, and having to decide whether they were going to be an adults-only bar or an open-to-all-ages restaurant, and now all of that has been lost with the imposition of evermore draconian laws, all meant to let the government save us from ourselves. There is now talk, admittedly in wackier jurisdictions like California IIRC, but ongoing nonetheless, about banning smoking in private cars and private homes if there are children present.
Very recently Montreal’s municipal health department head was complaining about the number of cars owned by Montrealers and how it was adversely affecting their health and that the government should do something about it. Scare campaigns are being waged against soft drinks as shown in a recent issue of Time and the attacks on PM Harper for his beer (soda?) belly. There are discussions about starting Junk Food sin taxes. (That, like booze taxes, don’t stop anyone from drinking or stop alcoholism, and the revenue goes into general funds and not into alcoholism treatments etc., but are there to encourage you to do the right thing, you know, just like tobacco taxes. I’d also question why someone skinny should pay a fat tax.)
I don’t know whether Dirk’s a liberal or not (I assume he’s not a libertarian), but establishing a precedent of the government being able to diminish property rights in the name of society’s good, especially on nebulous health grounds, is something that no conservative or genuine libertarian should condone. As conservatives and libertarians believe, big government will always justify its existence and its expansion (whether well-intentioned, out of economic self-interest, or, and I admit it is probably the least likely, out of nefarious intentions—of some), but if you’re a conservative, Dirk, supporting social engineering for “good” reasons shouldn’t be treated as mere slippery-slope thinking, especially if it’s just because you don’t like the smell of tobacco. (Neither do I.)
You mean, the cancer charities? Yeah, I feel really badly about them having an impact.
Regarding the charities, they’ve changed over the last 35 years, too, with professional fundraisers and expensive consultants out of fancy offices that has affected many fine ideas, like MADD too. (And it’s not the same as giving money to Princess Margaret Hospital directly.) They all just look more-and-more like the phoney environmental “charities” of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to my eyes that conservatives and libertarians already view as being full of it. The next time CityTV has a phone-in on smoking laws etc., ask the cancer spokesman what his job description is and how much he gets paid. I doubt he’ll be an unpaid or pro bono spokesman. And it’s a fight we’re already winning as smoking rates have been dropping for the past 40 years.
Take a walk in a hospital cancer ward sometime and explain that to patients, doctors, nurses, etc.
I neither said nor implied that firsthand smoking doesn’t cause cancer, especially lung and throat cancers, but it doesn’t take only 10 or 15 years of direct smoking (and that really dangerous secondhand smoke that they also inhale) to speed you to your death—it does take 40 or so years to kill you, if ever it does. My contention is that secondhand smoke killing people, thus justifying these laws, is unfounded; with the commonsense observation that if direct smokers die at an average age of 60, then how much longer would it take for the fractionally smaller amounts of carcinogens in secondhand smoke to kill a nonsmoker? And if nonsmoker Ms Crowe, God rest her soul, died of lung cancer without being a smoker, it probably had more to do with her genes than her workplace. (Are her smoking coworkers or the smoking patrons of the bars and restaurants she worked in all dead of lung cancer, too? Or many other nonsmokers she worked with? I doubt it very much. What about my dad’s example? And my nonsmoking mom isn’t dead of lung cancer, or any of her four children, even the one who was a smoker into his twenties, despite the secondhand smoking in our house, and in society in general, from 1945 to 1968.)
And it’s not just with lung cancer either. A CBC personality (Wendy Messely? SP?) has breast cancer and is a nonsmoker and she’s trying to blame chemicals (and big pharma too IIRC) for this. People can’t accept that it’s their time or the role of chance in cancer stories like these, and they look for something to blame. (Isn’t that one of the stages of dying?) Ironically enough, along with the birth control pill causing cancer meme, is that similar links have been found between abortion and breast cancer that, for some strange reason, the MSM doesn’t report on. (Gee, I wonder why not?) So the carcinogen fear-mongers don’t tell their audience everything either. BTW, how come we’re the longest-lived people on the face of the earth in all history if everything about the modern world is killing us? (BTW, the Japanese, whose diets and life spans are promoted to us Westerners as an example of healthy living, use 400% more pesticides than the U.S. does.)
I understand the reasons for Canadian Christian Conservative’s views, above, (hey, I’m a nonsmoker too and don’t want to go back to the ’70s either), but in my view it isn’t based on a sound argument and it might have unintended consequences later on.
So I invite CC and your readers to spend some time at junkscience and get the views that the MSM self-censors itself over; and make up your own minds by reading the comparative pieces there over months (most of the page’s links are to MSM reports, so you’ll get everyone’s views) instead of believing Toronto Star editorials and advocacy pieces masquerading as being straight news reporting.
And to inject a little levity, and on a higher plane than fart jokes, how about the U.S. Latino comedian who says (and I paraphrase), ‘I smoke directly because I don’t want to get any of that secondhand sh1t; it’ll kill you!’
At Mon May 29, 12:11:00 a.m. EDT,
Anonymous said…
And my father is 82 and has prostate cancer (one sister, my aunt, died quite young of cancer) but one smoking brother of his is still alive and his other siblings all lived well into old age. My condolences upon your father's death, especially at so young an age. I'm sorry that I can't offer you any concrete advice on how to see his death but my best wishes on your dealing with your loss.
At Mon May 29, 12:06:00 p.m. EDT,
Blake Kennedy said…
"what does the acronym PWNAGE stand for, Blake? I hope that you didn't just diss me."
It's not an acronym; pwned was originally a mistype of "owned" that some gamer hit somewhere along the line and it just caught on. It's what happens when a person gets owned really badly, like what happened above.
I'm going to respond to a few things when I get some time later on today, hopefully. I've got a rather full plate today.
At Mon May 29, 12:13:00 p.m. EDT,
Christian Conservative said…
"Let's see Dalton McGuinty stand up and make cigarettes illegal in Ontario. If he ever did this, I would stand up, applaud and defend him. And I'm a pack-a-day guy."
Wow... now that says something.
I'm all for banning it outright, but such a move would be political suicide.
Hey, hang on a sec... political suicide for McGuinty??? LET'S BAN SMOKING!!! LOL
At Mon May 29, 03:53:00 p.m. EDT,
Joanne (True Blue) said…
Mybe it would work if Smitherman came out once again and confessed that he was a cigarette addict.
At Mon May 29, 04:09:00 p.m. EDT,
Anonymous said…
"There is now talk...about banning smoking in private cars and private homes if there are children present."
This is as it should be. I think that anyone who smokes around a child should have their children taken away from them and they should go to prison for child abuse. In fact anyone who smokes (in public or private) near a child or non-consenting adult should be charged with assault. If I'm simply walking down the street and there's a smoker in front of me and I get a whiff of the smoke my throat starts closing and I can hardly breath. I'm not allowed to start spraying pepper spray randomly around me on a crowded street yet people are allowed to spread toxic chemicals around which keep me from breathing properly. I personally wish the government would outlaw cigarettes altogether, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
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