University of Guelph may ban on-campus smoking

GUELPH — It is an annual tradition at the University of Guelph — the weekend before classes get started, students start arriving on campus. And for many, that means getting dropped off by their parents, meaning they will be living away from home for the first time.

Although university is full of many firsts for a lot of students, this year could also be the last where smoking is permitted on campus.

Later this year, the University of Guelph will be deciding whether it wants to join a growing list of Canadian post-secondary institutions that have banned smoking of any kind within its boundaries.

Don O’Leary, the university’s vice-president of finance, administration and risk, said the move to bar on-campus smoking came as a result of the school’s healthy workplace initiative.

“One of the suggestions out of that was looking at preventing or limiting, as much as we can, smoking on campus,” he said.

“In consultations so far, even many of the smokers understand why we’d want to move in that direction but are concerned about being accommodated in some way.”

O’Leary said there are already a number of smoking-related restrictions on campus, including that all buildings are nonsmoking, and smokers having to be a certain distance away from buildings when they light up. As well, under provincial legislation, the sale of tobacco products on campus is also a no-no.

As far as when a smoking ban would come into effect, O’Leary said the school will be talking with students this fall before making a final decision by the end of 2018 on whether a ban would be implemented.

Should the ban be approved, O’Leary said, he expects it would go into effect by May or June of 2019.

“It’ll give us a chance over the summer to see how we deal with it, how we manage and to see some of the issues we’d face, all with the eye to, by the following September, implement it fully,” he said.

Although some school across the country have had bans in place for well over a decade — Dalhousie University in Halifax, for example, has not permitted smoking on campus since 2003 — it was only at the start of this year that the first ban in Ontario came into effect, with McMaster University in Hamilton making the move.

Other campuses are set to implement bans of their own in the near future, with Toronto’s George Brown College announcing last month that a ban would be going into effect immediately, and London’s Western University will be totally smoke-free by July 2019.

Should the University of Guelph join that list, O’Leary said, there would be exceptions, including traditional tobacco use during an Indigenous service, or someone who uses cannabis for medicinal reasons.

With recreational cannabis becoming legal in just more than a month’s time, O’Leary said, the ban would affect that, as well.

“It would be covered, the smoking of cannabis, anyways, in our non-smoking policy. It would fall within that policy,” he said, adding that the delivery of cannabis through the province’s Ontario Cannabis Store website, which goes online Oct. 17, would also be barred.

“We don’t permit alcohol to be delivered, so we won’t allow cannabis to be delivered to campus, either.”

O’Leary said another thing the university needs to look at is how it will govern non-smokable forms of cannabis, such as edibles.

“Those are areas we will have to consider, as well, going forward,” he said.