Georgina clears outdoor air
Lake Simcoe town set to bar smoking at beaches, parks
In a move sure to rankle smokers of the nature-loving type, the Lake Simcoe community of Georgina is a breath away from enacting one of the toughest outdoor antismoking bylaws in the province.
“Sometimes you have to push the bar,” said Mayor Robert Grossi of his northern GTA town’s recently approved report calling for a smoking ban for beaches, parks and trails.
If it passes, the bylaw will sweep across much of the town’s outdoor property — adding to an existing smoking ban on playgrounds, splash pads, skateboard parks, soccer parks and sports fields.
With its expanding outdoor no-smoking policies, Georgina joins more than 50 municipalities across Ontario that are pushing the indoor-focused 2006 Smoke-free Ontario legislation to the next level — outdoors.
Come April, Ottawa will ban smoking at outdoor restaurant and bar patios, parks, playgrounds, beaches, sports fields and farmer’s markets. Hamilton will follow suit in May, with a smoking ban on all city-owned recreational land.
It’s a level of regulation some call heavy-handed and discriminatory and potentially harmful to the widely successful campaign to clear indoor spaces of deadly second-hand smoke.
“It casts the movement as being fanatical,” said Dr. Michael Siegel, a Boston University public health professor and supporter of indoor smoking bans.
About 13,000 Ontarians die every year because of tobacco use, according to the Canadian Cancer Society. Indoors, second-hand smoke is also a “life or death” matter, Siegel said. But there’s no scientific evidence that exposure to secondhand smoke outdoors poses risks.
“By going to these extremes, I’m afraid the smoke-free movement is going to lose credibility,” Siegel said. “It undermines our argument for the workplace and makes it more difficult to promote these policies.”
Yet across the country, municipalities are joining the outdoor nosmoking movement. In 2010, Vancouver banned it in parks and on beaches. Defiant smokers can be slapped with a $250 minimum fine.
Micheal Vonn, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association’s policy director, called the ban “overkill.”
“The great outdoors are great indeed,” she said. “We think it’s overkill to take a huge piece of landscape and declare it a no-smoking zone.”
But advocates say outdoor bylaws force tobacco out of mainstream acceptability, encourage smokers to kick the habit and promote healthy living among youth.
“It’s about decreasing smoking around children so they don’t emulate that behaviour,” said Joanne Di Nardo of the Canadian Cancer Society, a national group that has sought bans across the country.
Grossi, a former smoker, said he hoped the ban would encourage smokers to put down the pack. “At the end of the day, you have to look at the cost of providing health services to those smokers,” he said. “If the feds aren’t going to take action and the province isn’t going to take action, we’ll do what we need to do.”
Georgina officials won’t decide on penalties until the bylaw comes before council March 26.
“There are people who will not abide by it, but hopefully peer pressure will help them out,” Grossi said. “If not, we’ll have to use whatever resources we can.”