Establishing designated smoking areas on city streets or in parks and squares would be a backward step, akin to the days when there were smoking sections on airplanes, says medical health officer Dr. Murray Fyfe.
“It just didn’t work because smoke drifts,” Fyfe said. “There have been a lot of variations on that — smoking sections in malls or restaurants or smoking rooms in airports — that we’ve all seen that have come and gone.
“But to do this would really be like going back in time using a policy that just doesn’t work.”
Some Victoria councillors worry that smokers will be left with no place to indulge as the Capital Regional District moves to expand its Clean Air Bylaw to parks and public squares and increase the no-smoking buffer zone around building doorways and windows to seven metres from the current three.
City staff say expanding the buffer could have the effect of eliminating smoking on city sidewalks.
Fyfe acknowledged that the new bylaw would “significantly reduce” areas in all of the municipalities where people will be able to smoke.
“Let’s not forget what the purpose of this policy change and this bylaw change is. … The primary purpose of it is to protect people from secondhand smoke.
“It’s not to accommodate those people who want to smoke,” he said
Some councillors worried that prohibiting smoking in certain areas, such as Pandora Green outside the Our Place drop-in centre, could have unintended consequences for homeless or those living on the margins who already feel targeted by authority figures and really have no other place to light up.
Coun. Ben Isitt thought the CRD might consider establishing smoking zones in large parks such as Beacon Hill, where people — such as James Bay seniors — might be able to have a smoke.
But Fyfe said establishing a smoking area in a park would require a large chunk of property.
“If you said let’s give an area a seven-metre radius for people to smoke in, and then you add a seven-metre buffer around that — which is what the science tells us that you need to do in order to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke — then you’re getting up to over 600 square metres,” Fyfe said.
The result he said, would be a large part of some parks dedicated to smoking.
“When you consider in the Greater Victoria area, the vast majority of the population — around 90 per cent — are non-smokers, it just becomes an equity issue for people who are non-smokers being able to access all areas of the park.”
In addition, he said, such areas would present dangers for children and youth, who might not recognize when they were creeping into a smoking area.
Fyfe also discounted the suggestion that the pending bylaw would further disadvantage the poor and homeless.
“The sad reality is that a majority of them smoke and for the majority of them it’s going to be tobacco that’s going to be the major cause of underlying illness and is more likely to be the cause of death for these people,” he said.
“So rather than looking at an opportunity to provide them ongoing smoking areas, we should look at it as an opportunity toward helping them to overcome this addiction.”
