Pass the food, not the poison

Iqaluit restaurants serve a variety of foods to suit all tastes, but the one thing you won’t find on the menu is a breath of fresh air.

In creating the nation’s newest territory, Nunavut residents proudly and frequently invoke enlightened principles of a modern Canadian society. But when it comes to public health and smoking, northeners are planted firmly in the Dark Ages.

How else to explain why, in a town that is two years away from becoming the seat of Nunavut’s first government, not a single restaurant has taken the initiative to create a truly smoke-free environment for its non-smoking customers.

Health Canada’s Office of Tobacco Control reports that more than 367 progressive-minded municipalities across Canada enforce smoking restrictions of one sort or another in public places, including restaurants. And for good reason: second-hand tobacco smoke promotes disease and hastens death in non-smokers. It’s also downright annoying.

To preserve one’s appetite for food while suffocating in a stench of acrid tobacco fumes does not make for a satisfying dining experience.

The poisonous compounds contained in environmental smoke pose a wide range of health risks: heart disease and strokes have been traced to second-hand smoke; so have cancer of the pancreas, kidney, bladder, breast and brain. Children exposed to environmental smoke run a higher-than-average risk of developing serious respiratory ailments as they mature.

Sure, some establishments around the capital pretend to have non-smoking “sections.” These sections consist for the most part of a table or two, usually indicated haphazardly by a small non-smoking sticker that everyone ignores. Poor ventilation further guarantees that everyone shares the consequences of the smokers’ habit.

And the long-term consequences for society are considerable: The easier it is for smokers to feed their addiction, the harder it will be to keep future generations from getting hooked. In a population with as high a birthrate as Nunavut’s, failure to discourage tobacco use will mean sharply rising health costs down the road.

Canada’s North already bears the ignominious distinction of being the last refuge for unrepentant puffers at a time when all other jurisdictions on the continent are mounting full-scale attacks on nicotine addiction. And because so many northeners are addicted, Nunavut communities face the doubly daunting challenge of preventing parents from transmitting this dependency to their children.

Just as millions of Canadians everywhere who have broken their own dependency on tobacco, northerners can begin to reverse the damage to their communities, but only by taking drastic action now.

All government and municipal buildings and the offices of Inuit organizations are already smoke-free Many private businesses have adopted their own smoke-free policies. Restaurant and hotel operators are also part of our communities. They also have a public duty, if not a moral responsibility to provide patrons with clean and safe environments.

Unless Nunavut is planning to invite the Imperial Tobacco Company to underwrite construction of a lung ward at the new regional hospital, our tolerance for tobacco in venues where people gather for nourishment is completely unjustified.

In Nunavik as reported in this week’s Nunatsiaq News, the Kativik School Board recently took the laudable step to ban smoking on school grounds. Here in Iqaluit, businessman Denis Coté has made the decision to prohibit smoking at his video arcade.

Now, is it really asking too much to ask taxi drivers to respect the no-smoking signs posted in their cars?

Would it be asking too much to require smokers to refrain from poisoning the air at the local supermarket while they shop?

Is it too much to want to savor the aroma of a good restaraunt meal without ingesting 4,000 airborne chemicals? DW