GN balks at smoking bans

AARON SPITZER

IQALUIT — Nunavut’s smoking rate is shockingly high, yet the territory trails far behind other regions of Canada in banning smoking in businesses and public buildings.

According to a 1999 survey, 70 per cent of Nunavut’s adult Inuit are smokers — well over twice the national average.

But unlike an increasing number of provinces and municipalities in both northern and southern Canada, Nunavut has no laws limiting smoking in stores, offices, hotels, bars and restaurants.

Though the territorial Department of Health and Social Services is conducting an aggressive campaign to teach residents about the dangers of tobacco, health officials have shied away from the more dramatic step of passing laws to limit where people can smoke.

In an interview Tuesday, Ed Picco, Nunavut’s health minister, said he doesn’t support territorial legislation to ban smoking in public buildings.

Instead, he encourages municipal councils to pass bylaws on the issue.

Currently, no municipalities in Nunavut have such bylaws in place.

“You don’t want (the Nunavut government) to come in with a rule or legislation that would cause consternation on the part of people forced to do it,” Picco said. “It’s up to the municipalities.”

The kind of region-wide prohibition Picco opposes was almost put in place in the Eastern Arctic five years ago, when Dr. Richard Bargen, then the medical health officer for the Baffin and Keewatin regions, decreed that a smoking ban in public buildings would be phased in beginning Jan. 1, 1997.

“It’s up to the municipalities.”

– Nunavut health minister

Ed Picco

The move was made without a public vote or community consultation, and it was retracted after businessmen and government leaders — including Kelvin Ng, who was then the Northwest Territories’ health minister — balked at the plan.

Bargen eventually lost his job over the decision.

Other areas outlaw cigs

In the wake of Bargen’s failed bid to stamp out public smoking in Nunavut, anti-smoking legislation has swept North America, with whole swaths of the U.S. and Canada going smoke-free.

Quebec began phasing in a ban on smoking in businesses and restaurants in 1998.

And as of Sept. 1, British Columbia will outlaw smoking in all businesses, including bars.

The municipalities of Ottawa, Toronto, and Edmonton are poised to do the same.

And for more than three years, the state of California – with a population greater than that of Canada — has banned smoking in all buildings where the public gathers, including bars and restaurants.

Smoking bans aren’t limited to the South. In Yellowknife, a smoking ban kicked in on Sept. 30, 1999. The ban covers all businesses except for bars. The prohibition on smoking in restaurants is being phased in, with the full ban beginning Jan. 1, 2005.

In Whitehorse, similar legislation is currently before the city council.

Education not enough

Francis Thompson, a policy analyst with Canada’s Non-Smokers’ Rights Association in Ottawa, said that though education campaigns such as the GN’s are important, banning public smoking often leads to faster and more far-ranging improvements in public health.

“There’s no question that regulations on second-hand smoke, apart from protecting children and vulnerable populations, have all sorts of other effects, and they have them quite rapidly.”

– Francis Thompson, the Non-smokers Rights Association

“The experience in a lot of jurisdictions has been that the first thing that groups do when they get money is run advertising and educational things, which are not necessarily the measures that have the most effect,” Thompson said.

“In terms of things that have rapid effects, there’s no question that regulations on second-hand smoke, apart from protecting children and vulnerable populations, have all sorts of other effects, and they have them quite rapidly.”

He said that though the key aim of smoking bans is to protect non-smokers, smokers themselves often benefit. He said studies show that employees who are forced to stop smoking in the workplace often cut their cigarette consumption or kick the habit entirely.

“That’s why the tobacco industry hates (bans) so much,” he said.

According to Picco, the health department this autumn will begin to “see how we can facilitate at the local level if there is an opportunity for bringing in bylaws.”

But Picco said his department’s prime goal is anti-smoking education, not legislation.

Education, he said, “is where it has to begin.”