Smokers Rights Canada

This is, to start with, a “good news” story. A court in Quebec ruled in favour of Olesia Koretski, a landlord who had a problem with a smoking tenant.

The case was actually pretty cut and dried. The words “no smokers” were clearly visible on a form filled out by the tenant as part of the lease application, but the tenant proceeded to smoke pretty much non-stop after moving in on August 1, 2006.

You can read a story about this by Jan Ravensbergen in the Montreal Gazette here: Final bell sounds in smoking battle. This article, however, leaves an important issue unresolved: Who paid for the legal costs of the tenant, Sandra Fowler?

The article mentioned mychoice.ca and its tobacco-industry-appointed President, Arminda Mota. It also mentioned that mychoice.ca was funded with $2.5 million from the tobacco industry (a lot of money for a web site), but didn’t mention that the tobacco industry is the sole source of funding for mychoice.ca.

Most important, neither Mota, Fowler, or anyone in the tobacco industry was willing to confirm or deny whether the tobacco industry paid Ms. Fowler’s legal expenses.

The public, especially members of the public who are landlords, need to know this. If landlords run the risk of going up against the tobacco industry every time they rent an apartment to someone, it becomes “the cost of doing business”. And asthmatic and pregnant women such as Ms. Koretski have the right to know that the tobacco industry regards them as targets.

So, if you’re an investigative reporter, make some phone calls. You might have better luck with getting answers than Jan Ravensbergen did.

“It is not the government of Canada’s policy to allow children to import tobacco products into Canada.” - John Brent, spokesman for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day

Are you sure, John?

The news from mychoice.ca is that Nancy Daigneault is no longer president of it. She has “moved on”, but there’s no indication of where she went.

One one hand, the job market for professional liars like Daigneault has been pretty good for the past few years. On the other hand, if a prospective employer were to ask her for a list of what she actually accomplished during her tenure as president of mychoice.ca, it would be a very short list.

The new president is Arminda Mota. Huh? How did that happen? The “members” of mychoice.ca (they have now raised this to 45,000) certainly didn’t get a chance to vote on it. So, who made this decision? British American Tobacco? The Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council? It’s a good question to ask if Ms. Mota should ever appear on a radio phone-in show.

One of her first actions as president was to discontinue the forum on the mychoice.ca site. The excuse given for this was that mychoice.ca had its budget cut, and they couldn’t afford it any more.

Here’s the real story. You can buy a hosting account from Dreamhost for $100/year that provides pretty much unlimited bandwidth and disk space. Dreamhost also supplies a one-click install for phpbb. There is, of course, an administrative cost; somebody has to check the site each day and remove spam postings, as well as postings that might attract the attention of lawyers looking for a defamation case. Or law enforcement officers looking for threats of violence.

Mychoice.ca had a guy on the payroll to perform this function. It’s hard to believe that they couldn’t afford to pay him. Even it you’re dumb enough to believe this, if mychoice.ca really had 45,000 members, instead of 45, they should have had very little difficulty locating an volunteer to take on this responsibility.

It’s just another example of the contempt that the tobacco industry has for their loyal customers.

From Frank magazine: “Joni Mitchell’s lament for our desecrated environment”. Song titles include “Big Yellow Fingers” and “Wild Smokers Don’t Run Very Fast”.

Click here to view the full-size image.

This time, it’s from George Jonas instead of Terence Corcoran. Here’s a response:

Editor, National Post;

With the publication of If you won’t shoot, don’t Taser by George Jonas (Nov. 24), the public discussion of the relationship of tobacco with death and disease has gone full circle.

People in Denial about this relationship have put considerable energy in identifying alternative causes for the many illnesses caused by tobacco; chlorine in swimming pools, x-rays, increased radiation in the environment, even “bad karma”. To relate just one of many cases I am familiar with, Californian Mary Herrin chose to identify her doctor as the cause of her two heart attacks, instead of her cigarette habit; Ms. Herrin died at the age of 58.

What Mr. Jonas has now given us, based on what he calls his own “mini-inquiry”, is that the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport was caused by Dziekanski’s cigarette habit, not by over-eager use of tasers by the police. Jonas, however, was not willing to blame Dziekanski for his own addiction to cigarettes. Nor was he willing to blame the manufacturers of the cigarettes Dziekanski consumed, even though those manufacturers lied to the public for many years about the adverse effects of their products, including the addictive nature of them.

Instead, Jonas chose to blame “Big Nanny”.

This is silly nonsense. No “nanny”, big or small, deprived Dziekanski of the ability to communicate in either of Canada’s official languages. No nanny separated him from the relatives he was supposed to meet at the airport. No nanny caused him to “create a disturbance”, attracting the attention of the police. No nanny caused the police to over-react.

George Jonas may well be looking for a big nanny to change his diapers for him. Good luck with finding a volunteer.

Robert Broughton

Here’s a worthwhile article by Bryan Farrell in In These Times: Tobacco Stains: The global footprint of a deadly crop.

Excerpt: “Without even factoring in the paper wrapping, packaging and print advertisements—which require as much paper by weight as the tobacco being grown—nearly 600 million trees are felled each year to provide the fuel necessary for drying out the tobacco. That means one in eight trees cut down each year worldwide is being destroyed for tobacco production.”

You’re a cop in Southern California right now, at the height of “Firestorm 2007.” Half a million people have been evacuated and hundreds of homes have been destroyed — and many more are threatened — by the still-mostly-out-of-control wildfires, fanned by winds up to 100 kph. One dead, many injured so far.

You’re about 30 km from the nearest fire, just patrolling on the outskirts of your quiet and relatively small town (which is not in any immediate danger from the fires), trying to live life and do your job as normally as possible when, all of a sudden, you notice the driver of the car in front of you toss a still-smoldering cigarette butt out of his car window.

After somehow ensuring that the hazard has been eliminated (tinder-dry bushes and trees line both sides of the street…and there are high winds), what do you do? After all, you’ve heard that cigarettes are the suspected/known cause of some of the fires but…

Do you ignore it (wouldn’t want to be accused of over-reacting, making a mountain out of a mole hill, etc.)… pretend you didn’t see it and just carry on, like nothing happened? Who would ever know?

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A video by Billy Rood, a.k.a “tantricdemon”:

Delta’s (self-confessed smoker) Joann Hamelin had a letter published in the Friday, Sept. 14 Vancouver Sun entitled, “There are worse habits than smoking.”, regarding Vancouver’s plan to ban smoking on patios, 6 meters from entranceways, etc.

According to Hamelin, vehicle emissions and obesity are “worse” (she conveniently neglects to provide any facts/statistics to back up her claim)…and all of us “anti-smoking activists” are hypocrites.

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Found in a gas bar near Mount Vernon, Washington:

Philip Morris is interested in the welfare of their customers? Well, isn’t that special?

And what could smokers tell Congress that they haven’t already heard from Philip Morris’ army of lobbyists? And couldn’t their marketing wizards have come up with a more original slogan than “enough is enough”?

We can only hope that the time will come when smokers “stand up and speak out”. This will be inconvenient for a corporation that buries their loyal customers.