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Resort’s crackdown on smoking puts public health first, but questions over personal freedoms persist

Resort’s crackdown on smoking puts public health first, but questions over personal freedoms persist

It’s one of the most popular ski destinations in the world and, after this month, Whistler-Blackcomb will be smoke-free.

As of May 31, tobacco, marijuana, e-cigarettes and vaporizers will be prohibited anywhere on the mountain, including chairlifts, ski runs, hiking and biking trails and parking lots.

It’s a move resort president Dave Brownlie says fits with Whistler-Blackcomb’s healthy, family-oriented philosophy.

It’s also a move spurring debate over the new wave in tobacco control – prohibition in outdoor spaces or even city-wide bans.

“A lot of these restrictions on outdoor areas are simply driven by the community,” Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst for the Canadian Cancer Society, tells Yahoo Canada News.

“As people become accustomed to smoke-free areas, they’re not accustomed to being exposed to a smoky place so they don’t like it – even just as a nuisance.”

Since smoking was reluctantly banned in hospitals and retail stores in 1976, Canada has seen some of the toughest anti-smoking statutes in the world.

The Smoke-Free Ontario Act that came into effect at the beginning of this year bars smoking near playgrounds, any sporting areas like soccer fields or skating rinks, and adjacent spaces for spectators.

“These are family areas. Kids are there and the community desires that there shouldn’t be smoking there,” Cunningham says.

Manitoba, Nova Scotia, B.C., Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario have prohibited smoking in vehicles in the presence of children under 16. In PEI, Yukon and Nunavut, the age is 18 or 19.

But it is municipal governments that have led the charge. Cities including Bridgewater, N.S., Kingston, Ont., and Saskatoon have smoke-free outdoor places bylaws that cover parks, beaches and, in some cases, sidewalks and streets.

An ever-growing number of municipalities have banned smoking on outdoor patios in addition to all indoor spaces.

But at what point does the common good become the nanny state? The tobacco fight threatens to infringe on individual rights, warn some.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, says Whistler-Blackcomb can regulate their own property as they see fit.

But the growing trend towards prohibitions on public lands like parks and beaches is a sweeping restriction on personal freedoms, he says.

Two years ago, a study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University found that some of the arguments in favour of outdoor smoking bans were “from definitive and, in some cases, weak.”

The authors suggest that what outdoor bans do is limit the opportunities for smokers to smoke.

But “as much as, as a society, we may wish to discourage tobacco smoking, it’s a legal activity,” Paterson tells Yahoo Canada News.

“Personally I don’t like smoke in my face as much as the next person. I’m a non-smoker.…but when you start to put in place these legal restrictions, you have to have sufficient justification to do it.”

Why not ban tobacco altogether?

Well, for one, total provincial and federal tax revenues from tobacco sales in 2012-2013 was a staggering $7.3 billion, according to Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada.

Also, it doesn’t work, says Cunningham.

“We know from alcohol prohibition that a ban would not work. There would be contraband overnight. We have millions of Canadians who are addicted to cigarettes so it would not be feasible to implement a ban.”

More than five million Canadians, about 19 per cent, smoke. The Canadian Cancer Society says there are an estimated 37,000 tobacco-related deaths annually.

A wide range of measures are needed to continue the decline in those numbers, Cunningham says. Smoke-free outdoor spaces are one of them.

“Every restriction on where you can smoke is a further motivator for people to smoke less or to quit altogether,” he says.

In Whistler-Blackcomb, staff will get a one-year furlough to smoke in designated areas.

Outside the resort, in the municipality of Whistler, smoking is banned anywhere within 25 metres of an outdoor venue, playground, playing field, sporting event, transit shelter or school, in addition to the common indoor prohibition.