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I don’t know what’s on the front burner for the rest of the world this week….but I can tell you on Salt Spring nobody’s talking about troop surges in Iraq or Golden Globes in Beverly Hills or sunburned polar bears in Nunavut.

No, the big island topic this week – the burning issue, as it were — is smoking.  Very confusing issue, smoking.  If you’ve done any traveling across Canada you know that smoking laws and restrictions are pretty much a

mish-mash from province to province and even from city to city.  Light up a smoke in Toronto and Ontario’s Tobacco Police will have you spread-eagled and cuffed you before you can ask for an ashtray.  In Alberta you must not indulge in hospitals or government buildings…but in casinos, bars and bingo halls – smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.  Quebec has some of the strictest anti-smoking laws in the country — or will have, by the time the snow melts.  As of May 31st Quebec will be one hundred percent ne fumez pas in all indoor public places from Baie Comeau to Kujuack…to Hull and back.

Here in British Columbia the legal air is a tad murkier.  In some parts of the province bars and restaurants are allowed to offer smoking rooms that don’t even have to be enclosed.  Other places – especially if those jurisdictions are close to the Greater Vancouver Area – are pretty strict.

Here on Salt Spring…we are – as usual – neither here nor there.  You cannot smoke at the bar or at your table in our restaurants or pubs, but all a smoker has to do is walk about ten feet to the patio or the outside deck and fire up.

Which is the reason a lot of islanders are talking about smoking this week — because it looks like THAT odiferous little loophole is about to snap shut.   The powers that be here in the Gulf Islands are looking at an outright ban on smoking on all outdoor decks and patios wherever food and beverages are sold.

Me?  I’m in favour.  Not because I’m a nicotine Nazi.  Hey, I smoked for more than twenty years, but I’m past my Messianic Thou Shalt Not Smoke stage.  I don’t want to give smokers a hard time.

I just want my damn patio back.

Before the government got to decreeing smoking areas I used to seek out the patios and outside decks at my favourite pubs and restaurants.  It was somewhere to go to get away from the recycled cumulo-nimbus thunderheads of stale smoke inside.  Then the lawmakers gave smokers the heave ho and the poor desperate devils came out and took over my patio.

Which it looks like they are about to lose.

I’m just glad I’m not a smoker facing this latest wave of persecution.  Of course I’m even gladder that I’m not a restaurant or a pub owner, some of whom are still paying for the specially engineered smoking rooms and enclosed patios they had to put in after the last flurry of legislation.

Personally I never understood the frenzy to provide ‘specially ventilated rooms’ for smokers.  Why?  These are people who enjoy filling their lungs with smoke.   What do they care about ventilation?  Give ‘em a small room, tape the windows shut, leave them one exit to the outside and send their beer and burgers in through a doggie door.

Be a lot cheaper.

Back in the 1990’s a Canadian prophet by the name of Maurice Cook wrote a book called The Aquarian Wave in which he made a number of predictions, one of which was that by the year 2010 the smoking of cigarettes will have virtually stopped.

Just three years from now?  I think Maurice was unduly optimistic on that one, but there’s no denying that our tolerance of smoking in public has undergone a sea change in a short time.  Can you remember when Air Canada offered designated smoking rows on every flight?  When the back half dozen seats on Grey Coach buses featured ashtrays in the armrests?

When people merrily lit up in theatres and taxis?  In coffee shops and five star restaurants?  Wasn’t so very long ago, chum.

Amazingly tenacious habit, smoking.  Nobody approves of it, but it just won’t die.  Back in the 80’s the U.S. Surgeon General  made headlines by declaring that tobacco was more addictive than heroin.  Wasn’t news to those of us who’d tried to kick the habit.  I went through acupuncture, hypnotherapy, quit smoking clinics and good old Cold Turkey before I finally crushed my last butt.

Will we ever see the end of smoking?  Humourist Dave Barry says cigarette consumption would wither away if manufacturers were forced to print a simple disclaimer on the package that read:  WARNING: CIGARETTES CONTAIN FAT.  Stephen Wright, another humourist disagrees.  He says smoking cigarettes “will actually take care of your weight problem.”

“Eventually.”

All I know is I am absolutely certain that I will never smoke again – on or off a patio.  Not because I have a will of steel.  I don’t.  Not because I’m afraid of lung cancer, emphysema or heart disease.

Nope.  See, when I started smoking, a package of British Consuls cost 28 cents.  Thirty-two cents for filter tips.  This morning I checked the price of a package of Rothmans at a grocery store here on Salt Spring.  Nine dollars and 60 cents.   For 20 cigarettes!

It’s not will power or fear of mortality that’ll keep me smoke free.  It’s my Scots heritage.  I’m just too cheap.

From Planet Salt Spring…I’m Arthur Black.

Arthur Black; all rights reserved.

MIND IF I SMOKE? YOU BET!

BREAKING NEWS!

Arthur's New Book To Be Released This Fall

Black’s eye for the absurd is in full focus here. For instance, despite the engaging getup and provocative title, few of these stories actually have anything to do with the environment. Sure, Black offers some words of advice on eating a teaspoonful a day of good healthy soil for longevity and explores the trend towards über-expensive high fashion grocery bags. However, this is not a tome about carbon footprints besmirching our melting ice caps. Giant hamburgers, on the other hand, are covered herein. You’ll also find all you could ever want toknow about men’s purses, how a chicken upstaged Columbus, social suicide by motorscooter—there’s even a sprinkling of flowered urinals—but precious little to make David Suzuki’s aorta do backflips. But then, for sheer entertainment value, environmentalism doesn’t hold an organic

Printed in Canada soy candle to a good Arthur Black-ism.