This week's Calgary Herald column from yours truly looks at just how far government anti-smoking measures have gone and why they've crossed a line:
When we suddenly awake one day to find that smokers are criminals, it will seem fitting that prison itself might be one of the few places left to legally smoke.
A number of federal inmates will argue in court this week that their rights are being violated by the smoking ban imposed by Correctional Services Canada last year. Should the challenge succeed, we can all sit back and marvel at the baffling legal construct where a convicted murderer would be permitted to smoke, but it would be forbidden for a trucker to do so.
In Ontario last week, a truck driver was stopped by police and issued a $305 ticket after being spotted on Highway 401 with a cigarette in his mouth. You see, the Smoke-Free Ontario Act prohibits smoking in the workplace -- a trucker's truck is his workplace. In fact, even if a trucker owns his vehicle and even if no one else but him drives it, it is still illegal for him to smoke in the truck.
Alberta's own law contains similar provisions, although no such citations seem to have been issued here. Pardon the pun, but the wheels have come completely off whatever justification previously existed for stringent anti-smoking measures.
Let's say for the sake of argument that second-hand smoke is as bad as even the worst-case assessment.
The whole point of smoking bans in the workplace and other public places was to protect the rest of us from ingesting fumes we did not consent to ingesting. The bans still at least paid lip service to the premise that if you want to smoke those awful cigarettes, then do so away from the rest of us. Now the whole "protection" mantra has been tossed out the window like the proverbial cigarette butt. We are now "protecting" the smoker himself, and once that genie is out of the bottle, there's no going back.
Read the rest here.
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