Smoke-Free: How One City Successfully Banned Smoking in All Indoor Public Places

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

Smoke-Free tells the story of how Greater Victoria enacted a non-smoking
bylaw for all indoor public places. Though there have been similar
efforts in other places, such as Vancouver and California, Victoria’s
was essentially a pioneering, crusading enterprise.

McLintock starts the story with the modest anti-smoking regulations in
the early 1980s and takes it to 1999, when hospitality establishments
were added to the list of smoke-free places and the bylaw became fully
effective. Along the way, she describes the rocky ride that the bylaw
had from industry propaganda, legal challenges, and the campaign to defy
the law on the part of restaurant and bar owners. In the end, compliance
with the law was near total, with the leading opponents grudgingly
admitting that the forecasts of economic disaster had proved to be
unfounded.

As a case study in public health, Smoke-Free is hard to fault, because
McLintock gives the opposition its due rather than smearing it as greedy
and anti-social. When the campaign began in the 1980s, the hazards of
second-hand smoke were not well documented. As the evidence emerged, the
defenders of public smoking changed their tack, stressing freedom of
choice rather than dismissing the health hazards as ill-founded. There
was, however, one aspect of the war of words that the smoking defenders
could not but lose. It was impossible for non-smokers, especially
hospitality workers, to avoid carcinogenic smoke. The freedom of some
was the curtailment of freedom of the others. That is why the proponents
of the bylaw eventually won their case.