Florida's tolerance absent in Ottawa
Susan Delacourt
The Ottawa Citizen
A few months before he became prime minister in 1993, Jean Chrétien ran across a few reporters who were standing outdoors smoking while a Liberal meeting carried on inside.
"What are you doing out here?" he asked. The reporters answered with the shorthand gestures used by most smokers these days: Shrugging sheepishly, they held their cigarettes aloft and smiled apologetically for their habit.
"I think it's awful the way smokers are being forced to stand outside," Mr. Chrétien said. "It's humiliating to them. It's going too far." The reporters jokingly asked the Liberal leader whether he'd do something about it if he became prime minister. You bet, he said.
Mr. Chrétien obviously has no control over the fact that now, eight years later, he lives in a city that condemns all smokers to outdoor exile. Five months ago, Ottawa's municipal government ushered in one of the toughest anti-smoking laws in the country, banning it outright from all bars, restaurants and workplaces.
Though the prime minister, a non-smoker, may have a slightly more generous view of how smokers should be treated in the nation's capital, he doesn't make the local rules. Nor do any of the countless other federal ministers and MPs who will tell you privately that they think the City of Ottawa's ban goes overboard.
And so most organized Christmas parties in the capital this year are something for smokers either to endure or avoid. Bars and restaurants over the river in smoke-tolerant Quebec are enjoying a surge in popularity among the political class. When the smoking ban is combined with the tougher security measures on Parliament Hill post-Sept. 11, you can't help but feel that Ottawa is in some strange new era of state crackdown. Welcome to the nation's capital: Please check all terrorist tools and tobacco products at the fortress walls.
We've now reached the place in this column where I admit that I smoke, so that you may be allowed to discount my bias, expel me from your home or refuse to allow me near your small children. I'll pause here, too, to allow you to summon up the usual warnings about my health, and the cost of my habit to you and the health-care system. I'll even take a break long enough to allow a certain satirical magazine to haul out some tired, recycled fiction about a pro-smoking sign that allegedly appeared once on my desk. (Or was it on another reporter's desk? Pick the version that suits you -- the utterly unoriginal point, I take it, is that people who smoke are bad.)
But given that non-smokers such as Mr. Chrétien are evidently not going to wade into the tolerance aspect of this debate, it falls to the smokers to ask whether this ban has gone too far. The point of the ban goes beyond keeping smoke away from non-smokers; it seems to go directly to shaming those who smoke. When did shame become a tool of public policy?
The anti-smoking crowd will say, of course, that you can never go too far and be too intolerant with a smoking ban. Indeed, though anti-smokers have presented themselves as champions of tolerance and inclusion, they don't argue for those civic virtues to apply to smokers. It is OK, in fact, to treat smokers in the same ways that older, more conservative societies used to punish people who were deemed immoral: through shame, exile and exclusion.
Last week, one of Ottawa's most strident anti-tobacco crusaders on City Council, Alex Munter, co-wrote an opinion piece in The Globe and Mail, citing important research in favour of municipal diversity. Mr. Munter and Toronto Councillor David Miller quoted the findings of U.S. professor Richard Florida, who has discovered that the most prosperous cities are the ones in which "bohemians" also thrive: gays, artists and creative types. Healthy cities are the ones that place emphasis on three Ts: technology, talent and tolerance, according to Mr. Florida.
Ottawa councillors don't seem to recognize the irony of citing Mr. Florida's noble work in favour of tolerance. Bohemian-wise, Ottawa has just taken a giant, anti-tolerant step backward. Envisioning Ottawa now as a lively, bohemian-friendly place such as, say, Dublin or Paris (how do you think a smoking ban would work in those cities?) seems laughable. Little wonder that Ottawa's hotel owners last week distanced themselves from a bylaw that helps restore the capital's reputation as boring, bureaucratic and anything but bohemian.
The test of tolerance, Mr. Florida would undoubtedly agree, is how well society treats people who might offend others' sensibilities. Mr. Chrétien voiced that type of tolerance eight years ago. These days in Ottawa, he and the other non-smokers are silent.
Susan Delacourt writes on national affairs. Reach her at sdelac@attcanada.ca .
