You can probably imagine the scenario: you’re walking down a Vancouver sidewalk and someone ahead of you is smoking. When they’re finished their seven minutes of sucking, they incomprehensibly flick their smoldering butt into the street, gutter, or worse, the bushes, like some sort of oblivious Don Draper-James Dean-Marlboro Man holdover from a bygone era.
If the act of smoking, and the smell and affects of second-hand-smoke isn’t offensive enough, non-smoking Vancouverites also have to deal with a percentage of smokers who think it’s socially acceptable to simply flick their butts wherever they please. Why is this ok? Why, in the minds of smokers, are cigarette butts somehow above or different that the rest of the garbage we properly dispose of every day? Walk along any street in the city, take a look into the gutter, and chances are you’ll see cigarette butts. The worst part is, many of those butts will eventually be washed away down storm drains, only to end up in our ocean. For anyone who has taken part in a shore clean up, you’ll know that a massive part of it is picking up a disgusting number of cigarette butts.
Here’s the good news: of the major cities in Canada, Vancouver had the lowest rate of smokers at just 14.5 per cent (in contrast, Ottawa has the highest percentage with 23.9). The City of Vancouver has also gone to great lengths to ban smoking in as many public places as possible, including any indoor space, near any doorway, any playground, on public transit, parks, the seawall, or trails and beaches.
Obviously, outdoor spaces are pretty hard to police. If you frequent any of our otherwise glorious city beaches, you will be able to relate to trying to select the patch of sand with the least amount of cigarette butts. Some of those have been washed up, but many are from bylaw-bustin’ beach smokers who simply treat the sand as their personal ashtray, which in no way shape or form is a cool thing to do. Again, more entitled Don Draper behavior. Bury your head in the sand while you’re at it. As a parent of a toddler, there are few things more annoying and alarming than pulling a discarded cigarette butt out of your child’s mouth during a day at the beach.
More good news: as of this week, the entire village and resort of Whistler has gone smoke-free. That includes the lifts, the gondolas, the ski runs, the parking lots, the bike trails, the Village Stroll, and all Whistler/Blackcomb restaurants and patios. The decision was made “to preserve the pristine alpine environment our guests come here for”, according to Whistler/Blackcomb president Dave Brownlie. Permanently butting out in Whistler also addresses the issues of fire hazards in an era of climate change.
Could we eventually see the same type of blanket non-smoking bylaws in Vancouver, currently making an effort to become the “Greenest City” in the world? Eighty-five per cent of us just might be in agreement. To the 14.5 of Vancouverites who still smoke, please do us all a solid and dispose of your butts properly.
