They Enjoy ‘Odious Habit’ : Tough Laws Put Canadian Smokers in a Fog

The hangout next door to the Toronto school board headquarters is called Student’s Restaurant, but the patrons idling there each day are not truant schoolchildren. They are school board supervisory personnel and workers who slip away from their smoke-free building to go to Student’s for a cigarette.

Writer David Olive is empathic. “I can’t write without smoking,” he said. “It really is that simple.” Besides, he says, he enjoys the “odious habit.” When the newspaper he once worked for, The Toronto Globe and Mail, banned smoking in the newsroom, he readjusted his working hours so he could come in at midnight and puff away while writing until sunup.

Tired of that routine, he quit the paper and went to work for a local magazine, which lured him away with the offer of a private office where he can light up cigarette after cigarette. Still, he says, he harbors no illusion that Canada’s militant anti-smoking crusaders will not assail him again.

“This anti-smoking thing has pursued me for the last three years,” he said. “It’s very disillusioning. They say it helps people to quit, but it hasn’t helped me at all.”

Smokers On Run

Like Olive, smokers all over Canada find themselves fighting a half-hearted rear guard battle. Cities across the country and the federal Parliament in Ottawa have enacted North America’s toughest anti-smoking measures. A Toronto ordinance, for example, requires that all businesses develop a smoking policy and that if a single employee objects to smoking in a workplace, it must be banned. Most other Canadian cities--with the prominent exception of Montreal--have enacted similar but generally less stringent measures.

The federal government recently passed laws that prohibit smoking on ships, airplanes, trains and buses. Tobacco advertising in newspapers, magazines and on billboards has been banned. And cigarette company’s sports and cultural promotions are to be phased out over a three-year period.

Tobacco companies are challenging the new federal bans in court, but at the same time, they are rapidly diversifying into different enterprises, including fast-food restaurants, drug stores and financial institutions.

Smokers grumble among themselves about the new prohibitions on the job. A favorite complaint in Toronto is that the power given a single employee by the city ordinance is highly undemocratic. In the end, however, they do not rebel but instead search out other ways to indulge their habit.

Ritual ‘Tea Time’

At The Toronto Star, business reporter Kenneth Kidd says he and other die-hard smokers have invented a ritual they call “tea time.” Every afternoon they troop off to the cafeteria, where there still is a smoking section, for a tea and coffee break--but mostly to smoke. Smokers at the Canadian Manufacturers Assn. retreat furtively to stairwells or restrooms, according to spokesman Gregory MacDonald. MacDonald, also a smoker, says, “I’m going out of my skull.”

But as much discomfort as the restrictions have brought, few smokers believe that they have a viable argument any longer. “It’s such an odious habit,” Olive said. “It’s ugly. It’s smelly. You’re inflicting damage on yourself, inflicting damage on others. I agree with the (anti-smokers’ position), as unfair as it seems to me. I don’t see my position as defensible. It’s not quite up there with beating your kids, but it’s a socially unacceptable thing to do.”

For years, Canada lagged behind the United States in adopting measures against smoking. Tobacco lobbyists were even able to take advantage of a cozy relationship with the government of then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau to require only the mildest of warnings on cigarette packages. The agreed-upon admonition counsels: “WARNING: Health and Welfare Canada advises that danger to health increases with amount smoked--avoid inhaling.” New federal laws passed in June mandate much tougher warnings.

The battle against cigarettes has also been waged with heavy taxation. Canadians are amused by the fuss Vice President Bush has made over the 5-cent tax Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis recently added to a pack of cigarettes to balance the state budget.

Prices Triple

In Canada, a 25-cigarette pack, which cost $1 in 1980, has tripled in price because of increases in federal and provincial taxes, which range from 82 cents in Alberta to $1.30 in Newfoundland.

Olive based one of the last articles he wrote for the Globe and Mail on a bank analyst’s calculations, which indicate that the average pack-a-day smoker in Canada spends about $1,600 a year on cigarettes and that if he quits at age 30 and saves the funds he would have spent on cigarettes, he could retire at 65 with more than $600,000.

“That was a nice incentive, I thought,” Olive said. “Did it make me want to quit? No.”

But the rising cost of smoking has clearly caused others to quit or cut down and may be the most powerful incentive of all, according to the tobacco industry. Tobacco sales have fallen 23% over the last five years in Canada, according to Jacques Lariviere, spokesman for the Montreal-based Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council.

Taxation Burden

“The single most important factor in all of that has been the very dramatic increase in the retail selling price as a reflection of the equally dramatic increase in taxation,” Lariviere said.

The tobacco industry spent about $67 million on advertising and promotion last year, but they found the number of outlets open to them shrinking. In 1984, The Kingston Whig-Standard became the first major Canadian newspaper to reject all tobacco advertising. It was followed by The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen and The London (Ont.) Free-Press, which is in the middle of tobacco-growing country. The new law forbids all newspapers and magazines from running cigarette advertising.

The lobbying effort behind many of the anti-smoking initiatives has been spearheaded by a Toronto-based group called the Nonsmokers’ Rights Assn., whose directors include doctors, insurance officials and journalists. The association’s fervent executive director, Garfield Mahood, says that unlike its counterparts in the United States, the group decided four years ago not to focus on campaigns to persuade smokers to stop but to attempt to “strip the tobacco industry of its legitimacy.”

“We just decided that he had to get away from a ‘blame-the-victim’ strategy,” he said. “We know that the industry can bring on new recruits faster than we can get people to stop smoking.”

Federal Ban Campaign

The association campaigned for the federal bans on cigarette companies’ promotion of sports and cultural events because of this concern about keeping young people from taking up the habit. A recent Gallup Canada Poll found that at least a quarter of 15- to 17-year-olds in Canada and nearly 1 in 10 children in the 12- to 14-year-old age group smoke each day.

Mahood believes that tobacco company advertising and promotions have in the past tended to dilute anti-smoking efforts, leading teen-agers to say skeptically: “If it was as bad as you say it is, the government would not allow it to be advertised.”

The one part of Canada in which the anti-smoking movement has made almost no inroads is the French-speaking province of Quebec. There are some restrictions in public buildings and hospitals. But few restaurants in Montreal have nonsmoking sections, and, just as in the old days, clerks and customers light up freely in department stores and many other establishments. When nonsmokers at the La Presse newspaper complained, the company’s solution was to install fans.