DiManno: Toronto’s choke-out for smokers escalates

First they came for the restaurant smoking sections and you didnt give a rats ass.

Then they came for the separately ventilated smoke rooms and you didnt give a rats ass.

Then they came for the partly enclosed bar patios and you didnt give a rats ass.

Now they want just about all the great outdoors: commercial patios, sidewalks, public squares and TTC shelters. (So much for the rule of thumb fire up a cigarette and the bus will come.)

Oh, theyll have public consultations on extending the choke-out for smokers, the public health board promised last week. But that wont count for licorice curls, as board chief John Filion has presumptively decided. No matter what feedback the board gets on proposals to expand Torontos anti-smoking bylaw, theyll plow ahead because consultation is a legal requirement, no more than a fingers-in-the-ears non-listening-to-you window-dressing exercise.

Anybody who has paid the slightest attention to Nico-Nazi tactics over the past three decades knows how this works drip-drip-drip of civil rights abrogated, in the name of a higher purpose; a kind of mental waterboarding for the shameless who continue to smoke.

Which, according to no less an authority than Dr. David McKeown, medical director of health for Toronto, comprises some 20 per cent of the citys population over the age of 20, a honking huge constituency to so seriously inconvenience, ignore and steamroller, on the grounds of whats good for you and more to the point good for them, the anti-smoke purists, pink and pristine of lung and virtuous of mind.

The no-smoking diktat around city playgrounds and childrens splash pads from 2009 just made me roll my eyes. I guess this might have affected the Filipino nannies minding your kids, if they happened to be smokers. Didnt matter one iota to any of the puffers I knew, accustomed by now to absorbing glares of disapproval if they ever dare to light up a dart in the vicinity of youngsters, including their own. Zealots have no off-switch.

Anyway, thats 20 per cent of the population who to hear ban-the-smoke Cassandras tell it will die gasping for air, hooked up to oxygen tanks and ventilators, with exhaled smoke spewing out of their tracheotomy hole. Well, actually these respiratory ravages can and do inflict all sorts of folks, non-smokers included, but only nicotine-enthusiasts are bludgeoned with blame, threatened to be stripped of health insurance coverage, subjected to moral shunning.

Worry not, however, about the wretched end-game part of life and all its depravities. Its not just those patients tethered to IV lines, sitting in wheelchairs parked outside hospitals, enjoying their tobacco fix, and old people shivering in the cold behind their assisted living facilities who will soon enough be considered expendable. Once the death merchants assisted suicide propagandists get their legislative way, the fragile and burdensome will be made to shuffle off alongside smokers to the colony of the unwanted, there to await lethal dispatch.

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DiManno: Toronto’s choke-out for smokers escalates