They huffed and they puffed, but seemingly not in the designated smoking areas.
“All council is doing here is mirroring what is already taking place in society,” Brendan Elliott said of Halifax Regional Municipality’s smoking ban bylaw that did a slow burn into existence Monday morning.
A spokesman for the municipality, Elliott said landlords, businesses, restaurants and bars have already banned smoking.
“We are seeing more and more places where people are finding it not acceptable to smoke. The municipality is just following in step with that.”
The bylaw bans all forms of smoking — cigarettes or cannabis — and vaping on all public property, with the exception of designated smoking areas.
One of the nine designated areas marked on the online map Monday was the transit terminal on Lacewood Drive. Late Monday morning, the designated smoking place there was difficult to smoke out. A stroll through the terminal and along the outside bays where buses stop to load and unload passengers did not immediately reveal the specific smoking area.
“I don’t know where it is,” said a bus driver who was exiting the terminal to have a cigarette on the grass behind a parked bus. The driver said the specific Lacewood terminal location was still to be determined according to an email drivers received three days earlier.
Finally, another transit employee pointed to a black cylindrical recepticle mounted on a cement base along the driveway leading from Lacewood Drive to the terminal. The recepticle stands about 25 metres from the terminal and it has a grey insignia of a burning cigeratte and a sign that says smoking is permitted within three metres of the bin. The recepticle has holes near the top for ashes and butts but there were fewer than a dozen butts inside, compared with hundreds snuffed out near benches and bus stops surrounding the terminal.
“We’re trying to do as good a job on the map as we can,” Elliott said of any difficulty that might be encountered in finding the specific smoking place at a designated area. “If you click on a specific little smoking sign when you get on the map, you are supposed to actually see a little bit better where in that location you can smoke. This is one of those things where there is going to be a learning curve for us and we’re going to try to figure out what makes sense for identification purposes.”
Elliott said the priority is to go through the approvals process to get the smoking areas in place.
“Then, once we have them in place, we’ll be making sure that they are as appealing as possible for those who are going to be using them.”
The municipality’s website has a form that can filled in to request a designated smoking area. Elliott said staff are assessing the applications with the goal of having 30 smoking areas designated by week’s end.
“First of all, we want to make sure that the places that we choose are safe. Another consideration, other than the Smoke Free Places Act, which says you have to be more than four metres away from a door or window, is that we have to make sure when we are doing snow removal or fall cleanup that we are not going to be damaging the recepticles that we are setting up. Also, a lot of these places that are being requested and selected don’t have a place right now that’s naturally available for smokers so we’re going to have to actually construct material that will go in place where these people are supposed to smoke.”
One woman texted that the designated smoking area at the Porters Lake transit terminal on Inspiration Drive is by the parking lot to the elementary school there.
“Did they just throw darts at a map to pick these locations?” she wrote.
Elliott said the province, with its Smoke Free Places Act, has already decided that 20 metres is a safe distance from a school or recreational facility.
“The location that we have out in Porters Lake is 26 metres (from school property), so if there is anyone complaining or thinking that is too close to where kids are, I would recommend that they reach out to their MLA or the minister responsible for the Smoke Free Places Act because that is ultimately what we are following,” Elliott said.
Elliott said bylaw compliance is complaint-driven. A complainant will call 311, a file will be opened and one of the municipality’s 20 compliancy officers will follow up.
“We’ve had a couple of calls to 311,” Elliott said Monday afternoon. “It’s one of those things where we have to try to get us much information from people as possible about where these people are, what the offence is and a descrption of what the people look like. Again, even if we were to be able to find these people, I want to stress that this would be about education, to let people know that they can’t smoke where they are.”
Fines for smoking on municipal properties such as sidewalks, streets, parks and trails can range from $25 to $2,000, but he said tickets and fines are a last resort.
“If somebody is blatantly disregarding what’s being said to them by the bylaw enforcement officer, there will be some sort of enforcement stick that we can use. Otherwise, we’ll be like those British comedies that say: ‘Stop, or I’ll ask you to stop again.’”
The municipal bylaw came into effect two days before the federal Cannabis Act will make it legal to buy, possess, share, grow, make and consume cannabis products.
Three other smaller municipalities in Canada have enacted comprehensive smoking bans. The Town of Kentville has had a smoke-free public places bylaw since 2010 and Hampstead, Que., passed a bylaw in March that does not include the banning of e-cigarettes. The municipality of Wood Buffalo, Alta., banned all forms of smoking and vaping on public property in July.
“We’re the only city in Canada that has gone this route,” Elliott said.
