VICTORIA, British Columbia - The province of Quebec plans to ban smoking in restaurants, bars and most public places beginning in January 2006. Under the law, which still has to be evaluated by a parliamentary commission, there will be no provision made for designated smoking areas in bars or restaurants and it will be illegal to smoke within 9 metres of the entrances to educational institutions, daycares, and health and social service facilities.

Tammy Aggett, manager of the Mad Hatter Saloon in Montreal, says that when it comes to pubs and taverns, she doesn’t believe anyone will obey the anti-smoking law and foresees some “major headaches” in trying to enforce it.

“Smoking is still really rampant here,” says Aggett. “People are not health conscious, they don’t care and they just want to go out…they think that one of the last venues for public smoking should be in bars.”

Quebec is the latest in a string of Canadian provinces to enact varying degrees of smoking bans in recent years. In May 2004, Nunavut banned smoking in all public places including bars, but the territory still has the highest smoking rate in Canada with 48 percent of the population lighting up—over double the national average.

There are no official statistics available as to whether the bans have been a motivating factor for smokers to quit, but according to the Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey, smoking rates have dropped in the last 6 years. In 1999, there were approximately 6 million smokers in Canada aged 15 or older, compared with just over 5 million for the same age group in 2004.

Dr. Richard Stanwyck, Chief Medical Health Officer for the Vancouver Island Health Authority, says that since the ban came into effect in Victoria— the first city in Canada to enact a smoking bylaw— there has been a significant drop in smoking rates.

“We don’t want to take all of the credit, but when we first introduced the idea of the bylaw, our smoking rate was around 20 percent in 1999. Our current estimates are around 13 percent, and we believe that at least some of that 7 percent drop is attributable to the smoking bylaw.”

Stanwyck says that a bar owner in Victoria who was the most vocal opponent of the bylaw when it first came in now concedes that, contrary to what he expected, business has actually improved because more non-smokers have become patrons and he has seen a positive change in the overall atmosphere of his bar. Stanwyck also says that a recent Ipsos-Reid poll found that the bylaw now has a 90 percent approval rate among the people of Victoria, compared with 63 percent in 1996.

Aggett, a non-smoker, says she thinks a smoking ban in itself is good but that smokers are increasingly made to feel like outcasts, and most smokers she knows believe that if smoking is so unhealthy then the government shouldn’t approve the sale of cigarettes.

“The government wants it both ways. They want people to quit smoking but they want to still sell cigarettes and make money off you. They’re profiting from the taxes yet they’re not putting the money back into the hospitals where people are dying of lung cancer. The mood is very cynical in Quebec.”