OTTAWA'S AMAZING BYLAW

If City Counsellors Can Wipe Out Smoking, Why Not Try Them On Illegal Drugs?

NOWHERE in Canada are smokers more ferociously treated these days than in
the nation's capital, where a draconian bylaw last August entirely banished
the hateful weed from all workplaces, restaurants and bars. Predictable
indignation ensued among Ottawa smokers and restaurant proprietors,
especially since their pleas for provision of separate, ventilated,
air-filtered smoking rooms were summarily rejected. And now, adding insult
to injury, chief medical health officer Robert Cushman, who lobbied heavily
for the 100% ban, has proposed an exception: "smoking huts" for city bus
drivers who cannot leave their employer's property.

Mr. Cushman's rationale is that city drivers fall outside municipal, and
inside provincial, jurisdiction. "This just doesn't make sense," fumes Dan
Taite, fundraising co-ordinator for PUBCO (the Ottawa Coalition of Pubs and
Bars), a six-month-old group fighting the bylaw in court. Furthermore,
giving bus drivers an "out" denied to others is "a contradiction and
absolutely hypocritical." Bartenders cannot leave their bars, he notes, and
go out to a hut for a puff. Meanwhile bankruptcy threatens some PUBCO members.

But hypocrisy reigns in Ottawa, Mr. Taite charges. For example, results of
the regional health department's pre-ban poll allegedly were tampered with.
Moreover, plainclothes bylaw officers, in an unprecedented tactical
innovation, haunt restaurants to nail them for infractions which carry
fines up to $5,000.

Notably different, meanwhile, is the official treatment accorded various
other weeds. Ottawans living near downtown parks complain bitterly that
overt drug-dealing nightly plagues their neighbourhoods. Despite their
repeated calls, they say, the police refuse to act. Staff Sergeant Leo
Janveau explains that this is "because we have civil rights in this
country. We get general complaints about drug offences all the time...but
the Charter of Rights will not allow us to go and search people just
because they look a little bit suspicious." Undercover work to catch
dealers, he adds, is costly and seldom successful.

PUBCO members would doubtless give their tobacco-stained eye teeth for such
an attitude from the city's bylaw officers. Dan Taite told city councillors
that he, being Jewish, knows Gestapo tactics when he sees them. He cited
"government-sanctioned intimidation, deliberate misinformation, undercover
officers spying on businesses, and a 'snitch' line for anonymous callers to
turn in their neighbours."

One of PUBCO's many sympathizers is Ottawa Sun columnist Claudette Cain,
former mayor of Gloucester (now amalgamated into Ottawa), who says she has
"a real problem with [bureaucratic] lies." Of the 504 Ottawa residents
polled in the survey, she notes, 420 were non-smokers. Yet 75% of poll
respondents thought smoking should be allowed in separate, ventilated
rooms--information which somehow failed to reach city council. This curious
circumstance has also upset some councillors.

Currently, PUBCO and the city are arguing whether a new Decima poll says
business revenue is not declining. The health department is not talking.
But bylaw department director Susan Jones says things could not be going
better. "We're at 95% compliance," she exults--much higher than with other
bylaws, and way ahead of other Ontario towns. Nor do her enforcing officers
encounter animosity, she claims; in fact, they are sometimes "applauded or
hugged."

But while tobacco, although still a legal substance, is so efficiently
suppressed, drug dealers and users infest public parks with various illegal
substances. There are also the weekend "raves." For instance, businessmen
in the central Byward Market area near the alcohol-free nightclub Illusion
are wondering about all the young people who pour into the street around 9
a.m. Saturday and Sunday, dishevelled and dazed after a hard night's
raving. Onlookers conclude they must be on drugs, particularly Ecstasy.

Illusion's owner Manon Gollain denies any such thing. "Everyone who comes
to my club gets searched by us," she avers, "because we do not want trouble
with the police." Police make visits too. "We send youth squad people into
Illusion and such places all the time," says Staff Sgt. Janveau. "We even
had a social worker that went into the club and did a lot of work in the
raves...But we simply don't have the authority or grounds to do something
at any moment without specific information. That is the difficulty for a
police officer."

But if public smoking is so easy to stamp out, Ottawans wonder how come it
is so impossible to stamp out drug dealing. Some maintain, however, that
there's an obvious answer: have city council pass a bylaw prohibiting drug
dealing in parks and at raves, and unleash the enforcement officers. The
druggies would not stand a chance.