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THE GLOBE AND MAIL - Canada's National Newspaper

By Terence Corcoran

As of yesterday, City of Toronto health police have the authority under a new bylaw to fine people who commit the latest health crime. The actual penalty for the crime, smoking in a private restaurant, starts at $250 and runs to $5,000 depending on the circumstances. It's a good bet, however, that the new law will go up in smoke before any significant money is collected, in part because of civil disobedience on the part of smokers and restaurant owners.

A second uprising against oppressive tobacco laws is brewing in Montreal and Ottawa, where various groups are organizing today against Health Minister David Dingwall's tobacco control legislation. According to news reports, Montreal restaurants are preparing to stage symbolic closings to protest against the Liberal plan to prevent tobacco companies from sponsoring cultural and sports events.

On the revolutionary scale, these are tiny ripples. But what those fighting the smoking battle--against health police, anti-smoking fanatics, statist bureaucrats and power-abusing politicians--may not realize is that their cause is a noble one based on the highest principles. It's the cause of individual rights against authoritarian rule, of personal liberty against state paternalism, of scientific logic over corrupt and junk science.

The official reason for banning smoking in restaurants is that second-hand smoke supposedly harms everyone else. As P. J. O'Rourke observed recently, the claim that "it harms everyone" is the "great cry of the new-wave totalitarians, the happy-face fascists, safety nazis, snuggle-puppy Stalinists. You throw these people out the door of politics, and they come crawling back in the window of health."

In the case of second-hand smoke, even the health hazard claim is spurious. Chances of contracting health problems from environmental smoke was claimed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in a 1992 study that has been discredited by every scientific review. The EPA rigged the study, and even then it proved nothing. There is no more chance of heart disease or lung cancer from environmental smoke than from eating a chocolate chip cookie every day.

When Canadian health activists claim that 300 Canadians will die from second-hand smoke a year, they are making the numbers up. Or when Garfield Mahood says "it's very clear--the No. 1 cause of preventable death in Canada is probably, for non-smokers, second-hand smoke," he is exaggerating. In fact, no Canadian can be said to have died from second-hand smoke.

The health risks associated with smoking are also routinely exaggerated and misstated. But even if smoking causes health problems, that is not a reason for mass state intervention.

Smokers (and non-smokers) looking for intellectual ammunition against the health fanatics invading their restaurants and expropriating their rights can find it in many places. One of the best is Smoking and Liberty: Government as a Public Health Problem (Varia Press, 1221 Fleury Street East, Montreal, Que., H2C 3K4, $9.95), a brilliant little book by Montreal writer Pierre Lemieux.

Among other things, Mr. Lemieux points out that the vast majority of smokers do not suffer from tobacco-related diseases. Only 10 per cent of smokers develop lung cancer, for example. Lung cancer rates also vary from country to country. Some countries with high smoking rates have lower cancer rates than countries with lower smoking rates.

Smoking and Liberty is a succinct and carefully documented summary of the junk science behind the anti-tobacco movement, and of the political hocus-pocus that politicians from Mr. Dingwall on down have been using to push the state into matters that properly belong to the individual.

The fact is that politicians don't care if the science is bogus, a principle laid down by former health minister Marc Lalonde in 1974. The Lalonde Doctrine, as Mr. Lemieux calls it, virtually said that when it comes to "modifying the behaviour of the population," it does not really matter whether the supporting hypothesis is valid or not. Mr. Lemieux summarizes the doctrine: "When God was in fashion, Power relied on religious justifications; now that science is God, Power corrupts science."

Mr. Lemieux's major contribution, aside from debunking the health scare, is to present the case for individual choice--even if one accepts that there is a health hazard. Once governments begin regulating behaviour as if it were everybody's concern, anything is possible.

Putting it in economic terms, Mr. Lemieux sees the risks clearly. "When society claims the ownership of everyone's health, everyone supports everyone else's costs. One's lifestyle may then be viewed as an externality for others." The end of this perverted logic, he said, is justification for "controlling or taxing not only tobacco and alcohol, but also sedentary lifestyles, driving, skiing, diet, sexual relations, and so forth." Obesity has already been identified as a health hazard by the health movement.

Over the past weekend, Liberal Labour Minister Alfonso Gagliano acknowledged in Montreal that "once the Health Minister is finished with tobacco, he could begin attacking alcohol."

© THE GLOBE AND MAIL - 1997