March 14, 2007
Tobacco Sales (Banning Tobacco and Smoking in Public Places and Schools) Amendment Act, 2007

I'm really pleased to be able to stand and speak in support of this.

As I was thinking about the topic and listening to the various other speakers, I was reminded of my grandfather, who was fond of telling the story of how he quit smoking. He was a very determined individual, but for years and years as a young man he'd been smoking.

When he reached his mid-30s or so, he really struggled to try to quit. And he was angry with himself because even though he was a very determined, self-controlled individual, for some reason when it came to cigarettes, he couldn't stop.

It was his anger at himself for not being able to control this part of his life that caused him to make a deal with himself. He made this deal with himself on a New Year's Eve. He said to himself: I'm not going to smoke for one year — cold turkey. He went for one year.

My grandmother would tell how on that New Year's Eve he sat up all night till midnight just to have that cigarette. He continued to smoke — not as much, but for a number of years after that, eventually quitting. It really illustrates the kind of hold that this substance has on individuals who smoke.

I am currently a recovering smoker. I'm wearing my nicotine patch as we speak, and I've been doing that for a number of months. It is a huge challenge. I would consider myself to be a fairly determined individual, and it is amazing the lengths to which a person's mind will go to get some of that nicotine, to get some of that substance back into the body and, even more so, just to continue in the habit.

For me, Madam Speaker, to look at any actions we can take that are going to make the world around a smoker more conducive to quitting, more conducive to choosing something healthier…. Anything that we can do along those lines, we need to do.

I'm very pleased to see that we're taking a look at things that are going to impact young people, what they see and what's around them. Having been involved in education at the school board level, I'm quite familiar with a lot of the research around student behaviour about how you change student behaviour, how you change school culture.

We often talk about it when we talk about bullying, when we talk about safety in schools and that kind of behaviour. But the same things hold true for issues like smoking. We know that, for example, when we talk about bullying behaviours, while we need to have punishments for those who act wrongly towards others, we also need to deal primarily with the audience — the other students around who by their inaction endorse what a bully does.
I would argue that it's the same kind of thing with behaviours such as smoking. When smoking was first banned from school grounds in the school district I was in, in Surrey, many people reacted by saying: "Well,

you know, it's not going to stop any kids from smoking. They're just going to go down to the local corner store, or they're going to go around to the neighbour's yard."

Certainly, as we change culture, as we change the ideas people have, those things can happen for a time, but there's something else that takes place as you make it more difficult. Maybe there's that kid on the edge who says: "I don't really feel like walking in the rain all the way down the block to that guy's house so that I can have a cigarette."

There's one kid on the edge who doesn't have it, and pretty soon there's a whole bunch of them that think: "I'd really rather go do that." It's about changing the audience for the behaviour when you're talking about students.

To take a step whereby we're going to say that in all of our public and independent schools and on the school grounds, we are going to eliminate smoking is a natural. It's a natural, and it's the kind of thing that is going to have such a long-term benefit for our students, not just in school but also in helping to change the kind of culture we all live in.

They're our future. They are the ones who are going to determine, by and large, how this world evolves around issues like climate change, health care and smoking. We need them to be believing in a life that is healthy and making choices that are going to reinforce that life.

When it comes to public spaces, public doorways, indoor air quality, that's an area that's really seen a significant cultural shift. I'm sure that we've all had experiences where we've walked through a cloud of smoke to go into a building and felt the discomfort. Even as a smoker, that was an uncomfortable place for me to be in. Yet it probably wasn't because the particular smokers were trying to be rude and nasty or obnoxious. They were probably just doing their thing.

This gives the extra impetus for that person to say: "You know, probably it bothers the folks who are walking by me, so I'm going to move, and I'm not going to stand here." It gives them that extra incentive, and you're making it a little bit harder. From the recovering smoking side of it, I will tell you that it makes it a little bit easier to quit.

When it comes to tobacco sales in public hospitals and health facilities, when this was announced, one of the things that struck me was how many folks approached me shocked that there would be any access in many of those public facilities. They were quite surprised that that wasn't already the case.

I think that there are parts of this where we're leading, and I'm very proud of this. There are parts of it where we're actually following what the culture is already expecting us to do in support of stopping this terrible scourge on not only us as individuals but on the costs to our health care system.

Certainly, the costs to our health care system are tremendous. I have a keen interest with respect to that, being the Parliamentary Secretary for the Conversation on Health. One of the things that is very commonly raised at the regional forums is that we need to be paying greater and greater attention to issues of prevention and, in particular, preventing chronic disease.

When you take a look at smoking, we know that smoking kills 6,000 British Columbians every year and costs the B.C. economy $2.7 billion every year. I don't think that you could even accurately calculate what it costs our health care system. You could probably come up with some figures that fit into a court action, etc., but when you really start to think of all of the different tentacles that a disease like lung cancer or emphysema has and what kinds of pressures that puts on all sorts of areas in the system, I don't know that we can even calculate it.

Then, of course, we have to think about the human costs. What kind of a cost is there on a family when someone dies young? What kind of a cost is there on a family when during that time of illness they're helping their loved one get through a horrible battle with lung cancer or with emphysema?

I had a wonderful uncle, a brilliant man. He was a denturist, and he was just one of these people that was always active, always outdoors. But he was a heavy smoker. I can remember as a child that it always surprised me to see someone who was relatively young….

In my eyes as a child he wasn't some grey old crotchety fellow. He looked very spry and very young, but he was dragging this oxygen tank around with him because it was the only way he could live and breathe. Eventually it was the emphysema that killed him. In spite of all that, he wasn't able to quit smoking.

I'm really pleased that one of the other things we're doing now is providing smoking cessation materials and the availability of that to those who are in need of it and who have difficulty affording it themselves. I think that's a huge step forward.

We've certainly seen advances in terms of cost. I know that years ago, when I was first considering quitting smoking and was looking at purchasing different products, the price of the products far outweighed the price that it would cost me to keep on smoking. That was a real disincentive, especially when there's all that fear with making that choice and taking the leap of faith that it takes to try and quit.

To be able to make it that much easier so that the availability is there, so that we're helping people remove those excuses that the nicotine and the addiction want to create in their minds…. We're doing something that is so profoundly helpful. When you think about it, it's hard to imagine another area where government can have such a direct impact on an individual and on their chance to live. It really is.

In the health care system generally, we're repairing people. We're fixing them when something goes wrong. Here we're actually offering a way in which we can be there alongside someone through all of these various things — whether it's assisting to remove the advertising so that children aren't being influenced by that and aren't being encouraged to smoke, or whether it's banning the smoking outside of doorways or on school grounds. All of these things are going to have a

direct impact on changing the way people think, changing the way children act and, in the end, changing what happens for their life outcomes.

It's a really tremendous thing to think that you can be in government and have that kind of an effect on people. We know that when it comes to smoking, there's more to this than just buying the cigarette and picking up the cigarette. We know that we have to help people with smoking cessation methods. I'm really pleased to see that we're doing that.

It certainly seems inconsistent that we would have ever allowed public athletic or recreational facilities or provincial buildings to sell cigarettes. Then again, we're in a cultural shift. It's a lot like what we've seen in climate change. It used to be that people wouldn't accept that climate change was a reality. Indeed, now they do, and they believe they need to do something about it.

Gosh, I can remember stories about ashtrays in school board meeting rooms, doctors smoking in labour delivery rooms. It was always the common, accepted thing. This is another example of something where you need to pay attention to how the world is changing around you, respond as a government and do something that supports the good things that other people are doing around it.

We certainly can see that we have a lot of support for something like this, and I'm very pleased to see that our opposition colleagues have been speaking in support as well. I wanted to read what the provincial health officer had to say about the kinds of changes, the kind of action that we're taking.

He says: "These changes will close a number of gaps in the protection of public health. It's so important that we prevent youth and young adults from starting to use tobacco and that we encourage and assist tobacco users to quit or reduce their use of tobacco products."

He's absolutely right. This is so critical that we think not just about the balancing of people's rights to their individual choices. We've covered that off, I believe.

We've allowed some flexibility so that people who are only impacting on their own health — in their own cars or their own homes — are going to be able to make that choice, much as we might wish they didn't. So we've allowed for that.

For those who would be using tobacco for ceremonial uses, we're going to ensure that those kinds of activities are also protected. We're taking a reasonable and balanced approach to this. We're taking an important leadership role, and it's not going to be without its challenges.

I know it's much simpler to stand in this House and talk about the values we all bring to this and about the fact that not smoking is so key to good health and that of course we want young people not to start using tobacco. It's very easy to talk about those things.

It is going to be extremely difficult, I believe, when we get down to implementation and we're dealing with individual communities and businesses and trying to strike a balance between what they see as their need to operate, to function, and what we know is good public policy. It's not going to be easy, but I do believe that by starting out on the right path with what appears to be support from both sides of the House, that we certainly have a better chance of achieving success than if this was simply government action.

I'm proud that we're a government leading this, but I'm very pleased that we appear to have support from both sides of this House. I think that's going to make some of the rougher spots along this road pass by with much more ease.

I'm also pleased to note that we're going to be working together with communities, with organizations, in terms of making these implementations work. That's going to be critical when we work with schools and school districts. It's going to be critical when we work with public facilities that we ensure that they're part of solving this and not just seeing this as the heavy hand of government.

It's always difficult to work with something that amounts to a negative, a ban — even when you're talking about banning a dangerous substance. It's going to be a challenge, but we need to be turning this into yet another opportunity to make healthy choices, another opportunity to ensure that we're all working toward our own good health and the good health of others.

It's an opportunity to be creating yet again another opportunity for British Columbia to be that place that leads, not only in health and physical fitness, but in everything that we have around us that makes this province such a wonderful place to be.

I'm very pleased to see us leading on this and very pleased that we're seeing the kind of support we're going need to make this work, to make this operate. I'm quite sure that those who've worked long and hard for many years promoting the quitting of smoking, promoting the removal of advertising, etc., will be coming alongside us and supporting us, as well, as we move forward with many of these initiatives.

With that, Madam Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to speak in support of this bill, and I'm very much looking forward to being able to see these actions taken and to seeing a healthier future for British Columbia.