The City of North Vancouver is moving to scale back where smoking will be allowed in city limits.
Council passed a motion Monday night asking staff to rewrite the city's smoking bylaw to prohibit smoking within 7.5 metres of doors, windows and air intakes, on restaurant patios, and in city parks and trail areas.
The updated smoking bylaw exceeds the provincial ban on puffing on tobacco of only three metres from doors and air intakes.
The bylaw, however, will exempt the existing patios that currently allow smokers to light up: Sailor Hagar's, the Royal Canadian Legion, Army Navy Air Force Veterans Unit 45, the Rusty Gull, the Two Lions Pub and Jack Lonsdales, though that bar voluntarily banned butts.
The decision came after requests from Vancouver Coastal Health and the Canadian Cancer Society for the city to join the District of North Vancouver and District of West Vancouver in creating a uniform North Shore smoking bylaw, which the other two governments passed and the city rejected in 2009.
That bylaw prohibits smoking in entrance ways, patios, parks, playgrounds and municipally owned public gathering places.
The goal is to open up those areas to people who would otherwise choose to avoid dangerous secondhand smoke.
"There are Canadian studies that show exposure to second-hand smoke on patios can be as high as it previously was indoors. The idea that there's enough ventilation on patios is simply not the case," said Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, the North Shore's medical health officer in his presentation to council.
Mayor Darrell Mussatto suggested that Lysyshyn meet directly with the pub owners, rather than come to the city looking for an outright ban. And the mayor showed little interest in banning smoking at the legion.
"Last time we had a legion delegation, they had someone who fought in the Second World War and he came in front of us and said 'I fought for this country. I want to smoke on the patio.' That's pretty powerful when you get those people coming in front of us," Mussatto said.
But it wasn't the individual smoker's health Lysyshyn was lobbying for.
"It's powerful but that doesn't give him permission to harm other people's health," he responded.
For the pub's owners, the issue was economic. Brian Riedlinger, co-owner of Sailor Hagar's in Lower Lonsdale, pleaded with council to spare pubs from the new bylaw to help them compete with restaurants, which, thanks to pending changes in B.C.'s liquor laws, will no longer have to sell food to patrons ordering alcohol.
"As a struggling small business, we need to find ways to distinguish ourselves from them and we see this as one good way because the impact on a non-smoker is minimal and no one under 19 years of age is permitted," he said.
Lysyshyn said studies have shown that tobacco bans on patios only have neutral or positive economic impacts over the long term.
The motion to tighten up restrictions on smoking in public places but leaving pubs alone strikes a balance between the competing interests, Coun. Craig Keating argued.
On the matter of smoking and going one step beyond banning butts on patios, First Street resident Gary Charbonneau appeared as a delegation asking council to consider banning smoking in Lower Lonsdale, using First Street between Lonsdale and Chesterfield avenues as a pilot area. Charbonneau presenting council with a 700-name petition requesting the LoLo ban.
For that, Mussatto said the city would have to get a legal opinion on whether or not it has the jurisdiction to enforce it, which staff would look into.
