North Vancouver City Mayor Darrell Mussatto is becoming a one-man guardian of the environment.
When he’s not guarding the taps to prevent us from needlessly watering our gardens and washing our cars in his role as chairman of the Metro Vancouver utilities committee, he’s fighting unsightly cigarette butt pollution as the anti-litterbug.
As Jeremy Shepherd reported recently in these pages, North Van’s mayor is proposing a province-wide deposit on all cigarettes of $1 per pack and 5 cents for each butt returned.
The mayor (and who can blame him?) is fed up with people who think the world is their ashtray and continue to toss cigarette butts onto the street, out of their car windows, on the beach or in the tinder-dry forest.
On the one hand, you almost feel sorry for the dwindling cult of smokers who are increasingly challenged to find a place to smoke. Not to mention what they’re doing to their health.
I say “almost” because they don’t endear themselves to the rest of us by besmirching the landscape with toxic waste. I especially love the ones who smoke with the windows down in their cars and toss their lit cigarettes onto the street because they don’t want their cars to smell or get cluttered by unsightly cigarette butts. Tough luck for the rest of us.
And there must be a 10th circle in hell for those remarkable individuals who park their cars, open the car door and dump their overloaded ashtrays onto the street.
It’s enough to make some people behave with extreme prejudice: Such as one guy, a natty individual with a handlebar moustache who was out walking his twin borzois. He had a unique response to a smoker, who was behind the wheel of a late-model land yacht. Caddy Man stopped at a light, opened the door, and dumped about 50 butts onto the pavement. Borzoi Man carefully scooped up the butts, knocked politely on the Caddy’s window, and as it rolled down, proceeded to pelt the guy in the car with his own garbage. The window went back
up immediately.
Not recommended, of course.
Mayor Mussatto is serious about this deposit thing. If the province won’t go for it, he’s considering a local ban, if it’s legal. I don’t see why not — if you can regulate dog poop, why not cigarette butts, which are also right up there on the obnoxious scale? And if you can’t protect your local environment without the OK from Christy Clark, what’s with that?
Of course, I’m not a lawyer. It’s probably a charter case for some enterprising legal beagle.
The question is, would it even work? In a way, in an effort to clean up the air, we’ve brought this upon ourselves, banishing smokers to the streets and then taking away their ashtrays. Mayor Mussatto says we don’t want to normalize or making smoking acceptable, but removing the ashtrays without an alternative leads to littering. Apparently smokers don’t think it’s a good idea to deposit their smouldering cigarettes into their pockets. They like to live dangerously, just not that dangerously.
In fact, smokers may think it’s OK to litter more aggressively, if they’re paying $1 a pack for the privilege. Sounds crazy, but these are people who voluntarily ingest thousands of chemicals, including at least 60 known to cause cancer. Talk about crazy.
I know, I know. If you smoke, the last thing you want to hear is some self-righteous drone going on about your bad habit. I used to smoke once myself, although that was so long ago it was OK to smoke on the maternity wards of hospitals.
Smokers, think about it for a minute — you’d be providing binners and recycling jockeys with a whole new source of income: gathering and recycling 500 butts a day (which doesn’t seem like a stretch) would be worth $25. Do the math. You could almost support yourself: that’s $750 a month, which is more than you get on welfare … and it’s income no one is going to declare. Trust me on that.
Whatever Donald Trump says, civilization is preserved through mutual co-operation. If we mutually assign toxic cigarette waste to the recycling bin, that’s one for civilization.
Thanks in no small part to Darrell Mussatto, or as he will be known going forward, Brother Nature.
Journalist and communications consultant Paul Sullivan has been a North Vancouver resident since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Madonna. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
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