The bylaw of smoking

Do-gooders at City Hall have launched an ad campaign to boost a new anti-smoking bylaw.

Come the New Year, smokers will be banned from privately owned joints where children are present, such as restaurants and hotels.

A new billboard spotted on the south side of the Disraeli Freeway over-dramatizes the anti-tobacco crackdown with the face of a hapless kid engulfed by a waft of smoke that could easily be mistaken for the pits of hell.

The billboard issues this warning: "Where minors are permitted inside, you smoke outside."

You don't have to convince me that cigarette smoking is bad news. But even more disturbing is the creeping infringement on individual rights and private property that has been ushered into law by the anti-smoking zealots.

The whole lot of them are a tiresome group of neo-puritans professing to know what's best for us. For whatever reason, they single out smoking as enemy No. 1 even though deadly heart disease and cancer can be attributed to other ...