Pearson properties go cold turkey

BY MARC LALONDE

The Chronicle

Saying the provincial ban on smoking indoors or anywhere near a building housing children at a given time was “too vague,� the Lester B. Pearson School Board took the law one step further and banned all smoking on board properties. That means no smoking anywhere on any school ground and even applies to the board’s head office in Dorval. The board officially incepted the new rule in a vote last week at the board’s monthly meeting.

So now students, staff, teachers and even head-office administrators must leave the grounds completely to feed their habit, making ashtrays out of sidewalks, lawns and curbsides.

Some responsible citizens hang on to their used butts, but most drop them wherever they please, leaving them — for the better part of the next decade. Cigarette butts and filters take up to 10 years to disintegrate, and in doing so, spread dangerous chemicals into the ground. Multiply that by, say, a hundred cigarette butts per day, and, you’re talking about quite a bit of detritus and pollution.

Students at Macdonald High School in Ste. Anne de Bellevue simply walk up the street off school property and light up — about 15 or 20 last Friday alone.

“They should put some kind of ashtray out here or something,� said one student, who asked not to be named. “Sometimes, I put the butt out and then throw it in the

toilet or something, but a lot of the time I just throw it on the ground and I don’t even think about it after that.�

It’s not any different at other West Island high schools. For smokers at John Rennie High in Pointe Claire, public property — complete with garbage cans and an ashtray — is right across the street. For smokers at say, St. Thomas High School in Pointe Claire, where everything around the school is private property.

A St. Thomas teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the butts littering the ground are “disgusting,� but couldn’t come up with a solution short of a public ashtray similar to the ones posted at the sides of large office buildings.

“I still don’t think the kids would use them even with those conditions,� he said. To avoid throwing his butts on the ground, the teacher puts them out on his shoe, then wraps the butt in a piece of tinfoil he brings from home, then throws the butts away at the end of the day.

The Dollard des Ormeaux resident said if the shoe were on the other foot, he’d be pretty appalled.

“If this were happening on my lawn, in front of my house, I’d be pretty upset about it. There’s no alternative, though,� he said.

Pearson chairman Marcus Tabachnick said by law, the board can’t do anything to make life more palatable for residents getting used to the smoking hordes congregating in front of their homes.

“There are no options on the school-board side of things, but we are very sensitive to the problem, which is essentially, shifting our troubles down the street. If the municipalities have any ideas we’d be very prepared to listen, but we’re not allowed to put ashtrays or anything like that in, by law,� he said.