Pocket ashtrays the butt of jokes

Clearly, distribution of these ashtrays will entice smokers not to discard their refuse on the ground. Instead, it is hoped, smokers will pocket the butt, and after the small pocket ashtray becomes full - it accommodates five used butts at a time - they will endeavour to empty their ashtrays neatly into garbage bags, and no more shall our lovely cityscape be blighted by piles of used, yellow cigarette butts outside buildings, schools and restaurants.

Sure it won’t.

This project might be the silliest thing the Tremblay administration - which has given us such delights as the look-you-have-your-mayors-back-in-name-only decentralization proposal, the crumbling infrastructure and the Park Avenue re-naming debacle - has come up with, and that’s saying something.

The notion that smokers are going to have an attack of conscience and start pocketing their butts after years of mindlessly flicking them away onto our streets, lawns and shoes, is silly at best and laughable at worst.

You’ve seen them, you might be one of them. Serious-looking people in shirts and ties, or just in shorts and T-shirts, furiously puffing away on a street corner. As they leave, they flick their butt away, never giving it a single thought.

The $40,000 Montreal spent on this charade of cleanliness would have been better spent on fixing the city’s crumbling infrastructure or tending to some of the leaks in our water system that Dollard des Ormeaux Mayor Ed Janiszewski once said was so porous, the city was losing up to 50 per cent of its water through leaky pipes.

We’re all for cleanliness, and frankly, the city’s move to ‘trash troopers’ whose mandate was to ticket businesses and landlords for improper maintenance was a good one.

But of course, in typical Montreal fashion, the trash troopers have been muted and their effect has been, well, mere window dressing.

All the well-meaning ideas in the world will go for naught unless someone, somewhere, in the city’s administration and in its blue-collar ranks, says finally, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll take responsibility for the job.’

Until that day, Montrealers, as well as those who live in the de-merged cities, will just have to accept that City Hall’s grand schemes and its inability to get things done on the ground will forever send Montreal’s best laid plans back to the drawing board.麞