Council amends smoking bylaw
Clarifies definition of patio
By Elaine Della-Mattia
Local News - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 @ 09:00
The city’s smoking bylaw received its first amendment Monday, paving the way for Algoma Health Unit inspectors to lay charges against bars that don’t conform to the city’s definition of “patio.”
The amendment requires patios where smoking is allowed to have 35 per cent of their walls open to the air.
The change also stipulates a patio must not share open doors or windows with a public place and must not be used as a main entrance. It also is prohibits sharing a thermostat, controlled heating or air conditioning with a public place.
Carol Wierzbicki, owner of the Esquire Club, told council local establishments have complied with the city’s bylaw but she and the others fear future changes will cost them more.
“We’ve followed the guidelines to specifications at great expense,” she told council.
“It’s law now as long as it ends here. I don’t want to see future regulations added.”
Wierzbicki told council it was time to back the business community, especially restaurants, bars, bingo halls, casinos and taverns, which have lost business to the smoking bylaw and are still waiting for non-smokers to “flock” to their establishments.
All have complained of a substantial loss in business since the city’s anti-smoking bylaw took effect last June 1.
Monday’s amendment was imposed to give business owners security against future changes.
They had questioned the city’s authority to regulate outdoor patios because the rules had not been included in the bylaw.
Ward 4 Coun. Neil DelBianco agreed it would be irresponsible to change the bylaw after Monday night. He vowed he wouldn’t support any future changes that might be onerous.
It’s unknown yet what provincial anti-smoking legislation will say or how it will affect the city’s bylaw, which is superseded by provincial law.
The province has promised legislation in the spring.

http://www.saultstar.com/webapp/sitepages/content.asp?contentID=95102&catname=Local+News

TORONTO, ONTARIO--(CCNMatthews - Jan. 26, 2005) -
Proposed changes to Ontario tobacco legislation and recent rise in taxes set to damage convenience store industry
Recent proposed changes to Ontario tobacco legislation, the latest rise in tobacco taxes and increased occurrences of theft have convenient store retailers concerned about the future of their business.
The Ontario Convenience Store Association (OCSA) (www.conveniencestores.ca) says the ability to sell tobacco products is critical to the livelihood of convenience store owners. Lottery tickets and tobacco products are key items sold in convenience stores with 40 per cent of sales coming from tobacco sales alone. Limiting the sale of tobacco will result in many of the smaller independent convenient stores going out of business. Small family run independent convenience stores make up the majority of the OCSA's 6,000 members.
Workshops addressing tobacco legislation issues and offering innovative sales solutions will be held at the Convenience U (www.convenienceu.ca) and CARWACS (www.carwacs.com) convenience, gas and car wash convention and conference, March 1, 2 and 3, 2005 at the Toronto Congress Centre.
It is the only show of its kind endorsed by the OCSA.
Adding to the concerns of Ontario convenience store owners is the Supreme Court of Canada's January 20, 2005 decision to support Saskatchewan legislation prohibiting displays, advertising or promotion of tobacco products in places where young people are permitted. Some believe this decision may have implications outside of Saskatchewan.
"The Ontario government recently announced its proposed ban of countertop displays, causing some confusion as to what kinds of tobacco displays are acceptable," says the OCSA Executive Director Dave Bryans. "Some convenience store owners believe they cannot have any tobacco displays, including back wall displays. Currently, the only proposed change is for the removal of countertop displays that allow the customer to handle the product prior to purchasing it."
The OCSA would like to work with the Ontario government on another key problem - illegal tobacco sales on native reserves. The convenience store industry has seen a dramatic increase in crime, which police officers believe to be a direct result of the three tax increases in the past twenty months. As cigarettes become more expensive, people are willing to purchase them at lower prices on the black market, which results in increased thefts. Small independently owned convenience stores are the main targets as they are perceived to be without security systems.
The November 2004 Tobacco Related Crime Study, prepared by the Inkster Group for the OCSA shows that since 2001 - 2002 convenience stores has experienced an 127 per cent increase in break and enter incidents, while convenient gas bars have seen an increase of 28.7 per cent. About 53 per cent of reported crime events at convenience stores have involved cigarettes.
"It isn't only the convenience store owner who's concerned about the proposed display changes and tax increases," says Petro-Canada Senior Director of Planning and Performance Howard McIntyre. "Gas bar retailers have licensees who independently operate our gas stations and face the same issues as convenience store owners. One out of three gas bar retailers experienced a crime event last year. This number will increase as the price of cigarettes goes up. It will also fuel the consumer's desire to purchase tobacco products via the black market."
Convenience U and CARWACS are produced by Fulcrum Events Inc. in association with Your Convenience Manager (YCM), Canada's leading magazine for the convenience industry and Conveniencecentral.ca.
About Convenience U
Convenience U, produced by Fulcrum Events Inc. (www.fulcrum.ca), held its first 'school of convenience retailing' in 2004. It is an event  designed to bring together retailers, suppliers, distributors and  leading industry representatives to discuss issues facing the convenience store industry and offer innovative solutions for success.
For additional information visit www.convenienceu.ca.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
Sacke & Associates Inc.Margaret Antkowski 416.493.5723, ext 204 margareta@sackepr.com

http://w5d2.ccnmatthews.com/scripts/ccn-release.pl?/current/0126054n.html

    TORONTO, Jan. 17 /CNW/ - Ontario's Chief Coroner, Dr. Barry McLellan and Fire Marshal of Ontario, Bernard Moyle are appealing to owners and residents of apartment buildings and other multi-unit dwellings to take extreme caution this winter to prevent fire.
    "Every year, the Coroner's Office sees victims of fires that occurred in multi-unit dwellings," says Dr. McLellan. "In many instances, a few simple precautions would have prevented these tragedies."
    For owners and building managers of multi-unit dwellings, the following safety measures will help to avoid disaster and are requirements of the Ontario Fire Code:

    -  Ensure the building's fire alarm system is operational and that each living unit is equipped with a working smoke alarm.
    -  Ensure that if self-closing door mechanisms are required in the building, they are kept fully functional.
    -  Keep hallways and exits from living units unobstructed by items such as motorized scooters.
    -  If the building is required to have a fire safety plan, make sure it is posted and that all occupants are aware of it and know what to do in case of a fire.
    -  Ensure tenants know to keep exits clear, door closing devices functional and smoke alarms working at all times.

    The Fire Marshal encourages everyone in Ontario who lives in an apartment to prevent fire in their homes by taking extra care when cooking or smoking and when using candles or portable space heaters. It is also important that everyone know what to do if a fire occurs by developing and practicing a home fire escape plan.
    "When you live in a multi-unit dwelling, your actions may impact on all the other occupants of the building," says Dr. McLellan. "Following good fire safety practices will help keep everyone safe from fire."
    In 2004, 100 people died as a result of fires in Ontario. Twenty-two of these deaths occurred in multi-unit dwellings.
 For further information: Bev Gilbert, Office of the Fire Marshal, (416) 325-3178; Dr. Peter Clark, Regional Supervising Coroner, (705) 745-9887

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/January2005/17/c3428.html

*how many fires is caused by cigarettes? stats say, not many

By D. Grant Black Sunday, January 30th, 2005

HAVE provincial governments botched the public smoking issue? Is a complete ban too harsh? For once, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein might be on to something. Klein waded into the tobacco debate last week when he dismissed the health benefits of a smoking ban in his province. Klein views smoking bans in bars as anti-business, and he advised at-risk service industry employees to seek jobs elsewhere if they don't like their customers' smoking habits.

But if Alberta has found the right balance between health regulation and business interests, what happens when the Wild West, anything-goes entrepreneurship of the Alberta Tories grinds up against an NDP government's social engineering next-door in Saskatchewan, where the new Tobacco Control Act banned public smoking as of Jan. 1?

The conflict is centred on Lloydminster, the Yellowhead Highway boom town on the Saskatchewn/Alberta border that now finds itself divided into smoking and no-smoking zones. Since the smoking ban only applies to the Saskatchewan side of the city, bar-owners there are watching their business migrate to the Alberta side.

Smokers in Saskatchewan can now be fined up to $10,000 for lighting up in public areas, and fines against businesses can go as high as $25,000. In case you've been out ice-fishing for the last few months, Manitoba's public areas went completely smoke-free on Oct. 1. The NDP governments in both provinces consciously chose public-health interests over economic ones.

In the mid-1970s, roughly half of Canadians smoked. By the early 1980s, some offices still allowed their employees to smoke at their desks in between gulps of coffee and bites of doughnuts. But now, smokers represent just 21.5 per cent of the Canadian population.

In my experience, many of the holdouts appear to be those hardcore, Andy Capp types who manage to balance a butt off their chiselled lips while expertly weaving through traffic. Some seem to feel that it's their God-given right to fill the air with toxic blue smoke everywhere they venture. There's nothing addicts hate more than the state limiting their ability to indulge in harmful habits around other people who don't.

Back in the 1920s, the Prohibition on liquor created a criminal class of entrepreneurs who were simply filling a need. But governments finally realized that taxes levied on harmful, yet socially acceptable, substances would grease the wheels of essential services such as schools and roads. It's a Faustian pact that governments now have with purveyors of alcohol, tobacco and even gambling.

Governments, though, have been compelled to scrap the tobacco pact out of fear that they could be held liable for smoking ailments, since they have a responsibilty to protect the health of their citizens. So, most Canadian provinces and territories have resumed their roles as Prohibitionists.

My local bar owner is pretty convincing about all this. He says the non-smoking 78.5 per cent of the population that the Saskatchewan government is protecting from second-hand smoke does not patronize his bar. Most of his clientele are not walk-ins, but regulars who smoke when they drink, socialize and push VLT buttons. He smokes, and so do his staff. If bar patrons who smoke are forced to head home to their own kitchen party, how does that keep people employed in the service industry?

Everybody knows that tobacco is bad for you. But a bar isn't a pilates studio -- it's not really a "public place." It's a place of free will, where people go to imbibe alcohol, fully aware that their liver could cack after years of alcohol abuse. You could abuse yourself at home with a bottle just as easily, but where's the entertainment value in that exercise?

Let's be fair about a compromise with bar owners: an entrepreneur who provides the social lubricant called alcohol should be allowed to create a separate area for their smoking clientele, with staff who smoke replenishing the drinks there.

Smokers to the left, non-smokers to the right. It would create two social dynamics, just like the days of separate entrances for ladies and gentlemen at beverage rooms. Smokers deserve their own smoking pens in their favourite watering holes.

Remember, even Vancouver's heroin addicts have their own subsidized shooting galleries.

D. Grant Black is a Saskatchewan journalist and pundit.

www.winnipegfreepress.com

CBC News Last Updated Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:17:36 EST

PITT MEADOWS, B.C. - Police are investigating after about 100 people, many of them children, were poisoned by carbon-monoxide at a hockey arena east of Vancouver.

Dozens of people were overcome by the fumes at the arena in Pitt Meadows Saturday.

Some were treated by emergency crews inside the arena, while others were rushed to hospital.

Police suspect the gas came from the exhaust of an ice-cleaning machine.

They are also looking into whether the air circulation system at the Ridge Meadows arena was tampered with.

General manager Jerry Remak says someone appears to have broken into the facility. He found that a padlock was missing at one of the entrances to the building and the ventilation system had been turned off during the night.

Fraser Valley health authority spokesperson Don Bower says four of the victims were transported to Vancouver General Hospital to receive oxygen treatment in a hyperbaric chamber before being released.

He says anyone showing symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning or any pregnant mothers who may have been at the rink Saturday should go to a hospital to be checked.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/01/30/arena-gas050130.html

 NEW YORK A federal judge in New York City has tossed out racketeering allegations the city brought against a group of online cigarette sellers.

But the judge will let New York City refile its claims in its bid to collect (m) millions of dollars in taxes.

 The ruling yesterday by U-S District Judge Deborah Batts came after the city had sued the operators of 16 cigarette Web sites to require taxes be paid on Internet sales.

 The judge said prosecutors could not prove the civil racketeering charges against the defendants, because they failed to show that the people who operate the online enterprises and the enterprises themselves are distinct, a requirement of that law.

 But the judge agreed to keep the case in New York, preventing it from being transferred to Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri or New Mexico.

http://www.wavy.com/Global/story.asp?S=2869799

By Jamie Morgan 31jan05

A MOTHER-of-eight armed herself with a cleaver after a suspected serial sex attacker walked into her foster daughter's bedroom in a terrifying home invasion yesterday.
The girl, aged 10, said she was woken by the sound of someone walking through the unlocked back door of the Findon home and in to her bedroom about 5am. "It was really scary," she said. "I saw someone standing in the doorway . . . and I asked 'Who is it?'." "The man said, 'Go back to bed' so I asked again who it was and he just said 'Go back to bed'.

The girl said the man, who she described as aged about 25, then went to her foster mother's room across the hallway and exposed himself in her doorway.

"Then he came back and I started screaming," she said.

Her foster mother woke up and ran to the room the girl shared with another child.

"I grabbed a cleaver and ran to the girls' room and he was just walking out the back door," she said.

"That's how much he didn't care – he didn't even run.

"I was so happy to have him out of the house, I didn't chase him, I just wanted to make sure everyone was OK."

The police dog squad searched for the man while officers doorknocked the area.

The mother said she believed the same man tried to climb into the front window of their home about a month ago. "I was leaning out the front window to have a cigarette about 4am one morning and saw the same guy trying to get in the front window," she said.

"I called out and he ran off. His face is burned into my memory now, I would recognise him anywhere."

The man is also a suspect in the indecent assault of two girls who were sleeping in a shed on a property at a Beverly address last Wednesday.

Police said the two girls were sleeping on the Williams St property when they were woken by the man about 3.45am.

He spoke to the girls before jumping a side fence, escaping on foot. Despite an extensive search of the area by the dog squad, the man was not found.

The attacker is described as being of Aboriginal appearance, wearing a black jacket, blue jeans and a black beanie.

http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,12100690%255E421,00.html

Growers attending meeting are urged to invest funds wisely

BY JOHN REID BLACKWELL , TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER  Jan 30, 2005

SOUTH BOSTON -- Growers of Virginia's top cash crop were cautioned yesterday to consider carefully how they use the money they receive from a $10 billion buyout of U.S. tobacco allotments.

Thousands of farmers and tobacco-quota owners in Virginia will get about $667 million over 10 years from the buyout, which Congress approved in October. Tobacco-farmer organizations had been lobbying for a buyout for years as demand for U.S.-grown tobacco dropped dramatically.

Several speakers warned farmers at the annual meeting of the Virginia Tobacco Growers Association that the buyout eliminates safety nets that were established during the Great Depression to stabilize the U.S leaf market. Starting this year, farmers will have no more price supports. Restrictions on where tobacco can be grown also have been eliminated, raising the possibility that production could shift out of Virginia.

"Make sure you focus on what is best for you in getting this money," U.S. Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr., R-5th, told about 300 farmers and quota owners at the meeting. "I don't know if I would put it into an operation that is going to go up and down in the future.

"Prior to 1937, the market would go up and down, and that is the way it is going to be now," Goode said.

Growers got no news yesterday on when the buyout payments will start coming. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is still working out the details of the buyout plan, said Nelson Link, agricultural programs specialist for the USDA's Farm Service Agency in Virginia. Link said he hopes farmers and quota owners will be able to sign up for payments in early spring.

"It is a monumental task to get all this money out, and do it fairly," he said.

Cigarette companies are paying for 96 percent of the buyout, with the rest paid by manufacturers of other tobacco products. Quota owners will receive 10 annual payments totaling $7 per pound, based on the 2002 quota. Growers who produced tobacco from 2002 to 2004 will receive $3 per pound.

'Think about ways to invest that money wisely," said Dixie Watts Reaves, an extension economist at Virginia Tech. She reminded growers that the buyout payments are taxable. Payments to farmers will be taxed as regular income, and payments to quota holders will be taxed as capital gains.

The buyout legislation gives farmers and quota owners the option of getting a lump-sum amount from financial institutions in exchange for the 10-year flow of payments. But farmers should know that financial institutions will discount the upfront amount, Reaves said.

"I encourage you not to be in a big hurry to take a lump-sum payment," she advised the farmers. "Shop around a little bit."

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031780535314&path=!news&s=1045855934842

The Associated Press - CINCINNATI

Tobacco growers are being squeezed between the government's plan to phase out a 1930s-vintage price support system and cigarette makers' refusal to pay millions under an agreement tied to a master settlement of anti-smoking lawsuits with 46 states.

In 1998, cigarette manufacturers agreed to pay the states $206 billion over 25 years. The following year, in a deal known as Phase II, they said they would pay tobacco growers $5.1 billion over 12 years to soften the effect of reduced demand for tobacco.

When Congress passed the $10 billion buyout legislation last year to pay growers the equivalent of about five years of sales, tobacco companies said that ended their Phase II obligation. Since buyout payments won't start until later this year, many growers were left short of cash.

"A lot of that money has already been spent, and here they come and say you ain't going to get it," said Bob Koehler of Ripley, vice president of the Ohio Tobacco Growers Association. "That puts a lot of boys in a pinch."

The four major tobacco companies contend that under terms of an amendment to the Phase II agreement, they don't have to make the final payment of 2004 and are entitled to a refund of payments made earlier in the year.

Bill Phelps, spokesman for Phillip Morris USA in Richmond, Va., said officials in the 14 tobacco-growing states where Phase II payments were made agreed that tobacco companies would be entitled to repayments in the year the buyout was enacted. The states dispute that.

A judge in North Carolina ruled in favor of the tobacco companies last month, but the state Supreme Court there agreed to hear the states' appeal directly, bypassing the appellate courts. Thursday was the deadline for filing briefs.

Tobacco quotas were established to prop up prices and limit the amount of leaf that a grower could legally market. Ohio, one of the smaller tobacco states, has an overall quota of 10.9 million pounds divided among nearly 15,000 growers.

At about $2 a pound, the average grower makes about $2,600 a year _ supplemental income rather than a livelihood. Most Phase II payments due in December would have been a few hundred dollars.

Not so for Lamar DeLoach, of Metter, Ga., one of the nation's largest tobacco growers and president of the Tobacco Growers Association of Georgia. He sold up to 2 million pounds of tobacco a year in the late '90s, and expected to receive a Phase II check for $250,000 last month.

"That's a quarter million dollars cash flow I didn't have Jan. 1 to meet my obligations," DeLoach said. "I had to renew some notes in the past couple of weeks, and there were a lot of other farmers at the bank. There's a lot of farmers at the end of their string."

Even if growers get a favorable ruling in North Carolina, the buyout likely will force some growers out of business, said Ed Cruttenden, executive director of the Ohio Agriculture Department's Tobacco Program.

"It would remove hundreds of thousand of (quota) holders from tobacco forever," Cruttenden said. "The net impact of this is ... by the end of the program in 2014, about 75 percent of all tobacco farms we know of will be gone."

DeLoach, who farms about 5,000 acres with corn, soybeans, wheat, peanuts, cotton and tobacco, expects changes. He has cut back from 550 acres of tobacco last year to about 100 acres this year, and plans to turn more land to growing vegetables that customers would pick themselves.

http://www.accessnorthga.com/news/ap_newfullstory.asp?ID=54124