The spring is coming on hard with temperatures waggling all over the place, even on the same day; cold and icy one minute, summery and 70s the next. The daffodils are dead but the little violets and vincas are beaming purple and prolific dandelion blossoms punctuate the greenbelts with brilliant yellow polka dots (in MTL there’s a movement to leave dandelions untouched when they’re flowering to feed pollinators. The gardener in me always itches to yank them out.)
Alas, the milder weather is lovely but also means lots of people are out and about. Though I’m more comfortable leaving the house in this pretending-to-be-post-COVID era, on every street I am laid low by an old respiratory enemy: cigarettes.
Like the dandelions, they are everywhere, and sadly not helpful to pollinators or anything else, really.
Having a mostly smoke-free environment at home is one of the things I desperately miss. Ten to thirteen percent of Canadians smoke; in California, it’s between nine and eleven percent, but in California we’ve socially shamed smokers into keeping it at home or in designated smoking areas. I can walk around much of Los Angeles and only encounter second-hand smoke occasionally. Here, it’s a constant barrage.
There are laws creating non-smoking zones in Montréal as well, but it’s very common for smokers here to walk around town with lit cigarettes, so there’s no avoiding their contrails. It’s clever, really: a way to violate every non-smoking zone but not directly break the law. Well-played, m’gars.
Also, and I don’t understand how, I am assailed by ciggie smoke in the street even when it appears there’s no one around. In the absence of a supernatural explanation (emanations from the ghosts of the 13k Québec smokers who die each year?) I assume it’s coming from people’s apartment windows, but it’s so incredibly strong sometimes I wonder if they’re smoking like this:
Maybe I can’t see the poor addicted bastards, but my nose detects their particulates. It stings, it burns; after that, I get headaches or sinus infections (like I have now).
You’d think that in a province/country with socialized medicine, everyone would have a stake in reducing second-hand smoke. Sure, there are cigarette taxes here and information campaigns, but is the government really trying hard enough? Cigarette taxes are a conflict of interest; they create a significant revenue stream that might be hard to give up. Seems it’s up to citizen groups to really push the issue.
I know I whinged about this last year, but it’s still a mega-downer. Public gatherings are in full swing now that COVID incidence is low, but I’ll still be trapped in the apartment by The Other Airborne Health Risk. However, looking at the PM2.5 levels in L.A. today, maybe I should stop complaining; they say living in L.A. is like smoking a pack a day, so what’s the diff, right?
The pollen here is prolly also not doing me any good, but at least it’s prettier and non-carcinogenic.
