Butt busters

>> Free portable ashtrays won’t smother
a smouldering problem for bar owners

A GIFT FROM THE CITY: Portable Plastic Ashtray

In June, the City of Montreal tried its best to warn every man, woman, child, landlord, smoker and combination thereof that our dirty ways were about to be washed away like so many discarded Timmy’s cups. Landlords and shop owners had to clean their stoops or else; bar and restaurant owners better not leave their dumpsters open; and if smokers were caught tossing their butts onto the sidewalk, they’d have a lot more than a wet, pre-cancerous cough to worry about. Fines against individual litterbugs would start at $500; for commercial establishments, it can run into the thousands.

But last week, Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s administration took a softer approach to getting smokers to clean up after themselves. It handed out 100,000 free pocket ashtrays, plastic pouches that can fit easily into a purse or pair of pants and can hold between five and seven butts. Light, compact and flexible, they are, says Tremblay aide Darren Becker, a reminder to smokers that they have to do their part in cleaning up. The ashtrays were made in China and cost $40,000. Whether smokers start using them remains to be seen, but the nice-guy tactic isn’t soothing some merchants, who say the ongoing cleanliness campaign is unfair and will ultimately prove to be ineffective.

Where there’s smoking, there’s a problem

Peter Sergakis knows all about fighting city hall. He led anti-tax demonstrations in the 1990s, and was at the forefront of the opposition movement to the province’s indoor smoking ban last year. This year, he was briefly involved in a merchants’ coalition opposed to the cleanliness crackdown, mainly because small business owners thought they would be targeted with stiff fines they couldn’t afford. The coalition has ceased its operations, but Sergakis is still fighting.

“One landlord downtown got a $20,000 fine,” he says. “Another got a $12,000 fine.” He doesn’t specify which merchants were on the receiving end, but, as the head of the Union des tenanciers de bars du Québec, he hears all about bar owners’ woes. In fact, he says he’s been fined three times by health inspectors himself, each time for $760 for not having an ashtray outside three of his bars, including the Gay Village’s Sky. “The ashtrays were stolen by homeless people so they could smoke the butts,” he says. “Do I need to hire a guard to protect my ashtrays?”

He says landlords are shouldered unfairly with the responsibility of keeping the city clean, even though most of the trash is caused by passers-by. It’s a sentiment echoed by other bar owners, including Jeff Picard, who runs the Crescent street brewpub Brutopia.

“It hasn’t touched me yet, but I have noticed people sneaking around the back of the place with a camera,” he says. “It’s entirely likely that sometime soon I’ll get a nasty letter or a fine.” Neighbouring businesses, he says, have been given “stern warnings.” And even though he cleans up in front and behind his bar regularly, and has five large, locked dumpsters and recycling bins, “It’s still a shithole back there. People, even in this day and age, are still littering, and the wind blows garbage around so it piles up out there. I can’t hire a cleaner to stand around for 10 hours a day.” Neither merchant believes that fining owners is the right way to go about cleaning up the city.

The Ville-Marie borough is currently compiling statistics on the number of fines handed out over the three months the crackdown has been in force. It expects to release the figures in early September, according to a borough representative.

SMOKE, STUB, DROP: How to use

Costly cleaning

Becker says the city spends $66-million annually on cleaning projects, from street cleaners to removing graffiti to hiring teenagers to sweep up to buying and installing new garbage cans and ashtrays. Becker says the city installed 1,400 new garbage cans this year and installed hundreds of ashtrays around metros and municipal buildings. “There’s an estimated one billion cigarettes smoked in Montreal every year,” he says. “That’s billion with a B. Too many of those butts wind up on the streets.”

One immediate problem with the portable ashtrays is their availability. They’re still being handed out for free at Accès-Montréal and borough offices, as well as local Eco-quartier offices and by street-cleaning crews. But when the Mirror picked up its ashtray at the Plateau Eco-quartier, one woman said they weren’t trying too hard to give them away because the all-plastic, non-biodegradable pouches are terrible for the environment.