I know a woman with COPD who goes outside and smokes, and it drives me NUTS. Seriously. And she’s on disability for COPD because she can’t walk for extended periods of time due to it. Make sense to anyone????

As for not being able to taste or smell–darn straight! My dad LOVES to smoke–loves the taste, the feel, the addiction. He quit 8 or so years ago (a year after my mum did) due to rising costs of cigarettes. He now admits he can smell and taste things he didn’t know he could. He eats VEGETABLES, something he never did while smoking because he hated the taste (but now loves it). Both he and my mother can’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke anymore.

Personally, I can smell it about half a city block away, if someone is smoking. If someone is a heavy smoker or just entered a shop I’m in after smoking, I can smell it. I hold my breath and move as far away as possible.

I live in a townhouse, and I’m lucky that when the next door neighbours are outside smoking up a storm (the one who was pregnant until recently, still did during her pregnancy and still does), I can close my door until they are done. It sucks that I can’t get my “fresh air” (as if Hamilton’s air is “fresh”, but I live near Ancaster where it is slightly more “fresh”), but at least I can’t smell it through vents or the cracks around my door anymore.

Not to mention the massive amount of illnesses I have that could very well be chalked up to my parents smoking as I grew up. Yay for nicotine (and the chemicals in cigarettes) sucking calcium out of bones, and affecting estrogen. I’m 31 and without a uterus, and had to relearn to walk due to endometriosis affecting nerves in my feet.

And while renters in Ontario MUST have rental insurance, most don’t, so who pays for the damages????

I have no tolerance for those that pull these kinds of pathetic stunts. Seen it all too often when it’s one-on-one and no one else really cares enough to contribute to the whiner’s crusade.

It’s perfectly legal (now) to smoke in your unit, even if there’s a municipal or State ban. Bans extend to public areas. Even if I wanted to (and I don’t) file an eviction over something so trivial would be an LOL waste of time and investment, not to mention MONEY! Spending thousands of dollars to evict someone because some whiner on the same floor “demands” it, and then moves out at the end of their lease anyhow because they want to “try something different?” HA!

The worst you could do is write a mean, bluffing letter or give a similar phone call. You could even say “Move. Now.” But If someone doesn’t want to, they don’t have to. Smoking in your unit is completely within the law, even if the hallways smell of smoke or if some frail tenant whines it’s in their apartment (and trust, then you get the ubiquitous “I’M ATHSMATIC!!!” or “I JUST HAD NASAL SURGERY!!!!” like, lol whut? cries of grandeur).

Team response all. the. way. The response is 100% dead on in calling out all the other “sensitivity” whining that goes on in multi-unit buildings such as “she walks on her floor in HEELS!” or “that man was SCREAMING on his cell phone at 10:30 am!” File that whiny “please be my RA” garbage in the dustbin of history.

I’m just asking that we all be reasonable and give each other some space.

On one of my small two bedroom units, the cost of smoking, in damages would be close to 1600 dollars…

Here are some questions you may want to ask about your 10%:

How much does a smoker need to smoke to reach a 10% higher risk of lung cancer than a non-smoker?
One cigarette a day? 10? 20? 50? You don’t know?
Then don’t spout meaningless statistics.

Does a guy who smokes half a pack a day have a higher or lower risk than a non-smoker who has worked with asbestos? What about the asbestos worker whose spouse did his laundry lo those may years? How did her exposure to asbestos and her infrequent smoking affect her? How do you assign statistical blame in these cases and others like them?
Many of the studies people rely upon today are flawed because investigators only looked for a correlation between smoking and lung cancer. The links between asbestos, radon, dioxins, pesticides, etc. and lung cancer were not widely known, and were not factored in.
When you do a study, you have to be extra careful that your study is not structured to find what you happen to be looking for.
So, I dispute your “10 times more likely” solely do to smoking claim.

Can you say “Quite a number of flawed study results out there when it comes to statistical conclusions”?

10 times as much as what original risk though?
10 out of 100 instead of 1 in 100? 10 out of 1,000,000 as opposed to 1 in 1,000,000?
Where’s your reference point? Do you even know? Or is “10 times” more risk just scary enough to you to stop you thinking any more deeply?

Simply saying 10 times more likely is absolutely meaningless.

Now, if you maintain that non-smokers very rarely get lung cancer, then you’re also saying smokers’ risk is 10 times what is an extremely small original risk in the first place.
Not a very scary thing to say if you give it some thought.

Popular sugarless gum advertisement:
“4 out of 5 dentists who chew gum recommend sugarless gum.”
What percentage of dentists chew gum?
Without that, the first statistic is meaningless.
If 100% of dentists chew gum, 80% recommend sugarless gum, but if only 10% of dentists chew gum, then as few as 8% of dentists recommend sugarless gum.
And that’s assuming that 100% of non-gum-chewing dentists do not recommend sugarless gum. We don’t even know what dentists who do not chew gum recommend. They weren’t part of the cited study group.
A seemingly easy to understand original statement, actually gave you no usable information whatsoever.

Statistics are slippery.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Watch out for all of them. Statistics especially in your case.

So, putting it beside that sign is totally irrelevant.

If you don’t like it (I didn’t) either buy a detached house or write the government.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but people in this province are anti-smoking insane.