For smokers who enjoy lighting up in their cars during the work day, public health officials have a surprising message: You’re breaking the law and could be charged.

Officials with the Middlesex-London Health Unit say they’ve already charged some companies and employees.

“We have charged individual drivers and companies,” said Linda Stobo, who oversees tobacco control for the health unit. “There is a misperception that smoking is a right.”

Stobo points to a law passed by Ontario in 2006 that prohibits smoking in the workplace. When an employee uses his or her vehicle for work, that law makes the vehicle a workplace, she said.

“(While) you’re working, there’s no such thing as a personal vehicle,” Stobo said Thursday.

The quiet crackdown came to light this week after health officials proposed creating a specific policy for their employees that explicitly banned smoking in vehicles being used for work.

The policy will be considered July 17 by the politicians and political appointees on the health board.

London employment lawyer Gene Chiarello said he can see arguments both for and against the health unit’s crackdown on smoking in personal vehicles. As someone who commutes once a week to Sarnia for work and who travels alone, Chiarello understands why some might believe health officials are pushing the law too far.

“To me, it seems a stretch,” he said.

Asked why people who drive alone shouldn’t be able to chose whether to smoke, Stobo said that the smoke is absorbed by the driver’s clothing and hair, smoke that others breathe in when the driver exits the car — what health officials call third-hand smoke.

Though Chiarello has mixed views of the health unit’s view of the law, he understands why officials want to treat all smokers the same, regardless of whether they drive with passengers. To do otherwise would make enforcement much more difficult, he said.

Local health officials aren’t alone in making a rule explicitly prohibiting staff from smoking in personal vehicles during work hours — similar rules have been adopted elsewhere in Ontario.

jonathan.sher@sunmedia.ca

Twitter.com/JSHERatLFPress

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THE LAW

In McNeill v. Ontario (Ministry of Solicitor General and Correctional Services) (1998), 126 C.C.C. (3d) 466 (Ontario Court General Division), the Court dismissed a claim that a smoking ban in a jail, adopted pursuant to the Guelph smoking bylaw, violated Charter equality rights or the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. In the course of the judgement, Justice O’Connor stated:

“The evidence is uncontroverted that tobacco smoke contains harmful carcinogenics that cause serious illnesses to both the smoker and those exposed to smoke “second-hand”. Quitting smoking improves the health significantly of both the smoker and those around him/her.”