City councillors could this week outlaw dozens of hookah lounges across Toronto, but a councillor who regularly smokes a water pipe is floating a compromise.

Toronto’s public health department is urging council to ban the use of hookahs in all city-licensed businesses. The growing international popularity of hookah lounges, especially with young adults, has sparked concern.

Ontario law already bans tobacco smoking in indoor public spaces. The city’s medical officer of health Dr. David McKeown is warning that pipes using charcoal to burn herbal mixtures, instead of tobacco, still carry health risks and help make public smoking socially acceptable.

A city staff report that says about 70 Toronto businesses allow customers to use hookah is going to council Tuesday with no recommendation because licensing committee members were deadlocked on the merits of a blanket ban.

One of them, Jim Karygiannis (Ward 39 Scarborough-Agincourt), plans to ask council to regulate the businesses in a special category with rules including no children or alcohol, serving only juice, pop and coffee.

“Let’s license them so we regulate them and don’t drive them underground,” Karygiannis said Monday, adding that for the past dozen or so years he has smoked in a hookah lounge near his home about once a month.

“It’s relaxing, you have a conversation with a couple of friends,” said the rookie councillor and former Liberal MP who also smokes Cuban cigars. “It’s a cultural aspect from the Middle East and is becoming popular in Greece and other places. If we make people smoke at home, you can bet they are using tobacco.”

Ashraf Hasouna, owner of Alexandria Café in Scarborough, says the ban would impact a large part of Toronto’s immigrant population that does not drink alcohol and “do not enjoy the nightclub as it is not in their culture,” he wrote in a presentation submitted to city council’s June 25 meeting.

“When they’re finished their time here, they go fully conscious, happy, no harm on them or the society, or the neighbourhood,” he told the Star of his clientele Monday evening. “If that is banned, the question is: where will those people go?”

Hasouna estimates 65 per cent of his business’s revenue stems from shisha and the other 35 per cent, mostly food and drinks, is “linked totally to shisha” because that’s what customers come to the establishment for. He says he wouldn’t be able to pay rent for the 3,600-square-feet restaurant without it.

It’s possible to burn hookah using electronic charcoal, Hasouna added, saying, “We are willing to work closely with the city if they give us a chance to work with alternatives.”

Noel Gerry, a lawyer representing 14 owners of hookah establishments, said his clients are “ready, able and willing to be regulated. They are small businesses, they support families and employees’ families, and they want to stay in business.”

Joe Mihevc, chair of the city’s public health board, is going to push for an outright ban.

“By quality, the negative health impacts of smoking shisha or tobacco are in the 1,000-times greater than any other product,” he argued.

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When a reporter noted the city routinely authorizes new liquor licences, and that alcohol causes well-known health and social harms, Mihevc said: “Smoking has a very negative health impact for both the smoker and the people who inhale the second-hand smoke, a very serious potential level of harm for human health.”

With files from Verity Stevenson