No smoking here - ever
This week, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that he plans to outlaw smoking in any vehicle transporting minors.
Plenty of other jurisdictions, including Nova Scotia, South Australia, Puerto Rico and California, have already forced smokers to hold their butts when sharing a motor vehicle with children – although for some inane reason, California police cannot pull a vehicle over for the smoking violation alone. Only once a driver is stopped for another reason can the crime of poisoning the kids with second-hand smoke be addressed.
But law or no law, in the little autocracy that is my pickup truck, smoking is not permitted, ever.
Heck, I didn't even let Tammy "Bubbles" Bruce, female star of TV's Crash Addicts demolition team, smoke in my truck while we yakked during an interview for Wheels last summer.
At one point, Bubbles raised her sculpted brow and chirped, "Umm, guess I can't smoke in here, eh?" Had I felt so inclined I could have let her light up – after all there is a loophole in most public smoking legislation that allows "performers" to puff away during "theatrical productions."
And in case you've never been backstage at a demolition derby, believe me, it's quite the theatrical production.
But even opening the truck's moonroof, thereby circumventing the rules yet again, creating an "uncovered open-air, or patio, setting," wasn't going to get that cigarette lit. My truck is a dedicated no-smoking zone.
Health considerations are of course a priority and naturally I want my passengers to save their lungs and save their lives, but mostly I just don't want my truck to stink. I keep a clean vehicle.
Now I must point out I haven't always been this fastidious about my vehicles. Truth be told, my first , a 1977 lemon-yellow Toyota Corolla hatchback, while not a total slobmobile, did harbour a few butts in the ashtray and a fair amount of garbage on the floorboards. Subsequent vehicles admittedly also suffered from a, let's call it, "casual" approach to housekeeping.
The man I married however is a car-coddler and so in the interest of matrimonial bliss, I converted.
Our children, though raised in an avowed car-coddling household, do come from mixed parentage so it's tough to predict what type of car owners they'll turn out to be.
It's likely their true automotive personalities will only emerge once they stop borrowing our cars and buy their own, thus freeing themselves from the current regime's tyrannical enforcement of the you-borrow-it-you-keep-it-clean rule.
I suspect that, much like the dirty laundry-hamper issue, our kids' car cleanliness training may not have fully taken and, once on their own, they will allow their standards to lapse. All but the smoking issue of course, which I'm certain they'll enforce, insisting their passengers butt out.
Not because it's one of those ingrained "as long as you live under my roof and drive my car" rules or even under threat of fine from some new government law, but because they are of that younger, smarter, non-smoking generation well-versed in all the associated health risks.
Besides, they know it'll make their car stink.
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