By Corinne Smith
Jennifer Escander leans over a pool table and lines up her cue for a shot. After playing her turn, she joins her friends clustered around a nearby table, sipping beers and chatting. Escander lights a cigarette and takes a drag.
In any other Ottawa bar, Escander might draw suspicious looks or disapproving murmurs , due to the bylaw banning smoking in public places, which took effect on Aug. 1.
But Escander, as a new member of the Cue ‘N Cushion Billiard Club, has signed a waiver form and paid the $2 membership fee.
Escander’s membership at the Cue ‘N Cushion allows her to do what she has done at the Bank Street billiard hall every week for the past two and a half years: shoot pool with her friends, have a couple of beers, and smoke a few cigarettes.
The Cue ‘N Cushion hasn’t always been a private club.
Owner Richard Teahen decided to privatize his family business Sept. 4, after experiencing the fallout from the smoking bylaw.
“During the last two weekends in August, I lost about $5,000 in business due to the fact that people weren’t coming out because they couldn’t smoke,” says Teahen, who estimates roughly 97 per cent of his customers smoke.
For Escander, the new bylaw banning smoking “is like Prohibition. I don’t understand why the law has been secluded to one city. I can go to Kingston, to Belleville, and smoke in a bar, but not in Ottawa. It’s not fair. There should be a provincial standard.”
For Sandy Lethbridge, another member at the Cue ‘N Cushion, membership represents choice. “My choice is to have a cigarette if I’m going out and having a beer. Right now, my choice is limited,” she says.
Almost 1,500 people have chosen to spend time at the Cue ‘N Cushion, a place where cigarette smoke is as much a part of the scene as the green-shaded lights hanging over the pool table.
Teahen says the brisk membership sales, a reaction to his decision to privatize his club, “just goes to show where my market is.”
Teahen has been conscientious about going private with the business his father founded in 1963.
The bylaw is very clear on defining public places. The members-only policy at the Cue ‘N Cushion is strictly enforced: gaining admission means showing your membership card and signing a roster at the new check-in table, wedged between the stairwell and the bar.
Members sign a waiver when applying for membership, stating they “willingly and knowingly wish to become a member in this club where [you] know people will be smoking.”
Even the staff must be members. Teahen says since his business became a private club, all his employees have quit.
“The staff are now strictly volunteers. The volunteers are members of the club, and when they’re at the hall, they volunteer.”
Teahen says he has taken all precautions to become a private club, so that “when the city comes after me, I meet their requirements.”
Although Teahen believes the “private club” definition exempts his business from the bylaw regulating smoking in public places, he is gearing up for a battle with the city.
Already, the bylaw enforcement officers are patrolling downtown bars and restaurants looking for infractions.
Stuart Huxley, a solicitor at the City of Ottawa legal services department, says the city “is aware of isolated situations, that some clubs and bars are private now. Overall, compliance with the bylaw is very high.”
Teahen has faced the bylaw enforcement officers, who issued him a $255 fine last week for allowing smoking in a public place.
“To date, we’ve only issued a handful of tickets, and none have gone to court yet,” says Huxley.
But Teahen plans to contest his fine in court, arming himself with copies of the bylaw and its exemptions, and the city’s definintion of public places.
The bylaw, according to Teahen, leads to “the big guys squashing the little guy. They’ve put us in a confrontational situation with our customers.”
“My business can’t survive from three per cent of my old customer base.”