Your government's decision regarding this matter was announced in public a few hours ago. As the Minister of Labour, I am in charge of health and safety at work. There is also legislation regarding the health of non-smokers.
Over the years, our department has worked to ensure that there be no second-hand smoke, to protect non-smokers in federal buildings equipped with smoking rooms. A few months ago, I became interested in the presence of second-hand smoke outside the smoking rooms. Some people told me that it was present.
To begin with, we checked 11 smoking rooms at random. Only one of them did not have adequate ventilation, and it was closed down. There was no second-hand smoke outside the 10 remaining smoking rooms. However, we wanted to go further. We checked 12 more smoking rooms and the results were the same, there was no second-hand smoke outside. Therefore, our Non-smokers' Health Act was adequate and companies were enforcing it properly.
I went even further to find out what happens in smoking rooms before people go to work in the morning and when they are full of employees who smoke during their break. I wanted to find out about the air quality. This led to very surprising results.
In the morning, before the employees went into the smoking room, there were 27 times more fine particles than in the adjoining room. When people went to smoke during their breaks, there was 245 times more fine particles in the smoking room than in the room next to it. Thus, to follow a good principle, we protected non-smokers by putting the smokers in one room, without any regard to what happened in there.
Let met give you an idea of what 245 times more fine particles represent. The air in that smoking room is six times worse than the air on the worst day of smog or pollution in Montreal or Toronto in the summer time. At that point, we had to make a decision, and we thought that the best thing to do was to change our regulations and close down the smoking rooms.
We are asking employers not to wait for the regulations to change, because it will take a few months. Because of the high particle rates that we discovered, they can go ahead right away.
The statistics showed that we had to intervene. The fine particles of second-hand smoke contain 4,000 chemical products, 50 of which are carcinogenic.