Late notice, but the folks from Streets are for People are holding a press conference at noon today at Queen and Bay (NW corner) regarding the Canadian Cancer Society’s “Driven to Quit” challenge, and the “counter-challenge” they’re calling for. From their press release:
The Canadian Cancer Society, in collaboration with local Public Health departments have challenged Ontarians to quit smoking. That’s great! It’s a filthy disgusting habit that’s bad for public health.
However, their Driven to Quit Challenge is a contest to quit smoking and win a new car.
When smog and air quality is at a crisis level, and the world has finally awoken to the reality of climate change, the Canadian Cancer Society is giving away another car to congest our streets and pollute our air.
We must keep this car off of our roads.
Those who enter the challenge and manage to quit driving for the month of March will win a prize pack including bicycles and a year of free bike maintenance. The group will also be trying to sign up candidates to quit smoking with the caveat that should they win the contest, the car will be donated for an art project and never have the chance clog our city streets.
It does seem odd that they would pick a car as the prize for this worthwhile campaign. Even the most mild of car critics, or car fans, can recognize there could be a more appropriate prize.
19 comments
What if the winner doesn’t live in a city? Do any of these people know what life is like in rural Canada?
Michael> I can’t speak for the organizers, but I don’t think that’s the point. I’m sure they know people in rural areas need cars — lots of people in Malvern need cars even. It’s just that of all the prizes in the prize universe, the cancer society picked one that causes health problems.
Saying that sends a mixed signal doesn’t in anyway condemn rural life. You’re presenting a bit of a red herring, like rural folks are relying on winning this car, or else they’ll be stranded.
They’re also giving away an HDTV, which rural folk or city folk could also enjoy with those little satellite dishes.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I think their organization is assuming that this car, the one that they say must be kept off the road, will definitely contribute to clogging up our city streets. This is not so.
HDTV’s will end up in landfill one day and are comprised of many harmfull chemicals. They also eat up electricity produced by coal generating plants….where does it end?
I guess the Cancer Society should have just offered up cash.
I suppose all prizes can be problematic in some way (except cash!). I guess it’s the direct connection between the exhaust from that car, contributing to smog, contributing to health problems. It’s more direct than say that HDTV ending up in a landfill. Maybe it’ll be recycled. Maybe the car will be recycled. Maybe the car will only be used on weekends for trips out of the city to the cottage, and during the week people will take public transit. Yeah, endless….
I believe offering money as a prize could be seen as endorsing capitalism.
I thought the tagline for this contest should have been: “Stop polluting your body and start polluting the planet.”
I saw the ad for this in Metro a little over a week ago. The focal point of the ad’s graphic was a driver’s sideview mirror displaying a reflection of a tossed cigarette butt on the ground. Not only did I have difficulty with the ethos of the contest itself but also with this image which, while downgrading the smoking habit, basically aggrandized the other filthy habit of smokers which is the tossing of their lit waste anywhere they please. The Canadian Cancer Society has done themselves a disservice by the nature of this contest and the way it was presented. As the ad I saw was presented in Metro, which one might presume has a strong demographic of transit riders, the Cancer Society could have, in both the public interest and their own, given away ‘a lifetime TTC pass (at least 30 years, anyway) for about the same cost as the car.
But since the contest is Ontario wide, a TTC pass may not make much sense.
I was confused by the ad when I first saw it. To me it would make more sense to give away something that leads to a healthy lifestyle. Cars and TVs would not seem to fit.
That said, the thinking behind it all is that these kinds of prizes create publicity and awareness and like it or not most people would love to win a car. Maybe a hybrid would have been the best choice.
I do think that the poster in a weird way seems to condone littering from your car which is a bad idea. Even when I smoked I hated lazy so and so’s who tossed their butts out the window.
For the record, here is the ‘form’ letter two members of ARC (Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists)
in response to a critique we sent them.
Dear Mr. …,
Thank you for taking the time to express you concern. And we sincerely apologize for the delay in response. The Canadian Cancer Society would like to assure you that cancer prevention is one of our top priorities. We know that at least 50% of
cancers can be prevented through healthy living and policies that protect the public. The Canadian Cancer Society works towards cancer prevention through advocacy, information and research.
To ensure the success of the Driven to Quit Challenge, we need to offer appealing prizes so that we can recruit as many participants as
possible. Our research tells us that cars and electronic products continue to be most popular. We go to every effort to select the most fuel efficient model available for the Driven To Quit Challenge grand prize. Natural Resources Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Health Promotion recommend Acura CSX as one of the most fuel-efficient
Ontario-made cars.
Even though the dangerous health effects of using tobacco products are well known, 1.6 million people in Ontario still smoke. The more participants we can register for the Challenge, the more pportunity we have to raise awareness about quit smoking resources such as our Smokers’ Helpline and to help smokers deal with a powerful addiction.
Every year we evaluate our prize pool for the following year’s campaign. Your prize suggestions will be filed for consideration for next year’s
Driven to Quit Challenge. Thank you again for your message.
Best regards,
The Driven to Quit Challenge team
(full text)
Leaving one form of toxic pollution to pick up another form of toxic pollution doesn’t make any sense to me…
I see the point behind all of this, but I just don’t think the Canadian Cancer Society is the most appropriate political target for the anti-car lobby.
Actually, the CCS is more than appropriate — they are the ones doing something seriously dumb. It’s not just a random target of the anti-car lobby (a bunch of activists from Kensington as a “lobby” is kinda funny).
Trading off one form of toxic poisoning for another is a bad campaign that was obviously not thoroughly thought-thru.
I understand they need to make the prize appealing to a mass audience, and a bike definitely wouldn’t do the trick. They should have gone for the electronic products.
I hope we’re not being too nit-picky on the CCS. They, like so many organizations like it, are the good people. And I’m sure they had the car donated or given to them at a substantial discount, so as in many charitable orgs they do as much as they can with what they’ve got. And they needed a big pay off that mass audience as Sam here says.
Though, because of the connection between car emissions and heath problems, it’s important here to push back a little on car culture — a culture powerful and entrenched enough in north america that it initially seems alright to use a car as a prize. Cars are always the (or one of) the “grand prizes” — game shows, those big lotteries for Sick Kids hospital…
So, hopefully this all comes off a gentle reminder rather than a rebuke of the CCS. And hopefully people quit smoking.
I wrote to the CCS and to TPH expressing my concerns about this contest and received the same form letter back as Tino, above. Although I understand and applaud the effort to help people quit smoking, I found it very odd that the contest is co-sponsored by Toronto Public Health. Ironically, on TPH’s own website (www.toronto.ca/health/smog/healthsmog.htm) they point out that smog, in large part from vehicular emissions, has an adverse impact on human health, leading to 1000-2000 early deaths a year in Toronto and several thousand more hospitalizations.
In addition, California’s strict Proposition 65, which mandates warning labels on cancer-causing compounds, has requirements for labels on gasoline pumps (which must have vapour recovery systems) and on automobiles themselves, due to their noxious exhaust emissions. Both are sources of, among other toxic and cancer-causing compounds, benzene. Many friends of mine are not aware of the fact that car exhaust is toxic, but hopefully the Ontario government will draw peoples’ attention to this with proposed labelling legislation – perhaps something that the Canadian Cancer Society and TPH could support.
I also wrote the CCS with my concerns, saying that as an asthma sufferer, both smoking and smog are equally as bad to me. I also got a copy of the same reply sent back. The stats from the large warning labels on cigarette packs tell us that in 1996 2,900 people were killed by car accidents and 45,000 were killed by tobacco. Maybe its a case of promoting the “lesser” of two evils…
Cigarettes are the Tony Montana of the Cancer world. They are the big bad guy that we can all point our fingers at and say, “You’re the bad guy.” but come on, most things in our consumer culture cause cancer. All those home reno products at the home depot have warnings on them. “this product known to cause cancer in the state of California.” What? so they don’t cause cancer here? All those condo’s are being built with cancer causing materials. Our cars, our computers, our cell phones, they are all toxic killers made possible by slavery. So who’s the bad guy?
But I digress. We, Streets are for People! are not merely dissing the Canadian Cancer Society and their contest. We are actually signing people up for their contest, and for our own. (to date we’ve signed up 12 people to quit somoking and 5 people to quit driving.) If you go to our site, http://www.streetsareforpeople.org you can look at our contest flyer with helpful stats on the car as threat to the public health, as well as tips on how to quit the filthy habit that is driving.
Yes we realize that our country has been built for cars and not for people. The promise of a railway has been betrayed. We have no public transit in this country and we have no public health. We have a health care industry, to syphon our tax money away to hospital administrators and pharmaceutical companies, but there is no one making laws and product restrictions to protect us from all the stuff that we know is killing us, and the planet.
Until we can open our eyes and acknowledge that our country has a big problem, we won’t begin to address it. This contest is an effort to get those in the government and society in general to take a good hard look at the facts, and begin to excercise our free will and make the lifestyle changes needed to survive. Because lets face it: we either adapt and survive, or continue to drive ourselves to extinction.
5000 Canadians die each year from air polution, of which car exhaust is the major contributor. Car exhaust contains chemicals which cause cancer.
In cabin (inside the car) has 16 times higher concentrations of death chemicals than ambient air, and ambient air measurements of CO2 are death for lung health.
Is it just me, or does anyone else see the falseness of the Canadian Cancer Societys’ overall mandate? Choosing to ignor the automobile as a cancer causing product EXACTLY like cigarettes. Canada boasts the worlds toughest labelling standards for tobacco products. Why not cars? Physicians continue to participate activey in education and lobbying efforts direct against nicotine addiction. But is it possible that the medical community has largely overlooked an even greater opportunity to improve public health? The automobile represents today the single greatest threat to safety, health, and the environment. Trading one cancer for another makes as much sense as carbon trading.