Last year, The Canadian Cancer Society and Toronto Public Health teamed up to bring you the Driven To Quit challenge which encouraged people to quit smoking in order to be entered into a contest to win a car. The great community group Streets Are For People (which brings us Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington) called out the charity group and public health department for the ultimate example of hypocrisy: quit smoking so you can pollute the air we breathe. Nice. Check out the video on their counter-campaign from March 2007.
It looks like Streets Are For People’s message didn’t really get through. Public Health and CCS are offering up the contest again in 2008 with a chance to win a Honda Prius Hybrid. The only consolation this year is one winner will be selected for a yearly Metropass. It would make more sense to see 30 yearly Metropasses given out as prizes (the equivalent of the Prius’s value) instead of a car.
This is an odd contest for Public Health to be involved with since they were the agency that released a report in Novmeber 2007, that states Toronto needs to reduce car emissions by over 30% a year.
photo by Scott Snider
20 comments
No one is quitting smoking for a slim chance at a metropass.
I can’t think of any single material prize of equal value to a car that doesn’t have environmental consequences. Except cash.
The 2007 website linked says “your local Public Health department” and the rules say must be resident in Ontario – is this an Ontario Dept of Health thing rather than a City of Toronto PH thing? The person who won the 2007 car was from Windsor.
As for the appropriateness of the prize, that may have been the decision of the funder, who in 2007 was Johnson and Johnson, again according to the website.
If anyone can tell me where I can buy a new Prius for $3 270 (the value of 30 metropasses), please let me know.
Or should i take up smoking and then quit and just win this one instead?
Ahem. I think it’s 30 annual metropasses… as in 30×12… Which would cost fat cash – $38520.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. They just don’t.
So offer cash, they just don’t get it and that is what makes it so sad.
Besides Streets are for People know of at least a dozen people who sent letter last year in protest (myself included). Here is a typical reply:
“Driven To Quit Challenge (Canadian Cancer Society)”
Dear Mr. Reis and Ms. Lucas,
Thank you for taking your time to express your concerns.
For the Driven to Quit Challenge, we took great effort to identify and
offer an Ontario-manufactured car that is deemed the most fuel efficient model available and recommended by Natural Resources Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Health Promotion.
Our goal is to register as many participants as possible and we hope
that all will be successful in their quit attempts. The outcome will be
several thousand fewer smokers in Ontario and one new fuel-efficient caron the road. In fact, last year’s winner was able to replace her mucholder car with a new fuel-efficient model and reduce harmful emission from both her car and her cigarettes. At the same time we 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.
Driven to Quit Challenge team
It looks to me like they heard the feedback and did their best to accommodate the concerns while still running an effective anti-smoking campaign.
They’ve switched from an Ontario-made car to a foreign-made one that has lower emissions than almost any car out there. If the winner switches their current car for a Prius, it’s almost certainly a reduction in total emissions.
The prize has to be appealing in order for the campaign to meet its main goal and like it or not, cars are still the gold standard in contest prizes. There’s probably a promotional discount that lets them stretch their prize budget further. And given the rate of car ownership across the contest area (all of Ontario), most people would be able to use the car themselves, but the Prius is also an easy car to resell new, due to delivery delays.
Instead of launching another effort to make life difficult for the people running this contest, maybe people should encourage Public Health to run a similar contest for reducing driving. A “driven to quit driving” campaign would target a different bunch of people — people in this city who can make a lifestyle change to walk, bike, or take the TTC. And there, Metropasses would make a great prize.
Quit driving and win a year’s supply of low tar cigarettes! The contest could take 1000 people off the roads and the winning smoker would switch from regular cigarettes to the low tar kind – a win-win situation!
(Note: Low tar cigarettes are not less harmful than regular cigarettes since smokers compensate by “inhaling more deeply; taking larger, more rapid, or more frequent puffs; or by increasing the number of cigarettes smoked per day”)
Yup – hypocaritical and carrupt!
Actually a lot of the public health folks should be fired for not doing their jobs – protecting public health from a known serial killer – the car. There are a lot of direct and indirect killings through smog and climate change – but does the PH dept do anything more than gnash teeth/send out more paper to prove that they are worth their salaries?
Instead of experimenting with public health by putting the carap into our air, why not privatize exhaust back into the passenger compartments so the carcooned can take their shit to their own living room? Oh – you mean people would die if they breathed in their carap, and we know this because Hitler used truck exhaust to first start killing Jews?
Caronto, Ontcario – never home to a no-smogging effort (and thanks tino for that no-smogging line.)
This is not just an air quality issue. Driving a car, even a fuel efficient one, is BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH and the health of those around you.
Cars are directly linked to a sedentary lifestyle, which equals obesity and diabetes. Car accidents are the number one cause of death in Canadian school children. Driving often results in psychological disorders like road rage, and hyper individuality.
For a fun look at the threat that cars are to public and private health go to http://www.streetsareforpeople.org/actions/quitdriving.html
How about the runner-up prizes?
The big screen TVs are also great for your health. Obesity, lethargy, how about attention defecit disorder?
This contest is not an attempt to better the health of the public, it is a government sponsored sales campaign for Johnson and Johnson, so they can sell all their quit smoking drugs.
Here’s an incentive to quit smoking: how about exercising your freedom of choice, recognizing that the immediate fulfillment of every desire is a choice, one that is disrespectful to the rest of society. Driving a car is a choice, one that is contributing to the destruction of our biosphere and the extinction of our species.
Freedom, the right to do as you choose, so long as your actions do not inhibit the freedom of others. The freedom to smoke, like the freedom to drive, should not supercede my freedom to live on this planet.
Now, how about the cancer society giving away luxury cars and suburban homes in the Princess Margaret Lottery?
Anyone? Anyone?
ps, Monday morning there’s the contest release at Eaton Centre, 10am. Anyone feel like showing up and raising a ruckus?
Peace, we’re all in this together,
MLJ
Matthew, I echo your thoughts completely. If only everyone was as intelligent and urbane as the Spacing readership and lived in downtown Toronto. We’d live in a perfect world where nobody drove, ever.
We should all collectively pass judgment on the people in every other non-Toronto non-intellectual city who don’t dress ironically and aren’t be motivated by a 30 year “Put your 100,000 person city here” Transit pass. Shame on them for not being excited about quitting smoking for the great prize of walking an hour to the nearest bus stop, and waiting outside in the fresh air for an hour while the bus (maybe) comes.
Well, at least they’d be breathing fresh air. I guess that’s gotta be good for something, eh?
Amen, MLJ! Shame on all the people who want to raise families in suburban homes! For those who dare to drive luxury automobiles! For anyone who buys a big screen TV!
If only we could all as moral as you. If only we could all have figured out the world as well as you.
Living in our downtown condos, listening to CBC Radio One and clutching our Metropasses.
That, truly, would be a world we could dream about.
I take it, tdotg, you have a problem with us, but do don’t you have a problem with the Cancer Society and Public Health holding a contest that rewards people with a vehicle that pollutes, no matter how much of a hybrid it is?
This isn’t about whether we don’t have any cars in our society — its about whether two highly respected/influential agencies should be promoting products that directly contradict their intended missions.
Matt L >> I believe Public Health was encouraged to run such a contest after meeting with concerned groups last year.
What is dressing “ironically”? Sounds sloppy. Sloppy dressing is bad for public space, just like bad architecture.
Matt,
Perhaps my post was too harsh. The point I’m trying to make is that there is a whole non-Toronto Canada out there which doesn’t hold the same extreme views on the environment as the Spacing team seems to. This is a Canada which lives in an area with poor transit, which already drives, and which needs to take the kids to school, to hockey practice, and needs to drive to the local grocery store.
While I agree that giving away an SUV would be inappropriate, it seems to me that the hybrid is an ideal compromise. One that is actually desirable to the majority of non-urban Canadians, and one that probably net improves the environment from their current vehicle.
The reality is that cars aren’t going away. When you see two reputable organizations promoting using hybrids, this is not unlike organizations giving away CFR lightbulbs. It’s behaviour we want people to adopt and is better than their current incandescents. Ideally there’d be no need for lightbulbs (and maybe there isn’t downtown where you could read under the faint glow of a street lamp) but the reality is, for the majority of Canadians, lightbulbs are an important part of their life and the giveaway improves their environmental footprint.
Is it just me or does Honda not make the Prius….
So many charities are corporatized, with a vested interest in a continuance of the problem.
Resistance. Is. Futile. You. Must. Submit. (not)
kendrew – it’s just you. Toyota’s hybrid is Prius, Honda’s hybrid was the Insight.
Honda’s current hybrid is the Civic Hybrid. The only easy-to-spot difference from any other Civic is an extra logo near the back license plate.
But this contest is giving away a Toyota Prius, which makes the “Honda Prius Hybrid” in the original post the typo that Kendrew’s referring to.
It is too bad that the Cancer Society has to whore itself out like that to help people. Tommy Douglas must be rolling in his grave.
Let’s just say that not everyone can “win” free public transportation. Like one said, last year’s winner was from Windsor. Where in Windsor did he live? Where did he work? Giving away annual transportation passes when the poor schmuck lives in the middle of nowhere does not pass common sense muster.
Now I understand the Toronto Public Health’s position to decrease car emissions by 30%. Consider if the winner is in the GTA, lives in an area poorly serviced by transit, and needs a car to get around the area, you just prevented him from buying one of those Gas Guzzler SUVs, which are a far bigger sin than the Prius is.
They should have given away a 2008 VW Jetta Diesel instead.