Imagine you can create the agenda for city council on Wednesday. What would you put on the list?

Would it be a discussion of how the city can reduce its debt without raising taxes? Maybe you would like to see a frank discussion about whether or not we really want a downtown arena. Perhaps you would want councillors to revisit the snow-removal strategy. If you’re a romantic, maybe you would like to see councillors discuss how to fix our crumbling sidewalks without asking people to pony up half the cost. If you are an economic realist, you might want to see councillors hold various city departments to account for delays and cost overruns.

Would banning smoking in city parks be on your list? It wouldn’t be on mine, but it’s going to get discussed anyway.

“Oh, Harding,” you might say. “You’re just a nasty old curmudgeon. Of course it should be discussed. It’s an important issue to Edmontonians. There’s a huge outcry.”

“Really?” I would say. Not according to Coun. Kerry Diotte. According to him, he has had only one email on the issue, and the head of the bylaw department told him that he has received just one call on the issue.

“So what?” you might ask. “It’s a health issue for the kiddos and seeing adults smoke will make them want to do it.”

If you said that, I might ask for some evidence-based research that shows that second-hand smoke outdoors is a health risk. Then I would want to ask you if it presents a greater respiratory risk than the particulate pollution from all the cars in this city. And then I would probably ask you if adults smoking in a park make smoking more enticing to the kiddos than seeing people smoke on the street.

“Well, it’s annoying,” you might say in response. I would agree, but I would also add so are those men and women who bathe themselves in fragrance and inflict their smelly selves on us in elevators and other enclosed spaces. And then I would ask you if we should have a bylaw against that as well.

But, then again, maybe an outdoor smoking bylaw has nothing to do with smoking at all. Maybe it’s part of a grand design that would use the money from those who were fined for smoking in parks to finance a downtown arena.