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Toronto Your essential daily news | TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 2016 Rooftop gardens like this one at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel are improving Toronto’s record. TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE
Subway makes sure it really is a footlong
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Chew on this proposed ban MLB
Keep smokeless tobacco out of sports facilities, councillor says
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Blue Jays players and fans will be prohibited from dipping or chewing tobacco at their home ballpark if a Toronto city councillor gets his way. Ward 21 Coun. Joe Mihevc is hoping to have tobacco use banned at all city sports facilities, including Rogers Centre. “While chewing tobacco has long been part of the culture for many professional sports, especially baseball, research shows that it has very real and serious health consequences,” Mihevc said in a statement Monday. Smokeless tobacco contains at least 28 cancer-causing chemicals and is known to be a cause of oral, pancreatic and esophageal cancer. It’s also associated with mouth lesions and tooth decay. Mihevc plans to put forward
a motion at the next Board of Health meeting asking the city’s medical officer of health to look into ways the city can restrict tobacco at all its sports facilities. Similar bans are already in place in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Smokeless tobacco is already banned in Major League Baseball’s affiliated minor leagues. Major leaguers, however, are permitted to chew or dip. The league has tried to limit the visibility of tobacco use by its players by prohibiting players from doing interviews with tobacco in their mouths and also by barring the display of tins or other packaging in the dugout and while a player is on the field. TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE WITH FILES FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
EW. Blue Jays manager John Gibbons gave up chewing tobacco two years ago, calling it a “dirty, filthy habit.”