There could be some smoking hot discussion at a meeting set for March 30 at the Whitehorse Public Library.

'First of all, what I want to do is inform smokers that things are a lot worse than they even understand here, and that unless we stand up for ourselves, things are going to get as bad, if not worse, than they are in the (United) States,' Brian Salmi, who's organizing the meeting, said in an interview Monday.

He pointed to a case in Michigan last month where four smokers were fired from their jobs for refusing to submit to blood and urine sample testing.

'For a decade now, there are a number of municipalities in the United States where you can't get a job with a municipality if you're a smoker,' said Salmi, a smoker.

He recently launched a human rights complaint against the city's smoking bylaw, which prohibits smoking in all public places.

In his complaint, he points to a case 10 years ago in Miami, Fla., where a woman who applied for a job with the city had to swear an affidavit that she hadn't smoked in the past year.

'She couldn't do that so she was denied the job,' Salmi said, adding there are similar cases throughout the U.S.

'And that's all coming here,' he suggested. 'So the biggest thing I want to do is explain to smokers that we have to start standing up for ourselves because we are the most openly and joyfully oppressed minority in the Western world today.'

While he's not sure how many people may come out to the meeting, he said he expects there will be some who understand the necessity of taking action on the matter. Some may be non-smokiers who have more civil libertarian tendencies.

'What course of action we take is certainly open for debate at this point,' Salmi said, though he added he has a few ideas of his own.

He was reluctant to say what many of those ideas are. The first, obviously, is to challenge the city's smoking bylaw, he said.

'The bylaw is at the crux of the matter,' he said.

His principal concern with the bylaw, he said, is he believes council was misled by staff in the argument that health hazards of second-hand smoke are irrefutable and incontrovertible.

'There actually is a very serious debate within the scientific community regarding the effects of second-hand smoke,' he said.

In an interview Monday, city manager Bill Newell said he thinks the city provided a lot of opportunity for all arguments for and against the smoking ban to be presented to council.

Even after the bylaw was introduced (with the exception of bars) in 2004, there continued to be discussion about the bylaw. Bars began falling under the ban in January a year later than other businesses came under it.

Newell noted Salmi is also able to speak at standing committee council meetings on the issue.

Salmi argued that with the information administration presented to council, members felt they had a responsibility to ban smoking.

While proponents of smoking bans often argue there's no safe level of second-hand smoke, Salmi noted that same argument isn't made for radiation.

'If the lies that are being told by smoking ban proponents were true, we'd all have been dead a long time ago,' he said. 'And unfortunately, staff managed to bamboozle council into believing this nonsense.'

If council members had been aware of the current debate regarding second-hand smoke, they may have taken another course of action, he said.

'Smoking rooms is one,' Salmi said.

The city turned down a request last year from the local Royal Canadian Legion to permit a smoking room in its Alexander Street facility. Some bars around town have also proposed the rooms, but to no avail.

Smoking bans aren't about protecting the health of non-smokers, but rather making smokers quit, Salmi argued.

He's hopeful there are enough people left in the Yukon who believe in liberty who show up to the meeting, 'if, for no other reason, than out of intellectual curiosity to see the heretic stand up and, you know, tell them the Earth revolves around the sun.'

The idea for the meeting came to Salmi when he was talking to some friends who are smokers. They ended up sitting around the kitchen table rather than a bar discussing the issue.

Any action that's taken will likely be discussed at a meeting subsequent to the March 30 event after there's a number of people found who are interested in working on it, he said.

'Start with this one, get the word out, find out who's interested in doing something, who's interested in being kept in touch with it, and then we'll discuss if there's different action,' Salmi said.

The March 30 meeting will get underway at the Whitehorse Public Library at 7 p.m.