Free Republic

The owner of a Montreal cafe where patrons can smoke a psychoactive variety of sage says he will close up shop next month. Matthew Liscomb told the Montreal Gazette that Les Mentheurs would go out of business on Aug. 23 due to legal battles and changes in provincial tobacco laws. On top of that, he said, business insurance has been increasingly difficult to get. It's not been easy getting insured and it's not legal to operate a business without proper insurance, he told the Gazette. The closure will mark the end of a stormy history for Les Mentheurs, a 30-seat...

Vancouver's hookah-parlour owners are celebrating after winning an exemption Thursday from a proposed new bylaw that will ban smoking on most sidewalks in commercial districts, in bus shelters and even in taxis passing through Vancouver. In giving the bylaw unanimous approval-in-principle, Vancouver city council members bowed to arguments that hookah lounges provide an important cultural space for the city's Muslims and granted them a temporary exemption. The bylaw, which provides for fines of $100 to $2,000, won't come into effect until the legal department has drafted Thursday's amendments. No firm date for its implementation has been set. Hamid Mohammadian, operator...

African restaurants are planning to shelve traditional attractions in the wake of the smoking ban. Restaurant owners said shisha or hookah pipes would be left as merely decorations to hang on walls after the new law comes into effect next year. The ban will mean the end of shisha cafs, whose clients are mainly Muslims and use shisha as an alternative to drinking alcohol, forbidden in Islam. But also the use of the pipes in ordinary restaurants which serve hookahs for smoking fruit-flavoured tobacco as a dessert option. Sherry Eskici, who owns the Mascara Restaurant in Western Road, Brighton, with...