Do-gooders at City Hall have launched an ad campaign to boost a new anti-smoking by-law. Come the New Year, smokers will be banned from privately owned joints where children are present, like restaurants and hotels.

A new billboard spotted on the south side of the Disraeli Freeway over-dramatizes the anti-tobacco crackdown with the face of a hapless kid engulfed by a waft of smoke that could easily be mistaken for the pits of hell. The billboard issues this warning: "Where minors are permitted inside, you smoke outside."

You don't have to convince me that cigarette smoking is bad news. But even more disturbing is the creeping infringement on individual rights and private property that has been ushered into law by the anti-smoking zealots.

The whole lot of them are tiresome group of neo-puritans professing to know what's best for us. For whatever reason, they single out smoking as enemy number one even though deadly heart disease and cancer can be attributed to other poor life-style choices. So once smoking is banned, what's next - whoppers with cheese?

After a while, their chiding all sounds the same. Thou shalt not smoke, drink, own a rifle, advertise ideas during elections, fortify your home, rear your children as you see fit, or in any way care or think for yourself.

Now the "butt out brigade" is getting in a few extra licks by extending the smoking ban to the city's 71 community centres.

The new law could have a crippling affect on programs and basic operations that depend heavily on cash raised from bingo nights and socials, say some community club reps.

Strip away the million bucks in private fundraising and the city will have to beef up operating grants over and above the existing $4 million mark. And that's bad news for over-taxed Winnipeggers, but not for everyone.

The displaced bingo nights and socials could be a boon to private halls and hotels recently straightjacketed by the new smoking ban. If it's not new business, it at least levels out the playing field.

But level playing fields that cut across public and private lines should make Winnipeggers feel uneasy.

The anti-smoking by-law is just the thin edge of the wedge. Next on the hit list is the Convention Centre. After that, it won't be long before our modern day prohibitionists try to outlaw smoking in the privacy of your own homes, with or without minors. I kid you not.

A county in Maryland, USA did just that. They recently passed a bill that penalized residents with a $750 fine for smoking at home if tobacco fumes lingered into a neighbor's property. What's next on the thought control agenda, curfews for adults and compulsory exercise classes? Locals protested against the Orwellian law and the bill was eventually scrapped.

And that's the trouble with Winnipeg's reckless anti-smoking law. It blurs the distinction between public and private property and paves the way for lawmakers to legislate against and emasculate individual authority over your own household.

Respect for private property and individual rights are non-negotiable, and if measured in terms of importance, expose the tobacco ban for the petty nuisance that it is.