About time.
I should be hollering this to the rafters, maybe conservative freedom-lovers will just absolutely love Olivia Chow now for the beer in parks.
I was over in Christie Pits the other day, people were already enjoying beers and other stuff without anything crazy happening.
It’ll be an interesting pilot, at least.
I am sure this will end well
They said no tickets have been issued in 2023 for illegal drinking in parks.
LOL. Because people are boozing out of their water bottles and plastic/paper cups. Amateur officers need to try harder.
City officials have said the proposed program is based on “public health guidance, public safety and operational considerations and the experiences of other Canadian cities.”
Right. If it was about HEALTH and SAFETY, they’d keep alcohol out of publoc areas. Absolutely zero reason to encourage public drinking.
Laws won’t stop people drinking and causing a nuisance. They won’t drink more now because it’s legal.
But now I can go to the park and have a beer with some friends after work. Sadly I can’t afford to rent somewhere with a back yard, public parks other areas are an important part of the collective public health, and cracking a cold one at the same time, well, no complaints here.
Whether people decide to drink despite laws is not the issue, since you can’t force the stupid out of someone (but we can certainly at least try to enforce those laws). The real problem is the normalization of alcohol consumption in a public space, and I think it’s just plain wrong.
Parks are a family space. Keep alcohol in bars or at home.
The harm has been studied extensively, so if it really were about health and safety, council would have voted differently.
The study you linked does have a lot of great background, and drew very reasonable logic based deductions, but those deductions are not yet validated. They are certainly correct, but there is no data out of those deductions yet. To say X will increase alcohol harms is great and correct, but if you need to balance policies, you need some reasonable data to balance X vs Y. i.e. what are the public health risks of alcohol in parks balanced to at risk people forced into more dangerous areas or harassed by police?
As for the family space part. From my experience here in Montréal, drinking in parks doesn’t mean drinking everywhere in parks. Drinking (along with smoking, vaping, and cannabis usage) is not allowed in areas designed for children; and can be further restricted based on the intent use of a park or an area of a park. For example, with my two closest parks, one has a play structure, sand pit, and splash pad; there is no alcohol at all. The adjacent park has picnic tables and an artsy pergola; alcohol (and smoking and vaping) are allowed. This same division of parks (or sections of parks) is common.
While I understand your concern with alcohol in public spaces, I’m reasonably certain that there are shared private spaces, such as restaurants and sporting events, where alcohol consumption has not led to negative outcomes or concerns about the familyness of a space.
There may be a cultural difference in Montréal compared to Toronto that allows drinking in parks to not turn the city into a libertarian hellscape with pints in hand everywhere; but I don’t think so.
