I now have a solid decade of adulthood behind me – I turned 28 last week – but my history as a sufferer of occasional hangovers is quite a bit longer.
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Underage drinking no longer provokes gasps and fainting grannies, yet in Ontario we’re stuck with a drinking age of 19 and have to leave bars earlier than in much of the rest of the Western world. Maybe it’s time for our government to start rethinking drinking.
It was only three years ago that Gerry Phillips, then minister of government services, announced, “Times change, and we have to change with the times.” He was talking about allowing patrons to take alcohol into bar hallways and washrooms – mainly because of fears that date-rape drugs could be added to unattended drinks.
Our laws changed because the times got tougher, not because someone figured you could be trusted not to smash your glass or worse, top it up next to the toilet.
But the longer this little control drama goes on, the clearer it becomes that our liquor laws are ideological holdouts. They make Toronto’s nightlife the prudish aunt of the party.
We’re not even 100 years past the Ontario Temperance Act, a war measure introduced as a thank-you gift to a higher power by Methodist premier William Hearst. At the time, the New York Times wrote, “On what was supposed to be his deathbed, [he] made a vow that if he was spared he would bring in prohibition measures as a thanks offering.”
We’re not only running on the fumes of temperance-era guilt, but also conforming to its imbibing style. “What we know from Prohibition is that people drank less frequently, but when they did, they went to excess,” says David J. Hanson, a sociology professor emeritus at State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam who’s spent over 30 years researching alcohol. The same, he says, applies to underage drinkers today.
Apparently, the mean age when we start drinking is 15.6 years, according to the 2007 study Reducing Alcohol-Related Harm In Canada: Toward A Culture Of Moderation. The same study confirms that “youth consume alcohol less frequently than adults however, when they drink, they tend to drink more [binge drinking].”
Yet the report recommends raising the drinking age from 18 to 19 in Manitoba, Alberta and Quebec instead of lowering Ontario’s to 18, even though the evidence suggests that more clandestine drinking means more bingeing.
Ontario’s legal drinking age was set at 18 in 1971, but it was raised to 19 a few years later over concerns that high school students could drink. Now that the fifth year of high school has been eliminated, drinking is a confusing issue for first-year university students.
Deputy mayor Joe Pantalone sees our local situation as a result of a hybridization of cultures. “When you talk about Toronto, you talk about the mixture of continental European traditions of alcohol, where it’s part of growing up – in moderation – and the British thing, where you can’t drink until you’re 19 and you acquire, with the clock striking midnight, the ability to drink. Magic!”
He suggests that young people get in trouble when they come of-age because they haven’t had practice in normalized drinking. It’s a mashup the city needs to manage. “Maybe you’re right – maybe the drinking age should be 18, but you need some serious discussion,” Pantalone says.
And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the arbitrary 2 am last call. Sure, a decade ago we went from 1 to 2 am, but we’re still creating a, um, bottleneck of revellers racing to finish pitchers before getting ejected and setting out in search of after-hours basements.
The city has wrangled some control from the province over special events permits for fests like Pride and NXNE. For year-round bars, the city has total control over extending hours, but hasn’t done so. Should it?
“People will just go out later if bars are open until 3 or 4 am,” says Samantha Wells, alcohol and violence researcher at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. “A study in Australia looked at extending hours by an hour, and violent incidents increased by 70 per cent,” she adds.
But why would our neighbours in Quebec be okay with 3 am and New York City with 4 am closing times? “Some jurisdictions feel that personal freedom is more important. It’s a matter of balancing what’s more important: your own convenience or harm to others,” responds Wells.
Hanson counters by passing along a study from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) showing that alcohol-related deaths are lower in states with later last calls. He does acknowledge that you don’t solve the fighting problem by just releasing all drinkers at a later hour. The real solution, he says, is encouraging bar-goers to filter out slowly. Hence his suggested option, in use in England and Wales since 2005: 24-hour bar service.
There, some bars close at 2, others at 4 or 6, thereby reducing the mob exodus. Results from these expanded hours seem mixed. Studies point to reduced disturbances in some time periods but increases in others. Britain’s Home Office, for example, reported a 25 per cent increase in violence from 3 to 6 am.
While we’re not sure of the final outcome in this experiment, we do know that our own Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) needs a shot of common sense.
“The liquor board goes out of its way to make it hard for clubs to do business,” says Gary Kendall, entertainment manager at the Silver Dollar. “There was a time when – because we also operate the Comfort Zone, which used to have a liquor licence – [AGCO] never quit until they found some little thing to close it down.”
“I think the AGCO can be silly in a lot of its rules,” agrees Councillor Pantalone. “In Little Italy during a festival, people standing [outside] to see if they could get into a bar were counted as people inside and the bar was ticketed. That’s absurd. There’s got to be a degree of common sense.”
But the city’s at the mercy of the province here. In this case, the AGCO simply acts as the bouncer with orders. The orders come from the Ministry of Government Services.
Government Services spokesperson Alan Cairns mentions some forward-thinking changes like risk-based licensing, for which the AGCO deals with serving applications case by case. He also notes the 2005 changes to wine dining. “Eligible licensed establishments can now offer their customers the choice to bring their own wine and take home the rest.”
But ask any Pride reveller what it’s like to have to limit your drinking to a swig pen – a well-policed, fenced-off area – instead of wandering the streets with your beer, as you can in Germany or the Czech Republic.
Our silly puritanical regs come down on the public pint, i.e., drinking on a sidewalk or in a park, during a festival or a quiet date. “What’s wrong with walking down the street finishing a beer?” asks Kendall. “Put it in something that’s not going to smash and can be recycled.”
Well, no go in T.O. Meanwhile, Montreal’s Pride festival prez, Eric Pineault, says people can no longer walk the streets drinking like they could 10 years ago, but at least they’re not herded into fenced “gardens.”
“We’ve got to drink in the [Emile-Gamelin] park where we have our shows,” he says, noting that the park accommodates 15,000. They could legally party until 3 am but choose to wrap up at midnight to respect neighbours’ right to quiet.
How civilized. Meanwhile, back in Ontario, Cairns says, “The government takes the service of liquor very seriously, so it is contained in defined areas where the licensee may monitor patron consumption.”
Translation: We’re too crazy to behave ourselves. Streetside drinking works in Germany and other parts of Europe, but we’re too irresponsible, it seems. Parks will become wild booze gardens. Avert your eyes, children.
Who will think of the children!?
Strict liquor laws are a “reflection of the temperance orientation, where you didn’t want children or, further in the past, women seeing you drink because it might somehow corrupt them,” explains Hanson.
“If society is concerned about drinking in parks, prohibit the behaviour you’re concerned about. If people are disruptive, go after that behaviour whether they’re intoxicated or not.”
But Pantalone says of street drinks, “I don’t think we’re there yet. We have a mingling of commercial and residential areas. There’s not enough separation, where you drink in the port lands and sleep in Rosedale.”
Pantalone’s overseen the nightlife boom on College in the past few years. He says he had to restrict the free market there because bars would have started opening on side streets and second floors. Now he’s dealing with another bar boom along Ossington and his side of Queen West.
“It’s fluid not because liquid is involved but because people’s fun is in conflict with peace and quiet in the home,” he says. The latest battlefield is the Great Hall, which has applied for a full liquor licence for hundreds of people rather than operating on event-by-event permits.
Queen Beaconsfield Residents Association founder Misha Glouberman opposes this, saying the area needs mixed retail and the street’s now too bar-heavy. Still, he agrees there’s potential in the idea of relaxing hours if regulators really toughen up on noise and other infractions.
“Closing time is definitely something that does screw up neighbourhoods. As a resident, I’d be happy to see later hours. If some bars close at 4 am, you don’t get as much of a crunch.” He adds that seemingly looser rules in Europe around who can drink where come with much stricter rules about disturbing people from patios, for example.
“They’re really freaks about that. They permit more and they regulate more,” says Glouberman. “The thing I always think about Toronto is that we’re a city that’s new at having a nightlife. Toronto feels like a teenager that’s just started drinking.”
Pantalone hasn’t reached any conclusions about the Great Hall, but he is planning a public meeting about the Ossington strip later this month.
It kind of makes you wonder what the liquor licence folks are thinking. On the one hand, our government-knows-best regulators say they’re looking out for us by forcing people to throw back drinks if they want to move from one bar to the next, and won’t trust adults to make adult choices on the other, they think it’s kosher to approve bar after bar in areas like Queen and Ossington that dump all their partiers into the street at 2 am. Weird.
pault@nowtoronto.com
