Pellerin: Free spirits? City of Ottawa should let us quaff a cold one in our parks

Ottawans are a mild bunch, unlikely to get too rowdy. The city’s bylaw department handed out a grand total of nine tickets in two years for drinking in public parks.

Published Mar 28, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 3 minute read

Toronto completed a pilot project last summer on allowing alcohol in city parks. Photo by Jack Boland /Postmedia

You can always count on City of Ottawa staff to ruin the beginning of what should be spring with their legendary risk-averse, buzz-kill energy. Now they’ve decided that the good people of Ottawa can’t possibly be trusted with alcoholic beverages in public parks.

After the successful experiment whereby Toronto allowed people 19 and over to enjoy a tipple in 27 public parks last summer without anyone freaking out beyond what you’d expect in Hogtown, intrepid Capital Coun. Shawn Menard asked city hall whether, maybe, you know, we couldn’t try it here, too.

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Dan Chenier, general manager of the city’s parks department answered, presumably without suffocating from self-restraint, that before Ottawa could consider a similar pilot project, it “requires a thorough evaluation of safety considerations.” There’s a need for consultation and the crafting of rules, plus of course the design of signs to think about.

In other words, no.

I’m about ready to hyperventilate in the brown paper bag I could instead use to carry my can of local craft IPA en route to a bucolic picnic. Is there a constitutional requirement I somehow missed that says we must at all times be ridiculous, anti-fun and regressive?

For residents who don’t have spacious backyards or balconies, going out for a drink means going to a pub or other licensed establishment. In the middle of an affordability crisis it has a distinctly Marie-Antoinette ring to it. Qu’ils boivent une pinte à 12 $!

It’s almost as infuriating as that time the city issued regulations governing the height and placement of little free libraries. Remember that?

If we had a history of behaving like drunken hooligans in public parks, that would be one thing. Especially if we did so whilst loudly reciting Voltaire from a book we’d picked up in a neighbour’s unregulated box. But really, Ottawans are such a mild bunch. In fact, when asked by the media how much of a problem unregulated drinking in parks is, the city had to confess that the bylaw department had handed out a grand total of nine tickets in the last two years.

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Not to promote civil disobedience, but since I took up ultimate, I’ve also enjoyed the occasional beer after a game. It’s possibly the meekest form of tailgating there is; a handful of sweaty adults standing around the parking lot quietly talking about kids, work and frisbee politics. Why on Earth would you ticket that?

Too many people seem to equate drinking alcohol with being drunk. I don’t want to make light of alcohol dependency; I know alcoholism can be hard to deal with. Casual drinking is something else entirely. What would be more natural than sipping a local craft cider reclining in your zero-gravity beach chair at Mooney’s Bay at sunset?

Sure, choose parks that aren’t right next door to a school if you want to avoid children finding out what “daddy juice” really means because there’s no way they’d ever find out at home. Oh, and by the way, making alcohol taboo makes kids more curious about it, not less. If you want your children to grow into people who have a healthy relationship with alcohol, let them see responsible drinking.

The City of Toronto recently released a report on last year’s pilot program that said most people were happy with it, that there had been few issues and that the program was implemented with minimal operational impacts. It’s considering making the pilot permanent. Oh, and you know what else? I checked and that city doesn’t even regulate little free libraries. And nobody has sprained a clavicle because of that.

I never thought I’d see the day when I would ask why Ottawa can’t be as cool as Toronto. Yet here we are. Why not let us enjoy a casual brewski, ideally with a free book, in this lovely nature we have? We’re big enough to handle that.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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