Loonie bar scene

Haligonians don’t have a drinking problem. We drink, we get
drunk, we fall down. No problem! Oh, and we go a little crazy for cheap
drinks. We sometimes have bar brawls. We’ve been known to get a little
bit horny, melancholy, belligerent and/or delusional about our hotness
when we’ve had a few. And we tend to eat donair. No problem! Except 1)
all that would be hard to read when it’s printed on a funny, hopefully
puke-resistant, t-shirt, and 2) our provincial politicians might try to
price said t-shirt out of existence.

A few days before Christmas, labour and workforce development
minister Mark Parent announced a major change for alcohol selling. “The
province is increasing drink prices to encourage people to drink
responsibly,” says the press release. “The move stems from an incident
in Halifax in December 2007 that saw several people arrested for being
intoxicated in public. Low drink prices were deemed to have been a
contributing factor.”

The only rule used to be that a bar couldn’t sell a drink below the
bar’s cost of buying the booze, which gave rise to the “dollar drinks”
business model used by the occasional bar. (A 40-ounce bottle of, for
example, Smirnoff Red vodka costs $36.48 at the government liquor
store, taxes in. You do the wonderful, wonderful math.) As of December
19, bars can’t sell drinks for less than $2.50. Minister Parent’s
t-shirt probably says something more like “Halifax doesn’t have a
drinking problem, it has a bar owner problem.”

Blaming the bar is certainly easy. But if a single incident at a
single club can trigger sweeping change across an industry, doesn’t it
also raise concerns about the others who were involved? After a brawl
spilled out of the Dome onto Argyle Street that Christmas Eve of ’07,
38 people were arrested. If each one of them wore an “I have a drinking
problem” shirt, would that make it easier for us to admit the patrons
share some responsibility with the publicans?

I talked with several Halifax watchers about the situation, and
there was agreement that as a society we haven’t learned to handle our
liquor. One source, Paul MacKinnon of the Downtown Halifax Business
Commission, put a finger on a fundamental lack of balance: People tend
to be Puritanical toward booze consumption during the week, then
indulge to excess on weekends. Bernard Smith, of Spring Garden Road’s
business association, suggests teaching responsible drinking to
students as early as grade four or five as a way to reshape social
attitudes that remain rooted in the days of Prohibition. I’d extend
that education program to high schools, where students could have a
beer with lunch.

Britain’s pubs came up often in conversation as a positive model.
Communities gather at the local watering hole, and with different
generations drinking together—which in itself is a rarity in
Halifax—the old effectively teach the young the value of a social
tipple. It’s hard to find a Haligonian who doesn’t romanticize the pub
tradition. It’s equally hard to find a pub-like bar in residential
Halifax. An explosion of pubs throughout HRM would do wonders for
building both communities and alcohol awareness.

Unfortunately, we’re likely to keep shirking responsibility until
the scapegoats are gone. The demise of buck shots at bars doesn’t
“encourage people to drink responsibly,” it encourages people to max
out their cash by drinking more at home before heading to the meet
markets. And when their arrival makes downtown drunker and less safe,
you will find a politician watching from the sidelines, pointing the
finger of blame, wearing a shirt that says “my government sells dollar
drinks.”

Liquid Paper: In “Sustainable Santa” (Dec. 11, Sustainable
City) Chris Benjamin wrote that all Just Us! containers are made
from bamboo. In fact, the bamboo containers don’t include coffee cups
and soup bowls, which are made from paper and coated with corn-based
compostable plastic.

Let me know what you think of the dollar drink rule,
via editor@thecoast.ca.

This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2009.