On Toronto's outdated alcohol laws
Give the people what they want! (Hint: It's drinking outside)
I'm currently going through the motions of moving out of my condo in Toronto. Last Sunday, during this process, the old bar cart caught my attention. What a relic of the carefree days before lockdown! I haven't touched any of these bottles since the last time friends were gathered here before a night out. It made me wonder: what will going out be like after we’ve made it out of the woods?
My social circle has shrunk in the last year, and I'm keen to reconnect with friends. I'm tired of what Jordan would call “quiet fun”. I want to brush shoulders at a techno club listening to Amelie Lens. I have to imagine that most people in their 20s feel this way, especially if we replace the techno club with a generic basement dive bar where a washed up band plays the Killers. Even the people who only make it out once a year should be due for their night!
But if it’s true that most people are itching to get after it, what will nights out in Toronto look like after the pandemic? Will there be long lines for even the most mediocre bars? Will every weekend feel like New Year's Eve?
As much as I'm looking forward to the long, boozy dinners with groups of friends, I'm dreading having to participate in the dumb line culture of Toronto's going out scene. I'm calling it "line culture" for lack of a better name, but what I’m trying to describe is the feeling that the line is a universal nuisance in the city for every night out with a big group, and overcoming it is often a messy dance.
If you’re going out with a big group, you have to pick a bar that will fit everyone. If you enjoy going where others will be, these types of bars get busy by definition. That’s especially true if you’re hip and in touch with what the kids like these days. After deciding on where to go, you have to confront the question of the line. You can rush through a pre to get there early enough to dodge it, a process which makes stragglers of your friends who don’t have their shit together. Or, you can spend too much of your evening waiting in the line, at the mercy of bouncers who get off on setting people straight. Finally, there’s always the option to admit defeat and pay a ridiculous (seriously, ridiculous) amount of money for bottles.
Why is going out in Toronto like this? In contrast, It's such a treat to go out in cities with relaxed open alcohol laws. I'm imagining the bar-lined streets in Lisbon where you can get a drink from one place in a plastic cup, leave with it in hand, and finish it on your walk to the next one. Isn’t it great when the party spills out onto the street?
Imagine if being on the corner of King & Brant wasn't defined by the decision of whether to stand in line for Belfast Love, Early Mercy, Citizen, or any of the other horrible bars in the area. Today, it wouldn't make sense to open a small, 10-seat joint on that intersection. But if people could drop in, grab a drink, and hang outside waiting for their friends to show up, a small bar angled towards take-out drinks might do well. If a couple of these places open up next to each other, you’ve got a party! Even if you had planned to meet the rest of your friends inside Belfast, why not just have a drink with the outdoor crowd and wait for the line to die down?
And this is for King West, the gaudiest part of Toronto. Imagine how much better going out on College or in Kensington might be if you could freely bounce from bar to bar, drink in hand? We can get past line culture as a city by loosening the arbitrary restrictions on outdoor drinking, moving us away from meeting inside a particular bar and towards meeting in an area surrounded by a cluster of bars.
Anyways, it’s not like drinking outdoors doesn’t already happen in Toronto. It’s an open secret that, in parks across the city, people regularly gather for drinks on a nice day. If the city is happy to turn a blind eye to this behaviour, why not also let local bars and restaurants benefit from it by being the ones who supply the drink?
In the next couple of months, open alcohol laws would throw independent restaurants and bars (the best part of our city!) a lifeline by allowing them to serve take-out drinks. A quick look at most modern western societies shows that, for a country as progressive as Canada, we’re far behind on open alcohol laws. Even in the US, States like New York and DC have recently modernised their open alcohol laws to allow restaurants to serve take-away drinks. Other places like Sonoma, California lifted restrictions long ago. Finally, there's research to suggest that public drinking tickets disproportionately affect people of colour, without actually improving public safety.
I’m not sure who the power brokers in Toronto are for getting this kind of change passed. When Ontario briefly announced that they partnered with SkipTheDishes to offer alcohol delivery, it was Jen Agg’s swift Twitter retribution that contributed to the scrapping of that program. I’m open to suggestions on how to get Jen’s attention (mostly so I can let her know that I am fanboy).
Once Toronto gets past the pandemic, there will be crowds of people eager to throw themselves back into the fray. Modernising that experience would be a step in the right direction for the city.
Note 1: Kevin reminded me that not everybody hates lines like I do. If Toronto does move in this direction, I’m sorry, Jonny.