HALIFAX—Never again. Please.

For 10 days during the Memorial Cup in Halifax, anyone wanting to watch free concerts on Argyle St. was corralled like cattle in and around two metal wire fences. In nearly any other city in the world, organizers would have simply turned the whole street into one big party with no fences on site.

But not here. The problem was our out-of-date liquor laws.

Memorial Cup host organizers rightfully wanted to sell alcohol at these concerts, but to do that, they needed to designate a “beer garden” to isolate anyone drinking. Their solution was to make the whole centre of the street the beer garden, putting concertgoers inside a veritable cage.

The fences created a claustrophobic atmosphere reminiscent of a police perimeter — not a celebration. Some concertgoers took to social media to complain, and rightfully so.

Did the fences serve any rational goal? Not likely.

At plenty of events, bartenders check IDs before selling drinks without needing a barrier to keep out people under the legal drinking age of 19. The fences unnecessarily excluded young people from concerts that everyone should have been able to enjoy together.

What do you think?

If the goal was to protect kids from the sight of people drinking, we would need to fence off dinner parties and restaurants, too. If the fences were supposed to protect the city from drunk people, they failed to prevent anyone from staggering outside the cage at will.

The fences accomplished nothing. They were an example of following bureaucratic rules for the sake of following bureaucratic rules.

The fault here, to be clear, is not with the Memorial Cup organizers. The problem is our unnecessarily strict liquor laws that prevent Nova Scotians from simply enjoying a drink outside.

Anyone who has visited Montreal or Europe, where people are allowed to drink in parks, will know there is nothing to be afraid of. There you’ll find friends having a few drinks on sunny afternoons, but there are no more obnoxious drunk people than there are here.

Police there are empowered to deal with problems, like public drunkenness and disturbances to the peace, as they are in Nova Scotia. The problem, after all, isn’t where people drink but how much they drink. Being outside does not itself make people binge drink.

Our outdated drinking laws hamper community events and festivals. During winter celebrations, we squeeze anyone having mulled wine behind a small roped-off area, as if they could contaminate the rest of the celebration. At street parties, anyone enjoying a glass of beer has to hide it, making lawbreakers out of respectable adults.

No one should put up with being treated this way. I would like to remind Nova Scotians that we make our own laws. If they undermine both our biggest events, like the Memorial Cup, and small community parties, we need to change them.

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We were fenced in like animals at the Memorial Cup because our provincial politicians have failed to update our prohibition-era liquor laws for the 21st century. Surely one of our major parties can commit to fixing this problem. It should be a political winner.

I’m confident most Nova Scotians would prefer to be treated like dignified adults, able to enjoy a cup of beer.

Tristan Cleveland is an urban planner and a political science PhD student at Dalhousie University. He’s also a contributor for Star Halifax.

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