A few minutes past 8 p.m. on a chilly Thursday, the doors of Bar Zero open for the first, and only, time. Along with two dozen other people waiting along Queen Street West in downtown Toronto, I’m led inside and instructed to use the free coat check downstairs. For some reason, the woman waving us toward the stairs is yelling and gesturing wildly, as if the music were too loud to hear over. It isn’t.

There are already people mingling at the bar. There are camera operators milling around. The lighting is a little too bright. This doesn’t feel like an ordinary night out on the town. It feels more like a middle-school dance.

That adolescent vibe extends to the refreshments: None of the drinks at Bar Zero contain alcohol.

This one-night-only event, run by the LCBO, is part of the corporation’s $1.47-million social responsibility campaign for the 2016 holiday season. Footage shot tonight will be used in a TV commercial, which will make the point that you don’t need booze to have fun.

“Bar Zero is meant to change perceptions about moderation and show that having a good time and a safe time are one and the same,” says Silvana Aceto, a senior communications consultant for the LCBO. At this, it flops. Bar Zero is a clumsy attempt at social responsibility that confuses moderation with abstinence — and its failure points to a bigger problem with the way we think about alcohol and alcohol regulation in Ontario.

Stay up to date! Get Current Affairs & Documentaries email updates in your inbox every morning.

Bar Zero is an ordinary tavern set up like a private party. Groups of people — ages 25 to 40, mostly — huddle around high-top tables, chatting. Others colonize the few couches. None of the guests look or sound like they’re having an especially good time. There’s a conspicuous absence of laughter, except when the occasional roving camera operator ambushes a group and enjoins them to fake it.

Behind the bar is Frankie Solarik of Toronto’s acclaimed cocktail spot BarChef. We go back a few years. He says hello with a purplish concoction involving maple and a sprig of rosemary. But lacking that ethanol bite, the drink is too sweet. All the drinks are too sweet. (Overheard: “I feel like I have a headache from all the sugar.”) This has long been my experience: most virgin cocktails just don’t taste very good, no matter how much care goes into them.

The real problem with Bar Zero is not recipe-related, however. It’s that the event doesn’t show anyone how to drink responsibly or how to behave at a real bar. And too many Canadians simply don’t know. Oh, we can open our mouths and knock back a beverage. But when most of us go out on the town, we perform the trick too many times in quick succession: the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health reports that 40 per cent of Canadians in their early twenties binge drink about once a month. Canada has a problem with drunk driving, too, sporting the worst DUI death rate among wealthy countries.

Yet when it comes to the social ills wrought by alcohol (drunk driving, underage drinking, drinking while pregnant), the LCBO confronts Ontarians with a lot of don’ts: don’t do this, avoid doing that. As for dos — advice on how to drink, responsibly and legally — the corporation points to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse’s low-risk alcohol guidelines, which offer tips such as “Set limits for yourself and stick to them,” “Drink slowly,” “Have no more than 2 drinks in any 3 hours,” and “For every drink of alcohol, have one non-alcoholic drink” — all of which are easier said than done when the lights go down and your friends start pounding them back.

Read more :

Why producers can't sell cider at Ontario's farmers markets

How 12 cases of beer in New Brunswick could change Ontario's liquor rules

Meanwhile, in southern Europe, people have been reducing their already-low rates of alcohol consumption for decades, leading to fewer deaths from cirrhosis, chronic liver failure, and traffic accidents. Only 6 per cent of Italian drinkers engage in what the World Health Organization calls “heavy episodic drinking” — i.e., binging — compared with 23 per cent of Canadians over 15 who consume alcohol.

Health researchers call it “the puzzle of Italian drinking”: in a country where the government regulates consumption with a light touch, the problems wrought by alcohol are appreciably less severe than what we see in Canada.

So how do Italians — not to mention Spaniards, Maltese, etc. — manage to drink responsibly without the government having to urge (or compel) them to do so? They’re culturally trained to view moderate consumption as part of a healthy adult lifestyle.

In August, I visited Tuscany’s public health department to speak with Allaman Allamani, a researcher who has been trying to solve the aforementioned puzzle. He said example-setting parents and positive peer pressure contribute greatly to the Italian sense of moderation. (Binging, for example, is considered taboo in the region, while Italians generally frown upon drunkenness.) “Americans, if they go out, they go out to get drunk,” Allamani told me. “Italians go out to drink with friends, and sometimes they become drunk, but drunkenness is a side effect of meeting, not the aim of going out.”

Some of the patrons of Bar Zero would like to see a more mature drinking culture emerge here, too. Wearing a T-shirt that says “NO FUN,” Kalen Hayman complains that there are no social options in Toronto “when the sun goes down, other than drinking — and that bothers me.” Hayman enjoys the occasional drink; what he doesn’t enjoy is a culture that has normalized getting bombed.

The LCBO should ally itself with people like Hayman. It should stop suggesting that the only choice is between drinking to excess and not drinking at all. It should stop offering unhelpful moderation guidelines that make no real-world suggestions. It should glean whatever wisdom it can from the Mediterranean model and formulate strategies to encourage that model to take root here.

Bar Zero does nothing to help that cause — and soon after 10 p.m., the crowd starts to thin out. It’s hardly surprising to see so little enthusiasm for this hamfisted media stunt, which features a pro-abstinence message no more effective those old-fashioned sex-ed classes that focused on chastity above all. Self-denial may sound like a noble virtue — especially to a Crown corporation with Prohibition-era roots — but in the long run, abstinence-only education is bound to fail. (Also, it’s no fun.)

I’d love to be wrong about this. I’d love to see fewer accidents on the roads this holiday season. Alas, just as teenagers won’t learn about safe sex by being instructed to keep their pants on at all times, does anyone actually think we’re going to make Ontarians more responsible drinkers by showing them a commercial featuring people standing around pretending to enjoy alcohol-free cocktails?

In a province where almost one-fifth of the population binges on the regular, encouraging people to drink responsibly is an important matter. The LCBO must give it more sober consideration.

Adam McDowell is a Toronto-based freelance journalist. He has been writing about alcohol for more than a decade and is the author of Drinks: A User's Guide.