In honour of the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness — which was yesterday, so please resume your foul mood — I believe I’ll have a drink.

In Seattle.

It’s there that, when we do go down for a visit, we have taken to indulging in happy hour, that magic time of day when ordering a martini will not require a bank loan, as it does here.

Following the recommendation of friends, we’ve been patronizing a place near the Seattle Art Museum. It’s a typical American chophouse where during happy hour you can get a generous pour of house wine for $4, a domestic beer for $3 and oysters on the half-shell for $1.50 a piece. The rest of the happy hour menu — tapas-sized plates of banh mi sliders, pizza, Moroccan chicken kebabs and the like — has no resemblance to the mundane pub food that typically weighs down menus here. The place is full a half-hour after happy hour begins, often with Canadians. The mood is convivial, not slovenly inebriated. We eat, we drink, we leave happy and walk back to our hotel.

It’s so very adult. You are invited to be literally happy, unlike here, where you are expected to act responsibly. It’s a small distinction but an important one: Vancouver believes the two states of being cannot coexist: Seattle trusts you to realize they can and that you will act accordingly. The Americans wrote happiness into their Declaration of Independence. The scold’s disapproving finger still holds sway here.

Thus, B.C. — for reasons that make no sense — is the only province in the country that still bans happy hours.

Temporary discounts on drinks during the afternoon are prohibited, while, oddly, weekly specials are OK — which only highlights the hypocrisy of the ban. You can get that cheap margarita all day Thursday, but not between 2-4 p.m. on any other day of the week. What’s with that?

The stated reason for the ban is to discourage binge drinking.

But I don’t buy it: I think B.C.’s antiquated liquor laws do exactly the opposite. By demonizing alcohol to the point where it is seen as sinful, and by making it prohibitively expensive, we have encouraged excess, not moderated it.

This, I think, is especially the case for the young, who’ll “pre-load” at home on drinks before going out because they can’t afford the markup at bars, and who literally don’t know how to drink because they’ve been infantilized on the subject.

But there are rules to counteract binge drinking in the context of happy hours — rules that all other provinces have put into force.

They’ve mandated time limits on happy hours, banned all-you-can-drink and two-for-one specials and set price minimums below which liquor cannot be sold.

Yet oddly — and that’s a word that keeps on cropping up in this issue — the restaurant industry here is against the idea of happy hours.

Its reluctance, said Ian Tostenson, president of the B.C. Restaurant & Foodservices Association, has to do with how wine and booze are sold in B.C. Here, restaurants and bars have to pay the retail prices individuals do. With a 123-per- cent markup on wine and 170- per-cent markup on booze, discounting drinks during happy hours would hurt their bottom line, Tostenson said.

“As long as bars and restaurants have to pay retail,” he said, “it’s really hard for them to do happy hours.

“And the provincial government earns so much revenue from those markups that it’s not in its interest to change that. From a realistic point of view, it’s not going to happen.”

That doesn’t explain, however, why restaurants and bars can afford to discount different drinks on a weekly basis — martini Monday, tequila Tuesday, etc. — or why they can afford to have a food version of the happy hour by discounting menu items in the midday. Is it the expense of happy hour restaurants fear, or the increased competition for customers it would bring?

And as much as Tostenson insists the government has made happy hours economically unviable here, he is a fan of them elsewhere.

“I love going to Seattle,” he said, “and having a happy hour.”

Seattle’s restaurant industry must be grateful for his, and my, patronage.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com