CAMRA BC – Vancouver Chapter have partnered with Vancouver Farmers Markets to use their community tables at 5 markets this summer. We’ve already done Kitsilano and the West End with Main Street (July 10th), Trout Lake (July 13th) and Kerrisdale (August 10th) still to come. Thanks to everyone who has come to see us and especially those who joined up! It’s been really good talking to people about all of the things that we do at CAMRA BC; our education programme, events, newsletters, pub-crawls, brewery visits and advocacy work. One thing that we did talk about was the fact that no craft beer (or any alcohol) can be sold or sampled at a Farmers Market. All the people we spoke to knew it was illegal but didn’t know why.
Craft beer at Famers markets is something that CAMRA BC has taken to the BC Legislature in our meetings with some of the MLAs and also at the Vancouver City Council. As you can imagine it was roundly supported with East Van MLA Jenny Kwan being particularly interested and helpful. We have been working hard on advocacy in the world of social media and online petitions but we decided to give “snail mail” a try, one person told me “A letter is worth 20 emails and an email is worth a hundred tweets.” so we put together a letter to the government explaining that we would like to be able to buy alcohol at Farmers Markets (along with some of our other campaigns) and printed off a few dozen. You can download a copy here.
Everyone who we spoke to about it at the markets agreed to sign a letter and we quickly ran out of letters at our first market, we also ran out at the West End market and in total so far we have over 100 letters ready to go. We’re posting out the letters in batches of 4-5 so that a steady trickle builds up on the desk of the Attorney General and by writing in your address we would hope that she will respond to each and every one. A couple of the people who signed letters were visiting from Seattle and Oregon and were surprised that it wasn’t possible for local artisan alcohol products to be sold at farmers markets.
We now know that the key MLAs to contact are MLA John Yap who as as “Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General for Liquor Policy Reform, will lead the stakeholder consultation on modernizing B.C.’s antiquated liquor laws and recommend improvements to the minister to take to Cabinet.” under Attorney General Justice Minister Suzanne Anton.
Stakeholders? That’s us! All of us are stakeholders and we should speak out so that they know what we want, and we need to do it now! Email them, tweet them, write to them, this our chance to make some real changes.
If you download the letter or want to write your own please send it to:
Attorney General Suzanne Anton MLA,
Parliamentary Secretary John Yap MLA,
PO BOX 9044 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC V8W 9E2
And if you see us at your local farmers market, come and say hello!
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