Hard to believe my favourite beer festival of the year has come and gone! Farmhouse Wild Ale and Saison festival was a fantastic time. CAMRA Vancouver organized a safe ride home initiative to get people from UBC to easily accessible skytrain stations. Click here to read my thoughts on our initiative and a little tie in with how the government makes things like this more difficult than they have to be.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity (like many of you) to go to the Farmhouse Wild Ale and Saison festival held at the UBC farm. The event itself was an incredible success, as one would expect based on how well-received it was last year. Despite the rain in the forecast, festival organizers told me that very few ticketholders didn’t show up. There was ample tent space to keep us dry and a plethora of beers to drink. An event like this is special for many reasons – it is one of the few beer tasting events in the province that caters to the more seasoned beer drinkers. Now, that’s not to say that the festival can’t be enjoyed by all; but wild ales, sours, and bruins do call for a specific type of tasting palate. The event itself was in a beautiful location at the UBC farm and really captured the community essence that The BC beer scene is all about. I would first like to take this moment to congratulate the organizers in a fantastically run event. As far as I know, there wasn’t a single person that was disappointed with their experience. Every year beer festivals seem to be cropping up in varying locations in the Metro Vancouver area – but this festival stands out as a unique event that is not to be missed by the beer goers in the city.
That being said, my article is not actually about the festival itself – but instead it is about something our society did after the festival. With too many beers to try in simply not enough time at a fantastic event like this, it quickly becomes a reality that drinking and driving can become a very serious issue. Even if a festivalgoer’s intention is not to drive home at the end of the event, we all know that our judgment has potential to be impaired if alcohol is in our system. I saw dozens of Car2Go carshare vehicles just outside the festival when I arrived. As great as the idea of short term rentals to get from A to B is, there was little stopping people from leaving the festival, getting in those car shares and driving home placing many members of the public at risk. The reality is, as much as I rant about how much I like the UBC Farm as the festival location, it is not the most accessible place unless you live close to the university campus. Translink is always a nightmare and cabs get really expensive, really quickly. So, we tried figure out what a good solution to this problem could be. While discussing this with CAMRA BC President Jeremy Noonan, we thought it would be a good idea for CAMRA to host a bus to safely get people from the UBC farm to varying transit locations across the Vancouver area. Seems simple enough doesn’t it? Well there were some logistics that surprised us. Certain sources close to the festival and Liquor Distribution Branch communities told us that the government would try and put a stop to it if there was even the slightest possibility that the bus was merely a vehicle to more drinking. We had to work very closely to clearly brand this as our initiative and no one else’s so as not to make anyone liable should the government (in a very BC Liberal kind of way) label our method of getting 50 people home safely as some kind of evil endeavour to destroy this province with the corrupting force of casual drinking. (End sarcasm.) Our bus was labeled very specifically as the “get home safe and affordably” bus.
We began at UBC Farm, drove to Commercial-Broadway station, then on to Lougheed, New Westminster and finally Surrey Central. The reality is, each of those stations except one has one or several pubs near it. The fact that event organizers run risk of being in trouble with the LDB because a safe ride service might drop people off somewhere where alcohol might be consumed – outside the purview of the event and entirely legally – is nauseating beyond words. This kind of attitude is yet another example of the government that we keep electing (or re-electing in a highly questionable bi-elections) that genuinely has no real care for local industry or local advancements when it comes to the beer drinking community. Every festival that is successful, every community initiative like our bus that is well-received, every brewery that opens up locally is ultimately contributing to them having a lesser grip on their alcohol monopoly in this province. Think about it, these festivals all cater to local breweries. Local breweries are generally found in privately owned liquor store businesses. Of course there are exceptions, BC Liquor does have its craft beer section, But the SKUs dedicated to local craft beer are limited. With the rise of locally run festivals, community initiatives like ours, and new breweries opening up left, right and center local alcohol suppliers are going to see success. With private sector liquor stores being successful, BC liquor would inevitably see a decline in profits.
As we know, provincial government historically is not in the business of losing money; particularly not with the liquor portfolio which has been (seemingly) designed to exploit small businesses and consumers. In order to maintain the status quo, which benefits Government run business, it is of crucial importance for them that they keep local business tempered. (Note: I won’t even get into the fact that I just glossed over the fact that the people deciding the laws on alcohol in this province have “government run businesses” with a large stake in it. I feel like corporate law has rules against insider trading, embezzlement, etc… why is this any different!?!) In the end, it’s all a game. We see Attorney General Suzanne Anton posing for photo ops at Dogwood Brewing, when her liquor reforms were some of the worst when it came to negatively impacting consumers of local beer products. This is the same person that claims to care about local business, but slashed profit margins of the private sector with her “leveling of the playing field” liquor reform (Which I like to call the “Keep your local business down so my government can keep making money off of laws that are remnant from a bygone prohibition era” reform, but that is just me.)
This may seem like a bit of a leap, starting with talking about this fantastic initiative that we took that did an incredible service to the local community and jumping into the overarching sentiment the government has towards drinking in this province. But, they are connected, whether we want to admit it or not. The government is in the business of seeing local events like this not be successful and they will jump at any opportunity to push them down. Meanwhile, community organizers like us simply want people to have a good time, enjoy what this province has to offer, and get them home safely at the end of the night. But, in the end, small business and grassroots nonprofit is not the dance partner the government is looking for. Money makes the world go round (at least that’s my theory on how Christy Clark keeps being re-elected) and government profit through corporate/consumer exploitation will always trump “people.”
Leave a Reply