Think of the Can Ladies: Don’t Crack Down on Drinking in Trinity Bellwoods Park

Trinity Bellwoods looking very fresh and very clean… thanks to the can ladies who cleaned it. via.

Toronto is a wonderland for anyone who enjoys making a big fucking deal out of absolutely nothing. Case in point—this Thursday’s community meeting designed to “hear people out” regarding a very grave issue in the city of Toronto. No, it’s not the fact that we’re going to be rushing a whole bunch of diesel trains into the city very soon while seriously polluting our air, and no it’s not the fact that our mayor may or may not be implicated in a criminal conspiracy that could have led to the death of a drug dealer, it’s something much more nefarious. Drinking in Trinity Bellwoods Park.

If you haven’t been, Trinity Bellwoods sits at the centre of a young neighbourhood that has literally exploded with cocktail-friendly gentrification. There’s even a brewery called Bellwoods that serves take-away beers, to celebrate the cluster of trendy individuals who congregate in the park peacefully on a regular basis to shotgun PBRs and throw glow-in-the-dark Frisbees at each other. This community of young people who spend their afternoons under the sun, while snuggling cheap domestic twelve packs, has also developed a small economy for the wonderful can ladies (and can men, but they are few and far between) who are more ravenous about recycling discarded alcohol containers than the crappy parking enforcers in this city are about handing out crappy parking tickets to punish you for your crappy parking job.

To even flirt with the idea of cracking down on public drinking in Trinity Bellwoods (by forcing more police officers on horseback to spend their time galloping around, posing for pictures with tourists and drunk 20somethings, and then writing them up for drinking tickets before galloping away again) will be wasting basically everybody’s time at an extraordinary rate. And, worst of all, it will be completely removing a revenue stream for the can ladies who are just trying to keep their hustle intact.

What, really, is the harm by allowing this park to be a good-times booze-fest? By keeping everyone together in one place you have a built-in system of surveillance to prevent people from getting slapped around or robbed, and there are plenty of opportunities to semi-drunkenly tightrope walk, semi-drunkenly play baseball, or semi-drunkenly play Frisbee with a bunch of your friends. The high-class art festival Luminato even placed a giant Marina Abramović installation in Trinity Bellwoods last month and, according to a recent super official VICE Canada survey, engagement in the performance art was up by a stunning 39% simply because of the increased blood-alcohol level of the park-goers.

But again, cultural bonuses, the thrill of day drinking, and sweet Frisbee games aside, why can’t the city let law enforcement’s head turn slightly sideways and permit the non-stop Trinity Bellwoods funfest to continue? Remember when Toronto’s city council got all hot and bothered about how unsightly and crime-ridden the club district was? Then we demolished it and spread the shitty clubness all over the city? The supposedly unsightly or “illegal” public drinking fiesta in Trinity Bellwoods will simply relocate to some other, less enjoyable, parkland. So let’s just leave things the way they are and keep those can ladies busy. They make money off the beer-soaked and sun-drenched grins of others, while the cops get to ride their sweet horses around town to spend their time cracking down on actual crimes. It’s a perfect system. Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

Toronto Is Forgetting its Other Problems