Road hockey: fun, Canadian and fraught with lawyers
It appears to be the most simple, uncontroversial thing. But if history is any kind of guide, it will become mind-bogglingly, maddeningly complex, and end up undermining our faith that the city government is capable of allowing people to have uncomplicated fun.
I’m talking about road hockey, of course.
Seven hours into the city’s public works and infrastructure meeting Nov. 12, rookie Councillor Christin Carmichael Greb introduced a straightforward request: That kids be allowed to use their road hockey nets, and maybe basketball nets, on the public right-of-way at the edge of the road, particularly in places where there are no sidewalks. She asked if city staff could prepare a report about the feasibility of this. The report request passed unanimously, without debate and without questions.
Simple. Uncontroversial. It’s road hockey, after all! As Canadian as maple syrup and simultaneously substituted commercials. God bless ’em.
What happens next, almost for sure, is that the city’s lawyers get a hold of this thing and bung it all up. Because if watching city hall teaches us anything, it’s that there can be nothing simple or uncomplicated about anything, and especially not road hockey.
Recall Councillor Josh Matlow’s doomed 2012 attempt to lift the bylaw that bans playing ball or hockey games on city roads: In order to do so, he and his fellow councillors were advised, they’d need to implement a system that could only apply on streets with low speed limits, with fewer than 1,000 vehicles a day passing on them, where the gap between passing cars was more than one minute long, where there were good sightlines and where 80 per cent of neighbours agreed in writing to allow it, and where the politicians on the local community council then granted a permit exempting kids from the law.
Matlow abandoned that attempt under the weight of the bureaucratic complexity.
So kids here who imagine themselves to be Connor McDavid on the road in front of their homes continue to risk a $55 fine.
Maybe it’ll be different this time. Maybe “placing” hockey and basketball equipment at the edge of the road will somehow prove easier than playing there. Who knows? But I doubt it.
The key concept here, in the eyes of the city’s lawyers, is not safety, per se. It is liability. It’s a magic incantation to city lawyers and the politicians who listen to them, “liability” — you say it aloud and the simple becomes incomprehensible.
The term makes the desirable become impossible, and anything resembling spontaneity and fun is banished.
The fear of liability is why the city thinks allowing people to skate on the frozen-over pond in High Park, as they have done for more than a century, is an expensive proposition requiring a rigorous monitoring and enforcement program.
Liability is the reason the city of Hamilton bans tobogganing on any city hill. It was liability concerns that led one east-end family on an odyssey to get the full city council to approve an “encroachment agreement” to allow them to erect a basketball net in front of their house last year.
It was because of liability concerns that Toronto’s public school board ripped down virtually all of its play- grounds — 172 of them, at a replacement cost of more than $27 million — in 2000 even though no serious injuries or lawsuits resulting from them had ever been recorded on that equipment.
Fear of liability is a tyrannical and costly ass-covering scourge on our body politic. If something is simple and fun, lawyers chanting “liability” will convince our politicians to ban it.
To be sure, other city bureaucrats are capable of completely burying a concept in red tape even without invoking that word.
In fact, at the same public works meeting Nov. 12, a staff report advised councillors that any plan to allow neighbourhood residents to paint murals on their local streets during street festivals, as they do in other cities, would require heavy regulation and monitoring for safety, and somehow put the city on the hook for maintaining and repainting such murals, and would require policing for “high artistic integrity,” and so on.
Even without the word “liability,” they’ll suggest the city is liable for all sorts of things that make most ideas freeing people to have unsupervised fun too expensive and complicated to bother. Still, “liability” is the big one.
One obvious solution is that a government with the authority to do so — at Queen’s Park or in Ottawa — should pass a piece of “use at your own risk” legislation expressly limiting liability in cases where inherently risky activities are tolerated but not openly encouraged or monitored. They could call it the “Road Hockey and Tobogganing Act,” and many of us would celebrate in the streets when it passed (holding our hockey sticks high).
But even in the absence of such a law, perhaps our politicians just need to grow a spine. In Kingston, road hockey was made expressly legal before 8 p.m. on local streets. They seem to have avoided being buried in lawsuits so far.
People walk and drive and bike on city streets every day, and many get injured and even killed doing so, but we haven’t banned it yet. People swim on city beaches when lifeguards are not there. Toronto has yet to succumb to the same tobogganing fear that Hamilton has — the legal risk is clearly relative.
It is the job of lawyers to advise us of possible risks, but it is our job to put those risks in context and make a decision. In weighing those decisions, maybe we have less to fear from liability than from fear of liability itself. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire