Hamilton finds park booze ban isn’t real
City has mistakenly enforced repealed bylaw since 2005
Hamilton just realized it has mistakenly enforced a non-existent bylaw booze ban in parks since 2005.
So, if a bylaw officer ticketed you any time in the last 16 years for tippling on a park bench or having a picnic beer on the municipal green, red-faced city officials would like to give your money back.
A report on the bylaw bungle recommends getting an alcohol ban back on the books as soon as possible — even as other Canadian cities experiment with allowing drinking in public parks. (As in deliberately, rather than accidentally.)
The news also follows past criticism of the city by Premier Doug Ford for cracking down on drinking in parks during the pandemic. “If a couple guys are sitting there, quietly on a picnic bench having a cold beer, who cares?” he said during a COVID briefing in 2020, later adding, “Give us a break. Just a little bit of a break.”
To be clear, Hamilton police can — and do — ticket people for offences under provincial liquor laws, including drinking in nonlicensed public places like municipal parks. During the first pandemic spring, for example, police handed out 369 tickets related to public drinking.
Any tickets handed out by police under provincial liquor laws remain valid.
But it turns out Hamilton has been separately enforcing pre-2005 parks bylaw rules that banned the possession, consumption or sale of alcohol in parks without specific permits. Those provisions were repealed in 2005 for reasons that remain “unclear,” according to a report to public works committee.
The belated realization prompted the city to search its records for citizens wrongly ticketed under the bylaw. No tickets were found prior to 2017 and only one, for $105, in that year. But in 2021, bylaw officers handed out 72 booze-in-parks tickets totalling about $5,400 — or $75 per ticket.
Only 44 of those people actually paid their tickets — so the city is preparing to send out 44 letters offering a refund, potentially a grand total of $3,939.50.
Councillors will now have to vote to put the municipal booze ban provisions back into the bylaw.
Council could put the bylaw rules back in place as early as next week.