It’s a black fly in your chardonnay. City of North Vancouver council has voted again to reject Save-On-Foods’ application to sell wine at its Park & Tilford store. The harms to public health were too great, the majority reasoned, to allow us to pick up a bottle of Pinot with our dinner ingredients.
Maybe we’ve had one too many, but we’re finding the logic a bit fuzzy. This is more or less the same council that bent over backwards to facilitate a brewery district in Lower Lonsdale and proudly made us the first jurisdiction outside of Quebec to permit the consumption of alcohol in some public parks.
Of course, public health matters. Having come through a pandemic, we should appreciate that now more than ever. But, in the push-and-pull that defines the relationship between the individual and the state, the health benefits of sending people across a parking lot to purchase wine aren’t so clear.
And even after a period of liberalization of B.C.’s liquor laws, ours are still among the austere in the Western world.
It is true that alcohol is a carcinogen and for some, it can be addictive. But the same is true of sugar, which Save-On also sells, and which council takes virtually no position on. If we need a nanny state for Sauvignon, do we also need one for soda?
The more time one spends pondering the contradictions in our approach to public health regulation, the more it feels a lot like having a hangover.
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