ILLUSTRATION BY SANDI FALCONER
Benjamin Leszcz is a writer and the co-founder of Wilda, an alcoholic beverage company based in Prince Edward County, Ont.
On a recent Saturday, my friend John and I took our kids to a small, idyllic island that is perhaps the world’s most ethnically diverse place. The sandy beaches and sprawling fields were packed with groups of day trippers. Each crew seemed to be speaking a different language, eating different foods, engaging in different pastimes. My seven-year-old son taught another kid, versed in cricket but not baseball, how to shag flies. I tried my hand at hurling, the Gaelic sport, invited in by convivial Irishmen. Later, John and I had a beer while our kids picked at barbecue chicken and explored a hedge maze.
It is still technically illegal to drink publicly on Toronto Island, but this detail has never deterred me (nor anyone, it seems). I felt especially unworried on my recent visit, knowing that drinking had been legalized in 45 other Toronto parks after a 21-1 April council vote. The horse, clearly, is out of the barn. With the decision, Toronto joined Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, all of which recently legalized park drinking following successful pilot projects. (Montreal, of course, is light years ahead.) Toronto’s 2023 trial run, in 27 parks, generated a grand total of two complaints. The storm of social ills, predicted by critics, never materialized. To the contrary, it is becoming increasingly clear that park drinking actually improves parks, helping them fulfill their highest purpose: to bring diverse people together – as Toronto Island does so well – and to remind us, in the words of 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, of our “commonplace civilization.”
Before Olmsted became the architect of the modern park – he designed Central Park, Yosemite, Montreal’s Mount Royal Park and many others – he was a journalist, commissioned in 1852 by The New York Times to report from the antebellum South. There, Olmsted found an individualistic, quasi-feudalistic society, bereft of a sense of common humanity. Back in the North, by contrast, he described a flourishing of “social enterprises” – communal efforts to build libraries, theatres, skating rinks, schools. Parks, for Olmsted, were the ultimate venue for the weaving of social fabric. He was so convinced, in fact, that he left journalism and dedicated the rest of his life to designing them.
Olmsted was plainly correct. What element of urban infrastructure connects us more strongly to our fellow citizens? Parks are a pin prick in the algorithmic bubbles that encase us today. A place where we meet neighbours and connect with strangers. Where kids befriend others entirely unlike them. Parks are fertile ground for the accumulation of what the sociologist Robert Putnam calls “social capital”: the relationships and loose ties that imbue societies with a spirit of trust, co-operation and reciprocity.
Fittingly, something else that correlates strongly with elevated levels of trust, co-operation and reciprocity is – you guessed it – moderate, social drinking. “Alcohol opens the social pores, allowing more relaxed social interaction, calms the nerves, and creates a sense of community,” write Robin Dunbar and Kimberley Hockings in Alcohol and Humans. According to UBC historian Edward Slingerland, the author of Drunk, alcohol’s capacity to diminish inhibitions and facilitate connection isn’t merely its highest use; it’s likely the reason that booze exists at all, or at least continues to exist, given the obvious downsides of inebriation during, say, hunter-gatherer times.
Thus, the legalization of park drinking is a victory not only for libertarians and for hedonists like myself, who view a crisp Riesling as an integral accompaniment to a baguette and cheese; it is a victory for all park-goers, and for society itself. Mr. Putnam writes that Olmsted designed parks as “a means to overcome isolation and suspicion.” Alcohol, it turns out, has the exact same function.
So what took so long?
Canada’s park-drinking pilots demonstrated that fears of unruliness, fist fights and car crashes were overblown. Once we acknowledged that litter and public urination were failures of civic infrastructure, not moral character, park services improved, too. And if we’re being honest, the informal pilot project of drinking in parks had been running smoothly – albeit illegally – forever, and notably during the COVID-19 pandemic. But this is Canada. For a stark reminder of that fact, look at Ottawa, where park drinking remains verboten. According to parks department general manager Dan Chenier, the city that fun forgot still needs to undertake “a thorough evaluation of safety considerations.” This, of course, is shorthand for the moral panic that ensues here any time someone proposes loosening liquor laws. It’s an old story: By allowing alcohol in parks – or selling it in corner stores, or on Sundays, or at baseball games – the weak-willed citizenry will descend into depravity. The puritans have been bolstered lately by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, which now recommends a draconian limit of two drinks a week, and by the intermittent-fasting-and-cold-plunge set, who prefer living “clean” to living well.
Still, legalizing park drinking isn’t a rebuke to the naysayers; rather, it’s a way of changing the conversation, focusing more on how people are drinking and less on how much. Park drinking can represent an incredibly constructive model for alcohol consumption. It is generally moderate: We are constrained by what we can pack into a cooler, and we attend to the rhythms of nature, taking cues from a cool breeze or darkening sky. It is democratic: Parks are for everyone, and are vital for city-dwellers without backyards. It is often accompanied by physical activity: Did you know a Frisbee can hold three pints of liquid? Most importantly, it is social: In city parks, we are seldom alone. This last feature is critical, according to Mr. Slingerland. “In most societies and for most of human history, the consumption of … alcohol has been a fundamentally social act,” he writes. “We are all not well equipped to control our drinking without social help.”
With luck, park drinking will nudge our norms forward, treating alcohol less as a dirty secret, and more as a healthy part of a socially connected life. We are living amid a historic crisis of loneliness and social isolation. We need strong measures to pull people out of their homes, off their screens, and back into each other’s lives. One prescription, at least, is an incredibly pleasant one: Pack a picnic, raise a glass, and let a warm breeze wash over you and your friends. I need not remind you that life is short, and summer is shorter.