A big green bottle

I come from East Asia, and back home my beer was Tsingtao. On a summer evening you can carry a big green bottle down the street, drinking as you walk and watching people go by, and nobody thinks anything of it. In Qingdao, draught beer is even sold in plastic bags: you carry it by hand with a straw stuck in the top, and it is part of the city’s scenery.

When I got to Montréal, I quickly fell for Québec craft beer: sours, IPAs, stouts, every microbrewery with a temperament of its own, the kind of place you keep going back to. But when I wanted to take a few cans to the park, or drink one while walking along the river on a summer night and looking at the city lights, I found out that here it is illegal. Montréal’s by-law P-1 (article 3) lets you drink in a park only during an outdoor meal, and only in a section where the City has put picnic tables.

This puzzled me. In 1898, Canada held a national referendum on prohibition. Every other province voted in favour; only in Québec did more than eighty percent vote against. How did the place that once rejected prohibition most firmly end up requiring you to lay out a sandwich before you can drink a can of beer in the park?

Banning harm, or banning freedom

The law can be written in two ways here. One way targets harm that has actually happened: late-night noise, fights, thrown bottles, public urination. Each of these is already covered by its own rule. The other way targets a freedom that “might lead to harm” and takes it away entirely. The ban on public drinking is the second kind: what it punishes is not waking the neighbours, but the bare fact of holding a can of beer.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill drew a line: the state may coerce someone for one reason only, “to prevent harm to others.” He happened to use drinking as an example: “No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.” Someone once convicted of violence while drunk, he argued, could be placed under “a special legal restriction, personal to himself.” Mill does not deny the risk. He only insists that restrictions fall on the situations and the people that actually create it.

Is punishment after the fact enough?

The other side’s case is not weak. Some harms cannot be undone: broken glass cuts a child, a drunken argument can turn into a stabbing, and a ticket afterward heals no one. Enforcement after the fact is also hard. The police cannot be there every time someone gets loud, while “no drinking” is clear and easy to enforce. And risks add up: one person with one can is harmless, but hundreds drinking late into the night in the same park can get out of hand. On the night Québec’s curfew was lifted in May 2021, Victoria Park in Québec City filled with people. By the end of the night a man had been stabbed, a woman had a head injury, and the police cleared the park.

So the claim that all preventive restrictions are illegitimate does not hold up. The real question is what kind of risk justifies what degree of prevention.

Grading the risk

I would rather sort risks into three tiers.

The first tier is serious, irreversible, falls on bystanders, and is not unlikely. Here a ban in advance is legitimate. Drunk driving is the classic case; no one proposes waiting until someone is killed before punishing it.

The second tier is moderate and reversible, but concentrated at particular times and places. The right tool here is a limit on time and place. Japan has long allowed drinking in the street. Tokyo’s Shibuya ward at first banned street drinking around the station only at Halloween and New Year, and only in October 2024 extended the ban year-round, from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m., with no penalty for violators. After the Victoria Park incident, Québec City likewise only moved its cutoff for drinking in parks from 11 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The third tier is minor and reversible, borne mainly by the drinker, or simply “unsightly.” Here the law should punish only disturbance that actually happens. Someone sitting quietly on a bench with a can of craft beer clearly belongs in this tier, yet the current rules treat it as if it were the first.

Who gets the ticket

A broad ban turns almost everyone into a potential offender, so who gets fined comes down to the discretion of whoever enforces it. Picnickers drinking red wine with a baguette and cheese are rarely bothered. Céline Bellot’s team at the Université de Montréal analysed years of municipal court tickets and found that the tickets given to homeless people were heavily concentrated in minor offences such as public intoxication and loitering. The ban also carries a hidden price threshold: people who can afford a bar terrace can raise a glass outdoors; people holding a beer from the dépanneur cannot.

There is another way, and it has been tried. In 2023, Toronto ran a pilot allowing personal drinking in 27 parks. The evaluation found that the disturbances and litter people had feared largely did not materialize, and alcohol-related emergency visits did not go up. In 2024, city council made the program permanent, with at least one park in every ward, while banning drinking within two metres of playgrounds and wading pools. Openness is the default; restrictions target specific points of risk.

Back to Québec

Québec went its own way. By 1919 the other provinces had all gone completely dry, most of them during the First World War. Québec’s own ban took effect that May, but a referendum a few weeks earlier had exempted beer, cider and wine, so only spirits were outlawed. About nine in ten Québec municipalities still banned sales locally, yet the province became the only place in Canada or the United States that never went completely dry. In 1921 it replaced prohibition with regulation, handing the liquor trade to a state commission. That generation acknowledged the harms of heavy drinking, but did not take away everyone’s glass because of them.

I am not asking the law to go easy on drunks. If I shout in the park or smash a bottle, fine me by the book. I only hope that, before it comes to that, I can sit quietly by the river, open a can of Québec craft beer, and, the way I used to carry a big green bottle back home, watch the city at night for a while.

The law should punish incivility, not confiscate everyone’s freedom in advance.

Sources

Further reading: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapter 1 (the harm principle) and chapters 4 and 5.