When the BC Liberals announced their plans for Happy Hour last week, beer and wine enthusiasts decried their decision to set minimum drink prices, effectively increasing the price of booze rather than decreasing it in some cases.
The change prompted columnist and political commentator Bill Tieleman, who led the fight to repeal the HST in 2009, to launch a new Fix BC Happy Hour campaign.
WE Vancouver reached out to Tieleman about just why this needs to happen.
WE Vancouver: Briefly, why do you think the happy hour rules need fixing?
Bill Tieleman: Well, everyone in the world knows that happy hour is a time when the price of drinks go down to encourage patrons to come to a restaurant, a bar, or a pub to have a slightly cheaper pint of beer, a glass of wine or a cocktail.
Only in British Columbia will the price go up for happy now, now that it’s been approved that the price goes up, not down. It makes us a laughing stock in terms of the entire world! There’s nowhere else you can go to where the price goes up, you know?
WE: Well, all prices are going up.
BT: Well, yeah. That’s the whole problem. You’re allowing happy hour but you’re setting a minimum price on all these drinks, which was higher than what they were currently being charged. Happy hour is really a 24-hour price increase.
WE: Do you think most bars and restaurants won’t even bother with the happy hour and serve at the minimum cost?
BT: Well, some of them are obviously charging more. If you have a drink downtown at a lot of big hotels and things, they’re well over the minimum amount to start with. That’s not the problem.
It’s a number of bars, it’s legions, ones that have a special niche or are just looking for a volume deal. The Pumpjack on Davie St. has been quite vocal about it.
There are only two things that can happen with the happy hour legislation: Either it makes no difference whatsoever or it increases the price. Neither of those is good! (laughs)
WE: What do you think the logic is with this new pricing structure?
BT: Well, there is no logic behind it because you wouldn’t call it “happy hour,” you’d call it “anti-drinking hour.” You’d call it “disincentive to have a beverage hour.”
But, more seriously, clearly what happened is the government didn’t do its homework. It didn’t do the obvious thing, which is send a couple of researchers with a wonderful assignment to go check out beer prices in pubs, wine prices in saloons and bars, then go back and say what the minimum price should be. It doesn’t appear to me to be rocket science.
You would think, even more simply, they could talk to bar tenders and co-owners of pubs and say, “We need a minimum price for our happy hour. What should it be and how high would be a problem?” I just imagine that you could approach this in any other way. It beggars the imagination that someone can’t get that right.
WE: These plans seem to run against what the BC Liberals often say, how they’re trying to reduce complications for businesses. Is this plain ineptitude? Is there something more untoward going on here?
BT: Oh no. This is plain ineptitude. There can be no other explanation, short of paranoia. Really. They just screwed up. That why I say, how can you screw up happy hour? And they did.
So, the solution is extraordinarily simple. That’s why I set up the Facebook page and did the columnon it. Just fix the minimum price. Fix it. Lower it. Make it work. Go to the Pumpjack. Go to the folks who run bars and pubs and say, “What’s your lowest price beer at any point in the week? What’s your lowest price high ball, what’s your lowest price glass of wine? If we set the price at this, will that be a problem?” They say, “No.” And it should, in a way, be lower than what their lowest price already is.
Or, you take a really radical step, which some people are advocating, and say we don’t have minimum prices. The government can just say they’ve decided to eliminate minimum prices. If you want to sell alcohol at wholesale price, if you want to sell it at a loss to get people into your bar for an hour, then we’ll just do.
Now, that would just be the purists saying let the market decide. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable argument. I think there are people that are concerned that it may lead to ridiculous priced booze and all that, but I’ve been to New Orleans where there’s a restaurant with 10-cent martinis. They seem to still be in business. I didn’t see anyone passed out in their chair. It’s a gimmick to get people in.
WE: I’m looking on your Facebook page and there are some comments on there that happy hour is a bad idea in general. Is that a popular notion here, that puritanical approach to, y’know, booze management?
BT: I didn’t include it in my column, but there’s a professor at the University of Victoria who’s regularly advocating for much higher booze prices as a reason to fight alcoholism and fight the encouragement to drink and all that stuff. My view is, when you have higher prices, people just seek out lower priced booze. All you’re really doing is encouraging people to drink gut rot as opposed to a better quality product, by and large.
The fact that we haven’t had a happy hour has clipped pretty close to a certain puritanical view of the world. Seattle is our sister city, basically. They have great restaurants, we have great restaurants. We have great bars, they have great bars. Great scenery. A lot of similarities. And they have happy hour, and have had it for a long time. No one has pointed out to me that they have a huge or different alcohol problem, that they have a huge drunk driving problem in comparison to Vancouver, or anything of the social ills and problems.
WE: In your experience, do you think most people actually do support less stringent rules?
BT: Absolutely. Yes. The reason the BC Liberals brought in all these rules was because they have presumably polled on it, and John Yap did his liquor modernization studyand report. They realize that. I am no fan of the government, but I’ve supported them on corkage, I’ve supported them on beer, wine, and spirits at farmer’s markets and some of these other changes. This one is just dead wrong.
WE: You obviously had some success with the HST campaign. Do you think the people will band together on this issue they way they did on that one?
BT: I don’t think this is an issue for a referendum. I don’t think that’s necessary. I just think the government needs to listen to what people are saying, maybe go back, do their homework, and fix the problem. It shouldn’t have to be something that goes on and on and on.
I kind of hoped they would put me out of business in short order, to be honest. “Oh yeah, Tieleman did this, oh I guess he’s right, you know, whatever.” And just fix it. Maybe quietly on a long weekend they will fix it, but governments have a tendency to be stupid – of all political stripes, I might add – so I don’t know what it’s going to take.
That’s why I’m encouraging people to join the Facebook page, write letters to the editor. I see some blogs posting stuff, VanEast Beer Blogis one. There just needs to be some noise and hopefully someone in the government will wake up from their stupor at five o’clock, realize there is no happy hour and say, “Ah, we should fix this.”
WE: Why are you personally invested in this one?
BT: I like happy hour (laughs). And I thought, when I read it, this is ridiculous. I’m a wine collector, I enjoy beer, wine, and spirits and thought it was ridiculous they didn’t have happy hour before. Then they say they fixed it and then, no! They didn’t fix it. They made worse! How can you make it worse? But they did.
The political point I made is, if you can’t get happy hour right, how is it you’re going to set up a tax regime for liquefied natural gas in an extraordinarily competitive world market, with players putting down billions of dollars of investment for these LNG plants, transportation and everything else – how can you get it right on that when you can’t figure out that happy hour means cheaper drinks?
This Q&A was edited slightly for clarification. For more information about Bill Tieleman's campaign visit the Fix BC Happy Hour Facebookpage.
