Council’s Misguided Corner Store Bylaw Punishes The Wrong People
Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor, based in Halifax.
HALIFAX — Over the weekend, an unsanctioned Dalhousie University homecoming celebration erupted into chaos as students took over the streets of a residential neighbourhood. They lit fires in the street, vandalized property, and broke into fights. Someone was stabbed.
Two days earlier, Halifax Regional Council took the first step towards passing a bylaw aimed at getting loud and disruptive groups of people out of that same neighbourhood late at night.
Their idea? Force a handful of corner stores in the area to close early so there’s nowhere for partiers to get pizza and other hot food.
Staff and council claim the rules will make it less attractive for people to wander around those residential neighbourhoods in the early morning hours. But it will also absolutely devastate the handful of businesses it targets.
As Triple A owner John Amyoony told my colleague Derek Montague: “it’s going to kill us. I know so. It’s going to kill me.”
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Listening to council debate the proposed bylaw on September 29, you’d think Amyoony and a handful of other business owners are almost entirely responsible for the neighbourhood’s problems.
“This is one of those cases where it only takes a handful of people to ruin it for everyone,” said Coun. Shawn Cleary. “We had to bring in a whole bylaw just really to deal with a handful of businesses.”
But this is not an issue about nefarious corner stores seeding chaos in the streets with their perverse, late-night pizza offerings. And council knows that. It’s entirely unfair, and frankly absurd, to blame a business for its customer’s actions.
The real issue – the one that council appears to be deliberately ignoring – is the culture of disrespect and impunity that Dal has allowed to fester among a portion of its student body. And it’s an issue about the police and council willfully ignoring the problem because they’re apparently unwilling to call the university out.
It’s telling that the staff report on the proposed bylaw doesn’t once mention Dalhousie University or even “students.” Councillors also didn’t acknowledge Dal or its student body when they debated the motion on Thursday.
But anyone with eyes and a brain knows this bylaw, and the complaints that fueled it are absolutely about Dalhousie students.
For years, “unsanctioned” street parties have been getting bigger, more disruptive, and more dangerous while Dal has shirked responsibility and the police have given, at best, the bare minimum response.
The police were at the disastrous Dalhouse homecoming party over the weekend, but how and why did they allow things to get so bad?
Plenty of average Haligonians are happy to call Dalhousie out for holding its hands over its eyes and allowing this toxic culture to bloom within its student body. But I don’t hear any of the city’s decision-makers saying that.
Dal is an incredibly important institution in Halifax, and it fuels so much innovation, immigration, and economic activity in the city. Is that why no one with power seems willing to publicly take it to task?
That weekend party demonstrated that things are finally bad enough that action must be taken. But, instead of tackling the actual problem, council is scapegoating a few small businesses.
There are actual solutions to these problems, but it will take courage and principle to put them in place. So far, I haven’t seen much of that from council, the police, or the university administration.
To start, council needs to stop wasting its time legislating late-night pizza and instead use its influence to demand more from the organizations whose refusal to address the issue got us here.
The municipality and Dalhousie cooperate on all kinds of initiatives. So why doesn’t the HRM make some of that support contingent on Dal meaningfully addressing the issue?
Council can’t (and shouldn’t be able to) tell Dan Kinsella where and how to use his police officers, but it does have oversight of the HRP. It needs to use that oversight to hold Kinsella’s feet to the fire and demand more action.
And the HRP, after years of willfully ignoring the seriousness of these parties, needs to get its act together and start doing its job. These parties are never a secret. The HRP needs to proactively commit more officers to the area, earlier, and shut them down before they’re allowed to balloon to 5,000 people.
Finally, Dal needs to take way, way more responsibility for what’s happening and start putting real solutions in place.
This year, the university undertook a “multi-stakeholder collaborative framework,” whatever that is, to address unsanctioned street parties. It even produced a fancy report full of recommendations.
That’s fine, but it doesn’t amount to any real action.
There are two things the administration can do right now to meaningfully address the problem. First, it can make a rule that any student who gets ticketed for involvement in unsanctioned street parties is expelled immediately – and follow through.
Second, the university can start providing genuine alternatives.
Dal’s campus bar is closed on the weekends and the administration has cracked down on alcohol. If the university held a sanctioned homecoming party where alcohol was available and controlled, students would have a place to celebrate that’s not on residential streets.
But, again, that means Dal would have to take responsibility and accept liability for its students’ behaviour instead of foisting it all off on the police and the city.
All of these things are possible, but they all require some courage, and for the institutions involved to take some measure of responsibility. Instead, we’ve seen a bunch of powerful and influential decision makers passing the buck, picking fights with Instagram accounts, or passing misguided bylaws that ignore the actual issue.
And because of that, a few small family businesses are getting unfairly punished.