St. Patrick's celebrations

[jordan2423]

I guess the question is, how much money and other benefits does the Oktoberfest bring into the region vs this St. Patrick's Day party.  Almost certainly no one benefits from this 1-day event on Ezra.

For example, Oktoberfest raises $1.5M a year for non-profit organization. Ezra event is $0.
Oktoberfest doesn't allow underage drinking, Ezra does.
Economic benefit of Oktoberfest is $22M+/year. Ezra, pretty much unknown, but most likely pretty close to $0.  That $22M translates into jobs, btw.  We're pretty much certain the only jobs created by the Ezra event is OT for emergency services in the area, plus work for people OUTSIDE the region, as we had to hire reinforcements from Peel region.

It's unlikely the Ezra St event would ever be made official. It's a time for under agers and young adults to drink illegally (and other stuff) on the streets and pass out. Making it official would probably kill the event all together, or at least make it very small.  

I do believe that at some point, though, things are going to get to out of hand and it will be banned outright.

Amazing that our police guy Larkin thought they'd control it better this year...he's off on pretty much everything.

Considering you have no evidential basis to support any of those numbers for ezra, your numbers are pretty much better off not even mentioning. 
You're comparing a 1 day event to an event that is pretty much 2-3 weeks long.

There's literally no point in comparing numbers.

As someone who was working on the ground with Laurier students that year - the problem with the tent party was that your ticket required you to show up at a certain time (8am/10am/1pm/4pm? or similar) , if you missed it your specific time your ticket was no longer valid, and once you left you were not permitted to re-enter.

If it had been run as any normal organized festival/tent party (security at gate, enter/exit as you please) it would have been much more popular. Many of the students I spoke to (several hundred, so this is not a small sample size) went but left because they got too cold and didn't bring a jacket, or they were hungry and wanted to go get food (or have a less expensive drink at home), not all of their friends could get tickets, or they lost track of time/got held up and missed their limited window for entry. 

I can't say, in their position, I wouldn't do the same - I would rather go hang out with all of my friends on Ezra where we can come & go as we please than have to show up before 10am and pay $12/drink for the rest of the day with no chance of reprieve from the cold.

They also combined the tent party with a concert (The Chainsmokers) which was just silly.

As someone who was working on the ground with Laurier students that year - the problem with the tent party was that your ticket required you to show up at a certain time (8am/10am/1pm/4pm? or similar) , if you missed it your specific time your ticket was no longer valid, and once you left you were not permitted to re-enter.

If it had been run as any normal organized festival/tent party (security at gate, enter/exit as you please) it would have been much more popular. Many of the students I spoke to (several hundred, so this is not a small sample size) went but left because they got too cold and didn't bring a jacket, or they were hungry and wanted to go get food (or have a less expensive drink at home), not all of their friends could get tickets, or they lost track of time/got held up and missed their limited window for entry. 

This is the kind of stuff that tempts me to become a Libertarian. It reminds me of the abortive Toronto program to have non-hotdog food carts. Instead of just revising the bylaws to allow them with reasonable regulation, they required people to sign up, buy a specific cart from the city, and operate under restrictive rules that would make McDonald’s executives blush. It seems that our city governments attract the wrong sort of person to work for them: people who think that what everybody else does needs to be regulated and controlled down to the smallest detail.

Whereas the right way to do it is to apply regulation with a light touch: identify real problems that are actually worth spending public resources addressing, and construct minimal interventions to do so.

Nothing wrong with running a tent party, but run it like a normal one. Thanks for passing along those details. When I heard about the sanctioned event I thought it was a good idea, and I still do. But a tent party can’t be run like the zoning department.

You're welcome.