The following article appeared in the June 10 edition of the Guelph Mercury:
As the sun sets on the Royal City, the spires of Church of Our Lady cast a long eastward shadow down Macdonell Street toward the heart of the entertainment district.
It’s May and the students are gone — leaving the city in relative calm and allowing the locals to slowly reclaim the downtown. It is an annual ritual and a time of reflection for those who rely on the influx of nearly 20,000 students each fall to keep them in the black.
From September to the end of April, students pack the bars and restaurants, filling the air with restless energy, and the cash registers with the spoils of youthful abandon. The driving rhythms of the latest pop craze are music to the ears of club and restaurant owners but when the bars and restaurants close at 2 a.m., the music and lights of the dance floor are replaced by police radios and sirens.
As many as 7,000 students pour on to the streets creating havoc for law enforcement and headaches for many downtown businesses.
Only when the last of the post-secondary revelers has returned to campus, leaving the streets of downtown littered with fast-food wrappers and smelling of bodily fluids, is there time to ask if it is all worth it.
The answer is more complicated than many might think.
When the problems began to surface nearly a decade ago, two reactionary camps formed with bar owners against downtown business owners and concerned citizens. It wasn’t until 2007 that cooler heads prevailed and all the players came together to form the Nightlife Task Force.
City councillor and downtown business owner Ian Findlay has been a member of the task force since its inception.
“We received complaints from downtown merchants about the entertainment scene,” he said. “People were fouling their store fronts, breaking windows, vandalizing and leaving garbage. We decided to put everything on the table to see what we could tackle in the long and short term.”
While the problems are easily identified, the solutions are not as simple. Their application and ultimate success lay somewhere between perception and reality.
Many people think it is unsafe to go downtown at night. There have been a number of well-publicized brawls involving large numbers of people. Occasionally, the central figures in these skirmishes have been awarded three square meals a day and accommodations at the taxpayers’ expense, but most are simply fined or sent on their way. The reality is the vast majority of these incidents are simple bar fights.
Conrad Aikens, owner of Van Gogh’s Ear, Jimmy Jazz and Vinyl, has been working downtown since 1995.
“Whenever you put that many young people together, you are going to have fights whether they’ve been drinking or not,” he said. “They have fights at high schools where liquor is not an issue.”
One of the more publicized fights occurred outside the front doors of Van Gogh’s Ear in July, 2003. Aikens said it was a fight between two guys. Once it got started, a crowd of slack-jawed spectators formed.
He says the crowd was far smaller than the 500 people reported, but the number stuck in the collective memory and influenced public opinion.
“To say it is not safe downtown is over generalizing,” Sgt. Dave Begin of the Guelph Police Service said, adding it is usually a small number of intoxicated people involved in fights.
“If you look at the number of people per capita getting into trouble it is low,” he said. “When you see five people charged out of what could be as high as 6,000 or 7,000 people all pouring out of the bars at the same time, that’s not a large number.”
Most of the problems occur because people can’t get a ride out of the downtown core.
“The person has left the bar, has grabbed something to eat and now they want to go home. That is when the problems start,” Begin said. “There are not enough cabs to get the people out of downtown in a short time.”
Cindy Bevan has been driving a cab in the city for 11 years. She said many fights break out when someone tries to take someone else’s cab. She said she won’t even drive into the core on busy nights.
“I’ve had my side mirror ripped off, my top lights punched out and I’m on my seventh antenna,” she said.
Bevan said putting more cabs on the road to deal with increased demand for two hours, two nights a week is not the answer. She believes a short-lived experiment to establish taxi stands would have worked if there had been more of them and if they had been located and monitored better.
Brenda Whiteside is the associate vice-president of student affairs at the University of Guelph and a member of the Nightlife Task Force. She said the taxi issue has yet to be resolved, especially for students and other people who are not returning to the university campus when the bars close.
She said the extended bus service that transports people to the university until 3:30 a.m. has helped tremendously and many of the ideas introduced by the task force have been good even if they weren’t well received by the public.
“We got beaten up over the pissoirs but they were never intended to be a final solution,” Whiteside said. “The feedback from downtown businesses was that public urination decreased.”
“They were very well received, especially by those contributing,” said Findlay, who suggested the idea after seeing pissoirs used in Edmonton. He said they gathered empirical evidence that people would much rather use the pissoirs than risk the $365 fine for public urination.
Whiteside said it’s not fair to lay the blame for all the problems at night on students because many of the more serious offences are not committed by them.
Aikens said he rarely has serious problems with students. They are going to party somewhere, so he thinks it is better they go to the bars than throw house parties in quiet neighbourhoods.
He said many merchants depend on the students for a large percentage of their business so they shouldn’t be discouraged from coming downtown.
It is worth it to welcome them to be a part of the day and nightlife of Guelph, Aikens said.
Whiteside said the university has begun a campaign to teach students about responsible drinking and to instil in them a sense that Guelph is their home while they are here.
“I’m not going to say the problems have been solved but we’ve moved quite far from six years ago,” she said. “That has been due to a collaborative effort.”
It could be said the city is a victim of its own success. Guelph has a vibrant nightlife and that is largely, but not entirely, due to the students. And they will be back this fall, which should be a good thing as long as we continue to look for better ways to get them home safely at the end of the night.