I pity the smaller bars and places such as the dessert shop who normally wouldn't carry this crap and who'll probably be stuck with heaps of it after the summer is over. I also feel for the staff who have to explain to each customer that they can only bring them Bud Light on the street but if they want to drink beer, they must go inside and pour it into a Bud Light cup.

I walk the length of the Village after each fireworks and it is the BIA who supply the street cleaners, not the city. The police are only present at a few intersections directing traffic and I suspect only during the fireworks. This isn't a 'site', it's a city street, and like anywhere else in Montreal you can walk off in any number of directions with your drink in hand.

I blame the Village BIA for this idiocy. Hopefully they'll consult their membership before they make another dumb decision such as this one. I suspect the Village businesses will have made enough extra money off the pedestrianisation to offset whatever they were forced to pay for the Bud Light and I don't think that this deal will be renewed in 2010. Maybe they'll be able to ship the leftovers to places where it belongs: cheesy sports bars.

The fact is that it is just plain impossible for festivals like these to be held without sponsorship deals due to all the charges associated. Liability insurance is stupidly expensive for events in public spaces. Gay events even more so because of an 'increased risk of pedifiles' (seriously this is an added fee that gay events have to pay but non gay events don't) The city has to be paid for clean up, permits, and liquor licencing, the police have to be paid for increased presence, security has to be paid for to make sure that people don't walk off site with their bud lights, the fees for an event of this size are huge. This is the problem.

If we want our public spaces and events to be free of advertizing then the underlying fee structure must change or people need to be willing to start donating.

Demonizing Labatts for what was likely the most competitive sponsorship deal the buisness association could find, is ignoring the real issue of how insanely expensive it is to put these festivals on in the first place.

I posted a link in a news roundup a week or two ago to an article with soundbites from happy restaurateurs raving about how happy they are, though. I guess if the worry was that they had to buy a bunch of product they wouldn't normally buy, the increase in sales more than made up for it.