OKANAGAN — Before long you’ll be able to take a beer up to your hotel room from the bar in the lobby thanks to announced changes to B.C.’s liquor laws.
“It gives people a bit more freedom, especially if it’s busy down here,” says Kelowna bartender Amy Sawatzky.
The latest recommendations include not only loosened rules for where you can drink in a hotel but also the option to remove the fences at beer gardens, meaning events like Kelown’a Centre of Gravity, might be able to serve up drinks to revelers who’d then be free to wander their grounds, booze in hand.
“This is always the biggest single issue. With any major event in Kelowna,” says Mayor Walter Gray.
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Gray says security at events like this one is always a big concern, but he thinks tearing down beer garden fences would actually have a moderating effect on bad behaviour.
“I mean, right now, with beer gardens we’ve had a feeder lot mentality where the only thing you do when you go behind that fence is drink, drink, drink, drink beer, and everybody else is drinking beer,” says Gray.
The more liberal laws has mixed reaction from Okanagan residents, some all for it, others says it’s a bad idea.
Meantime in Vernon, organizers of the largest slo-pitch softball tournament in Canada say they’re still digesting the proposed new laws but likely won’t be making changes anytime soon
There is some discretion under these new recommended changes. Events that are hoping to remove the fences at their beer gardens will have to apply for approval to do so.
The new rules are expected to come into throughout the next few months.
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