Who's to Blame

WHO’S TO BLAME?

For every person who declares, not without a heavy dose of self-righteousness “People should learn to be responsible for their behaviour,” there are some of us who think otherwise.

The case of the four carefree kids who drove into the water in Muskoka a few weeks ago, is still with us. Not because three of the four are dead, the girl having miraculously escaped, but because of the unanswered question. “Who served these kids the drinks?”

It has taken several weeks, but now the father of one of the dead kids has come pleading for government action to curtail this kind of behaviour. He has a record, from the restaurant or club bill, that the four of them consumed 31 drinks in about three hours. That’s more than seven drinks each!

This is where the righteous among us declare that responsibility rests with the kids themselves, or with anyone too foolish to drink and then drive.

This is also where I, bleeding heart liberal that I continue to be, believe that blame should be laid with the servers who fed them the drinks, and with the establishment that let it happen. This is nothing new. Even though the Liquor Licence Act spells out quite unequivocally that (and these are my words) the establishment is responsible for being sure that they do not serve alcohol to anyone they suspect has had too much to drink.

It may be that I will be gagged on this issue if and when there is a case against the establishment that sold them the drinks. They can be found guilty under what the law describes as “standard of care.”

Why does it happen? Because the wait-person has a “live one” and as long as they keep drinking the tips will; get bigger. Or the management that makes it part of every training manual to be sure that the wait staff pushes the product.

The mayhem that we have in our downtown club area is a classic example of the rampant selling of too much to drink. The chaos in the streets, sometimes with fatal results stem from the effects of too much alcohol, often mixed with too much testosterone.

The Liquor License Board can’t do much about testosterone, but they can enforce their own laws so that establishments, when they empty as closing time, do not disgorge hordes of dangerous (to themselves and others) drunks.

And in the case of the three who died, it was just a harmless afternoon of the kind of fun young drinkers get into. Was the alcohol responsible for the drowning deaths?

I would not like to be the proprietor or the server at that Lake Joseph establishment.
I hope they are dealt with severely, and maybe a message will be sent to proprietors and wait staff that they are at least partially responsible for their patrons leaving and killing themselves. Yes, people should be responsible for their own behaviour, but alcohol has a way of dulling judgement.