6 a.m. Bar Closing Prone To Probems

OpinionsMegan Dolski — Published November 1, 2011

Your best friend is ungracefully draped over a toilet seat while your boyfriend is throwing up in yesterday’s grocery bag. Your stomach is filled with two-dollar peanut butter noodles—its four a.m. and after enjoying a solid night of debauchery, you’re home-sweet-home and triumphantly calling it quits.

I doubt you felt pressed for time during your evening filled with over-indulgence, chatter and unfortunate dance moves, but a new proposition suggests you could have had an extra three hours to get your drink on.

Gilbert Rozon, Just For Laughs founder and potential candidate for Montreal Mayor, recently suggested that bars in a downtown “night-life zone”—located from Guy St. to Papineau Ave., between Sherbrooke St. and Rene-Levesque Blvd.—should stay open until 6:00 a.m, as part of an initiative to re-brand Montreal as a “Fun City.”
As a proud Montrealer, I take offense—as if it’s not fun enough!

Montreal’s bars are currently closing the latest in Canada, tied only with Vancouver—serving a 3:00 a.m. last call. There’s only a handful of cities worldwide that keep their tap’s flowing later, such as Atlantic City, Miami and several towns in Germany. But being the “Vegas-of-the-North” is not something we should be striving for.
The logic behind Rozon’s suggestion is that closing bars later would increase Montreal’s touristic appeal and be financially beneficial to the city’s economy. But would an extra three hours really change anything when our city is already the latest closing drinking hole for miles? Not to mention the appeal our 18-year-old drinking age has to our neighbors down south, combined with Quebecers’ reputation for having ragingly vibrant joie de vivre that’s difficult for visitors to keep up with.

Not to mention, if you really want to keep partying after last call, there’s no stopping you. Montreal hosts a slew of after-hours venues—clubs like Circus, Stereo and Centre Fractal—not to mention a host of underground venues—are all readily available to keep your night going as long as you’d like.

While in theory, the “more business hours + more booze = more money” equation makes sense, it does not come without problems. Bars are going to need to increase their staff, and likely security, to keep their establishments bustling through the night—a feat even Steve Siozios, Head of the Crescent Street Merchants Association, predicts would be trying.

“It’s going to be very difficult to staff bars until six in the morning and besides that, I don’t think the demographics allow for people staying up until six,” Siozios said in a CJAD report.

With a 6:00 a.m last call, bartenders, waitresses and managers will all potentially be working well past 8:00 a.m once they’ve finished cash-outs and cleaning duties.
This would make it impossible for a bartender to work just an eight-hour shift—requiring managers to schedule staff for constant (and dreaded) double shifts, or tack on an entire extra flight of servers to finish the end of the night.

Safety is another issue that arises with this “fun city” venture. While one could argue that drunk-driving would decrease because drinkers would have more access to public transit, is it really smart to have highly inebriated stragglers trudging home at the same time as business morning rush hour? Probably not.

Montreal is a fantastic city—and is widely known as a great place to party, and we don’t need a later last call to prove it.