Categories: Food & Drink

Here are the 22 parks where public drinking will be allowed in Vancouver

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Here’s an open-ended question- when trying out very popular public programs, wouldn’t it be smarter to launch them outside of the busiest time of year? You know, just to get acquainted with how it looks. We only say this because, after almost a year of waiting, public drinking is about to be allowed in Vancouver public parks. And, we think the floodgates are about to open. Here’s what you should know about the plan.

Back in July of last year, the Vancouver Park Board announced that it wanted to launch a pilot program that would allow public drinking in certain parks around the city. This was in line with a few other municipalities around Metro Vancouver, and Vancouver itself even designated public drinking plazas last summer.

Then, on Monday, the Park Board officially approved all the parks in Vancouver where they would allow public drinking. These are:

Collingwood Park
David Lam Park
Fraser River Park
Granville Park
Harbour Green Park
John Hendry Park (Trout Lake)
Kitsilano Beach Park
Langara Park
Locarno Beach Park
Maple Grove Park
Memorial South Park
Memorial West Park
New Brighton Park
Pandora Park
Queen Elizabeth Park
Quilchena Park
Riverfront Park
Robson Park
Rupert Park
Stanley Park
Vanier Park
Volunteer Park

Now, it should be noted that these parks will not be fully open to public drinking. Instead, they will feature clearly marked ‘designated drink areas’. Think less drinks on Kits Beach and more drinks beside it, and you’ve got a general idea of how these are going to be set up. Once in effect, the areas will be open between 11AM and 9PM, and the pilot itself will run until early October.

So, what was the hold-up in getting this going? Well, turns out that while the Park Board has authority over the parks, the Province needed to amend a few rules to actually make the plan legal. This took a pretty serious amount of time, but finally, the bill was more or less passed earlier this week.

Now, all we need is one final kiss of approval and we can get an opening date! We’ll keep you posted, folks.