2010 Olympic Killjoys: No Beer Garden

Despite all the complicated stuff, Canadians are actually pretty simple folk. We like our brief summers and our coffee hot, and our ice hockey and our beer cold. Canadians drank 68.3 litres of beer per capita in 2004, good for 19th best on the planet. And if you’ll notice, almost all of the countries who beat Canada in that consumption are going to be showing up in Vancouver for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

Unfortunately for drinkers with a sporting problem, the “roaring success” that Holland House’s Beer Garden has been in every Olympics since Barcelona 18 years ago might not make it’s way to Vancouver over our obsessive red tape. Holland House is a hospitality event the Netherlands [15th place] Olympic Committee and Dutch government hold every Olympics with a simple idea: They set up a nightly beer garden with international beer company Heineken supplying the beer. They bring their equipment, cook Dutch food and delicacies, serve beer and bring in Dutch nationals to throw a party and bring a little bit of authentic Amsterdam to Vancouver’s Olympic Games.

Only problem is, Canada isn’t having any of that fun stuff:

Let’s start with the City of Richmond.

It initially welcomed Holland House, hoping to make it a centre of celebration around the Olympic Speed Skating Oval. But with about three months to go before the Games begin, the city is suddenly insisting all of Holland House’s equipment, from high-end European kitchens to draft beer taps, be approved for use in Canada. That could take months, if ever.

It’s also insisting Holland House meet all building codes if it puts up a few walls in the arena, even though such rules have been waived for other Olympic venues. The city is even demanding the Dutch start putting in permanent plumbing and gas lines for a three-week event. (I don’t know about you, but I think the people who have dikes to fight off an ocean will be pretty reliable on the plumbing.)

It gets even more bizarre at the provincial level. Holland House succeeds because it brings thousands of people into one place every night for a massive party. The plan in Richmond is to create a space for about 3,500 people in a hockey arena.

But the B.C. liquor control and licensing branch wants to squelch the party by reducing the crowd to 1,500, essentially creating a half-empty room while thousands line up outside.

Finally, there’s Ottawa.

It’s insisting Dutch organizers must prove no Canadians are losing out jobs to the 330 Dutch citizens coming in to run Holland House. Ottawa wants all the jobs posted for two weeks, to see if Dutch-speaking Canadians might apply. (Do the feds have a secret plan to raid Dutch Pancake Houses across the country?)

Richmond, fail. B.C., fail. Canada, fail.

Building codes? Permanent plumbing? Gas lines? Come on people, it’s a beer garden. You drink beer, eat food, engage in drunken revelry and then fall down. It isn’t complicated. Germany has been leading the way on this file since the eleventh century.

And while I appreciate the idea of saving Canadian jobs [Dey took yur job!], I think we can handle the outsourcing of this little project to our blonde-haired friends in the little European country of cheese and dykes [of both kinds].

Ah well, this is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from these Olympics and their red-tape-for-thee-but-not-for-me rules. Oh and as for all that projected economic activity we’ve heard so much about being generated by these Games, they’ve been significantly downgraded from $10.7 billion to $4 billion. And that’s a best-case scenario. Something tells me turning the taps off on this Beer Garden is a prime example of why. The Olympics haven’t been allowed to simply go with the flow and spirit that the organizers talk so much about because of regulations, restrictions, registrations, and red tape.