St. Patrick's celebrations

[Pheidippides]

Spending 500k as an insurance policy on riots which have cost 100-200k seems like a really bad use of public funds.

Do you have a citation for the hospital cost?  Honestly, I don't know about real costs.  In terms of number hospitalized, St. Patties day compares similarly to other events like Bluesfest and Octoberfest.  It's also the case, contrary to the beliefs of so many commentors, that people who aren't students aren't entitled to more or better or more immediate care than the students who may be injured or sick as a result of this event.

Problem drinking is absolutely a social issue, but that isn't exactly related to this event, and honestly, making this into a real event would help eliminate some of these social problems, serving would be more controlled, but mostly, there would be other things to do, food to eat, etc.

Your estimates of potential damage are too low. The money spent to prevent potentially hundreds of thousands of damage at each street party not the potential for all street parties.

The Fanshawe riot caused >$100,000 in damages and there were only about 1,000 people present. Damages could easily get in to the millions with a crowd of >22,000.

Sorry, I thought I linked to the cost of alcohol report (the press release is here):

• There were 3,079 deaths due to conditions entirely caused by alcohol in 2015 in Canada, according to Statistics Canada. More than half of these were due to alcoholic liver disease. By comparison, 2,066 people died in motor vehicle accidents in 2015.
  
• Almost 80,000 hospitalizations in Canada were due to conditions entirely caused by alcohol in 2016–2017, which is similar to the number of heart attack hospitalizations (77,000).
  
• The rate of women who died from causes linked directly to alcohol has increased by 26% since 2001, compared with a roughly 5% increase over the same period for men.
  
• The average number of Canadians hospitalized for conditions entirely caused by alcohol in 2016–2017 grew over the previous year, from 212 to 217 a day.
  
• Of all avoidable deaths in Canada, the proportion from conditions 100% attributable to alcohol grew from 2.7% in 2001 to 3.8% in 2015.
  

In terms of hospitalization costs I already documented that page on page 3 of this thread:

CTV said there were at least 52 hospitalizations, 15 of which were serious, and 1 ICU stay. A standard hospital stay in Ontario costs $5,364 and ICU stay is about 3x that of a general ward bed. That's another $289,656 of everyone's tax dollars at work, all completely preventable.

Also, keep in mind that 500k is just the police spending for St Patrick's day and homecoming. Back in the spring the paramedic costs and WLU's costs were also included. For St Patrick's Day that was $713k. If you add the $200k the police spent on the homecoming party and the nearly $300k in hospitalization costs that is $1.2 million dollars. For reference you can operate an ambulance 12 hours a day for entire year for that much.

Where is your data that says BluesFest and Oktoberfest contribute as many hospitalizations?



Perhaps we can solve two problems at once. Every party related conviction should involve shovelling our sidewalks all winter!