There was a moment in the debate about a proposed new fireworks bylaw at Committee of the Whole this week where Coun. Dominique O’Rourke cut through the noise, and the complicated new process that staff was proposing, to ask an important question: What problem were they trying to solve?
In recent years, the question of fireworks has created, well, fireworks. There are many people in our community who dread those select days out of the year where we’re allowed to set off fireworks, and there are others for whom it’s a fun holiday activity. Then there’s the people like me, the ones who don’t really care either way.
I think if we got down to brass tacks though what people have issue with is not when someone sets off some fireworks at a local park on Canada Day or Diwali, it’s the two or three weeks around those days when young people set off fireworks at one in the morning some random night for a laugh.
So what problem are we trying to solve? Dicks. We’re trying to solve dicks.
I don’t know if there’s a cure for that.
What was clear from the public engagement on this matter is that the vast majority of respondents are unsatisfied with the Wild West of fireworks we have right now. Sixty-five per cent said that they were unsupportive or very unsupportive of the status quo. At the very least, people want more enforcement of the current rules around fireworks or improving education about their proper use.
The number one group of people who seem the most irritated by fireworks are pet owners, and my sister is among them. Where she lives, in the west end, surrounded by a lot of open fields inviting the discharge of celebratory firecrackers, sparklers and rockets, the days before and following Victoria Day are as worrying as the date of the annual check-up with the vet.
The Guelph Humane Society supports a total ban, and the Guelph Fire Department joins colleagues from across the country wanting a complete ban on commercially sold fireworks. The city’s feedback from Guelph residents shows that 47 per cent are very supportive of a ban with another nine per cent just regularly supportive.
That’s a majority, but I wonder how much of that is soft. Hypotheticals are easy to answer. You might say “yes” if I hypothetically offered you a million dollars to pull out three of your teeth, but you might feel a bit differently if I asked you while holding a pair of pliers in my hand.
But what if fireworks went away tomorrow? Might that matter more than we think?
The public engagement report noted some interesting feedback from the Guelph Youth Council. No one in that group was in favour of a ban, and the majority wanted more days where fireworks are allowed, but with the caveat of improved safety. They expressed happy memories around fireworks and the sense of community and celebration they evoked.
I confess, I have some happy memories of fireworks on Victoria Day at the Georgetown Fairgrounds in my middle and high school days. There was a carnival that weekend that was capped with fireworks on Monday night, but you could also watch the display for free from the grounds of Park School next door without the cover charge.
But the fun of those celebrations wasn’t just the professional fireworks display, it was the store-bought fireworks we set off as a kind of pre-show. We would buy the fireworks (or rather our parents would by them) from the corner store, which would bring in a small selection of fireworks the week before Victoria Day especially for the occasion.
Now, a fireworks retailer plops a storage container at a shopping plaza near a busy intersection and you can shop your brains out for all kinds of fireworks, enough to put on your own professional-esque fireworks show. What’s wrong with that?
Funny you should ask…
According to Statistics Canada, between April 2011 and April 2023 there were 210 reported injuries related to fireworks and similar products. Nearly one-quarter of those cases were from young people in their 20s, and two-thirds of those injured were males. Three out of five of those injuries were burns, and another 19 per cent were eye injuries. Nearly three-quarters of all injuries required a trip to the emergency room.
So case closed, right? We need to permit the crap out of fireworks!
Not so fast. Our friends in the fireworks lobby – and yes, there is a fireworks lobby – pointed out that human error from the use of candles caused an average of eight deaths per year every year between 1999 and 2008. That’s another interested data point from Statistics Canada.
Now I maybe your typical overly-precautious, nanny state liberal, but I have a lot of questions about the city’s proposed bylaw, and they all centre around the original question and answer we started with. Does this bylaw solve the jerks that set off fireworks in clear flagrance of the rules? Is some young person hanging out with their friends and a pocket full of firecrackers going to say, “Stop, do you have a permit for those?! Is anyone here a licensed pyrotechnician?!”
I’ve never done renovations, or applied for a building permit, but listening to staff explain the process for being allowed to set off some fireworks when all this is said and done, sounds just about as onerous. At least when you get through the process of building a deck, you have a deck, what happens after you spend a couple of hours filling out forms, and spend hundreds of dollars for 10 minutes of light and sound? What are you left with?
Some councillors believed that the bylaw presented a good compromise between people who want fireworks and people who want a ban, but sometimes “compromise” is a word used to describe a government’s unwillingness to take direction because they know it won’t be completely popular. In this case, that means banning fireworks outright.
There comes a point in creating laws and regulations where you have to wonder if you’re being overly prescriptive in one direction. I’m sure there will be some people and groups in Guelph that will follow these rules to the letter, but no one ever acts out by clinging tightly to the rule book.
Maybe it just makes more sense to take away the temptation, or else learn to live with the occasional annoyance.
