Posted by Well, this amazing gem of a story came across the newsfeed today. Canadians under 54 drinking more at home due to COVID-19 pandemic: Nanos poll. “Canadian adults under the age of 54 have consumed more alcohol since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, a new poll has found. The Nanos poll, commissioned by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), revealed that 25 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 35 and 54 say they have increased the amount of alcohol they drink while at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, 21 per cent of Canadians between 18 and 34 years of age also say this is the case. Just 10 per cent of adults over the age of 54 say they have been drinking more alcohol since they began practicing physical distancing, the poll found.”
Gee really? People stuck at home, bored out of their minds are drinking more? Who would have even guessed. It’s a good thing that we have government funded (yeah they say they are a non-profit but they get funding from Health Canada) to waste money on such insights. The worst part is these mind boggling insights aren’t even accurate.
First, the headline claims that adults under 54 are drinking more which, even according to their own data, is incorrect as all age groups are drinking more. Just that those over 54 are only drinking 10 percent more while those under 54 are drinking 21-25% more.
Second, relying on a self-reported poll to monitor alcohol consumption is probably not very accurate. Does anyone actually keep a reasonably accurate count of how much they drink a weekly basis? Is there possibly an observational error when people replace their weekend bar-hopping binge drinking with one or two glasses of wine at home with dinner instead? (Hint: you probably forgot how much you drank during the Friday night bender but likely remember the one glass of wine you had with dinner).
Third, the story doesn’t really tell us how much more people are drinking (one beer a day or one beer a week is a huge difference) and if this really represents a problem. There is no real way to find this out under current circumstances in any case. A rise in the sale of alcohol could merely represent the natural tendency to stock up and hoard a bit like we have seen with things like toilet paper.
I’m naturally biased (like most readers probably are) to assume that the findings are correct. People are probably drinking more because it makes intuitive sense that people stuck in their homes, stressed about finances and bored out of their minds would drink more. But all of this is speculation and smacks of further, and unwarranted, restrictions on citizens who are already suffering enough.
Why? Because the nanny-state government, liberal media and holier-than-thou do gooders at so-called NGO’s love to use crap excuses like this to restrict individual liberties more. An exaggeration? Maybe, but this is what the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation has run recently. “Limit alcohol supply during pandemic to reduce burden on front-line workers.” To tell you how biased this idiot (Tim Stockwell) is, he makes this bizarre claim that, “Would a ban only push alcohol dependent drinkers to seek out non-beverage alcohol and illicit drugs? Evidence suggests that when alcohol is unavailable for this population, few cope in these ways and many simply replace alcohol with cannabis — a much safer alternative.” There you have it; the CBC thinks that we should ban alcohol so people will smoke pot instead. Close down the liquor stores but keep the marijuana stores open. How is that for some twisted liberal social-engineering to you? Tell you what Tim, evidence suggests when alcohol is unavailable for the population, most people substitute it with illegal alcohol which is far more dangerous in every aspect. We have a massive scientific study of this; it was called prohibition in the United States and gave rise to not only Al Capone and organised crime but to one of the greatest Canadian fortunes called the Seagram family.
And this was not the only article that CBC has run on the let’s ban alcohol during Covid-19 vein. “Do alcohol and COVID-19 isolation mix? Some health experts don’t think so.” “[Dowsett Johnston] says alcohol has become so woven into everyday life and culture that it’s difficult to talk about it as a public health issue, despite the evidence it can be harmful and even fatal. “It is almost impossible to talk about this without sounding like a prohibitionist,” she said. But the fact is, she said, alcohol causes more death in this country than any other drug. “More people die from our favourite drug — and it is our favourite drug.”
Yup. The usual litany of smug holier-than-thou, its for your own good liberal assholes. We live in a society full of these jerks who suckle at the tax payers teat under the auspices that they are doing it for the good of the public. I’ve found that most of these self-righteous liberals tend to be miserable, lonely and full of their own broken down relationships and families and somehow think that they have some sort of moral imperative to preach to the rest of us what to do. Balanced reporting? Hardly. But then its not newsworthy I guess to report something that most of us already know – it makes sense for us to have a drink or two to take the edge off in these extremely stressful times.
Update 1 (16 April 2020): Gotta love our media and government. Just as I finish writing “Because the nanny-state government, liberal media and holier-than-thou do gooders at so-called NGO’s love to use crap excuses like [banning alcohol sales for our own good during Covid-19] to restrict individual liberties more”; this happens. “RCMP intercept woman carrying alcohol ‘in excess’ into Fort Good Hope.” “In a news release on Tuesday, RCMP say they were doing checkstops on roads and trails into the community on Saturday night when, around midnight, they encountered a woman carrying alcohol ‘in excess, as per the N.W.T. Liquor Act’. The woman, 34, was carrying 24 375-ml bottles of vodka and 12 cans of beer’, say police, who seized the alcohol… They say the woman is from Fort Good Hope and is ‘facing charges.’ The investigation is ongoing.” In case you are having trouble visualizing what the RCMP considers to be excessive, here’s a photo.
I guess to our nanny-state Canadian government, any reasonable sized house party (let alone the university ones from my past) that I’ve been to in my life would be considered to have an excessive amount of alcohol. I personally bought more than this just yesterday (two cases of Prosecco or 24 bottles because it was on sale) to make Mimosa’s during this self-isolation because I wanted to minimize trips out of the house (I got groceries at the super market next to the liquor store at the same time). Even if this woman was importing the booze for resale rather than stocking up for her own use, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this is excessive — regardless of what some asinine fascist local law says.