No hike to drinking age coming

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/09/2014 (4235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The provincial government has already nixed raising the legal drinking age to 19 from 18, even though a report to encourage Manitobans to drink more responsibly remains months away from being submitted.

The decision comes despite recommendations made in the National Alcohol Strategy and from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA) that advocate raising the legal drinking age to 19 to harmonize the legal drinking age with other provinces and reduce the number of traffic collisions and alcohol-related crimes linked to young people.

Chief provincial public health officer Dr. Michael Routledge, who is chairman of the committee examining a strategy to foster responsible alcohol consumption, said raising the legal drinking age isn’t the most crucial matter.

“As much as it tends to get focused on, there are a lot of more important steps and actions that we can take in terms of reducing alcohol-related harms than looking at the drinking age,” he said. “In some respects, it overshadows more important issues around alcohol.”

Routledge said the committee will submit its recommendations to the province, likely before the spring.

A cabinet spokeswoman for Healthy Living Minister Sharon Blady said the government wants to focus on more education about the dangers of abusing alcohol for all Manitobans, and legislating stronger requirements for bars and servers to ensure responsible use of alcohol.

“We are not planning to raise the drinking age, which is 18 and the age of majority in all other respects,” Rachel Morgan said.

The government announced one year ago it would create a new plan for responsible alcohol consumption, a process that would include working with the CCSA, which co-wrote the 2007 National Alcohol Strategy.

Gerald Thomas, a research and policy associate with the CCSA, said the national organization believes the drinking age in Canada should be 19 in all provinces. The Canadian Public Health Association also supports raising the drinking age to 19.

Besides Manitoba, Alberta and Quebec also have a minimum alcohol purchase age of 18 with the rest of Canada set at 19.

Thomas said a uniform national drinking age would address cross-border shopping for young adults living near the boundary with provinces that have a lower minimum purchase age, such as Saskatchewan and Manitoba. “Such cross-border shopping has been shown to increase certain types of risks like overconsumption, drinking and driving,” he said.

Second, it would increase the time between when a young person gets full driving and full drinking privileges.

“It has been shown that risks increase when there is less time between these two events,” he said. “Overall, the available research suggested that the acute risk of harm from alcohol for young adults could be lowered if all provinces moved to the minimum purchase age of 19.”

Russell Callaghan, an associate professor at the University of Northern British Columbia’s Northern Medical Program, also said the province should raise the minimum drinking age to 19. Callaghan has written extensively that a national drinking age of 19 or even 21 would reduce alcohol-related traffic collision, crimes and hospitalizations.

“You’ll see alcohol-related deaths go down, you’ll see alcohol consumption go down,” he said. “Injury and disability will also will go down, including among people younger than the minimum drinking age.”

More specifically, Callaghan said an older minimum drinking age would reduce admissions to emergency departments for alcohol-related incidents, from collisions to alcohol poisoning to physical assaults and sexual assaults.

“There’s some evidence to suggest that it has a dampening effect on suicide among young people,” he said.

Dwayne Marling, vice-president of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan branch of Restaurants Canada, said raising the drinking age has not been a large issue among participants in the provincial committee.

“What we’re really talking about is societal values and the way society as a whole thinks about and approaches the consumption of alcohol,” he said. “It has more to do with the way in which society treats liquor as a whole than age.”

bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca