Liquor suspension praised

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/02/2015 (4071 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s closing time at the Sutherland Hotel — for one solid month.

When the taps are turned off in two weeks at the more than century-old hotel at 785 Main St., its Point Douglas neighbours will be holding their breath.

They’re hoping this break is the beginning of the end of one of the city’s most notorious crack dens and gang hangouts.

In December, the Sutherland was slapped with a 30-day suspension of its liquor licence, the worst penalty yet for the hotel, whose owner fought and failed to get the order overturned in an appeal.

On Friday, the board of the Liquor and Gaming Authority of Manitoba issued its last word on the order: The Sutherland will serve no alcohol between 9 a.m. Feb. 25 and 9 a.m. March 26.

One-day suspensions for serving liquor to minors or plying inebriated bar patrons are more the norm.

A 30-day suspension is unheard of in Manitoba, as are police raids and drug dealing as evidence for pulling a licence.

“The suspension? It’s really quite unusual, it’s rare, the longest suspension anyone can remember for quite a few years,” liquor authority spokeswoman Kristianne Dechant said. “And it’s the first one issued by the Liquor and Gaming Authority.”

The authority took over gaming and liquor licences when it replaced the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission last April.

The suspension will force the hotel’s closure for a month, but it will reopen, owner Boris Kirshner vowed.

Kirshner said he feels the order is unfair.

Every hotel on the north end of Main Street has a seedy reputation, Kirshner said. He swears the hotel has turned a corner since last winter’s drug raid.

“I’m there every single day and I’m a white male, family, two children. I’ve never had issues. We’ve never had stabbings, shootings, anything like that. We’ve had the occasional bar fight, nothing that gets out of hand,” Kirshner said.

That may be true. A quick search of public records turned up more violence, including a homicide in 2004, at the McLaren Hotel down the street.

But the hotel is no stranger to severe violence.

A hotel bouncer, an associate of the notorious Manitoba Warriors street gang, was called into the bar by a work colleague and fellow gang member in 2010 and administered a beating with a baseball bat, fracturing a man’s skull and femur.

For Kirshner to insist the Sutherland is a quiet bar — “I’d say 85 to 95 per cent of our customers are older people, so it’s not like there’s people flashing gang colours and selling drugs in front of other people” — was apparently hard to swallow for his neighbours and the liquor authority.

The authority cites the hotel’s criminal history in its order, with the suspension pivoting on extensive evidence of undercover investigations — 18 crack sales to a single undercover officer in 2013 — and a police raid in 2014 that scooped up four staffers and one hotel resident on drug charges.

“Most of the transactions were made by employees of the Sutherland Hotel while they were working their shifts in the beverage room or the retail beer vendor,” the order noted.

All too often, the 24-hour video surveillance the former liquor board imposed on the Sutherland had been turned off, a primary reason for the suspension. The cameras were off the day of the police raid.

Point Douglas residents were gleeful. Many have spent years cleaning up the area, one of the poorest in Canada, by closing down one crack house after another.

“I would like to see it closed permanently. That place is for the Manitoba Warriors, and it’s nothing but a drug haven. If you want to buy crack, that’s where you want to go,” said one Point Douglas resident reluctant to make his name public.

Sel Burrows, whose activism is a neighbourhood conduit for ridding Point Douglas of crime, said the Sutherland has been a drug den for years, but most people are afraid to come forward for fear of retaliation from street gangs.

“We’re in our 70s now, but we’re not going to let these punks push us around,” Burrows said.

At the very least, the suspension will give residents breathing room.

“I’m not a lawyer, and the liquor board’s had some changes, but to me, a message is being sent to the Sutherland that if it reopens, it has to follow the rules like any other establishment,” Point Douglas Women’s Centre executive director Kate Sjoberg said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca