Staff of the Halifax Alehouse work in front of the bar in July, 2023.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
Terri Giffin is a former counsellor based in Halifax.
On Christmas Eve, 2022, Alex Levy – the former head of security at the now-shuttered Alehouse bar in downtown Halifax – put 31-year-old Ryan Sawyer in a chokehold for nearly two minutes.
Last month, just before Mr. Levy was sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter, he apologized to Mr. Sawyer’s family in Nova Scotia Supreme Court.
“I tried to deal with the situation the best I could with the training I had,” Mr. Levy said. “Maybe it wasn’t the most up-to-date training. Maybe it was the wrong training.”
Halifax bouncer found guilty of manslaughter in 2022 death of bar patron
If that was the case, then this tragedy was absolutely preventable – and that’s not even really hypothetical. In 2010, the Nova Scotia legislature passed the Security and Investigative Service Act (SISA), which mandated standardized training, screening and licensing for bouncers, often the first line of defence in a bar scene that is a major tourism draw and economic engine for the city of Halifax.
That law would have aligned Nova Scotia with similar regulations in place in Ontario and B.C., and it received royal assent. But SISA contained a clause that required cabinet to proclaim it before it could go into force, and since then, every provincial government across the political spectrum – under the NDP, then the Liberals, and now the Progressive Conservatives – has chosen to leave it in stasis.
As a result, Mr. Levy was never licensed, and never received the standardized training that should have been required. And the public has never been given an explanation for exactly why this law has gotten stuck in purgatory.
That is a personal affront to my family and me. SISA was passed thanks to a decade of advocacy by my father, Cyril Giffin, who championed the cause in memory of my brother Stephen, who died in 1999 after being beaten by staff outside a Halifax bar. My family believed that SISA was on the books. My father even stood in the provincial legislature to take photos with government officials to celebrate SISA’s passage in 2010, four years before he died. It was only when we read reports about Mr. Sawyer’s death that we realized it had not actually been proclaimed.
Nova Scotia mandates background checks for bouncers after 2022 death of bar patron
Ross Landry, the NDP justice minister who led the charge on SISA, told The Globe in 2023 that he couldn’t recall why it wasn’t proclaimed before the government was defeated in 2013, but added that the bar and service industry had raised concerns, which demanded further study by his ministry.
A more recent provincial Justice Department memo to the PC government, written not long after Mr. Sawyer died, noted a similar potential reason for the hold-up: “Industry consultations raised concerns over the regulatory burden on businesses.”
Without clarity or transparency, it is impossible not to suspect that “whatever happened here seems to have happened behind closed doors,” as Wayne MacKay, professor emeritus at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law, said.
Tragically, it has taken the death of Mr. Sawyer (and allegations of other injuries by Alehouse patrons) to prompt the Nova Scotia government to act. Last year, it announced updates to the province’s liquor laws to regulate bouncers and bar owners at licensed establishments.
Those regulations, which are set to come into effect on June 1, have yet to be released, but the consultations around the changes have also taken place behind closed doors. Special-interest organizations such as the Restaurant Association of Nova Scotia (RANS) have said that they were involved in the process. RANS’s executive director said that it would be “very, very engaged.”
Can we trust the government to ensure the integrity of these new regulations when they are holding private meetings with industry groups and lobbyists?
Nova Scotia finds itself at a crossroads. The province, with its Maritime traditions, has a longstanding drinking culture, and public safety must thus be paramount. Government should not be meeting behind closed doors with industry when public safety is on the line, and regulations for bar owners and bouncers shouldn’t be watered down or halted to accommodate businesses. This province needs to finally act and make real changes to protect people – the kind that the government said were going to happen almost two decades ago – because no one else should die like my brother or Mr. Sawyer did.