Every summer in Japan, the city of Tokyo hosts The Crying Baby Festival. During the festival, a bunch of babies are lined up on stage, then sumo wrestlers in scary masks jump out and frighten the kids. According to Japanese folklore, whichever baby cries the most, will enjoy the longest and happiest life.
I wish we could take our daughter to this festival, because based on the amount of crying she does when we can’t find her stuffed Elmo doll, my daughter is going to enjoy a very long, very happy life.
The Crying Baby Festival sounds like a lotta fun, but I’m a sucker for a good festival. I would spend all summer going from festival to festival if I could. The Festival of the Steel Phallus, hosted in Kawasaki, Japan, is definitely on my bucket list. As is The Festival of Exploding Hammers, in San Juan de Vega, Mexico, where dudes attach firecrackers to hammers and smash them against steel plates. That’s it, that’s the whole point of the festival. You just bolt firecrackers to hammers, and swing them around to make a big bang. Simple, elegant, brilliant. The Monkey Buffet Festival in Lopburi, Thailand is another good one; it’s just a day where people put a bunch of food out and let monkeys chow down.
These exotic festivals all sound awesome, but closer to home, there’s no shortage of cool festivals right here in Niagara. However, while I had long assumed that these types of festivals were a major boon to the local businesses, upon closer inspection, it turns out that in some cases, the total opposite was true.
Take for example, Canal Days. Tens of thousands of people flock to Port Colborne for Canal Days every August, so it must inject a ton of cash into local businesses right? Well, not really.
Years ago I did a deep dive into this strange phenomenon and found that many local businesses do much worse on Canal Days weekend than they do on a regular weekend. I even talked to several shop owners who told me they close down their store for the entire weekend because not only do they not do very well from a business standpoint, but from a logistical perspective, it’s a pain in the butt to even open the doors, so they don’t bother.
There were, of course, a few exceptions. A lady who owns a candy and sweets shop on West Street, right in the middle of the Canal Days festivities, told me she sells more ice cream during the four-day Canal Days festival than she does in a month otherwise.
This counterintuitive festival oddity isn’t unique to Canal Days in Port Colborne, as I discovered recently while reading a PelhamToday story about the town’s Summerfest. Just like with Canal Days, some local businesses found it was more trouble than it was worth. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, as they say.
The oddest part of the story, as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that businesses are being charged a fee to participate in the event if they want to be a vendor in front of their own store. That’s absolute madness.
On balance, it’s hard to say if these types of events are worth it when you look at the big picture. They bring people to town, sure, but if most of that money is going into transient market vendors setting up a booth to sell cheap sunglasses and hats sourced from China, what’s the point? If local restaurants aren’t making additional revenue, because dollars are being funneled into food trucks that drive in from Hamilton, what’s the point?
Like with anything, the value of these festivals will vary depending on who you ask. There is, of course, some good spinoff from these types of things, but invariably you can’t host a big festival without some negative side effects.
Just look at the big Glastonbury Festival, a raucous music and theatre festival in England, where back in 2019 some scientists decided to test the water of the nearby Whitelake River for traces of drugs. What they found was that levels of cocaine in the water were large enough to disrupt the life cycle of eels.
I’m no scientist, but I’d wager if you tested the water in the canal after Canal Days was over, you’d find fentanyl levels large enough get the local fish population high as a kite.
James Culic does not condone the use of drugs on fish. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or spark up some debate with a letter to the editor.