Socially distant Without cold-cut comfort of venerable Manitoba socials, many revellers left to reminisce about the days of old By: Eva Wasney Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 11, 2020

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This article was published 10/09/2020 (1570 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In every community across this vast province, there are meatless shoulders, unspent drink tickets and orphaned silent auction prizes. The coronavirus pandemic has not been kind to the event world, but for the Manitoba wedding social, the last six months have been devastating.

Bethany Trapp and Tylor Hebel are planning to marry in July next year. Their wedding date hasn’t changed, but the bud, spud and steak social they’ve been planning since their engagement has already been postponed once, with another move on the horizon.

The original plan was to host a dinner party and fundraiser at Boogie’s Diner for 150 of their closest friends and family members. Travel restrictions have put a damper on the guest list.

“Our American family wants to be there with us to celebrate and to contribute to our big day, but they can’t when they can’t cross the border,” Trapp says.

The couple met online and spent the first year of their relationship long-distance dating and road-tripping between Winnipeg and Hebel’s hometown of Roseau, Minn. The social was going to be a kind of engagement party for the out-of-towners and a way for the couple to offset some of their wedding expenses.

“We don’t want to go into debt for the wedding,” she says. “We just want to be able to just pay for everything up front and kind of be done with it.”

They’re holding out hope that the social will go ahead in 2021, but as a contingency plan, they’ve reworked their wedding to save costs and are prepping for a virtual ceremony if the border remains closed next summer.

Brent Bernas and his fiancée, Jessica Kaminsky, are facing a similar situation. They’ve moved the date of their 500-person social at TYC Event Centre three times since March.

“A lot of people are in worse situations than us,” Bernas says. “But it is frustrating because we sank a lot of money and deposits into prizes and food that we’re not getting back.”

They’ve offered refunds on the hundreds of social tickets they’ve sold already, but so far friends and family have declined to recoup their $10. Sorting out what to do with their silent auction prizes, including a pricey and likely unusable WestJet travel voucher, has been another headache.

“We have quite a bit of stuff because we were only three weeks off before we had to postpone it,” Bernas says. “It’s all just sitting there collecting dust now.”

Like most Manitobans, Bernas has been attending socials for most of his life and was looking forward to having his own.

“It’s a party with all your friends and family as opposed to going to a pub or a bar where it’s a bunch of strangers,” he says. “It’s kind of the last blow-out before we get married and now it’s likely not going to happen.”

With that in mind, the couple has started brainstorming alternative fundraisers, like a golf tournament or trivia night, that could work with public health guidelines.

Some fundraising ideas are better — and more legal — than others.

The Liquor, Gaming and Cannabis Authority of Manitoba (LGCA) has been fielding calls from people looking to run their own online silent auctions or raffles in lieu of a social. While it might seem like a good way to move prizes and raise money, the practice is actually illegal in Canada.

“The Criminal Code authorizes only the provinces to operate lottery schemes,” says LGCA communications analyst Lisa Hansen. “It also authorizes the provinces to license charitable and religious organizations; people having a social are not a charitable or religious organization.”

The LGCA is taking an educational approach to the issue and so far, none of the proposed online raffles have led to fines or legal repercussions.

“It’s kind of the last blow-out before we get married and now it’s likely not going to happen.” – Brent Bernas

In 2018-19, the LGCA issued 8,075 liquor permits and 4,919 raffle permits for socials in Manitoba. Hansen couldn’t say how COVID-19 has impacted those numbers this year.

The fallout for community centres — the quintessential wedding social venue — has been significant.

Varsity View Community Centre in Charleswood runs about 25 socials a year. They’re heading into what would typically be a busy fall social season with one booking on the calendar.

“It concerns me as a resident and a volunteer who wants to see the community club succeed,” president Murray Cunningham says. “I take a lot of pride in my club, so I hope that we don’t go under from this.”

Community centres receive an annual operating grant from the city and bring in additional revenue from venue rentals and events like socials.

While any extra cash helps, social margins are actually quite thin. Varsity View charges $1,500 to rent its hall on Laxdal Road for an evening. After paying for staffing, drink mix and cups, Cunningham estimates the club makes a 10 per cent profit on each social it books.

“As we’re not making as much money, we’re also not spending the same amount of money so we can float for a while,” he says.

If cheap drinks and raffle tickets are the rye bread and mustard, music is the garlic sausage of the perfect social sandwich.

“It creates the whole evening,” says Molly Olson, events co-ordinator with Winnipeg entertainment company Crystal Sound. “If you have good music, you have a good party.”

The business is a mainstay of the Manitoba social scene, employing more than 30 event DJs and booking roughly 200 social gigs in an average year. Unfortunately, 2020 has been anything but average.

Save for a few small summer weddings, Crystal Sound’s turntables have stopped spinning for the first time in 45 years.

“In regards to socials, we are doing none,” Olson says. “The majority of socials are indoors and the indoor limit is 50 people and to have a social with 50 people, they would lose money.”

With no events on the horizon and COVID-19 case numbers rising across the province, Olson is understandably worried about her own bottom line.

“It is impacting us quite aggressively,” she says. “Our main goal, obviously, is making sure that people still get to have their events, but as a business, we really just aren’t bringing any income in.”

The people making the actual sausage are also struggling with a lack of customers. Cantor’s Meats has been offering a social platter of ham, salami, garlic sausage, cheese, pickles, rye bread and potato chips for nearly 50 years.

“Nobody’s buying them anymore,” says owner Ed Cantor, who estimates the social packages account for about 25 per cent of his deli counter sales. “It’s another way to lose business, but it’s like that everywhere.”

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @evawasney