Parents, did you drop your kids off in Bronte for the “Victoria Day fireworks?”
If so, what were you thinking? Our community is not a McDonalds’s play place.
There are no public fireworks or organized community events in our neighbourhood for Victoria Day, and there hasn’t been for years. What are you dropping your kids off here for? What exactly do you think they are up to while wandering around unsupervised? When you see the videos each year of literally hundreds of kids in our streets, running in and out of traffic, shooting fireworks off into crowds, aiming fireworks at each other, members of the public, homes, businesses and even police, do you think that’s ok?
The Bronte community is sick of this disruptive and dangerous behaviour, and sadly Victoria Day is just the warmup for Canada Day. We gladly welcome more than 20,000 of you each year for the lakefront Canada Day festival and fireworks. However your unsupervised teens are not welcome to run riot after the show. Last year there were close to 1,000 of them, literally terrorizing the community. Time to take some responsibility for your offspring.
We are grateful that police and town council finally devoted adequate resources to this problem this year. Tonight the several hundred kids who showed up were surprised to find police on every street corner in Bronte. Those who were arrested and / or given hefty fines for violating the new and improved bylaws were probably surprised too, but not as much as their parents. There was still dangerous and disruptive behaviour, but less than in previous years.
Parents, do better. If you wouldn’t want this happening in your neighbourhood, please don’t let your kids behave this way in ours.