No more throwing candy from parade floats, Bonnyville town council decides

The Bonnyville Santa Claus parade in 2015.

People in Bonnyville will no longer be allowed to throw candy from parade floats.

Instead, people in participating in parades can toss candy from the road so children won’t run as close to the floats, in hopes of preventing serious injuries.

Town council looked at strengthening their parades policy at Tuesday’s meeting.

“We also don’t want to regulate it to death,” said Mayor Gene Sobolewski on The Morning After.

“This started off with the safety issue of throwing candy from a float. And literally the policy covered off a lot of borrowing from other communities what they do, including Edmonton and stuff like that.”

“Instead of going to that extent, taking the fun out of a parade, let’s try and stop the practice of throwing the candy from vehicles. Because especially when people are driving the vehicles there’s not a lot of distance and we just don’t want those little kids or have the temptation for those little kids to come running up, particularly with some of the larger vehicles that are around or spooking horses, things like that.”

However, town council does not want to stop the fun for kids during the parades, said Sobolewski.

It’s essentially a precaution in case of the rare, what-if scenarios.

“We’re just going to say, refrain from throwing it from the actual float itself, but have some walkers like we do at Canada Day and stuff like that and have your bucket and fill the buckets and have out or throw all the candy you want.

“But basically from a zone that’s a little closer to the people and the kids can get showered with candy because that’s what we want to do. We want to preserve that.”