Lemonade stand could still get tangled in red tape, dad fears

CTV National News: Lemonade stand shutdown Two young entrepreneurs got their first taste of Ottawa-style bureaucracy. Richard Madan explains.

The National Capital Commission is encouraging two children to keep selling lemonade after shutting down their stand last weekend, but their dad isn't sure whether they'll be able to complete the necessary paperwork.

Kurtis Andrews says despite the assurances of the Crown corporation in charge of parkways and paths in the National Capital Region, the bureaucracy may be too much for his daughters Eliza, 7, and Adela, 5.

"They gave us some assurances that we would almost certainly, probably, be able to operate on Sunday," Andrews said in an interview with CTV News. But "the girls can't provide proof of insurance. They can't provide a site map. And so on and so forth. So I expect that there's going to have to be some ... modification of the normal bureaucracy here."

The NCC apologized Monday after a conservation officer shut down a lemonade stand that Eliza and Adela Andrews set up to earn money to pay for a summer camp. The girls had already been selling in front of their home for several weeks and even went to a local sports field to offer free lemonade on a particularly hot day, Kurtis Andrews said.

Last weekend, the girls put the stand near the Rideau Canal to take advantage of a section of the road that's open exclusively to cyclists and runners on Sunday mornings in the summer. With temperatures in the mid-20s and high humidity, business was just starting to take off when a woman on a bike stopped to tell them she thought they needed a permit to sell their wares on NCC land.

"She was a little unsure about specifically why what we were doing was prohibited. And also she wasn't 100 per cent sure if we were on NCC land or on city land," Kurtis Andrews said. Shortly after, a junior conservation officer arrived.

Andrews says he hoped the NCC would let it go since the stand was being run by children.

"This is not a slippery slope to something, grand chaos or anything like that. But the first individual and the enforcement officer both felt that they had to enforce the law," he told CTV News.

"In a very strict sense, operating this stand here in front of our house wouldn't comply with zoning bylaws."

The girls were confused at first about what was happening.

“I felt sad because I really liked selling lemonade,” Eliza Andrews told CTV News.

'It's just a lemonade stand'

A spokesman for the NCC says the organization has been working for years to make the capital's parks and pathways "exciting and a great livable place."

"This is definitely something we encourage and so we were a little disappointed that this is the situation they had to deal with yesterday," Nicholas Galletti said in an interview with CTV News. "We apologized and hopefully we'll get them back on the parkway next week."

The woman who reported the Andrews sisters to the NCC is a volunteer with the organization, Galletti said, "who was cycling by and wanted to just ensure that everybody understood the rules."

"In this case, it's just a lemonade stand."

The NCC says the officer acted in good faith by applying federal land use rules and says it will explore a youth engagement component to go along with Sunday Bikedays.

Kurtis Andrews went to the NCC on Monday to file the paperwork. The lemonade stand exercise started as a way to teach the girls about running a business, and has now covered the type of red tape business owners can encounter, he said.

"This morning I explained what a permit was... they're learning a little bit about bureaucracy, which I think was an important business lesson."

Pierre Poilievre, an Ottawa-area Conservative MP, says it's ridiculous the NCC initially tried to stop the girls from selling lemonade on the parkway.

"I want to thank this family for bringing this to our attention and also for teaching their kids the right values of entrepreneurship and hard work. That's what we should be encouraging. Not shutting it down," Poilievre said.

"I think it's about common sense. I mean, if somebody's trying to build a 6,000 sq. ft. night club, that's a problem. But if a couple of seven-year-olds are selling lemonade, let's relax and celebrate them for doing it rather than trying to shut them down."