Ontarians realizing LCBO isn’t needed
On Thursday evening, Colleen Macleod, chair of the team bargaining on behalf of government liquor-store employees, declared the summer of 2024 utterly ruined.
“Tonight, (Premier Doug) Ford’s dry summer begins,” said Macleod, of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU, hours before the first strike in the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s (LCBO) history became official.
Desperate? Delusional? That’s up for debate. OPSEU’S news release announcing the strike suggests “delusional.” At one point it claims the LCBO is “Ontario’s best-kept secret.”
What could that possibly mean?
The release then quotes OPSEU president J.P. Hornick as follows: “We told Ford not to ruin everybody’s summer, but now he’s closed the Science Centre and forced a dry summer for Ontarians by refusing to offer a deal that would be good for LCBO workers and Ontario.”
The Ontario Science Centre is a tired old children’s destination in North Toronto that has been neglected in every way by consecutive provincial governments. I’m quite sure few people in Ottawa, Windsor or Thunder Bay have ever even heard of it. Mashing it together with the LCBO, just because OPSEU represents employees at both, suggests the union really doesn’t understand the fight it’s getting into.
If the Ford government is willing to dig in its heels and fight — which isn’t something it’s particularly known for — this could be a great win for the Ontario consumer.
It’s not 1990. The LCBO shutting the doors to its retail stores is really only a minor pain in the rear end, thanks to years of piecemeal, needlessly complex and tooslow but nevertheless significant liberalization that really kicked into gear under former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. (Ford is often mocked for being obsessed with alcohol, but Wynne was nearly beyond parody. If her government woke up in a crisis Monday morning, it was safe to say she’d find herself announcing more beer and wine in supermarkets by Thursday afternoon.)
The LCBO website is still prominently offering to deliver booze to your home, for free. You’ll have to plan ahead for that; it’s not sameday delivery. But it’s also very convenient.
For once, Ontarians can be glad that The Beer Store — Ontario’s bizarre post-prohibition beer quasi-monopoly, now owned by megabrewers headquartered in Denver, Tokyo and Anderlecht, Belgium — is still around. It’s not on strike, and it delivers, too.
Ontarians who live in rural or semi-rural areas are absolutely fine. Hundreds upon hundreds of private local businesses — corner stores, small supermarkets, wilderness outfitters, gas stations — sell beer, wine and spirits under licence from the LCBO, which has assured us that supplies to these stores will continue unabated. These stores have proliferated under Ford’s watch, and thank goodness.
Urban spirits aficionados who lack the foresight to order ahead from the LCBO may find themselves caught out, at least with respect to their regular brands, but craft distilleries in Toronto and Ottawa stand ready and willing to make your summer as wet as you want it to be.
Plonk aficionados (no judgment) have the privately run Wine Store and Wine Rack, which peddle mostly low-to-mid-range Ontario wines.
Two hundred and twenty six Ontario supermarkets are already licensed to sell wine, or have a privately run “wine boutique” on site, while twice as many are licensed to sell beer and cider.
Fans of craft beer can call up the brewery. They all deliver.
If worse comes to worst, since pandemic-era rules were made permanent, a restaurant or bar can sell you anything it’s willing to let go, so long as it’s sold with a food item. (One Toronto establishment that I will not name makes you buy a piece of chewing gum for 25 cents. Other Toronto establishments that I will not name don’t even bother with that fig leaf.)
And of course, if you live near the Quebec or U.S. border, which an awful lot of Ontarians do, then this point is even more moot.
I suspect National Post readers don’t need this explained, but the notion that liberalizing sales takes profits from public coffers and transfers them to private coffers is too ubiquitous in mainstream media not to rebut. Adjusted for inflation, Ontario has never made more money from liquor sales over the past 20 years than it did in 2020, well after all this liberalization began.
True, 2020 for various reasons was a particularly thirsty year. But the revenue trend (adjusted for inflation) was up throughout Wynne’s tenure as well, even as she handed out hundreds of licences to supermarkets to sell beer and wine.
The reason is not complicated: Someone has to pay what it costs to sell the stuff, and a supermarket’s or big-box store’s overhead is dramatically lower than the LCBO’S. Much as people wail about the potential loss of good-paying jobs, OPSEU is at pains to note that LCBO wages start at less than $18 per hour — just a buck more than the minimum wage.
It’s not much less, if at all, than what your average unionized supermarket pays their entry-level employees.
So what, exactly, are we protecting here?
This bonkers strike is a clear signal to the Ford government on liquor-retail liberalization: More, harder, faster. As Ontarians will soon see more clearly than ever, we simply don’t need the LCBO as a retailer.