LCBO. The dumbest strike ever: Chris Selley

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The Ontario liquor retailers’ strike appears to be over, or at least limping toward the finish line, with employees still to ratify a new contract and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) filing last-minute grievances. While details are few and far between, the government can only hope it got a good deal for taxpayers and liquor buyers. Ontarians could have easily sat out this “dry summer,” as the OPSEU ridiculously dubbed their strike, indefinitely.

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A week after the strike began, nearly 15 percent of Ontario residents told Leger Marketing that the closure of LCBO stores had “personally affected” them. Only 29 percent said the government should use legislation or arbitration to get LCBO employees back in stores as soon as possible. Eleven percent said they didn’t even know about the strike. And 32 percent said they had explored “alternative places” to buy alcohol, of which there are now countless.

I suspect that many more people explored these options during the second week of the strike, as refrigerators and wine shelves were empty. This is potentially bad news for the LCBO’s future retail market share. But you didn’t even need an alternative to the LCBO: with a few days of planning, you could get all your usual brands delivered for free. Delivery and wholesale options operated as usual. Restaurants and supermarkets supplied by the LCBO continued to receive supplies, and while there were reports of empty shelves in some supermarkets, that was no more true than usual in the supermarket I visit.

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The worst story I heard about supply chain problems in my local operations was that one of the operations ran out of Jameson whiskey and was unable to restock. Is It was quite a big deal in the pub in question, but the regulars seemed to be appeased, at least temporarily, by the many other whiskies.

So the whole thing looks like a terrible miscalculation by the union leadership on behalf of its members – both a fundamental miscalculation of the scope for influence and a bizarre tactical decision to dedicate the strike primarily to expanding the sale of ready-to-drink cocktails and bottled water (RTDs) to supermarkets and convenience stores.

Not the wages, not the benefits, not the number of full-time jobs – things that people can at least understand – but where you can and can’t buy a White Claw or a Caesar in a can. Did they really think people would care?

As far as I can tell, it was an attempt to relate this to the future of LCBO retail: RTDs are a large and growing part of the Ontario alcohol market and (before the strike) were only available at the LCBO. OPSEU wanted us to believe that Ontario would not make a profit by allowing supermarkets to sell them. And that’s their advantage: An incredible number of Ontarians, including far too many journalists, cannot imagine the government getting its share from wholesale rather than retail.

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Nevertheless, this move was obviously not a success.

There were other union miscalculations along the way. Helpfully, the government put together a map of hundreds of places where you could buy alcoholic beverages during (and after!) the LCBO strike: beer stores, supermarkets, wine shops and wine racks, rural agency stores, breweries, distilleries, cider houses, wineries, the list goes on. And the union wanted us to be angry about it.

“If Ford really cared about an Ontario that was ‘for the people,’ he would have worked on a GP locator, not an alcohol locator,” Colleen MacLeod, chair of OPSEU’s LCBO division, said in a statement – perhaps hoping that outright non sequiturs would prevail where poor arguments had so far failed to do so.

The union’s argument was based on the idea that creating an online map with objects on it would be a very expensive, laborious, high-tech task. But it isn’t. You just copy a few hundred addresses into a platform called Mapbox and you have a map. It even uses open source maps.

“LCBO staff fully support the mom-and-pop shops and craft breweries, wineries and distilleries and we encourage people to visit them as well,” MacLeod continued hilariously. OPSEU absolutely does not support mom-and-pop shops that want to sell beer and wine, as they can do so under new rules that come into effect in the fall.

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But we must understand that OPSEU’s resistance is in their own interest. “Mom and pop stores … will be even worse off in Doug Ford’s Ontario – his business model will ruin them, not help them,” MacLeod warned.

OPSEU knows better than anyone how to run a corner shop. Sure.

I think this misstep is understandable. Premier Doug Ford lives on in the minds of his opponents like few politicians I have ever met – more than Kathleen Wynne, more than Stephen Harper, perhaps even more than Justin Trudeau. They are deeply convinced of his fundamentally evil nature and his insidious plans, first for the LCBO, then for the entire rest of the public sector. This is true of every public sector union leader in the province.

But the majority of Ontarians who do not get a rose-tinted fog at the mere mention of Ford’s name will have spent the last two weeks politely and earnestly urging Ford to return OPSEU to the negotiating table, stressing time and again that the wholesale and retail LCBO is an essential part of the province’s future.

His actions support this view more than those of his critics. If Ford really wanted to destroy the retail arm of the LCBO, he could have done it in one fell swoop, as the Ralph Klein government did in Alberta. He could have expanded liquor sales to grocery and convenience stores, or allowed standalone stores to participate in the new market, rather than just supermarkets and convenience stores.

Some of us wish he had done just that. And we would not be happy if this new contract included major concessions to a union that has clearly lost its way. OPSEU should be facing a reckoning with its own members.

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