Strikes by state liquor stores are, at worst, a minor annoyance
On Thursday evening, Colleen MacLeod, chair of the state liquor retailers’ negotiating team, declared summer 2024 completely ruined.
“Tonight marks the start of the dry summer for (Prime Minister Doug) Ford,” said MacLeod of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), hours before the first strike in the history of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) became official.
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Desperate? Delusional? That is debatable. The OPSEU press release announcing the strike suggests “delusional.” At one point, it claims that the LCBO is “Ontario’s best-kept secret.”
What could this possibly mean?
The press release quoted OPSEU President JP Hornick as saying, “We told Ford not to ruin everyone’s summer, but now he has closed the science centre and given Ontarians a dry summer by refusing to offer a deal that would be good for LCBO workers and Ontario.”
The Ontario Science Centre is a boring kiddie destination north of Toronto that has been neglected in every way by successive provincial governments. I’m pretty sure few people in Ottawa, Windsor or Thunder Bay have ever heard of it. Lumping it in with the LCBO just because the OPSEU represents workers at both facilities suggests that the union doesn’t really understand the fight it’s engaging in.
If the Ford government is willing to stand firm and fight – something it is not known for – this could be a major victory for Ontario consumers.
It’s not 1990 anymore. The LCBO’s closing its stores is really just a minor bummer after years of piecemeal, needlessly complex and too slow but nonetheless significant liberalization that really took off under former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. (Ford is often derided for her obsession with alcohol, but Wynne was hardly a parody. If her government woke up to a crisis on Monday morning, you could bet it would announce more beer and wine in supermarkets on Thursday afternoon.)
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Free home delivery of alcohol is still prominently offered on the LCBO website. You have to plan ahead for this; it is not a same-day delivery. But it is also very convenient.
For once, Ontario residents can be happy that The Beer Store – Ontario’s bizarre post-Prohibition beer quasi-monopoly, now owned by major breweries based in Denver, Tokyo and Anderlecht in Belgium – is still around. It’s not on strike and it’s delivering.
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Ontario residents living in rural or semi-rural areas have it absolutely fine. Hundreds upon hundreds of private local businesses – corner shops, small supermarkets, wilderness outfitters, gas stations – sell beer, wine and spirits under license from the LCBO, which has assured us that supplies to these stores will continue unabated. Thankfully, these stores have skyrocketed under Ford’s leadership.
Urban spirits lovers who aren’t foresighted enough to order ahead from the LCBO may be left with at least their usual brands, but craft distilleries in Toronto and Ottawa are ready to make your summer as boozy as you want it to be.
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For plonk lovers (no rating), there is the privately owned Wine Store and Wine Rack, which sell mainly low to mid-range Ontario wines.
226 supermarkets in Ontario already have a license to sell wine or operate a privately run “wine boutique” on site, while twice as many have a license to sell beer and cider.
Craft beer fans can call the brewery. They all deliver.
At worst, since pandemic-era rules were made permanent, restaurants and bars can sell you anything they have, as long as it’s sold with a food item. (One Toronto establishment I won’t name here charges you for a stick of gum for 25 cents. Other Toronto establishments I won’t name here don’t even bother to use that fig leaf.)
And if you – and this is the case for very many Ontarians – live near the border with Quebec or the USA, this point is of course even more irrelevant.
I suspect National Post readers don’t need to have this explained to them, but the idea that liberalizing sales will shift profits from the public purse to the private purse is too common in the mainstream media to be refuted. Adjusted for inflation, Ontario has never made more money from alcohol sales in the last 20 years than it did in 2020, long after liberalization began.
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While 2020 was a particularly thirsty year for a variety of reasons, sales (adjusted for inflation) were also on the rise during Wynne’s tenure, even as she issued hundreds of licenses to supermarkets to sell beer and wine.
The reason for this is not complicated: someone has to pay the cost of selling the goods, and the overhead costs of a supermarket or big-box store are dramatically lower than those of the LCBO. As much as people moan about the potential loss of well-paying jobs, OPSEU stresses that wages at LCBOs start at less than $18 an hour – just a dollar more than the minimum wage.
That’s not much less, if anything, than the wage the average union supermarket pays its entry-level employees.
So what exactly are we protecting here?
This crazy strike is a clear message to the Ford government regarding liberalization of the liquor trade: more, harder, faster. As Ontario citizens will soon realize more clearly than ever, we simply do not need the LCBO as a retailer.
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