In Ontario politics, you’ll rarely go wrong betting on disappointment. So it is with the news that the province’s grocery stores have reached an agreement with the Beer Store that will nominally preserve the Ontario Deposit Return Program, which collects empty alcohol containers. As reported by the Canadian Press, the grocers — who were adamant that they not be required to personally touch the icky empties themselves — will kick some money to the Beer Store, who will continue to operate the deposit program and pledge to keep enough locations operating that “there is a point of recycling available within 10 kilometres for the vast majority of the population.”
The government says this is exactly the kind of outcome they wanted to see before January 1 of next year rolls around: the grocers back down from their threat to simply stop selling alcohol, the deposit return system continues to operate, and even the Beer Store will preserve some jobs, presumably.
“We’re pleased that The Beer Store and grocery retailers have reached an agreement in principle to maintain Ontario’s world-class deposit return program, a win for businesses and consumers,” said Colin Blachar, spokesperson for Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy, in an emailed statement. “This is another step forward in modernizing Ontario’s alcohol marketplace and delivering more choice and convenience to the people of Ontario.”
Scratch the surface, however, and the announced settlement looks less like a victory and more like a retreat. The province had just barely started to enforce the rules requiring grocers more than five kilometres from an existing Beer Store to start accepting empties, and now the province is accepting 10 kilometres as a reasonable travel distance instead.
Those who passed middle school math will remember that a circle increases in area with the square of the radius; by doubling the allowable distance to travel to a Beer Store or other recycling point, this agreement could quadruple the geography each collection point covers — that is, we could still see massively fewer locations accepting empties across the province, even as the agreement nominally preserves the ODRP. For those of us in Toronto, a single location at Bloor and Yonge could satisfy the 10-kilometre standard for nearly the entire city, but Toronto isn’t actually what I’m worried about.
We’ve already seen towns in northern Ontario lose their only Beer Store location, leaving empties stranded for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Saying that the “vast majority” of Ontarians will be within 10 kilometres of a recycling point is cold comfort in the north, where the vast majority of Ontarians don’t live. It seems likely that this agreement between the brewer’s oligopoly and the grocer’s oligopoly is going to give both of them sufficient room to abandon recycling across most of northern Ontario, if the Ford government lets them.
(The government will still have to approve terms of the settlement to ensure that any agreement meets the standard of providing recycling access to consumers; both the brewers and grocers will have distinct responsibilities, but the agreement hasn’t yet been finalized.)
Why any of this matters: the deposit return program in Ontario is the Crown Jewel of the province’s recycling programs, regularly showing vastly more success in diverting glass, metals, and plastic from Ontario’s landfills than the Blue Bin program. Those landfills have lifespans, and when they reach the end of the line (as many currently are) they have to be replaced with new landfills, usually paid for by municipal property taxes or user fees. A weaker deposit return program will see more waste sent to landfills; those landfills will reach the end of their useful lives sooner; and their replacements will be expenses we’ll all have to bear.
In one sense, none of this is surprising: the province’s grocery oligopoly has been successfully fighting off efforts to impose any kind of deposit return scheme on beverage containers for about as long as I’ve been alive, and this week’s news is just the latest in their long string of victories over successive Ontario premiers. No doubt they’re popping champagne in the executive suites this week, presumably after the latest meeting with their accountants about how much they owe Canadians this year in price-fixing compensation.
Nevertheless, it is all disappointing because the expansion of alcohol sales was likely the best opportunity we were going to get in a generation to do something in Ontario that jurisdictions all over North America have already managed, in some cases for decades. (The oddest part of this whole issue, to me, has been the voices confidently asserting that something that’s common practice in Quebec and New York State couldn’t possibly work here. This isn’t particle physics!) Whoever forms the next government isn’t going to have these specific circumstances to use as political leverage against our complacent incumbents.
Finally, it’s just... a kludge. An inelegant compromise born of three parties — the government, the grocers, and the Beer Store — all of whom are more interested in doing the laziest, easiest thing they can instead of making something sound that works properly and reliably for the next guy. That’s hardly unheard of in government, but it’s also not something to celebrate.
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