There’s an old story: a man gets yelled at by his boss at work and proceeds to head home, humiliated. He might have the self-control not to yell at his wife or his kid — but the dog (or in some tellings, the cat) gets a swift kick from its owner. The dog has done nothing wrong, or at least nothing deserving of physical abuse, but the man has to bring his anger somewhere and the dog is the one creature the man can abuse without facing even more consequences than he already has.
In the fall of 2025, Premier Doug Ford seemingly can’t do anything about the province’s growing unemployment, or its housing crisis, or a college and university system teetering on the edge of insolvency, or a series of transit projects that would need to be already up and running to be merely wildly overdue. But he can yell at the distiller Diageo for the planned layoffs of approximately 200 workers at the company’s Amherstburg plant.
Ford reiterated his threat to bar Diageo products from the LCBO’s shelves if the company goes forward with its Amherstburg closure, saying “I swear to God, those bottles of Crown Royal are coming off the LCBO shelves” and implying that further Diageo products could be next, including Smirnoff vodka.
I don’t begrudge the premier sticking up for workers in a dispute with their employer, but we should be clear about what’s going on here: this is a relatively small dispute in the province with a company that the government can afford to antagonize. It’s cheap heat. It’s kicking the dog to feel slightly better about everything else that’s going wrong.
Larger, more powerful companies are also putting workers in jeopardy elsewhere in the province to silence so far from the Premier. In Oshawa, General Motors is considering potentially furloughing as many as 750 workers currently building the Silverado truck, which would, in turn, imperil a further 1,500 workers at parts suppliers. All told, about 10 times as many flesh-and-blood workers are facing an uncertain livelihood early next year in Oshawa, in a situation that’s certainly comparable to what’s going on with Diageo.
It's true that the province doesn’t have a monopoly on car sales the way it does with liquor, but the broader public sector is an enormous customer in its own right. The province buys vehicles directly to meet the government’s needs, and Queen’s Park also dictates the procurement rules for the constellation of agencies, boards, commissions, schools, municipalities, and police services from Kenora to Cornwall. If the Diageo precedent were to be applied evenly, there’s absolutely nothing stopping the Premier from threatening General Motors the way he’s threatened Diageo.
(On Monday, TVO Today asked if the province was considering retaliatory measures against GM. The premier’s office has not yet responded.)
A cynic might point out that Amherstburg is represented by a Progressive Conservative MPP while Oshawa is represented at Queen’s Park by a New Democrat, explaining the disparate treatment. That’s accurate but almost certainly wrong: Ford isn’t ignoring the Oshawa workers because they have an NDP MPP. He’s likely playing nice with GM because it’s a vastly larger company that could impose much, much more pain on Ontario if it comes to believe that this is simply not a jurisdiction where it wants to keep doing business.
That’s not just a totally reasonable call for the premier to make, it’s arguably the correct one — but it just shows what a tempest in a teapot the Diageo squabble actually is. If the liquor-monger had the operational scale of GM, the premier would be watching his words more carefully.
Maybe Diageo will back down when threatened with losing access to the LCBO’s shelves. Maybe they’ll sue the government for unfairly targeting them for political retaliation. Or maybe they’ll proceed with the announced layoffs and take what comes. But whatever comes next, the proper way to understand this fight isn’t as a premier demonstrating his strength, much less lending his muscle to help out the little guy. It’s an example of how much is going wrong everywhere else in the province — and how little Ford has been able to influence events.
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