The best part of Ontario’s waste management system is falling apart, and there’s a chance it’s going to collapse completely by the end of this year. The Beer Store’s deposit return system boasts truly impressive recycling rates, substantially better than achieved via Blue Bin curbside collection. Thanks to the Ford government’s decision to liberalize beer and wine sales in the province the foreign-owned beer retailer is busily shutting down locations as quickly as its contract with the province allows. Some remote towns have already lost the only return location within a two-hour drive, imperiling a system that keeps substantial volumes of bottles and cans out of the province’s landfills (which are themselves overburdened and in some cases reaching the end of their useful lives, with huge implications for municipal taxpayers).
This is an eminently solvable problem, and at least right now, the Ford government’s position is the correct one: the grocery stores that have enjoyed the increased revenues from beer and wine sales will now have to play a role in keeping the deposit return system operating.
“They all signed up benefiting from increased choice in their stores,” Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy said last week at an unrelated announcement, noting that the agreement required grocers to put recycling in place. “My message to the grocers is: comply or give the license back. Your choice.”
Ontario’s big grocery stores have been grumbling about this for months, and as usual, some sympathetic smaller players are being used as a cat’s paw for the industry’s big outlets. The Loblaws, Sobeys, and Metros that make up the province’s cozy oligopoly have been fighting every form of deposit return for beverage containers going back to the 1980s (that’s why we have the Blue Bin in the first place) and they’ve made no secret of their hostility to the impending requirement that they start collecting empties starting January 1, 2026.
Think of the impossible difficulty, the grocery barons whine, of collecting and sorting empty beer bottles and cans. You see, they aren’t the large, sophisticated, billion-dollar operations with their own vertically integrated warehousing and shipping networks. No, they’re just simple folk utterly incapable of managing the task that small convenience stores easily manage in other jurisdictions (go to Quebec or New York State, they’re not far away) or indeed the task that the Beer Store managed for decades in its own locations.
They don’t have the space in their stores, they plead, while the Loblaws store nearest to my home had two empty retail spaces inside it for years — an abandoned dry cleaner that folded during COVID and a wine shop that closed-up when booze moved from the periphery of the store to the centre aisles under the Wynne government. The idea that every single square inch of their real estate holdings are being used to their utmost doesn’t pass the “open your eyes and look around” test, much less the laugh test.
This isn’t a job we’ve ever had to do before, they say — which is why the provincial rules expressly allow them to sign contracts with the Beer Store to do the job for them if it’s truly necessary. But are we being asked to believe that this work is simply beyond the workers and management of these massive companies? That somehow the Beer Store just happened to corner the market on the unique genius it takes to sort clear glass from coloured?
And it shouldn’t go without saying that these are all the very same companies that are implicated in a price-fixing scheme that stole at least hundreds of millions of dollars from Canadians from bread purchases alone. So, while it’s true that in general the grocery business is one of small profit margins made up on volume, in the specific case of Canada’s biggest retailers, we are owed more than a dollop of skepticism to their claims of poverty.
When you eliminate all the obviously false excuses, you’re left with the obviously true one: the grocery giants in this province would really, really like to keep making all the profit from alcohol sales without even the slightest bit of environmental or social reciprocity. They’ve received a generous windfall from the Ford government (a change in policy that’s done active harm to the province’s fiscal state) not to mention the arguably even more generous terms they had under the Wynne government for a decade: they’d like to keep receiving that cash without having to so much as give one of their existing part-time workers more hours on the payroll.
I’m not a fundamentalist on this point: there are, legitimately, some small grocers who face some real hardship from being forced to choose between stocking beer and wine or accepting empties. That’s why the province’s current policy exempts stores under 4,000 square feet — if your local convenience store or small green grocer has added some beer fridges in the past year, they’re almost certainly fine. Nevertheless, maybe that number needs to be modestly increased; I’m certainly not going to vouch for the Ford government’s perfection in rule-making. Ultimately, however, the question of what to do about small stores is a distraction.
The actual fight in Ontario this year is over whether big grocers will, once again, get the province to bend and relieve them of any obligation to collect empties. And the grocers already have history on their side: Queen’s Park has sided with them consistently for decades, and as recently as last year when the province reversed course and abandoned any compulsory deposit return scheme for non-alcohol empties. (The Retail Council of Canada boasted of their successful lobbying on that file, so it's not like the Ford government simply had a change of heart.) They are betting that, like all of his predecessors for decades, Doug Ford will chicken out.
He shouldn’t. If he does, he and his finance minister would end up eating their words — and consumers, and taxpayers, would end up paying for it.
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