Various Ontario governments have been promising substantially liberalized beer and wine sales in this province since I was in kindergarten, but it might actually be happening sometime in 2025 — and no later than January 1, 2026 — as the Ford government has invoked its legal rights to end the contract then-premier Kathleen Wynne signed with large multinational beer companies by then.
The details of the agreement are pretty banal because the government is leaving much of the superstructure of alcohol sales in Ontario intact: there are already so many regulations and laws governing the sale of alcohol on public-health grounds (properly so, as alcohol is not a benign substance) that opening up retail sales will change relatively little, at first. The LCBO will keep its monopoly role as a retailer of spirits — no gas-station bourbon here, folks — and keep its current wholesaler position for wine. The Beer Store will be the wholesaler for large brewers, so the gas stations and corner stores that put up shelves of libations will ultimately be kicking their money to the same people for now. Small brewers will (gasp, shock) be allowed to distribute beer to retailers directly up to a certain threshold, past which the law will consider them large brewers, and they’ll be obliged to use the Beer Store as a distributor.
The new system will last for at least five years while the government decides what to do with the Beer Store’s deposit-return program — in effect, the Beer Store’s distribution monopoly is being retained to pay large brewers to keep operating one of the province’s most successful recycling programs.
The changes could be considered radical only in Ontario. They are, nevertheless, substantially better for consumers than the ridiculous straitjacket Ford inherited from the Liberals, which primarily served to further enrich the grocery oligarchs of central Canada while still reinforcing the idea that Ontarians couldn’t actually be trusted very far by their government.
I will be happy to raise a glass of some discount gas-station wine when that becomes a possibility, if only for the novelty of it all. But there’s a broader point to make about politics and government in the wake of the resolution of this decades-long issue.
Governments are always buffeted by reasons not to do something. The status quo is a known quantity, even when it’s bad or unfair or merely annoying. When it comes to change, even the best due diligence in the world can’t guarantee that unforeseen problems won’t crop up and give a government a nasty surprise.
The Liberals, under both Dalton McGuinty and Wynne, were understandably cautious about major changes in realms far beyond the narrow field of alcohol sales. Early in McGuinty’s tenure, a number of Ontario cities asked the province to investigate de-amalgamation, including in big urban cities like Toronto and Hamilton and in more rural regions like Kawartha Lakes; McGuinty refused to try to put the toothpaste back in the tube, despite having made a clear campaign promise to allow it, in part because the Liberals, once in government, feared destabilizing municipal services.
Doug Ford could have used that little history lesson before promising to dissolve Peel Region, I suppose. But this isn’t a column about Peel. It’s about political instincts — the Liberal instinct was consistently to listen to voices of caution and prefer inaction and the status quo to even the small risk of change. In broad strokes, that meant they ended up leaving much more of the Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution intact than they’d probably anticipated would be the case when they won in 2003.
On details like alcohol sales, that meant they left an easy win for their successor: Ontarians actually do find the status quo irritating, they are extremely likely to appreciate the easier access afforded by these changes, and — perhaps most notable of all — there’s basically zero chance that any future government will try to put this toothpaste back in the tube. Everyone, implicitly or otherwise, is going to acknowledge that this was the right move.
The opposition parties at Queen’s Park could take a lesson from all this, if they’re paying attention. There are other aspects of everyday life that Ontarians find irritating, and reasonably so. And the government could do something about it. The NDP has been holding public meetings about improving cellphone service, and it’s said it’s willing to consider a Crown-owned telecom as part of its plan. If it were to form government, however, it would immediately face a storm of opposition, and undoubtedly some of that would come from the civil service, urging caution. (That’s more or less what happened after 1990, when Bob Rae promised the NDP would bring in public auto insurance: it never happened.) They would face the same choice governments always do: listen to people urging caution at all costs or treat voters like promises matter.
It's easy and comfortable for progressives to sneer at the Ford government and make smug jokes about how the Tories want voters to be drunk for the next election. A more productive attitude would involve asking why this easy win was left sitting for the Tories to claim as their own, and why progressives didn’t get there first. What other easy-win issues are lying around out there, just waiting to be claimed by someone willing to push back against the nervous Nellies who would inevitably counsel inaction?
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