What do you even say at this point? As Ontario’s LCBO strike continues, the union wants private alcohol-expansion plans curtailed — particularly the sale of ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages. Instead, the Ford government has decided to accelerate plans to get cans and bottles on grocery and convenience-store shelves.
The faster timeline isn’t exactly warp-speed ahead. The new plan will move up the rollout by two weeks for RTDs. Ford refuses to budge on the union demand to roll back plans for the ready-made drinks, and in case there were any doubts that he planned on sticking to his guns, this latest move ought to put them to rest. It’s an antagonistic decision that will further poison the relationship between the government and union in the long run, and yet OPSEU has returned to the bargaining table as of Wednesday, hoping to get a fair deal.
As Phil Tsekouras reports for CTV News, at a recent press conference, Ford was emphatic that the province has made up its mind on the matter: if the union was drawing a line at RTDs, “the deal is off,” he said, adding, “Let me be very clear. It is done, it is gone. That ship has sailed. It’s halfway across Lake Ontario.”
Ford is betting that Ontarians will side with the government as it aims to serve consumers with a greater number of locations to buy alcohol. And his plan might work. Sort of.
As the Toronto Star reports, less than 4 per cent of grocery stores in Ontario — 53 of them — have applied for and been granted alcohol-retail licences, compared to just about 40 per cent of the province’s convenience stores. The reason, writes Josh Rubin, is that the grocery chains don’t want to deal with (which is to say pay for and manage) recycling infrastructure. Smaller stores aren’t required to meet these standards.
There is no pressing need to get alcohol onto store shelves, other than to fulfil the immediate desire of the government to wrong-foot the LCBO and its staff and undermine their capacity to leverage store closures to get a better deal for workers. Ford’s move is thus a kind of scab-labour runaround, consistent with Tory efforts to help consumers find alcohol near them while the provincial retailer is on strike.
I support, in principle, the plan to liberalize alcohol sales. I have long supported breweries and wineries and distilleries selling their products outside the LCBO. And I think if we were to create a model for alcohol distribution today, we wouldn’t bother with the prohibition-inspired state retailer.
My concern isn’t that the state retails (or wholesales) alcohol. It’s that we maximize the number of workers who have unionized, well-paying jobs with good working conditions and that the marketplace is protected from being dominated by a handful of private chains. That’s not what we’re going to get with Ford’s plan. The accelerated timeline is a slap in the face to workers who stand to get a worse deal as the province plays hardball.
I take some solace knowing that the big grocery chains, which are utter monsters prone to anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and exploitative behaviour, are not rushing to take up the province on its alcohol plans. But, either way, consumer choice and flexibility will ultimately come at the cost of shifting power further to retail chains — which is what so many convenience stores and almost all grocery stores are — and leaving workers high and dry.
At the very least, Ford should slow down his plans to liberalize alcohol sales and think long and hard on what his government wants for the workers it professes to care so much about. It’s easy to pit the LCBO against consumers, but these 9,000 workers represent more than themselves. They represent the struggle for good jobs against bad jobs with cookie-cutter private-sector retailers that don’t give a fig about their employees and dominate an ever-shrinking market. Even if many of Ontario’s grocery workers are unionized, many aren’t, and those who are still struggle with poor working conditions. And convenience stores? Forget it.
Of course, I understand. It’s the summertime, and the mythology of the province is bound up with having a cold one on a dock or after cutting the lawn or while watching a ball game. Ford is counting on that connection, combined with a full-court press to argue the struggle is really about boosting Ontario’s alcohol producers. But this fight is about more than that, and we ought to take the time to fully think things through before the final plans are in the can.
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