My immediate reaction to the news that Ontario convenience stores will be able to sell beer and wine by the fall was that I’m finally, at last, going to be able to retire one of my favourite anecdotes.
I’ve no doubt inflicted it on TVO Today readers before, but for the uninitiated, years ago, before COVID, I met a friend in downtown Toronto. She is American and was here for a few days to work. We hadn’t seen each other in years and were excited to reconnect, but when we met up, she was tired and jetlagged. I asked her what she wanted to do, and she asked to keep it simple. We could get dinner at a local bar or, she suggested, even just grab a few beers from the convenience store just down the street from her hotel and then find a nice park to drink them in. It was, after all, a lovely evening. And I just sort of grimaced and had to explain to my American friend that what she was proposing was doubly illegal. It wasn’t legal to buy alcohol from convenience stores in Ontario. And it wasn’t legal to drink alcohol in Toronto parks. So we had dinner in a bar.
But the times are changing. Toronto has decided to permit drinking in some parks — wow! — and Ontario will now let convenience stores sell alcohol. There will also be changes in how grocers and big-box retailers like Walmart and Costco can sell booze, including allowing the large-sized packs often found in the United States and Quebec. The mid-to-late 20th century is arriving in the Centre of the Universe at last.
Not without controversy, of course. The province has said it is going to spend $225 million to fast-track this so that it’ll happen by the fall, ahead of the expiry of the existing agreement between the Beer Store and the province, which was set to end next year. Premier Doug Ford says the money will be carefully monitored to ensure that it’s spent on easing the transition for Beer Store workers; critics say it’s a sweet-heart deal for Ford’s corporate buddies. The Ontario Liberals, meanwhile, are accusing the government of dramatically underreporting the real cost figure of the new booze deal; they say that, when you include the discount retailers will pay off the LCBO rate and some forgone fees, it’ll actually cost just over a billion dollars. They’re calling it the “billion-dollar boozedoggle.”
Cute.
The exact cost doesn’t matter. It’s a bizarre use of money in any case, especially since the existing deal was expiring next year anyway. This isn’t fiscally prudent, and it’s not the best use of taxpayer money. There’s no serious argument that it is or could be.
I am at peace about it all the same. Canada and Ontario are places where the voters put up with way too much nonsense from their politicians. We let publicly owned assets rot. We let critical and obvious problems go unaddressed. We ignore our outdated policies and institutions and just assume there’ll never be any consequences for our refusal to make even slightly uncomfortable decisions or hold our political leaders to any kind of standard. As Iobserved years ago about the ballooning costs to repair 24 Sussex Drive — the nominal official residence of the prime minister of Canada — whatever the cost is, we should pay it. And rather than think of it as a waste, we should consider it a penance or a fine. It was ridiculous that we, as a country, allowed it ever to get so bad, and we should collectively pay to fix it. I feel much the same about the cost of modernizing booze retail in Ontario. This is what consequences look like.
Indeed, the entire thing is a useful reminder of how timid and old-fashioned our politicians are. Almost no one actually thought that how Ontario was handling alcohol retail sales was the best system, at least for consumers. That’s why both Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments have been oh-so-carefully-and-slowly changing it for years. The ban on convenience-store sales was basically the last bridge to cross. It still took years.
It’s been interesting to see some of the criticism of the announcement. Again, if you want to lament the money it’s costing, that’s fine. But the notion that Ford is somehow beholden to the beer companies or that this is just yet more populism, in the same vein as Buck-a-Beer, just doesn’t make sense. Ford has been promising to do thissince before he was elected. That’s six years of talking about this without doing anything about this. This doesn’t tell us that Ford is reaching for easy populist gimmicks or looking to do his buddies a favour. Those narratives just don’t fit the facts. Nothing here tells us that Ford is a populist or a stooge doing favours for big business. If anything, this better fits my meta-theory of Ford: he absolutely hates making any kind of decision that anyone will object to so he tries to avoid doing so as much as possible (and when he finally does, he often reverses himself because he can’t stand the blowback).
So, yeah. In this, I see more of what we’ve often seen from Ford: loud, bombastic pledges and rhetoric followed by timid, incremental action — and that only after bizarre delays, with an always high risk of total reversal.
What else sort of fits is that Ford knows that this will be popular, even after all the costs are paid, and that he could, frankly, use something else to talk about other thandeleted Greenbelt emails andearly election speculation. I can believe that, but, then again, this plan didn’t spring up overnight. It’s not the sort of thing you can announce for purely tactical reasons just to throw some chaff in the air in response to the embarrassing news story du jour. Whatever you may think of this plan, it didn’t happen overnight. Again, rather the opposite.
I’m glad it’s happening. I don’t drink much anymore, so I’m not sure I’ll ever really benefit from it; to the extent that I still buy beer, I tend to buy premium or craft stuff that I doubt I’ll find in my local Circle K. (All part of my Drink Less, Drink Better plan now that my body makes me pay the morning after for anything after the first drink.)
But I am glad we are finally modernizing something that has long been an irritant. It’ll be good for businesses, good for consumers, and, in the end, good for all of us. We won’t have to think about this anymore. It won’t be low-hanging fruit for a politician to fume about when they need to distract people. We’ll just have laws basically in line with the rest of the continent — and no excuse not to focus on real issues.
No real excuse, anyway. We’ll no doubt find something. But, in general, I support fixing the dumb things so we can focus on the important ones. And I support our paying to fix our dumb mistakes. So I’ll call this a win, of a kind. A dumb, ugly kind, but that seems to be the best we can ask for these days. Enjoy the beer.