We can now buy beer, wine, and ready-to-drink cocktails from corner stores and gas stations. We have no idea yet what the effect has been on the PC party’s standing in the polls, but let me offer this prediction: any positive impact this has on Doug Ford’s standing in advance of his likely self-imposed spring 2025 election is going to be small — and fleeting.
To be clear, I expect that, in general, this move will be popular enough and that once the final pieces are in place — with big-box stores allowed to sell large-format volumes of beer later this fall — none of the opposition parties will seriously propose to reverse it. That’s the nature of these kinds of policies: corner-store beer has been proposed for literal decades, and no prior government was willing to bite the bullet and push through the thicket of objections. But, once it’s done, successor governments will be happy to accept the new normal — status quo bias is one of the most powerful forces in Canadian politics.
It's just far from clear that anyone who isn’t already a Tory supporter is going to move their vote on this matter — and there’s plenty of reason to think that even people who are Tory voters won’t be voting next year based on their intense love of getting White Claw at the local Esso. There’s no rule in politics that says voters are obligated to be grateful, even when they agree with your policies and have benefitted directly from them.
Probably the clearest recent example of this in Canadian politics was the effect of legalizing cannabis for the federal Liberals: undeniably part of Justin Trudeau’s 2015 election victory, the promise to do a sensible thing on drug policy played a role in that year’s surge in youth-voter turnout, which benefitted the Liberals.
The problem for Trudeau and his party is that you can legalize pot only once. And by 2019, those same young voters were asking, “Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?” at the same time as the party was beset by controversies like the SNC-Lavalin affair and Trudeau’s decision to abandon electoral reform. A substantial fraction of 2015’s Liberal voters disappeared, leaving Trudeau with a minority in the House of Commons — those voters have never returned, and the 2021 election didn’t change anything in terms of the seat makeup in Parliament. Worse still from the Liberal perspective is that young voters now support Conservatives by a substantial margin.
(In the midst of serious concerns about the public-health impacts of expanded beer and wine sales, it’s worth noting that many of the same authorities are absolutely sounding the alarm about the effects of widespread cannabis use. Chief Medical Officer of Health Kieran Moore’s annual report, released earlier this year, notes that cannabis use was responsible for 16,584 ER visits and 1,634 hospitalizations; some cannabis-related conditions have seen a 13-fold increase in monthly ER admissions since legalization. It can be true both that legalization was the right thing to do for any number of reasons and that we have more work to do.)
The pot analogy is imperfect for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that Trudeau and Ford are very different politicians. But if we’re asking “what will beer and wine in corner stores mean for a spring election,” my first instinct is to say: not very much at all. Ford has been premier for six years — likely seven, by the time we actually get to casting votes — and opinions of him are more or less baked in and will be resistant to major changes. People who were already going to vote for him may love him a little bit more, but we don’t weigh votes based on enthusiasm.
The good news for Ford is that “no major changes” in his current standing means he’ll get re-elected to another majority. Beer and wine availability isn’t going to be the specific cause of major changes in his popularity — it’s also not going to save him if, say, the RCMP announces formal charges for anyone in his orbit.
If beer and wine prove meaningful at all in the coming election, that’ll be because of the role they play in a larger story the Tories want to tell about their tenure. You can draw a line connecting beer and wine in corner stores to the government modestly increasing speed limits on 400-series highways, making licence-plate renewals automatic, and footing the bill for GO commuters getting free TTC fares and vice versa: these are all relatively small, marginal changes that prior governments have considered and either rejected or dragged their feet on for years because of implementation questions. (Presto was created to make fare harmonization happen between GTA transit agencies, but the Liberals never put money on the table to make it happen.) They make people’s interaction with the government slightly less annoying on a daily basis, and most voters aren’t overly concerned about the detailed objections of subject-matter experts.
This poses a problem for the opposition that I haven’t yet heard a terribly good solution for: Does anyone want to make the case that government should be more annoying every day?
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