Juno News - July 13, 2024


Doug Ford stands firm on alcohol sales expansion


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

169.34767

Word count

1,523

Sentence count

87

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

OPSU is on strike, and the Ontario Liquor and grocery stores are refusing to sell alcohol during the strike. What does this mean for the economy and the province's finances? Is this a good or bad thing? And what should the government do about it?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The LCBO is not a necessary entity in this province. I actually have a photo of Ontarians 0.97
00:00:16.980 lining up outside an LCBO I wanted to share with you here. Oh, sorry. No, that's the Soviet bread 0.84
00:00:22.600 line. Never mind. Scratch that. I thought I had the LCBO photo there. They're very similar
00:00:26.680 sometimes. David Clement joins us. He is the North American Affairs Manager for the Consumer
00:00:31.780 Choice Center and I would say probably one of the LCBO's biggest critics just as it's a fundamental
00:00:36.860 structure here. David, good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming on today. Thank you very much
00:00:41.240 for having me. Let's start off with this $2.5 billion because what Opsu is trying to pretend
00:00:46.840 here is that it's providing this great service to the people of Ontario and we would just not
00:00:52.980 have a functioning society. We wouldn't have a functioning welfare state if it weren't
00:00:57.140 for the LCBO and that is just patently untrue. Yeah, it is untrue. Most people don't realize
00:01:05.620 apparently neither does the union that the dividend the LCBO pays is primarily as the wholesaler.
00:01:15.360 So all alcohol sold in the province, whether it's at a restaurant, whether it's at a grocery
00:01:21.080 store, whether it's at an actual winery that produces the wine, the LCBO tax on their markup.
00:01:29.800 And so if you're at a winery and most people don't know this and kind of the light bulb goes
00:01:34.800 off when I explain this. So if you're at a winery in Niagara, you buy a bottle of wine from that winery,
00:01:41.080 you may often wonder, well, why is the price not better than at the LCBO?
00:01:46.960 Yeah, it was made six feet from here, right? Yeah, it was made six feet from here. It never
00:01:51.040 went into an LCBO warehouse. Well, this doesn't make any sense. It's because the LCBO includes their
00:01:56.400 markup on all alcohol. That's where the revenue to the province comes from. It doesn't matter who sells
00:02:02.480 it. In fact, if alcohol sales were to remain the same during the strike, so Ontarians bought the same
00:02:11.280 amount of alcohol, the revenue to the province would go up, not down. It would go up because when you buy
00:02:19.520 from a grocery store, you're not paying to keep the lights on at the 680 plus retail stores that the
00:02:28.560 LCBO operates. And so the LCBO doesn't have to operate a single retail store in order to generate
00:02:35.680 money. And we already know that this is true because the government had the choice to do exactly
00:02:41.360 that for cannabis and they opted not to. Why? Because it's cheaper and more efficient not to,
00:02:46.880 and it's more responsible for taxpayers in the province as a result. And so we have OPSU behaving as
00:02:55.760 if those who want to get rid of the retail side of the LCBO are talking about some alternative reality
00:03:02.480 that doesn't exist. And they're forgetting that Ontario doesn't have a single storefront retail
00:03:08.880 for alcohol. The province doesn't physically sell a single tobacco product or vape, generate hundreds
00:03:15.520 of millions of dollars off of that. Alberta has exactly the model that I'm talking about in terms of
00:03:23.280 the province has a monopoly on wholesale, but allows for private retailers to sell the alcohol.
00:03:29.040 BC has a mixed model, which is probably what Ontario would look like in transition where you have
00:03:36.800 government stores as well as private retailers existing. And so the idea that we need OPSU to
00:03:42.720 generate the revenue for the province is just completely false. Well, and I'll also make the
00:03:47.040 point here that no one, I mean, you and I are proposing it, but no one in the Ontario government
00:03:50.640 is even proposing abandoning the LCBO retail right now. The issue is allowing convenience stores to sell
00:03:57.520 you know, some ready-made beverages here. Like it actually will not jeopardize the OPSU workers deal
00:04:03.680 at all, except in the sense that it makes consumers aware that, oh yeah, maybe I prefer this. Maybe I
00:04:08.880 prefer to go to this store that I'm already at buying a two liter bottle of Coke and also pick up my white
00:04:13.520 claws there. Yeah, exactly. It's about convenience. And it, it, it may sound trivial to a certain extent,
00:04:21.120 but it actually means quite a bit to be able to go grocery shopping and then pick up whatever,
00:04:28.000 whatever else you might need on the beverage side. Now I wish that the rollout in, in grocery
00:04:34.160 stores and convenience stores was even larger. It should have included spirits as well. It doesn't,
00:04:40.080 the LCBO under the new framework would maintain a monopoly on that. I don't think that they should have
00:04:45.680 that. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, they're holding drinkers in the province ransom now over
00:04:52.320 ready to drink cocktails. And I think most people just see how ridiculous and silly that is.
00:04:57.440 And the arguments are always, anytime there's been a labor dispute,
00:05:02.400 the arguments have always been ridiculous. Like I know in the past, OPSU was really making it seem
00:05:07.040 like they were the answer to drunk driving, that there would be drunk drivers
00:05:10.240 drivers on the streets in large numbers. If LCBO unionized employees were not the ones that got
00:05:16.000 to be the gatekeepers on alcohol purchases. And there's been no evidence to suggest that.
00:05:20.960 And as evidenced by the fact that a convenience store owners, uh, have tremendous penalties if they
00:05:26.640 are caught selling tobacco to minors and LCBO does not that the liquor, the liquor store is not losing
00:05:32.160 its liquor license. Correct. Yeah. The opposite is actually true. And I remember when they ran the campaigns,
00:05:37.840 when this, uh, corner store plan was first thought of when Doug Ford won, um, and there were these
00:05:44.240 really nasty ads that in my opinion touched on some very uncomfortable stereotypes about who runs
00:05:52.240 convenience stores that were really gross. Um, very mega ask in the stereotypical way of like really
00:06:00.880 going after ethnic communities who often operate these, these stores, um, on the, on the premise that
00:06:07.200 they weren't going to be responsible retailers and ID, but all of the secret shopper data actually
00:06:13.520 suggests the opposite is true because they have skin in the game. If they don't ID for age restricted
00:06:18.560 goods, they get fined. Um, if they get caught several times, they lose their ability to sell
00:06:24.480 age restricted goods completely. And that's, I mean, then your business model fails. So they have skin in
00:06:30.000 the game. If an LCBO employee fails to ID, I don't know there are any ramifications at all.
00:06:37.440 No. And I, I used to work for the LCBO and I wrote a column about this and, and, you know,
00:06:42.160 well, there were, you could kind of get a slap on the wrist if you got caught at the end of the day,
00:06:46.880 there was no penalty for it. And certainly the store itself had no penalty or liability for it. And
00:06:52.240 I wanted to ask you about where this is going to go because Ontario consumers are now getting this,
00:06:58.720 you know, propaganda from the union. And I love that they try to make billionaires out to be the
00:07:02.960 bad guys here and not like some small business that wants to open up a wine and liquor store, some
00:07:08.560 independent wine or liquor shop, some independent convenience store owner. Like that to me is also
00:07:13.520 an incredibly disingenuous part of this is that, you know, yeah, there are some corporate profits that
00:07:18.160 are going to do well if Loblaws can sell vodka and whiskey and whatever, but there are a whole bunch of
00:07:23.360 independent small businesses that could open up as well. If we were to have a freer alcohol retail
00:07:28.240 environment in this province. Yeah. It would democratize commerce while generating the same,
00:07:34.240 if not more revenue for the province who would be against that. That, that is, that is the most
00:07:39.840 baffling thing is like, well, why would we want to keep small bit predominantly small businesses out of
00:07:47.680 the game just so that Opsu can maintain its retail monopoly for its LCBO cashiers? That's a bad deal.
00:07:58.000 It's a bad deal for taxpayers and it's a bad deal for consumers because again, this really only matters
00:08:03.520 because they have that monopoly. If they didn't have that monopoly, they would go on strike and
00:08:09.040 the options for consumers, the alternatives for consumers would be endless rather than being very
00:08:15.680 limited. Now, the Ford government did release that map, which is certainly helpful, but it is
00:08:20.960 significantly limited in terms of where you can buy specifically spirits, but I would also say most
00:08:27.120 wines. You're not going to be able to buy most wines at the alternative stores because the LCBO still
00:08:35.280 has the monopoly on where those are sold. David Clement is the North American affairs manager over
00:08:41.760 at the consumer choice center. Great to talk to you, David. Thanks for coming on today. Appreciate it.
00:08:45.600 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at
00:08:51.120 www.tnc.news.
00:08:58.640 .