00:01:00.000welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:19.680north this is canada's most irreverent talk show the andrew lawton show on true north uh doing
00:01:32.200things at a bit of a different time today it's been a wacky week for reasons i have discussed
00:01:36.500with the big book launch but uh let me just do the shameless plug right out of the gate today
00:01:41.520pierre polyev the story that i wrote the biography that i wrote of the conservative
00:01:46.380leader and prospective prime minister is released. So you can pick up your copy of Pierre Polyeva
00:01:51.940Political Life on Amazon from your local bookstore. And oh, there you go there. Thanks, Sean. Always
00:01:56.700good to get the full there. Anytime you spend not looking at me, I think the show probably improves.
00:02:01.700But that is officially out today. And I've been doing lots of interviews, including on CBC. Talk
00:02:06.300about going into the belly of the beast. But I had a great interview yesterday on power and politics.
00:02:11.340We're going to talk about all the controversial stuff on the show today. We'll talk about Canada's
00:02:15.160military spending, going to talk about recognition of a Palestinian state. But let's start with
00:02:20.800something that can unite us all, beer. Now, my friend Grant Dingwall has been in the trenches
00:02:26.580on this fight for many, many years now. He founded some years back a campaign called
00:02:30.960Free My Booze, which, as the name suggests, is the noble calling. It's not a call for free booze,
00:02:36.900but it's a call for liberated booze, letting alcohol be sold in convenience stores, beer and
00:02:42.500wine. And in the Ontario context, the beer store has this massive, massive oligopolis effect
00:02:48.800that has disadvantaged consumers in more ways. Well, my friend Grant is finally getting what
00:02:55.040he wants. Premier Doug Ford has expedited the long plan rollout of beer and wine to convenience
00:03:01.620stores. So I figured we'd have Grant on to talk about this. Good to talk to you, sir. Thanks for
00:03:05.580coming on today thanks so much for having me on so let's let's explain for non-ontarians first off
00:03:12.380what the heck is the beer store and why has it had such an outsized influence in the retail market
00:03:18.620yeah so basically in uh 1927 ontario ditches prohibition the government says we don't know
00:03:27.340what to do with beer we you know what do we do with this new market and they called on uh the
00:03:33.140brewers in Ontario at the time to start a store. And they said, you guys can sell beer, we'll sell
00:03:37.340liquor, that's how we'll deal with it. And as time went on, those brewers didn't let new brewers in,
00:03:44.040they kept ownership themselves. And those brewers were more and more successful, they brought,
00:03:50.380you know, they sort of gained their stranglehold stronger and stronger. Eventually, they all got
00:03:57.240sold to foreign multinational interests. And then, you know, here we were in the 2000s with
00:04:04.400a store that was owned by three multinational breweries, and it had the unique privileges to
00:04:11.700sell beer to consumers in Ontario, even privileges over the LCBO. So they were allowed to sell six
00:04:20.140packs and 24 packs, but the government-run liquor stores weren't allowed to sell those because the
00:04:25.620beer store had unique privileges. Whenever the topic of the LCBO and the beer store have come up,
00:04:32.480what's always astonished me is that the arguments in favor of them are just so terrible and they're
00:04:38.460so fictitious. The LCBO believes that if you let anyone else sell alcohol, babies are going to be
00:04:45.000walking around with bottles of whiskey and people are going to be getting into car accidents and
00:04:48.920drunk driving is going to go through the roof. To use Pierre Polyev's language of the gatekeepers,
00:04:54.180These are people that believe that they must be the gatekeepers of alcohol, otherwise all hell will break loose. And I've yet to hear a legitimate defense of these things.
00:05:04.360I mean, there isn't one, right? You know, this is how beer is sold everywhere in the world outside a handful of US states and a handful of Canadian provinces. So I guess to finish the history lesson, because I think it's instructive in that respect, in 2012 to 2015, sort of in that period, it came out that the Ontario government had signed this hidden deal with the beer store.
00:05:32.560and the details that deal got out and pressure got put on the ontario government to do something
00:05:39.060so what they did was they signed a 10-year deal with the beer store in 2015 that dictated the
00:05:46.720terms publicly so basically they brought it out of the shadows they said the hidden deal is no more
00:05:51.420here's a new deal that we're signing for 10 years and as part of that deal we got beer and wine in
00:05:57.500300 grocery stores in ontario no convenience stores those were still taboo uh but we got it
00:06:04.680in 300 grocery stores and later 450 um but that sort of killed the moral argument right like
00:06:11.720if these 300 grocery stores are acceptable by the moral police uh then why not the other 3 000
00:06:23.020grocery stores that existed in Ontario, right? Why are these 10% good and the other 3,000 bad?
00:06:29.660And they never had an answer to that. And that was sort of, that's what put the writing on the
00:06:34.260wall, right? That we were eventually going to be successful because the status quo was so
00:06:39.880nonsensical at that point. They'd given up their moral arguments. So now what?
00:06:44.620I haven't looked at the comments on YouTube, which generally speaking,
00:06:48.560carries some risks if you do. But when I've talked about this issue in the past,
00:06:52.140it's not uncommon to get some variation of, oh, sure, there are bigger issues to talk about.
00:06:56.720Why are you wasting time on this? And I've never liked that because you can walk and shoot gum as
00:07:01.380a government and as a media enterprise. I mean, you have to be able to talk about war in the
00:07:05.660Middle East and you have to be able to talk about the little things that affect people. But why does
00:07:09.420this matter? So for me, it just mattered because it was so, so profoundly stupid, right? Like I was
00:07:16.24025 and i was bored when i launched free my booze uh but it was for me it was a sign of government
00:07:23.040overreach and government stupidity that was just so in our face every day you know uh before we
00:07:30.900launched free my booze before the the reform started rolling out uh you were unable to buy
00:07:37.660beer at 6 p.m on a sunday anywhere in the province there wasn't a single place in this province where
00:07:43.220could go and buy a beer at 6.01 pm to take home uh and you know in the middle of summer it's broad
00:07:50.420daylight you know it's like but but we had all these holdovers from the past uh and they were
00:07:56.900just uh they were just like annoying for no reason there was no justification we were needlessly
00:08:03.060inconveniencing consumers needlessly inconveniencing uh businesses you know holding back economic
00:08:09.620growth for what, right? So it was just a sign of how stupid things were. And it was something that
00:08:18.200I thought we could win if I put my effort into it. So now I know that the criticism coming from
00:08:24.780these newfound fiscal hawks in the NDP and the liberals in Ontario are that, you know, this is
00:08:30.240going to cost $225 million to do what Doug Ford is doing here. What's your make on that? Because
00:08:35.580they've basically expedited it and there is a cost to that yeah so look i mean ford is doing
00:08:40.940kind of what i want but not how i want it right uh and that's been that's been true every step
00:08:46.100of the way on this uh unfortunately i don't get to write all government policy i wish i did
00:08:50.420i'm sure you you can share that that uh misery um but look from my opinion i i think when ford
00:08:56.980came in he should have just signed legislation that killed the deal uh there was people that
00:09:00.980didn't want to do that because they said it's a bad sign to business uh you know for the government
00:09:05.120to renege on its deals. I was of the opinion that deals that are signed in bad faith that have
00:09:11.460no benefit to anyone in the province don't have a reason to exist. But they didn't do it. They
00:09:16.500decided to negotiate with the beer store. They decided they wanted to work within the legislation,
00:09:21.220work within the law rather than change the law. So that meant we had to wait until 2026 originally.
00:09:28.900And now they've gone back and negotiated further and said, we're going to move this ahead.
00:09:33.060um but unfortunately you know negotiating with a multi-billion dollar conglomerate
00:09:40.160uh has a price uh and that price is going to be apparently 225 million dollars
00:09:45.840uh the ndp and liberals are sort of claiming that there's additional costs they're like oh well
00:09:51.900the wholesale discount is another giveaway to these corporations um and i think most of that
00:09:58.520is nonsense i mean wholesale pricing exists in every industry of course it's going to exist in
00:10:03.260alcohol um so they keep trying to throw this billion dollar figure around and i've looked
00:10:08.420at those numbers and i don't think they hold up uh but yeah there is the cost of 225 million
00:10:13.740and that's because kathleen wynn the liberal premier signed a 10-year deal uh to excuse the
00:10:20.820language to screw us uh for 10 years and ford wants to get out of it early um that's where
00:10:27.960we're at. Yeah. And I think it needs to be pushed back at them. So yeah, well, this only happens
00:10:33.160because of your party and what your party did. So this idea that all of a sudden the Ontario
00:10:37.440Liberal Party cares about government spending is delightfully quaint for anyone who was around
00:10:41.920during the Dalton McGinty, Kathleen Wynne era. Well, I know you've been plugging away at this
00:10:46.540for a while. So congratulations on the Wynne grant. I appreciate your time today.
00:10:50.440Thanks so much for having me on. All right. Yeah. The little things matter. I mean,
00:10:53.900if we can't unite on being able to buy beer. So I actually, confession to you all, when I was in
00:10:58.980university, I took a job at the LCBO, which is the state-owned liquor store. Now, I hated it then.
00:11:04.760I was against it then. But when you're 19 and someone is paying you like $25 an hour to be a
00:11:10.400cashier, the principles start to waffle a little bit. So I'm like, well, I can take it down from
00:11:16.920within. I didn't take it down from within. I just cashed my paycheck and that was that.
00:11:20.300But the point was, is that it was always just an inherently ridiculous enterprise.
00:11:24.940So I'm glad that the monopoly is slowly but surely getting chipped away.
00:11:28.660Well, I said we talk about the big and the small here.
00:11:30.580Let's go to one of the bigger ones, because Canada's back.