Beer For The Asking

On Beer In Corner Stores

Doug Ford is bad.

Doug Ford prioritizing liberalizing beer policy in this province over literally any of our current crises is … I’d say weird, but it’s on brand for a Premier who likes the title more than he likes the job description. Doug Ford has been a disaster as Premier, and it’s arguable that his legacy is worse than that of Mike Harris, making him the worst Premier of my lifetime. Doug Ford is bad.

He’s also good at politics. It’s annoying, but he is very good at politics. There’s a reason he’s the new Teflon premier, and it’s mostly because he does two things – admits when he fucks something up, and does high-salience, popular and populist things to appeal to an Everyman persona. (He also has been airing TV ads on every hockey and basketball game for the last two months uncountered, which arguably won the Tories Milton.) And what I want more than anything is someone that can beat him.

I disagreed with Crombie’s electability case but in the period since she has won I have tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. I have written in defence of her decision to rule out a provincial carbon tax, commended her for her housing plan, and have tentatively decided I’m voting Liberal at the next election. I still don’t think she was the right choice; she’s the option available to us. Relitigating the leadership race is mostly useless.

The problem is that Crombie just went backwards in Milton, is down 13 in Abacus, and is generally failing to move the needle in any way. Do you think I want any of this to be true? No, but it is. I take no pleasure in my party losing, because spoiler alert, I want a hospital system that isn’t a fucking disaster more than I want Bonnie Crombie to lose. If Bonnie ends up as Premier, I will gladly eat every word I have ever said if Crombie wins and implements genuinely liberal and progressive ideas. I want nothing more than my initial lack of faith in Crombie to be a joke that is told for years and years in government offices at Queens Park, partially because that would mean my readership has increased but more because it would mean we won.

Those who insist on reading my commentary on Crombie through the lens of 2023 do so at your peril; more bluntly, you are imposing your assumption of a bias and telling me and everyone else that you can’t conceive that I could come to these criticisms in good faith. That narrowminded approach may make you happier, but Crombie and co. just underran Steven Del Duca in a key suburban marginal. There’s reasons to be terrified here, especially given that Doug Ford is going to call an early election because he senses weakness.

But that’s all secondary to the actual thing I want to write about today, which is beer policy. Bonnie Crombie decided to re-emerge into the public spotlight to highlight the government’s decision on selling beer and wine at corner stores, more grocery stores, and other retailers early. The details are in this CBC story, and the costings are unclear, but the government’s spending some money to break the (Liberal-signed) contract a year early. And my response yesterday, and it remains the same today, is that this is the issue Bonnie Crombie decided to go all in on?

…

The billion dollar pricetag for this that the Liberals are quoting is a crock of shit – it’s roughly a billion in total costs if you contort the baseline in such a way that the downsides are maximized and the upsides limited. The only way you get to the billion dollar number is by stacking projected future income lost through fee reductions while not accounting for potential behaviour changes, while using as the baseline every store having access in 2025 (which wouldn’t happen without the initial $225M breaking of the contract). I’m quite confident that the license fee reductions will cost money, and it’s likely, as the CBC article claims their reporting indicates, that the true cost will be closer to $1B than $225M. I doubt it crosses 10 figures, but I’m not going to pretend that the difference between $999M and $1B should matter.

The problem with all of this is 3 fold: the Beer Store is a price-gouging abomination that lines the pockets of Molson, Anheuser-Busch, and (less so, but still) Sapporo, the party’s language has been decidedly unclear on where it stands on the broader question of beer liberalization, and that this is one hell of an issue to come out swinging on. On the first point, the Beer Store is dogshit and needs to be destroyed. One of Kathleen Wynne’s worst decisions was not abolishing it entirely. It is a disgrace to this province and I am personally fine with the government firing it into the sun. I don’t love the cost of ripping up the contract but personally, I’m fine with busting the contract early at the cost. It is a disgrace, and undoing Kathleen Wynne’s monstrosity of a decision is worth it to me. I get that it’s not to many readers of mine. Save yourself, no amount of yelling at me will change my strongly held opinion that The Beer Store is satanic. (Note: I think the last time I had a beer was 2020? I’m that asshole who goes to a brewery and orders a mixed drink.)

The second part of this is that the Liberal messaging has been a disaster. From the party’s official email, under Crombie’s name: “Doug Ford is spending more than a billion dollars of your money to line the pockets of big brewers and grocery store billionaires — all at the expense of our public services. The major grocery chains — who are already making record profits — and big-box American stores are going to make a killing.” Any plain-text reading of this suggests that the party is opposed to making grocery store billionaires and big-box American stores richer through policy, which reads as opposing beer liberalization.

I’ve been reliably informed by someone in Crombie’s orbit that this isn’t about opposing beer liberalization once the contract’s up, but merely about opposing license fee reductions for new retailers. I take them at their word that that is what they meant, but it is a sign of how bad their comms were on this that they signaled they opposed liberalization in principle seemingly by accident. If they are pro-liberalization in principle, imminent public clarity on this point is a must.

But my main objection to all of this is much more simple: this is the crisis we face? It’s not the fact that our hospitals are overrun or the housing crisis or that we have elementary school kids spending their days in temporary classrooms because we haven’t built enough schools or the fact that we’re still nowhere on making it economical to take transit between Ottawa and Toronto or any of the other thousand crises we face. We have the post-secondary sector on the verge of collapse, we have a crisis of antisemitic hate manifesting against our people, and this is what Crombie leads with.

Readers of mine know that I like a drink or 12, but booze policy is not more important than these issues. Trying to Greenbelt-ify this is bad politics, but more importantly it’s beneath us. The best case to make against Doug Ford is that there a cost to his obsession on these kinds of issues. The case that will take down Doug Ford is that while he’s swanning around wasting time on beer policy or helping his developer donors or fighting Justin Trudeau, he’s not funding child care centres or more school construction or whatever issue you want to talk about.

That’s the frame that’ll defeat Ford because it frames his choices as distractions from the real issues, allows the Liberals to frame themselves as driving the narrative, and focuses the media, the province, and the progressive voter pool on issues where the Liberals have ideas. We all mock Poilievre for how his answer to every problem is to axe the tax, but it has now ingrained in a lot of people’s mind that the carbon tax is to blame for higher prices. That it’s not doesn’t matter.

What the Liberals need to do is stop bouncing from issue to issue in a desperate ploy to play scandal whack a mole, but let the Premier do the bouncing. It’s obvious Ford is trying to deliver beer in corner stores before an early election because he knows there’s no housing or health care or transit solutions coming down the pike before Canada Day 2025. That he thinks this will move meaningful numbers of votes is asinine, but the solution isn’t to also prioritize booze politics. It’s on the Liberals to show they can be trusted to form an alternative government that can fix our present discontents, and that means focusing on what Ontarians care about.

Scandal of the day doesn’t kill Ford, just as it didn’t McGuinty. Showing the electorate you’re trusted to govern, and that your eye is firmly on the ball? That will. A beer boondoggle won’t take out Ford, and we have to lead, not follow, if we want back in government.