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EDITORIAL: Ford’s boozy billion-dollar blunder (June 2024)

July 19th, 2024 · No Comments

Who is clamouring so much for beer and wine in corner stores and at every grocer that the province feels compelled to exit its deal with The Beer Store early? The financial penalty to leave the contract now is between $225 million and $1 billion depending on whose numbers you buy. The current arrangement with The Beer Store (TBS) is set to expire in 16 months, with no penalty from Ontario taxpayers. Could it be that Premier Doug Ford is planning an early election, wants to get this campaign promise fulfilled ahead of time, and doesn’t mind a bit wasting taxpayers’ dollars to check that box?

Ontario’s 10-year agreement with the conglomerates that own TBS expires in December 2025. The controlling owners are global beer giants Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch InBev. These are foreign companies. The president of the Retail Council of Canada, Diane Brisebois, called the move “a sweetheart deal for the big multinational beer companies” that actually compounds the business of selling beer and wine at grocers by seeking to offload recycling costs (of beer cans and wine bottles) onto grocery stores. Undoubtedly, consumers will end up paying the stores to manage the returns.  Among the changes now coming by Sept. 5, 2024 is TBS will no longer have the exclusive right to sell 12 and 24 packs of beer and consumers will have an additional 8,500 retail locations to purchase beer. The current arrangement caps the number of grocers selling beer and wine at 450, but that limit disappears with the new deal. 

For the announcement of this deal, Doug Ford selected a gas station which features a convenience store near his Etobicoke home. Apparently, filling up your car and buying some chips and a six-pack of Coors will now go hand in hand. The province is also allowing the sale of hard cider and mixed alcoholic drinks to be sold in convenience stores. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) warned that increasing the number of places to buy alcohol would “significantly increase” the 6,000 annual deaths in Ontario attributed to drinking. CAMH urges the province to permit municipalities to opt out of the plan as it did for legal weed stores.

The Ontario Liberal Party pegs the cost of Ford’s move at closer to $1 billion. This includes the $225 million the government acknowledges, a rebate of $375 million in fees The Beer Store currently pays to the LCBO, and $300 million in lost revenue from licensing fees from retailers which also appears to be scrapped. Additionally, those grocers and convenience stores that will be allowed to purchase product at the LCBO at a ten per cent discount will cost the provincially owned corporation $150 million annually.  The whole deal does appear to cost over $1 billion, and that is without considering the loss of revenue to the LCBO. The LCBO is Ontario’s cash cow, not unlike the provincially owned lotteries. Ford is at once raiding state coffers and crippling Ontario’s ability to govern in the future.  

Bonnie Crombie of the Ontario Liberals offers a long list of where the government could spend $1 billion more wisely: 10,000 more nurses or teachers, funding for school repairs, a 25 per cent rebate on development charges to make new homes more affordable, a $25 per hour minimum wage for PSWs, a 50 per cent rebate on new heat pumps, 7000 public electric vehicle (EV) chargers, etc.

As some will remember, Ford ordered the EV chargers removed from Ontario’s 400-series highway service centres when he first came to office. 

The nurse who is making their way home after seven 12-hour shifts does not lament that they can only buy a six-pack in the grocery aisle instead of a whole case; they just wish there were more nurses. But listening to that nurse, seeing the myriad of other problems, and seizing investment opportunities to solve them is not within Doug Ford’s DNA. He has evolved very little from his “buck-a-beer” platform and does not really care about governing; he only cares about power.

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