Premier Kathleen Wynne unveiled a pre-budget ‘goodie’ today with her Finance Minister, Charles Sousa.  In what is termed as a ‘good news announcement,’ the government is allowing for more sales of wine in grocery stores come this fall.  However, once you read all the rules, you begin to wonder what the heck is the point of it all.  Maybe Wynne and co. want us to swallow a few gulps this weekend before we hear about her budget next week, I don’t know!

An enterprising student just asked me why some of the larger grocery stores, and not all food and beverage retailers like corner stores, will get the chance to sell wine and beer?  Why all the rules? Why not expand it to all grocery stores?  There is only one answer: union jobs.

Much has been made of the fact that the LCBO gives a dividend to the public purse of over a billion dollars per year to fund the programs and services the government likes to fund.  However important that argument is, we all know that any government could recoup that money by imposing a new excise tax on booze to make up the difference.  So that’s never really an argument.  The only real argument is that privatizing the LCBO would mean that thousands of union jobs would vanish.

I encountered this proposition when I confronted an NDP colleague at Queen’s Park about possibly allowing liquor sales in convenience stores.  His response to me was very specific: if you can guarantee me that anybody selling booze in Ontario will be a unionized worker, then we can talk.  If you can’t guarantee me that, then I’m not interested.

Another bit of evidence is this: OPSEU, the union representing workers at the LCBO, have long opposed privatization of the LCBO. There is one exception to this rule, however.  The exception is that OPSEU can be the only buyer of the LCBO if it is indeed sold.  That’s right: in order to protect union jobs in the LCBO, OPSEU goes out and headlines a consortium of private equity firms – you know, those big, bad capitalists – to finance a buyout of the LCBO which is all done to protect its unionized jobs.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Now, only a small fraction of Ontario’s grocery stores get a crack at selling booze.  Most of these are some of the larger retailers in town.  And, what about the largest retailers who sell groceries makes them stand out over other retailers? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, their workers are typically unionized too!  The NDP must automatically agree here, and won’t complain.  They’ll be silent on this one.

Why aren’t booze being sold in corner stores? Not a lot of those jobs are unionized.  Many of those jobs are small business owners themselves working long hours to earn a living for their families.  Tough though, they can’t be unionized and won’t see any liquor in their stores.

In its place is a set of regulations that must be in place in order for sales to be adequately carried through by grocery stores which require the infrastructure to carry out their regulatory and legal obligations.  Notice that there aren’t any complaints about lost revenue at the LCBO.  Notice how we don’t talk about the social responsibility aspect of selling booze to minors anymore.  We champion ‘choice’ at the expense of these things now, except that we really don’t have any choice at all.  The government continues to tell us what we can buy and where, which is the precise limitation of freedom we should be moving away from in the 21st Century.

Let’s face it, we trust ma and pa restaurants to sell booze.  In rural Ontario, beer, wine and spirits are sold in grocery stores.  There is no reason why the rules that apply to some industries and geographies cannot apply everywhere in this province.

Grow up, Ontario: It’s 2016!