Beer and chips, sold side by side? Oh, the humanity!
Kathleen Wynne sees a massive conceptual difference between the idea of selling beer and wine in supermarkets and the idea of selling beer and wine in convenience stores. So massive and self-evident is this difference, indeed, that she doesn’t feel it necessary to explain its nature. “Doug Ford is trying to distract voters with a reckless pledge to put beer in corner stores,” the Premier of Ontario tweeted Tuesday. “It’s not safe and it’s not sensible, unlike our balanced approach to adding beer and wine to grocery stores.”
Convenience stores: reckless. Supermarkets: balanced, safe and sensible. QED.
The Liberal government has achieved “a balance between safety and convenience,” Wynne told reporters in a Tuesday press conference, where she was unsubtly flanked by various representatives from Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Why couldn’t that balance be achieved with corner stores? No answer.
“What we know is that it’ll create greater access to youth to alcohol,” MADD CEO Andrew Murie said. “They’ll be more likely to serve intoxicated people with alcohol, and it will increase incidents of impaired driving.”
Even with hyper-rigorous enforcement and draconian penalties? That seems counterintuitive, no?
“You could have a situation where you’d have marijuana and beer and wine beside the candy bars,” said the premier (referring to Ford’s musings about a freer market in cannabis, which he has since repudiated). “That’s the image that I think we have to reconcile. Is that really what we are looking for?”
Beer and candy bars! Living together! There are absurdities piled on absurdities here, but perhaps the biggest is this: Minus cannabis, Wynne is literally threatening Ontarians with the status quo. There are hundreds of convenience stores, corner stores, general stores and other kinds of retail operations in rural areas of Ontario that are licensed to sell beer, wine and liquor. The most general of these stores also sell cigarettes, fireworks, bait and tackle, firewood, various jerkies and, yes, against all reason and sanity, candy bars and potato chips.
I am not making this up. The province even provides a convenient online map of these so-called “agency stores.”
I’ve been banging on about this in columns for years, but Twitter seemed to take uncommon notice of the situation on Tuesday and unleashed a hurricane of mockery. Folks posted photos from Wynne’s various press conferences announcing beer and wine in supermarkets that clearly show candy, chips and other snackables for sale alongside. How could she not have noticed?
Ah, but they were supermarket’s roofs, not convenience stores’ roofs. And therein lies all the difference, apparently. For some reason.
There are, of course, studies that show children aren’t being carded enough at certain stores in certain jurisdictions. But to ascribe those results to the retail model itself — convenience store, supermarket, private liquor store, public liquor store — is absurd. Some business owners and employees are honest and diligent, and some are skeevy and lazy. Enforcement and penalties are either rigorous and strict, or they aren’t. If any government were capable of designing a thorough inspection regime and mandating crippling penalties for offending businesses, it would surely be a Conservative one in rod-up-its-butt Ontario.
Either that or rural Ontarian children are being put at unconscionable risk — and all Ontarian children, with respect to tobacco sales. It can’t be both.
Over the years, I have often been asked why anyone should care about this. I would respond: If this is the unholy mess they’ve made of something as simple as retailing beer and wine, how do you imagine they’re doing making the healthcare sausage? I would point to the naked self-interest: It’s at least questionable whether The Beer Store would still exist in its current form if it weren’t for its foreign megabrewer owners’ fearsome lobbyists and the huge donations they used to make to political parties. Do you imagine that kind of malign influence was confined to this sector?
It wasn’t all just selfinterest, of course. Some of this madness is genetic, either to the party or to this most Presbyterian of provinces. On Wednesday, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said she would halt the rollout of beer in grocery stores where it is, at 350 locations, pending further study. That makes political sense: donations or not, an NDP government wants to be in the unions’ good books. They opposed the supermarket rollout to begin with.
But she offered some rather inscrutable reasoning: “I’m not happy that my cheese department now sells beer in my local grocery store,” she said, “not because I don’t like beer, but because I like cheese better.”
Some of us dare to dream of a province where beer and cheese needn’t battle for territory; a province where retailers offer as much beer and cheese and other stuff as they want — not just in rural areas but urban ones, too — and no one would have to suffer. Some of us, that is, see very little conceptual difference at all between beer in supermarkets and beer in convenience stores. We hope the Liberals’ flailing Temperance League act on Tuesday might have convinced a few more.