What comes after buck-a-beer?
President’s Choice is ending its buck-a-beer promotion on Sept. 3, just days after it started: We get one week, one long weekend and then out of the pool, party’s over, back to class. PC-branded beer will rocket back up to $1.38 a bottle when you buy 24 at The Beer Store or $1.65 when you buy 12, which highlights just how steep — and presumably unsustainable — the discount really was. We shall see how long the two other participating breweries’ offers last, but they made it quite clear, as did PC, that this was a limited-time offer prompted by Doug Ford’s most shamelessly blunt populist pledge.
My goodness, though, what a commotion it will leave in its wake. Some brewers quite understandably took the opportunity to note the impact of aluminum tariffs on their bottom lines, to complain that Ford’s government was playing favourites by giving away expensive product placement in LCBO stores for $1 beer, and to note the government is actually raising taxes on beer.
Others, however, waxed utterly scandalized. “How about buck a pound of steak? Who would eat that?” asked one Toronto brewer who had perhaps not entirely thought through his rhetorical question. “We haven’t even given two thoughts about this,” Great Lakes Brewery’s communications manager, Troy Burtch, told the Toronto Star. “Why would anyone do this?” Burtch and Great Lakes have signalled their total uninterest by tweeting incessantly about it.
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation went after some of the affronted craft brewers for accepting taxpayer subsidies for their higherend products. People on social media lined up for and against buck-a-beer, vowing to boycott the participants or those complaining about the program.
The whole thing was a dumb Ford Nation stunt, no question. But good grief. You can hardly blame the breweries, either for participating or for not: they were just trying to wring as much publicity as they could from the situation. No one is really any worse off, or at least not much. What we were really seeing among the chattering classes was a rerun-by-proxy of the June 6 election: to drink Ford’s swill was to vote Ford Nation; to boycott it was to stand bravely against their entire agenda.
In a year it will look ridiculous. But this is what Ford does, if you let him. This is a man who summarily chopped Toronto City Council in half, in the middle of an election campaign, and the people who oppose the move have since spent most of their time yelling at Mayor John Tory, who also opposes the move, who has no power to stop it, and whose displeasure is a key motivation for Ford’s actions.
This sort of seat-of-thepants, divide-and-conquer populism might not have legs, though. The Ontario Superior Court ruled this week that Ford’s government had arbitrarily and unfairly and above all clumsily targeted Tesla and its customers — who are very, very fancy, in Ford’s characterization — for special punishment in winding down subsidies for electric cars. As my colleague David Reevely argued in the Ottawa Citizen, it’s an example of the bad things that can happen when you try to turn “half-made-up bluster into real government policy”
And what if buck-a-beer has whetted Ontarians’ whistle for real change in liquor retail? Ford promised beer sales in corner and big-box stores, after all, and that’s not something he can snap his fingers and make happen. That’s nothing short of revolution. Ontario’s liquor retail knot is so huge and tangled that President’s Choice-branded supermarkets can’t sell President’s Choice-branded beer — not just because they only make 12 and 24 packs, which supermarkets are prohibited from selling, but because supermarkets aren’t allowed to sell any brand of beer in which they have a commercial interest.
That’s just one item among scores in the haunted encyclopedia of insanity that is the Master Framework Agreement between the province and The Beer Store, which caps the number of “new” beer retail outlets until 2025. The contract is as legally binding as it is horrifying; if you somehow turned it into a statue, it would be the perfect memorial for 13 years of Liberal governance.
All the better to topple it, of course. But while people might not like The Beer Store, I suspect it would be difficult to turn people against it en masse. It’s where Ontarians buy most of their beer, after all, and incumbency is a hell of an advantage even when it doesn’t come with a 24. There are far more important files at Queen’s Park that need the premier’s and his ministers’ intention, of course — but none comes with a more entrenched status quo. If Ford Nation can keep his beery promises past Labour Day, the sky might be the limit.