The End of The Beer Store’s Monopoly

 

“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”

~Revelation 18:2

The days of The Beer Store’s monopoly are over, and I fear we are the poorer for it.

For months now, we’ve known something big was coming from our Dear Premier, Douglas Clortho Ford. There had been rumblings that an announcement about the province’s retail beer system was forthcoming and my sources at Queen’s Park were increasingly troubled by Dofo’s anxious, aggressive behaviour. They tell me he’d been eating an inordinate amount of mint-flavoured toothpicks from his favourite Etobicoke diner and aides were calling out sick in droves, fearful of his restless energy. “He has been pacing for hours,” one told me a few weeks ago under the strict condition of confidentiality. “He’s worn through two pairs of double-wide loafers and he’s sweat through half a dozen ill-fitting wool blazers.”

Indeed, he was excited. And now we know why.

Because two weeks days ago, steeped in Dep gel and bounding through the automatic doors of a convenience store like the demon dog from Ghostbusters bursting out of Louis Tully’s bedroom, Ford announced that the province wouldn’t be renewing the Master Framework Agreement, which currently limits the number of grocery stores that are allowed to sell beer and prevents anyone but The Beer Store from selling beer in formats bigger than a 12 pack.

Yes, the days of The Beer Store’s monopoly are over, but I fear we are the poorer for it.

Obviously, killing The Beer Store’s stranglehold on the exclusive ability to sell Ontarians packaged beer is a good thing. The Beer Store, conceived of as a cooperative of Ontario’s breweries, became a farce once the biggest breweries on earth commenced their ruthless strategy of buying up or pushing out as many independent breweries as possible in the name of bland, yellow, carbonated capitalism. Now the erstwhile co-op is owned by three of the earth’s biggest beer-marketing machines and has lumbered on as the dusty, conveyor-belt-and-malt-fart-scented offspring of the shittiest parts of Canada’s beer industry; a biproduct of unchecked greed kept alive by stupidity and laziness.

Its death should have always been a foregone conclusion (why the fuck can’t we just buy beer somewhere else?), and yet the money-Hoovering owners of AB InBev, Molson-Coors, and Sapporo always found ways to allow just enough lager-soaked cash to splash out of their trough and into the campaign coffers of the people who might have the power to enact change. For decades, even in the face of increased public pressure, all that politicians from both sides of the aisle have ever been able to muster in response to our IPA-fueled rage at the absurdity of the situation is a resounding “Meh.” And once, memorably back in 2014, “Let them have grocery stores.“

Enter the meaner, hashish-slinging older brother of Canada’s favourite mayor.

“Big deal. Who cares if you aren’t rowdy?”

Ever since Doug Ford careened into queen’s park he’s had a perverse interest in beer (not to be mistaken with his perverse connection to bees).

In 2018, presumably pandering to those among us who are nostalgic for being broke but still needing shitty lager in bulk, Ford leveraged Laker Lager’s 2008 “buck-a-beer” sloganeering for his own campaign and pledged to lower the minimum price of beer.

99.9% of the province’s breweries responded to the groundbreaking policy that allowed them to sell things at a massive loss with a resounding, “Um, no thanks.“

In 2019, he attempted to cancel the MFA with The Beer Store and in a cringeworthy PR play directed PC MPPs to “go out to a neighbourhood convenience store to showcase it as a potential future location for Ontarians to buy beer and wine.”  Of course, Premier Dofo quickly realized it would cost the province millions of dollars to prematurely end the contract and this campaign promise also fizzled. 

In 2020, with so few matters of public health and safety to focus on, Dougie again set his sites on beer and he relaxed liquor laws during the pandemic to allow bars and restaurants to sell alcohol for takeout (inarguably a great thing, incidentally). He also came out swinging in favour of drinking in parks (with the notable exception of “yahoos”) and in response to fines for public drinking offered the sage advice: “Big deal. Who cares if you aren’t rowdy?” (Yes, he really said these things). 

But of course, Doug Ford has no interest in beer himself.

He’s a self-described teetotaler whose brother had some rather famous issues with substance abuse so rather than any personal interest in making access to beer easier, it seems clear his desire to make beer a political issue every once in a while is related more to his tendencies toward blunt populist pandering: “Waterslides, folks! What’s the deal with licence plate stickers? Have you tried these real egg sandwiches from Timmies?”  

The move against The Beer Store makes even more sense when you consider Doug Ford’s tumultuous relationship with unions (warning: overly-detailed recap on labour relations incoming). When he picked a fight with Ontario education workers and their union, CUPE and its Ontario Council of School Board Unions (OCSBU) and passed Bill 28, removing the legal right to strike, Ford ostensibly threatened to unleash a  “nuclear option” with the infamous notwithstanding clause, and inadvertently aligned a lot of Canada’s unions against him. His government repealed the Bill in the pursuant shit storm, but before the dust settled, Ford had drawn the ire of:

• UFCW Canada Local 1006A
• The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Construction Council of Ontario (IBEW CCO);
• International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT);
• The United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry (UA);
• The Ontario Pipe Trades Council; and
• The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.
• CUPE,
• OPSEU, and
• Unifor.

Suffice it to say, he has at best, a strained relationship with unions. Indeed if there’s one thing that irks Doug Ford more than undeveloped wetlands and the persistent existence of libraries, it’s unions having the audacity to fight for their workers.

And so in dissolving the Master Framework Agreement, Ford gets to not only look like a populist beer-swilling every man and appear to be helping small breweries, he also gets to make a serious body blow to United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Canada Local 12R24, The Beer Store union comprising 6000 members from Thunder Bay to Windsor.

And they’re not too happy about it.

Responding at Ford’s presser, John Nock, the president of UFCW Local 12R24 was quoted as saying, “Premier Ford’s decision to prioritize altering the alcohol retail system in Ontario could be disastrous for our members.” Ford’s private security moved on him fast, but he continued to jabber as they carted him away toward a panel van. “The price of beer may go up, festering boils will break out on men and animals throughout the land, and the Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs.”

It was a depraved and scary scene.

Of course, none of this shit will really happen (except for maybe the frogs. That actually happened to a friend of mine in Egypt). This is silly fear mongering from a union that has thousands of members with high-paying jobs and who pay dues to people like Nock to protect those jobs with their hyperbolic gibberish. Nock doesn’t really fear higher beer prices, he is leery of the army of sons and daughters of Mac’s Milk Owners who will now be tasked with the impossibly-difficult job of selling cigarettes, lotto tickets, caramel-filled Drumsticks AND (egad!) cans of beer. Of course Nock’s fears about job losses aren’t unfounded. About the only thing that is certain about these changes is that were will be less and less need for Beer Stores now that Doug Ford has invited a plethora of large entities with non-unionized employees to get in on the action. Indeed, Dougie even took the beer-sales-cash-cow show on the road in 2020 during an “official trade missions to the U.S.” when he saw fit to pop down to Texas for 24 hours to meet a top executive of 7-Eleven, a company that was magically granted a liquor sales license from the AGCO in December of 2022 and which will now stand to profit considerably with the addition of more stores.

So of course he’s not really shunning big business and helping improve access for consumers and our province’s craft brewers so much as fucking over a very large
union while trying to make a little more room at the trough for some new piggies.
And these ones brought poorly-paid employees and Slurpees!

A place of honour among the vape refills, Cheetos, and crack pipes

And maybe this is ultimately why the end of the Master Framework Agreement just feels kind of…icky. This doesn’t feel like the fairy tale ending we all wanted for The Beer Store. That vision, for most, includes local breweries, who have risen up from the detritus of spent grain, overdue bank notices, and ignored sexual harassment claims to form some sort of new collaborative that actually does things and as Item One of their agenda have opted to drive a bulldozer through that wall of little labels at the local Beer Store outlet. That’s decidedly not with this ending is.

Indeed, it’s a sort of uncomfortable twist of fate that the death blow to the entity formally known as Brewers Retail Inc will be delivered under the glassy-eyed, meat-sweating gaze of Doug Ford. This is an industry whose most vocal members and consumers seem to lean left (recall the outrage when peope are occasionally reminded that – dear god – brewery owners sometimes speak with their conservative representatives in parliament!) and they’re also fighting a pretty public battle to get this same government to lower the outrageous taxes they pay for the right to make beer. So it’s odd, to say the least, that they all have to line up to hail Doug Ford as their lord and saviour when thus far he seems to have turned a deaf ear to the issues that are actually hurting craft breweries — and he’s ignored their requests to open their own stores in favour of an announcement offering them a place among the vape refills, Cheetos, and crack pipes at your local gas station or corner store. It’s a bit like thanking your captor for ordering pizza. “Sure, I’m chained to a radiator in my underwear, but he did get me me the stuffed crust.”

There’s also the very real idea that The Beer Store was always a pretty handy villain. The theologian James Alison once noted, “Give people a common enemy, and you will give them a common identity. Deprive them of an enemy and you will deprive them of the crutch by which they know who they are.” I don’t know if Alison ever tried to balance a 12 pack of Max Ice on the handlebars of his ten speed, but his point applies to The Beer Store. The largely faceless monopolistic entity has long served as a handy shorthand for what Ontario’s craft beer industry is not, and thus helped small brewers agree on what they are all about: People over profits, a fair shake for the little guy, a modernized and logical approach to retail alcohol. From the community-minded in Vankleek Hill, to the sustainability-focused in Toronto and the anti-vax in Waterloo and the assault-apologists in Guelph – every brewery owner could at least agree to hate The Beer Store together. With the dissolution of the Master Framework Agreement, one wonders if the dwindling influence of The Beer Store in this province might also see Ontario’s craft brewers struggling with an identity crisis in the new, uncertain future of virtually-unlimited retail beer outlets. I picture the Rebel Alliance, having parked their X-Wings back at base after destroying the Death Star, the celebration dying down, looking at each other and wondering, “What the fuck do we do now?”

If nothing else, it was great for clicks.

On something of a personal note, public outrage about the The Beer Store’s monopoly fueled what I’d consider some of the most fun and engaging media coverage for Ontario’s craft beer scene. Just as it brought brewery owners and workers together, so too did loathing The Beer Store bring a weird little group of folks who might call themselves “beer writers” together. Prone to various idiosyncrasies and varying opinions on the industry, a handful of us keyboard warriors could at least always come together and find common ground in our opposition to our shared boogieman: the monopolistic fuckery of the province’s only privately run beer retailer. Many column inches (and…pixels?) were devoted to navel gazing about The Beer Store, the idea of privatizing liquor sales, Kathleen Wynne’s government, and more. There was even a weird time when the Beer Store seemed to be feeling the pressure of collective public sentiment that agreed their time was up and they either found or paid for people to champion them online and we sweaty-palmed, basement-dwelling wordsmiths sparred with them gamefully in the comments section of long-forgotten publications like Torontoist, The Grid, and The Toronto Star.  And so, it’s a little bit inside-baseball, but I’ll miss that; a fleeting memory of a time when farting out an opinion about where a person can buy beer felt close to something like cultural relevance.  If nothing else, it was great for clicks.

In many ways The Beer Store actually got me really into beer writing. Once the first cracks in their monopoly started to appear when the Wynne government loosened up regulations, the writing was ostensibly on the wall for the big anachronistic retail chain, and I admit, I lost the appetite for it a bit. There’s a rumour that someone, talking to a depressed Hunter S. Thompson, reminded him that Nixon was still alive and that Thompson would one day get to write his obituary. Supposedly this cheered him up.

So I guess this is just that: An obituary of The Beer Store’s monopoly that spurred me to fire up this neglected blog, though it’s nowhere near as satisfying to write as I’m sure Thompson’s final thoughts on Nixon must have been (and obviously, much less satisfying to read).

Somewhere in a rural Ontario town, a Labatt button man is measuring up the local gas station

And yet, it’s probably worth noting that The Beer Store isn’t actually going anywhere. Unlike the 37th US president, whose scandal-plagued body was laid to rest at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, The Beer Store will in fact live on — albeit in some lesser form.

Much like when the Rebel Alliance destroyed the first Death Star and the embattled Empire started building it again, the Galactic Macro Empire will rebuild. It’s virtually inevitable that The Beer Store’s current 420-store footprint will not survive having so much new competition — they will sell off huge numbers of their stores and they will layoff thousands of UFCW Local 12R24 workers — but as the unholy offspring of three of the earth’s biggest beverage/sales and marketing entities, there will almost certainly be some version of The Beer Store after 2025 that drives profits for its owner companies. They still recycle all of Ontario’s empties and thus retain a major bargaining chip and they still distribute beer to something like 10,000 licensees, so it’s crazy to think they’ll simply give up on their customer-facing retail operations. It will go into a sort of remission, but it will resurface, much like a cold sore from that regrettable grade eleven after-hours tryst in a public pool.

So too might be there be hope for Ontario brewers facing an identify crisis with no one villainous entity to unite them. If history has taught us anything about the sale of beer, it’s that any space that can be leveraged and monopolized with cash — be it the taps at your local, the vendors at your favourite team’s arenas, or a super market end cap — the world’s largest brewing companies will find a way to use their vast sums of money to influence that retail space. It’s not all that hard to imagine the proud “7-11 Bud Light Proud Partnership” announcements that are coming, the local Giant Tiger bedecked in dazzling new neon signs proclaiming the availability of fresh, cold Belgian Moon. Indeed, somewhere in a rural Ontario town, a Labatt button man is measuring up the local gas station, creating specs for branded fridges to add them to the 2025 budget and beef up their sales reps’ new arsenal of swag. Ontario brewers are actually moving to a brand new battle, one that will be waged on many new fronts, and so they ought to do their best to get aligned quickly.

Who knows, with the plethora of fuckery that is sure to abound as 8,500 new beer retailers enter the fray, it might even hasten the arrival of a new wave of keyboard warriors and podcasters. This could be a new golden era for beer media, too. Some of the old guard might even be compelled to dust off their various blogs and commit to writing with some regularity once again.