Ontario’s liquor store strike appears to be over, or at least staggering toward the finish line, pending ratification of a new contract by employees and some last-minute complaints from the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU). While details are as yet scant, the government better bloody well have gotten a good deal for taxpayers and booze-shoppers. Ontarians could easily have ridden out this “dry summer,” as OPSEU laughably branded their strike, indefinitely.
A week into the strike, a scant 15 per cent of Ontarians told Leger marketing that shuttered LCBO outlets had “affected (them) personally.” Only 29 per cent said they felt the government should legislate or arbitrate LCBO workers back into stores as soon as possible. Eleven per cent said they didn’t even know the strike was happening. And 32 per cent said they had explored “alternative locations” to buy booze, of which there are nowadays myriad.
Many more explored those opportunities in week two of the strike, I suspect, as fridges and wine racks were depleted. That’s potentially bad news for the LCBO’s future retail market share. But you didn’t even need an alternative to the LCBO: With a few days’ planning you could get all your regular brands delivered for free. Delivery and wholesale options were running as normal. Restaurants and supermarkets supplied by the LCBO were still supplied, and though there were reports of empty shelves at some supermarkets, that wasn’t truer than normal at the one I visit.
The worst tale of supply-chain woe I heard at my local establishments was that one had run out of Jameson whiskey and had been unable to stock up. That actually is quite a big deal at the pub in question, but the regulars seemed mollified, temporarily at least, by the many other whiskies.
So this all looks like a terrible miscalculation by union leadership on behalf of its members — both a fundamental misreading of who had leverage, and a bizarre tactical choice to make the strike first and foremost about expanding the sale of ready-to-drink cocktails and seltzers (RTDs) to supermarkets and convenience stores.
Not wages; not benefits; not the number of full-time positions — things people can at least relate to — but where you can and cannot buy a White Claw or a Caesar in a can. Did they really think people would care?
Near as I can tell, it was an attempt to make this about the LCBO’s retail future: RTDs are a big and growing slice of the alcohol market in Ontario, only accessible (before the strike) at the LCBO. OPSEU wanted us to believe that by allowing supermarkets to sell them, Ontario would make no profit on them. And that’s their baked-in advantage: An incredible number of Ontarians, including far too many journalists, cannot wrap their minds around the notion of the government taking its cut at wholesale rather than retail.
Still, this gambit clearly fell flat.
There were other union miscalculations along the way. Helpfully, the government put together a map of the hundreds of places you could buy alcoholic beverages while (and after!) the LCBO was on strike: Beer Store locations, supermarkets, Wine Shop and Wine Rack locations, rural agency stores, breweries, distilleries, cideries, wineries, the list goes on. And the union wanted us to be angry about that.
“If Ford really cared about an Ontario that’s ‘for the people’ he would have worked on a family doctor finder rather than a booze finder,” Colleen MacLeod, chair of OPSEU’s LCBO division, said in a statement — perhaps hoping outright non sequiturs would carry the day where bad arguments hitherto had not.
Baked into the union’s argument was the notion that creating an online map with things on it was some kind of very expensive, laborious high-tech task. It isn’t. It’s copying-and-pasting a few hundred addresses into a platform called Mapbox, and hey, presto, it makes you a map. It even uses open-source maps.
“LCBO workers fully support the mom-and-pop stores and craft brewers, wineries and distilleries and we also encourage folks to go to them,” MacLeod continued, hilariously. OPSEU absolutely does not support the mom-and-pop stores who want to sell beer and wine, as they’ll be able to under new rules that take effect in the fall.
But OPSEU’s opposition is for their own good, we are to understand. “Mom-and-pop stores … will be worse off in Doug Ford’s Ontario — his business model is going to crush them, not help them,” MacLeod warned.
OPSEU knows how to run mom and pop’s store better than mom and pop do. Sure.
The miscalculation is, I think, understandable. Premier Doug Ford lives in his opponents’ heads like few politicians I’ve ever encountered — more than Kathleen Wynne, more than Stephen Harper, maybe even more than Justin Trudeau. They are utterly convinced of his fundamentally evil nature and dastardly designs first for the LCBO, then for the entire rest of the public sector. That describes every public-sector union leader in the province.
But the majority of Ontarians, who don’t see the pink mist at the very mention of Ford’s name, will have heard Ford over the last two weeks politely and earnestly urging OPSEU to return to the bargaining table, stressing over and over again that the LCBO, wholesale and retail, is an integral part of the province’s future.
His actions support that narrative more than his detractors’ narrative. If Ford really wanted to destroy the LCBO’s retail arm he could have done it at a stroke, just like Ralph Klein’s government did in Alberta. He could have expanded sales of hard liquor to grocery and convenience stores, or allowed standalone stores to participate in the new market rather than just supermarkets and convenience stores.
Some of us wish he had done just that. And we won’t be pleased if this new contract contains any major concessions to a union that has clearly lost the plot. By rights, OPSEU should face a reckoning from their own members.
National Post
[email protected]
Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.