Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star knows how it feels. He has been on the front lines for the Toronto Star long enough that he is showing the tedium of fighting the Beer Store. It is like punching your pillow. It just surrounds your fist and nothing happens. And if you chew at it, you will just end up with a mouthful of feathers.
But Martin marches on. A reliable journeyman journalist, he heads in the direction prescribed by his editor. The Toronto Star editorial direction is to crucify the Beer Store and it shall be done. Martin is the instrument to do the job.
Obviously the Beer Store and its owners at Brewers’ Warehousing are a bit concerned about Canada’s largest circulation newspaper calling for the company’s scalp (figuratively). They still have a lock on the most popular beers in the province and nobody will call for a tag day to protect their profits.
But the Beer Stores’ ace in the hole is Ontario’s ignorant and out-of-date politicians. They have those idiots by the short hairs. For close to 100 years, these dumb politicians have been running scared of the long-dead Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The beer monopoly goes back to the arrangement with those abolitionists to control the sale of beer through that anachronistic system. It is a system that is not only out of date today but was annoying Ontario voters back in the 1920s. It was only accepted then as being better than prohibition.
To be fair to Martin Regg Conn though, we should admit that the Beer Store is resisting his complaints. They have designated speakers now who are often managers of local Beer Stores who will tell you of the evils of letting convenience stores sell beer. They will cheerfully tell you of the evils of convenience stores selling beer and cigarettes to 16-year olds. The only thing they fail to explain is why a minimum wage Beer Store employee is harder to dupe than a minimum wage convenience store employee.
Martin takes pains to note that while Ontario Beer Stores are often smelly, uncouth, disreputable, disgusting establishments, that is not the problem. He is most perturbed to find that the Beer Stores are owned by companies in Belgium, Brazil, Japan and the United States. While that might just be catering to the Toronto Star’s xenophobia, it is not working as a call to arms.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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