Ontario beer drinkers are foiled again. Now the Ontario government wants to sell beer and wine in large grocery stores. It should have been easy to predict an outcome such as that. After all, everyone knows how much the Liberal’s friends, the Weston family, owners of Loblaw Companies, need the money. Here we have been trying so hard to make it easy for someone to pick up a six-pack of beer and the Wynne government wants to do the opposite. They are just not very bright.
There would be no convenience at all to having about one in seven of the football-field size combined grocery and dry goods and pharmacy super stores selling beer. Even if the coolers were near the door, you would still have to contend with that one-to-eight item line-up for people who cannot count to pay for your little six-pack.
And how are you to know if that mega-store sells beer? It can never be as well signed as Ontario’s famous “In and Out” stores. The Beer Store might have been the destination but the “In and Out” was the identifier.
And yet the stupid Wynne Whigs are going to shout about the new convenience. In discussions with the Retail Council of Canada, it was disclosed that the government wants to “enhance choice and enhance convenience.” How do you do that if your obvious aim is to add the beer and wine to the week’s grocery purchases? There is nothing wrong with selling beer, wine and liquors with food. That is certainly one way to do it. It is just not the only way. To restrict it in this way is just further unwanted and unwarranted paternalism by out-of-date, ignorant politicians.
And, at the same time, these politicians are going to force the foreign-owned Beer Store owners to kick in a new $100 million tax for the right to sell beer in Ontario. These owners are going to be quite unhappy with that and are going to raise their prices to pay the government’s new tax. The consumers always pay for the government’s greed.
We have got to free Ontario’s slaves folks. We have waited too many decades for the sale of beer, wine and booze to reflect our progress as a society. We are not making progress in this province. We are stalled somewhere in the early 20th Century. And the really bad news is that these stupid politicians are charging us more than other people pay for booze. After all, they do not want the poor working man or woman to drink.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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