No doubt we all know a few new democratic party stalwarts. They are neither as numerous nor as annoying as they once were but they all need a hug these days. They are angry, bewildered, concerned, depressed, you name it. They are not their formerly misguided but cheerful selves. They have fallen on hard times.
One of my frequent flyers (readers), an Ontario NDP, through and through, recently sent me a rather pointed comment on one of my postings. He headlined his e-mail: “You Fucking Idiot.”
He obviously felt strongly on the subject.
What the Dipper was complaining about was my calling the agreement between unpaid consultant Ed Clark and Brewers’ Warehousing a specious matter. “Specious” in this instance was used to indicate the document was plausible but would be a useless piece of paper if signed just by Mr. Clark. It is like a ‘ghost’ document. “Ghost” in this context being something people talk about but nobody has ever seen.
The problem I have with this supposed agreement is that it also committed Brewers’ Warehousing to a budget of $100 million per year to expand, improve and maintain their sales premises. Looking at the Beer Store’s latest audited statement (2014), you are a bit confused about their saying they kept their end of the deal.
The first problem is that in an industry that grosses about $4 billion per year in Ontario, the Beer Store only shows us cost recovery. With 450 stores in Ontario, you would expect the beer retailer to be adding new stores and shipping locations and maintaining the older locations. It is hard to believe that the Beer Store could do that for less than $100 million per year.
Our friendly NDPer is giving us the union B.S. that by weakening the Beer Stores’ monopoly further, we would be jeopardizing 7000 well paying jobs. It would make sense to pull all the part-time jobs from that figure before saying they are well paid.
But if the Beer Store does the distribution to the convenience stores, they could create even more jobs. Who is lying to whom here?
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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