The very first government-run liquor stores opened in Ontario nearly 100 years ago, garnering huge fanfare, hours-long lines and a healthy degree of puritanical skepticism.
Reporters chronicled the scenes in a massive spread published in The Globe and Mail on June 2, 1927, where they noted that people were mostly civilized as they waited to acquire their permits to buy alcohol, though there was some line-cutting and “police reported one drunk arrested” at a store in London, Ont. Reporters also observed with some bewilderment that women – women! – were often among those lining up to purchase alcohol, some pushing baby carriages “with the baby at home apparently” to cart their bottles home.
That was the beginning of a government monopoly that would persist well beyond the province’s social, cultural and legal maturation. While today’s LCBO stores are nothing like the drab and priggish operations that made customers fill out order forms to have their bottles brought out to them in paper bags, the underlying rationalization of the government’s stranglehold on alcohol has persisted: that is, that liquor is inherently dangerous, ergo only the government can be trusted with its distribution (glossy magazine and other advertisements produced by the LCBO, notwithstanding).
Globe editorial: Last call for Ontario's liquor board
The head of the union representing LCBO workers repeated this notion when discussing the province’s plan to expand alcohol sales to convenience stores and all grocery stores later this summer. “Imagine what would happen,” JP Hornick, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), said, “in gas stations if you wind up with wine, beer and ready-to-drink [being sold] with very little training.”
LCBO workers began striking on Friday to protest Premier Doug Ford’s efforts to break up the agency’s hold on retail alcohol sales in the province. While OPSEU is pushing for pay hikes and more full-time jobs for LCBO employees, its president Hornick has said the union’s “line in the sand” is over the liberalization of alcohol sales in the province. OPSEU doesn’t want to see ready-to-drink cocktails, in particular, being sold in corner stores and grocery stores, since the move poses an existential threat to the LCBO’s continued retail dominance. And besides, only the government can be trusted to sell you alcohol responsibly. (Well, the government, and the foreign-owned conglomerates that operate The Beer Store. And the folks who run rural agency stores. And the Wine Rack. But mostly the government.)
To the extent that this argument ever had much merit – Alberta, with its private liquor retail model, would like a word – it started eroding in 2015, when the first grocery stores in Ontario started selling six-packs of beer, and has all but collapsed now in 2024, with 450 grocery stores across the province licensed to sell beer and wine. The successful rollout of cannabis sales through private retailers, with Ontario serving as the wholesaler for the province, has also quieted the notion that private retailers can’t be trusted to sell regulated substances.
An LCBO worker strike might have rattled the province a decade ago, when people couldn’t just pop into a nearby grocery store to pick up a bottle of wine, or order online for delivery in a couple of days. But the little bit of liquor liberalization Ontarians do enjoy has provided a release valve for whatever pressure a strike might’ve exerted years ago, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of further loosening the LCBO’s grip on the retail market. Indeed, the irony here is that by walking off the job to maintain their monopoly, the LCBO’s workers are demonstrating the importance of dismantling that monopoly. In effect, they are making Mr. Ford’s case for him.
The trajectory of liberalized alcohol sales in this province suggests that this will be the first and last LCBO strike; it is more likely that the LCBO’s role will evolve to be less of a retail operation than as the provincial wholesaler of alcohol. Indeed, despite whatever small concessions the union might win over the course of these negotiations, it is unlikely to succeed in its demand to maintain its antiquated hold on the market – especially not now that Ontarians have gotten a taste, so to speak, of what an open market for alcohol sales might look like in the province.
In time, we might look back on the LCBO’s monopoly with the same charmed bemusement we now experience when recalling how annual permit holders once had to fill out a form for someone to fetch their whisky from the back. “Remember that time LCBO workers went on strike?” “Oh yeah. There used to only be one place in Ontario you could buy alcohol! What a wild time that was …”