RE: Letter: Privatization of alcohol sales wouldn’t be a good thing
Would privatized liquor sales really not touch prices? It’s difficult to say—but privatized liquor sales have many other benefits that Alex Brockman ignores in his letter published Jan. 23.
Brockman is right in asserting that the bulk of liquor prices are made up of taxes—the difference in prices between a case of beer in the United States over Canada is mostly due to this fact.
To be fair, the LCBO is operating at such a massive economy of scale—it’s the largest purchaser of alcohol in the world—that it can use its buying power to push down prices, much the same way as Walmart.
But low prices aren’t the main benefit of privatized alcohol sales.
Innovation, job creation, and variety thrive when distribution is decentralized. It shouldn’t be any surprise that brewers and distillers across Ontario agree that the craft beer and spirit industries are much further ahead in the United States, Quebec, and British Columbia.
Quebec has completely decentralized its beer market, and the results have been astounding. Currently, the majority of top-rated Canadian craft breweries are from Quebec, most notably Unibroue, Dieu du Ciel!, and Le Trou du Diable. Even some European beer bistros stock Québécois products as high-end imports.
Bars in Ontario, fed up that the LCBO will only occasionally stock their highly-demanded, superb beers, have taken to private importing businesses to get them, making beers such as La Vache Folle—which retails in Gatineau for $5—be sold in Toronto bars for $18. Meanwhile, other rarer beers fail to get imported at all.
This has everything to do with their laws. Quebec breweries operate their own distribution networks. They hire drivers and own their own trucks, allowing them to get their product where it’s most demanded for the best price, and build rapport with their customers and use their brands to create more experimental brews.
Rural communities aren’t left out either. Decentralized distributing allows breweries in places as far away as Saguenay, Shawinigan, and Baie-Saint-Paul get their beers across the province easily and at-cost.
These small, separate systems produce many jobs that would be redundant and eliminated under the LCBO’s system. Steve Abrams, co-founder of Mill Street Brewery, told me that Ontario craft breweries create more jobs than the Big Three (Labatt, Molson, and Sleeman) combined.
So the LCBO might give us a fair price, but it’s skimping us on quality.
