Beer at a grocery store in Ottawa, on Aug. 9, 2018.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Ontario Premier Doug Ford unveiled a deal on Friday that will speed up his long-delayed plan to allow beer in the province’s corner stores but require the government to funnel up to $225-million to the Beer Store chain, which is owned by multinational brewing companies.
The deal means Mr. Ford, who made the announcement at a gas station near his home in Toronto’s west-end area of Etobicoke, is now poised to fulfill a stalled, six-year-old promise on expanding alcohol sales within months. The government says the first convenience-store shelves will be stocked with beer by Sept. 5.
That is 16 months before Ontario’s existing deal with the Beer Store was set to expire, on Dec. 21, 2025. The 10-year agreement, made by the previous Liberal government, guaranteed the chain’s quasi-monopoly on beer but allowed a limited number of grocery stores to sell it.
The Progressive Conservative government says the new deal, which will also allow beer, wine, cider and premixed drinks in all grocery and big-box stores as well as convenience stores this year, will give Ontarians up to 8,500 more places to buy booze – ending the Beer Store’s dominance over beer sales, which dates back a century to the end of Prohibition.
Critics immediately seized on the multimillion-dollar payment to the Beer Store, which is controlled by global beer giants Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch InBev. The money will go toward covering wages and other costs to keep a minimum number of Beer Store locations open, as the chain is a key part of the province’s recycling system.
The announcement fuelled speculation that the Premier was contemplating calling an early election, in spite of Ontario’s fixed-election-date law, which has the next vote scheduled for June, 2026. Asked several times by reporters on Friday if he would stick to that date, Mr. Ford declined to answer directly.
Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie called the beer deal “a blatant attempt by Doug Ford to buy the next election” in a post on the social-media site X, saying it would only benefit “grocery store billionaires and multinational companies.”
NDP Official Opposition Leader Marit Stiles said in a statement that the money could be better spent elsewhere, with hospital emergency rooms closing and millions of Ontarians without family doctors.
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health warned that increasing the number of places to buy alcohol would “significantly increase” the 6,000 annual deaths in the province blamed on drinking. CAMH urged the province to allow municipalities to opt out of the plan, as it did for cannabis stores.
The deal will make Ontario just the third jurisdiction in Canada to allow beer in convenience stores, after Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. It is common in many U.S. states and allowed in Britain.
Only 450 grocery-store locations were allowed to offer wine and beer under the existing Beer Store agreement. The new deal will allow all grocery stores, big-box stores and corner stores to sell the 12 and 24 packs now exclusively sold at the Beer Store, as well as 30 packs.
The province’s LCBO stores will retain their monopoly on hard liquor, and become the wholesaler for the new booze retailers. The Beer Store will retain a role in distribution.
The Retail Council of Canada, whose members include the country’s biggest grocery chains, criticized the new deal, which will require larger retailers to start collecting empties as the role of the Beer Store in the recycling system for alcoholic beverage containers recedes. (The government and the Beer Store must still negotiate a new recycling deal.)
Diane Brisebois, the council’s president and CEO, decried what she called “a sweetheart deal for the big multinational beer companies” that is “compounded by pushing the brewing giants’ recycling costs off onto grocers and hence onto Ontario consumers.” She even suggested grocers might even bail out of the booze business.
The government’s payments to the Beer Store will cover worker wages and benefits, but also renovations to stores, sales and marketing, and even the costs of new computers and software. It is also supposed to cover compensation for lost sales because of the cancellation of the chain’s monopoly on 12 and 24 packs, until the existing 10-year deal is up.
The cash, which would be subject to audits, comes with a pledge to keep at least 386 of the Beer Store’s 422 outlets open until July, 2025, and at least 300 running until the end of that year.
Speaking to reporters, Mr. Ford insisted that the money would go solely to the Beer Store’s workers, not the beer giants that own it – even though the text of the deal says otherwise.
“What we’re doing, we’re supporting the front-line workers at the Beer Store,” he said.