Ontario Government (Conservative majority), 2025-29

[Brad Sallows]

I suspect many stores will be re-thinking their liquor licence, particularly if sales aren't all that robust. Very few want to commit the staff and storage space (both usually in short supply) for deposit returns. I was grocery shopping today and had to ask a staffer where a certain item was and, after checking a few logical places, he said that with having to shoe-horn in shelf space for booze, the store ends up shoving other products wherever they can find space.

With the loss of sales, The Beer Store can't economically stick around just as a deposit return service. It would be interesting to know what their numbers are like.

ON obviously structures the requirements differently from BC. Here, convenience stores are often marginal businesses, and having a liquor licence is seen as approximately equivalent to a licence to print money.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Its another case of beggar your neighbour. Instead of us fixing our own problems, we are hoping to pinch these individuals off the US.

BC is doing the same thing, but will take applications from many other places. Where else is this happening, one wonders.

Next time someone has the premiers all together in a room, some gadfly ought to prompt them to consider what is going to happen: "Is your province going to be a winner or a loser in the bidding wars?"

[Add: Also, people trained in Canada will be highly desirable to employers worldwide. We should be training not to capacity, but to overcapacity. Not for profit, but just as the cost of maintaining capacity.]

 

[Czech_pivo]

BC is doing the same thing, but will take applications from many other places. Where else is this happening, one wonders.

Next time someone has the premiers all together in a room, some gadfly ought to prompt them to consider what is going to happen: "Is your province going to be a winner or a loser in the bidding wars?"

[Add: Also, people trained in Canada will be highly desirable to employers worldwide. We should be training not to capacity, but to overcapacity. Not for profit, but just as the cost of maintaining capacity.]

That is a very true statement - training for 'loss' in other words - for just like we steal doctors from Kenya or India or South Africa or the US, the US and parts of Europe are just as actively stealing our doctors. Free mobility of labour.

I've got an old high school friend from Windsor who did 2yrs at U of Windsor in Chemistry, got into U of Ottawa med school, trained then in London, ON at Victoria Hospital as an Orthopedic Surgeon, worked a number of years back in Windsor and then left for Texas 20yrs ago and is making money hand over fist there. He'll never come back. The whole family was a bunch of geniuses - his Dad was a Dr, Mom a Nurse, oldest brother is Doc, next to brothers are Dentist, sister is a Psychiatrist and lastly him an Orthopedic Surgeon. The others all stayed in Canada except for him. The Dad/Mom were trained in the old Yugoslavia back in the early 60's and we got them to come to Canada then. If they had stayed, Canada would have lost 2 Drs, 2 Dentists, a Nurse and a Psychiatrist and the US an Orthopedic Surgeon.

 

[RangerRay]

According to the Interweb, all provinces except Ontario and Manitoba have some manner of deposit-return system for beverage containers.

In Manitoba, you can only return beer bottles and cans to select beer vendors for deposit. Everything else goes in the blue bin. We’re like 80 years behind the times here.

 

[lenaitch]

ON obviously structures the requirements differently from BC. Here, convenience stores are often marginal businesses, and having a liquor licence is seen as approximately equivalent to a licence to print money.

For sure. I imagine a liquor sales licence is similar to a gaming licence. If a convenience store lost its gaming licence for some reason, it usually closed shortly after because lottery is a huge traffic generator.

The problem isn't the sales, but the deposit-return of the containers. I'm not exactly sure how it would work if Ontario went back to a broad-based deposit return system (liquor, soft drink, etc.). There used to be one, years ago, but I imagine the corner store business model has changed much since then