But the shenanigans at Queen's Park have been endlessly fascinating. Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who is among the most unpopular people in the English-speaking world, saw his majority government reduced to a minority in October 2011. Why only a minority? Because the opposition leader, Progressive Conservative Tim Hudak, is the dumbest motherfucker on earth, and managed to antagonize everybody who might have voted for him. That's a pretty impressive accomplishment.
As I've mentioned before, the rest of the world isn't like the United States. When given the choice between evil and stupid, Canadians will usually embrace evil. If nothing else, evil is at least predictable and not infrequently rather clever. Americans, on the other hand, have a fabled history of taking stupidity to their collective bosom, which explains the state of the U.S economy.
That isn't to say that we like evil. We try to punish it to the extent that we can without stupidity winning. In a nutshell, that's how McGuinty was reelected, albeit only with a minority.
However, a minority situation was less than ideal for ol' Dalton. The corruption and politicized, wasteful nonsense that defined his two majority mandates were about to catch up with him. It was only a matter of time before the opposition PCs and NDP combined to drive his government out in a confidence vote and force an election that McGuinty would almost certainly lose, probably to the NDP.
So McGuinty did the only thing left to him: he resigned and prorogued the legislature. Of course, this put Liberals - who howled with self-righteous indignation when Stephen Harper prorogued the federal Parliament - in a position where they found themselves cheering McGuinty's tactical genius and personal grace.
(For the record, I oppose prorogument in all but the most extreme circumstances. Were it up to me, shutting down the government on a political basis would mean exactly that. The government would stop dead. The civil service wouldn't be paid, nor would government benefits to the citizenry. Contracts would immediately be in breach and the government would be liable for it. That way, the government would be too scared to prorogue without accompanying legislation that a minority couldn't pass. A bare minimum, prorogument should be introduced as a confidence motion in the legislature.)
When you get down to it, all McGuinty will have accomplished in the end is his face being out front when the Liberals are finally defeated. As soon as the Liberals have a new sacrificial lamb and the legislature resumes sitting, I expect that the government will be vaporized on the first available confidence vote.
That means that Ontario is already in an unofficial campaign, which puts the Grits at a decided disadvantage, since they don't have a leader who can issue policy proposals. And whoever wins the Liberal leadership (and I expect it will be Gerard Kennedy, if they're smart) will only be premier for about 15 seconds, so he or she won't have time to put together a platform.
Tim Hudak, being Tim Hudak, took an obviously good idea and watered it down with his trademark stupidity.
There is absolutely no reason for a government monopoly on alcohol sales that isn't statist, stupid, or both.
The sale of beer, wine and spirits in corner stores and supermarkets would give Ontarians more freedom of choice, but not necessarily lower prices, says Tory Leader Tim Hudak.
Hudak told reporters Tuesday a Progressive Conservative government would “end the LCBO and Beer Store monopolies” without forgoing the revenue from hefty provincial taxes.
“Let’s let the private sector into the alcohol business, let’s have some more competition,” he told reporters outside an LCBO outlet in Toronto’s Liberty Village that refused to let him hold his news conference inside.
Hudak said it’s time Ontario opened up its liquor retailing, like Alberta and other jurisdictions.
“A lot of states and provinces have moved out of the public control of alcohol and they actually found they increased choice and increased revenue for the government at the same time,” he said.
The "public safety" argument is easily the most specious and the most dangerous.
If a product is as dangerous as statist shitheads suggest it is, government should be banning it instead of profiting from it. What kind of government knowingly finances itself through the ruination of the citizenry? What kind of a fuckheaded moral example is that? And that goes for alcohol, cigarettes, and lotteries and casinos. By the way, why are marijuana, cocaine, heroin and prostitution left out of the mix?
The idea that high taxes will discourage the use of a good or service is economically boneheaded. Government rather rapidly becomes dependent on the revenue and a downturn in sales only hurts government revenues, which will have to be recouped elsewhere. The entire argument for "sin taxes" is idiotic and self-defeating when you think of what happens if those taxes accomplish their objective of eliminating the sin. At some point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
I'm not against taxes and recognize that they are the cost of a somewhat civil society. If it were up to me, we'd be taxing income or consumption, but that's another argument for another day. Having said that, I'm against using the tax code as a means of behaviour modification. After all, we already have the criminal law for that.
It's also singularly ineffective. Look at cigarette taxes as a prime example. When tobacco taxes got to high in the early 90s, everybody bought cigarettes that were smuggled in from the United States. Then the Chretien government cut the taxes by about two-thirds without a dramatic increase in smoking. After the individual American states jacked up taxes and sued the tobacco companies, Canadian smokers started buying untaxed tobacco from Native reservations, which are protected by treaty.
One of the great truths in life is that when you raise taxes beyond a certain point, you essentially incentivize tax avoidance. Liberals and statist social conservatives don't get that and they never fucking will, mostly because neither recognizes economic reality.
Misfits across the ideological spectrum offer three other cases for strict government controls on booze. These are health care, drunk driving and the fucking children. I'll address each now.
I smoke and drink, and I'm taxed disproportionately for both. Not only am I paying for my heath care, I'm paying for yours, too. There's virtually no chance that I'll see my 50th birthday, so I wind up saving the system a shit-ton of money.
People who have fun and die young are always cheaper than those that live clean and take decades to finally die. Just think of all cash you'll save from my not consuming government retirement benefits. Also, I've read that 85% of the health care you consume will be in the last 18 months of your life, assuming you meet ordinary life expectancy.
More likely than not, I'll either drop dead of a coronary or actually explode with cancer over the course of about three weeks. When the taxpayer is providing endless goodies to old people, it only makes economic sense that they should want to limit the number of old people around to collect. I'm doing my part. Are you?
I used to spend a lot of time in California. I was shocked to learn that you could buy beer and wine there, not only in corner and grocery stores, but at fucking gas stations! If anything is going to "encourage" drunk driving, you would think it would be that. But I'm not aware of California having a greater incidence of drunk driving, per-capita than Ontario. This very probably has a lot to do with California putting drunk drivers in jail more often (and for longer) than we do.
It appears then that the criminal law is much more effective at dealing with drunk driving than government monopolies on distribution of alcohol are. And I don't know how to break this to this shitheads at MADD, but driving under the influence is already against the law.
If you live in Ontario, look around. Are you really seeing a shortage of drunken teenagers out there?
Even if the current system is working ideally, which it isn't. you've created a perfect situation where it's easier for kids to get illegal drugs from a criminal market than it is for them to get a fucking drink. Ever notice how countries with looser alcohol laws, like France, Spain and Italy, have far lower instances of teen drunkenness and all around fuck-uppery than we do in North America? I sure as shit have.
That's because parents are actually interested in their maggot children there. They allow kids to drink, but they monitor it and acclimate them to the experience. We want the goddamned government to do it for us, ignoring entirely how well the government does things like deliver mail, which has your address on it and everything! According to this philosophy, a government that demonstrably can't balance a fucking checkbook is supposed to take care of your kids for you. Good luck with that.
But, as Jan Wong explains, there is one really good idea for keeping a government monopoly on booze.
Today, the LCBO downplays the control aspect while struggling to satisfy its dual mandate of turning a profit without turning people into drunkards. The subliminal message of Food and Drink, the LCBO’s free magazine, remains paternalistic: don’t drink on an empty stomach. The hypocrisy is astounding. The LCBO goes further than most stores in trying to persuade you to buy its product for every social occasion short of a toddler’s birthday party. What other retailer has dreamed up 300 styles of gift bags, boxes and bottle-friendly containers in the past five years? Chris Layton, an LCBO spokesman, says the gift bags earn $3.5 million a year—although consumer interest is now shifting to gift cards.It isn't so much that Ontarians are in imminent danger of alcoholism as the government of Ontario is already in the throes of it. They're addicted to the money. That's why David Peterson,. Mike Harris and Dalton McGuinty himself all made the promise of privatization, but never followed through.
According to Layton, Food and Drink is the LCBO’s single most popular marketing initiative. Six times a year, the LCBO prints 500,000 English copies and 20,000 French copies on glossy 60-pound stock. It turns a comfortable annual profit of $350,000 to $400,000 after expenses. Here’s one of the secrets to its success: wineries must submit marketing plans—including how much they will spend on advertising in Food and Drink—before they can obtain coveted shelf space at the LCBO. Food and Drink competes for scarce advertising dollars against private-sector magazines that aren’t bankrolled by government monopolies.
Truth be told, Torontonians would buy alcohol without any encouragement from fancy stores or glossy magazines. If we could save money, I’m fairly certain we’d shop at a no-frills warehouse with fluorescent lights. To get an idea of how monolithic the LCBO is, I checked out another monolithic retailer, but one that offers the warehouse shopping experience: Costco. First, consider that Ontario’s population is a tiny fraction of that of the U.S.—4.1 per cent. Then note that while Costco is one of the biggest wine retailers in the U.S., it must compete with thousands of private liquor stores. Now check out these numbers: last year Costco grossed $1.3 billion (U.S.) in wine sales; the LCBO’s wine sales grossed $1.58 billion, according to its most recent annual report. Despite its much smaller territory and consumer base, the LCBO actually eclipses that other monolith to the south, Costco.
In fiscal 2010–2011, the monopoly paid a dividend of $1.55 billion to the Ontario government. It was the 17th consecutive record annual dividend, and it does not include the various taxes levied (a total of $749 million). The annual report also lays bare the secret behind the LCBO’s profit margins: we’re paying double. At Costco, a bottle of Woodbridge sauvignon blanc costs $6.99; at the LCBO it’s $11.95. Costco sells Veuve Clicquot for $38.99 a bottle; the LCBO charges $66.30. When I asked for pricing examples for table wine, some markups were 137 per cent. For a wine that retails for $10.45 (the LCBO didn’t provide actual product names), it pays wholesalers $3.77 if it’s a U.S. or non-Ontario Canadian wine; $3.72 if it’s another imported wine; and $4.10 if it’s Ontario wine. And these wholesale prices may be inflated.
And Tim Hudak, being Tim Hudak, is doing nothing at all to change that.
Hudak addressed social concerns that some — like MADD Canada — might have with easier accessibility to booze, by noting there aren’t “riots in the streets” in other more liberal jurisdictions.
The Beer Store’s Jeff Newton said while consumers assume such changes would mean lower prices, Ontario’s high tax rates on alcohol prevent that.
“Their assumption is automatically that means prices are going down based on their experience from shopping in the corner store … in Florida or Buffalo,” he said.
But Newton said the Ontario tax on a case of 24 cans of beer in Ontario is $9.80, compared to 32 cents in New York or $1.08 in Florida.
With the existing tax structure, he said the cost of distributing beer to thousands of stores — and markups — mean consumers would pay more.
Sobeys, which operates 112 stores in Ontario and supplies 213 franchises, welcomed the initiative, saying what “Tim Hudak is proposing is of great interest to us.”
“We’re supportive of anything that provides our customers with greater choice and convenience,” said Sobeys’ Andrew Walker.
Hudak isn't talking about lowering the alcohol tax in Ontario, he's talking about actually expanding it. If you increase the distribution chain to the private sector, the HST and provincial income and business taxes apply each step of the way. One assumes that individual corner stores and groceries would still need to be licensed to sell booze, so there would be fees in that. Plus, a Hudak government could generate billions more in selling off or franchising existing LCBO retail locations, who would also be licensed and taxed.
This is an enormous tax grab from a supposedly "conservative" candidate. It's also retarded if you know anything about economics.
Hudak is essentially proposing to expand on a liberal economic tax model in ways that hurt consumers even more. Business will make out like bandits with increased sales and the tax base on those sales increase dramatically. But because of increased distribution and (presumed) increased compliance costs, prices go up at the retail level.
Everybody wins but you and me. Businesses that sell alcohol aren't going to swallow those taxes, fees and compliance costs. They're going to pass them along to you, which is exactly what happened in Alberta.
Even if Hudak cut the tax down by 90% to match Florida's, the expanded base would more than make up the revenue. The deeper market penetration should expand sales, which should drive the price down. Unless, of course, the hidden hand of government actually drives them up for no reason at all.
If Tim Hudak is going to run on this, conservatives are going to have to pin the stupid cocksucker down on his plans before anyone votes for him. Because my guess is that he's going to follow up this populist (meaning stupid) nugget of an idea with a dramatic cut in corporate taxes. That'll mean that you're further subsidizing, say, the auto companies - and their unions - every time you have wine with dinner.
Forget the nonsense you hear about other Canadian provinces. In one way or another (with the possible exception of Quebec,) they've expanded the market while keeping taxes high and continued monopolized distribution. Alberta, in a particular, doesn't have a provincial sales tax, which tends to drive "sin taxes" higher, so there's no offset in retail price.
Unless Hudak is willing to commit to an American model of lower taxes and greater distribution, conservatives and libertarians should kill the dumb fucker dead on this.
