And What Is It With This Ongoing Obsession With Alcohol Over Climate Change and So Many Other Challenges Ford Should Be Paying More Attention To?
A Commentary by Niagara At Larger reporter/publisher Doug Draper
Posted June 9th, 2024 on Niagara At Large
Early into his tenure as Ontario premier, Doug Ford challenges brewers to produce beer people can buy for a dollar a can.
When it comes to setting top priorities for Ontario, what does Premier Doug Ford’s include?
Do they include protecting and preserving our public health care services? No. How about addressing climate change, saving what is left of our wetlands, woodlands and farmlands or taking real action to fight climate change? Definitely not.
But when it comes to beer and booze, you can drink all you want to that.
When Ford and his Conservatives first formed what I guess you would have to call a government back in June of 2018, the newly anointed premier almost immediately went on a rant over the cost of beer.
He vowed to offer consumers a can or bottle of beer that did not cost more than a dollar and challenged commercial brewers to do the same – something they claimed was impossible without significantly compromising on the quality of the brew.
Doug Ford’s Buck A Beer didn’t exactly rave reviews.
Ford should have listened to the brewery pros because it wasn’t long after his ‘Buck-A-Beer’ showed up on the shelves of LCBO stores across Ontario that buyers of his swill couldn’t come up with enough words to describe how horrific it was.
An LCBO employee told me at the time that one customer said the beer tasted like ‘carbonated mule piss.”
Not to let that bad experience in the beer business stop him, Ford went on to allow bars across Ontario to start serving alcoholic beverages at 9 a.m. instead of waiting until the usal noon hour – a move he made around the same time he raised speed limits on some of the province’s busiest highways.
There was a good thing for Ford and his puppets to focus on while landlords were throwing people who couldn’t afford stiff rent hikes of their apartments and parents were begging his government to offer more services to help their autistic children.
And, of course, through all of this Ford has continued working away at giving privately owned retail stores the right to sell an ever growing number of alcohol products – a move that will almost certainly mean the end of many, if not most, Beer Stores (owned and operated for almost a hundred years by a consortium of Canadian breweries) and publicly owned LCBO stores that also go back about 97 years.
This ongoing push reached a head this summer when contract negotiations between the Ford government and the union representing more than 9,000 LCBO employees over job security and wages, among other things broke down and the employees went on strike just as the summer holidays were ramping up.
No worry about a dry summer though though.
Sporting a big smile over a table stocked with beer and a barbecue covered with meat and hamburger buns, Ford can be seen on a video he posted, letting us know how we can find outlets in or near our region of the province that will sell us all the beer and booze we may want while the strike is on.
To watch a CBC news report featuring the video, click on the screen immediately below –
I can’t believe that polls continue to show that if there was an election held in Ontario today, Ford would win another majority government.
Like the late British prime minister Winston Churchill once said ……”The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
Apparently many of those “average voters” have every intention of voting this bozo and his merry band of minions back into power again.
As for climate change, the growing wage gap and all the rest, just pour yourself a tall one and drink any worries you may have about that away.
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Doug Draper is a veteran journalist who worked at The St. Cahtarines Standard and many other news outlets before founding Niagara At Large
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