When the B.C. government recently announced a review of its antiquated approach to liquor regulations, there were two missing questions:
- why not privatize the government's liquor stores? and;
- why not reduce the Liquor Distribution Branch to what it should be–a regulatory overseer–and otherwise allow consenting adults to buy beer, wine and spirits from other adults who wish to sell them beer, wine and spirits?
Both my questions are rhetorical, especially the lengthy second one, and I know the answers: in 2002 and last year, the provincial government made a deal with government employees' unions not to privatize anything (liquor stores in 2002; the warehouse in 2012) in exchange for the cheap trinket of temporary labour peace.
If liquor store employees were an essential service, one could understand it.
But memorandum to Victoria: government unions are never going to want anything but the ouster of the current crop of government MLAs. Thus, it behooves one to understand why government MLAs repeatedly cave in to a narrow, self-interested pressure group that represents its own interest well but not the wider public interest.
It has been clear for some time – say since the 1980s, when private liquor stores were first allowed in B.C. – that government brings no special skills to the retailing of beverages, as a 2002 minister responsible for government liquor stores, Rick Thorpe, once said. Thus, ipso facto, government liquor stores need not exist.
Whenever the issue of privatizing the 195 government stores arises though, the usual suspects raise the usual arguments about how only government employees' unions can protect the public from everything from alcohol abuse and underage drinking to drinking and driving and other social ills.
Right. Here's another rhetorical question: so when there were only government liquor stores in B.C., the province had neither underage drinkers nor drunk drivers?
Buy that special-interest group malarkey and you'll invest in Bernie Madoff's new prison-sponsored investment fund.
One of the better recent studies on liquor privatization came from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in 2009. It compared the retailing of beer, wine and spirits. In his Alberta-Saskatchewan comparison, author Dave Snow took on the Saskatchewan government employees' unions on all fronts, including the question of social harm.
Here's a summary fact: in a province with a plethora of government-run liquor stores, and with comparatively low overall sales and consumption rates, Saskatchewan, wrote Snow, showed the "highest, second-highest or third-highest rates of alcohol-related harm with respect to friendships, marriage, work, studies, employment, finances, legal problems and physical violence."
The notion that government employees in liquor stores are the safety barrier between civilization and its decline because of private beer or wine sales has always been a silly assertion.
As for prices, the most comprehensive study ever done, where taxes and provincial markups were excluded to arrive at an apple-cider-to-apple-cider comparison was performed by me. I made the comparison 11 years ago when I compared the prices on more than 2,000 types of beer, wine and spirits available in B.C. and Alberta. Result? Alberta won most of the time. That should be unsurprising, as competition drives down prices, a fact contested only by those who operate quasi-monopolies or are employed by them.
However, years later, a so-called consumers' group tried to replicate my study. Its results showed lower prices more often in B.C. Except the group cherry-picked its data to exclude the most competitively priced stores in Alberta, for example, the Real Canadian Liquorstore chain. Perhaps that omission resulted from how the fake consumers' group received most of its funding from governments and government employees' unions, not ordinary consumers.
In announcing the recent review of liquor regulations, Suzanne Anton, Attorney General and Minister of Justice, was quoted as noting that "some of B.C.'s liquor laws go back many years."
Indeed, B.C.'s referendum on Prohibition dates back to 1916 (and was reversed in 1920). British Columbians have had government-run liquor stores ever since. Despite the rise and fall of other retail chains in the past century (anyone recall Eaton's?), B.C. government liquor stores continue to exist, this because of government protection.
There has always been a grand degree of irony that British Columbia, the most liberal province in Canada, has an approach to liquor retailing that was born in Prohibition and survives because of special-interest pressure.
The premier has a decent majority in the legislature; perhaps she should use it one of these days to bring British Columbia's retail industry in wine, beer and spirits into the 21st century. •
