Crombie shows she’s a tax-and-spend Liberal on $1B booze claim

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If Bonnie Crombie had her way, we wouldn’t be moving to beer and wine in corner and grocery stores. Or, if we did, she’d impose taxes and fees so steep as to make the system unaffordable and doomed to fail.

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The Liberals put out a news release on Monday making the claim that Premier Doug Ford’s plan to put beer and wine in convenience stores is going to cost the province $1 billion. A quick look at Crombie’s claim and her breakdown of the costs shows it’s not true but she keeps repeating it.

Apparently, Crombie comes from the Trudeau Liberal school of communications.

“If you repeat it, if you say it louder, if that is your talking point, people will totally believe it!” Catherine McKenna, Trudeau’s former environment minister, said.

Crombie is following the same pattern of saying it louder, repeating it and making it her talking point with this $1-billion claim.

The Liberal leader is claiming that the province will lose $375 million because a fee the LCBO imposed when the Wynne Liberals put beer into 450 grocery stores won’t be extended to beer sold in the estimated 8,500 other stores. The fee was invented out of whole cloth by the LCBO and wasn’t needed, Crombie’s claim of $375 million lost is based on a media report that extrapolates that fee across all new stores.

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Dropping this unnecessary fee was a key ask of the craft brewing industry which also lobbied hard for getting their products into convenience stores while Molson and Labatt opposed the idea.

She also claims that the province will lose $150 million by telling the LCBO to offer a 10% wholesale discount to non-government retailers. In many instances, that 10% discount will result in you getting beer or wine at cheaper prices, in other cases, it will mean the local retailer can make a living.

Either way, Crombie is demanding higher prices by insisting there be no discount to help get this new sales chain off the ground.

Finally, Crombie claims, out of nowhere, that the province is forgoing $300 million in revenue by not charging a licence fee for convenience stores or grocers to carry booze in their stores. The province is charging a licensing fee for any new retailer selling alcohol but it’s not as big as Crombie wants.

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To “prove” her point, Crombie points to Saskatchewan, where licence fees went for as much as $450,000. I’m not sure that Crombie has spent much time in Saskatchewan, but the government there closed all their liqour stores as part of privatization.

Is she asking the Ford government to shut down the LCBO and let the private sector run all aspects of this sector? Given her tax and spend comments, that is doubtful.

Crombie is advocating that independently owned convenience stores pay as much as $50,000 to the government to be able to sell beer and wine and that grocery stores pay as much as $100,000. A fee that size would make it unaffordable for the independent owners of these stores to enter the market, meaning we’d be left with the status quo.

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The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario is required by law to charge licensing fees on a cost recovery basis, Crombie wants to use this government agency as a profit centre.

There is enough to be upset about with the Ford government paying The Beer Store $225 million without inventing new piles of money to create the false idea that the province is losing $1 billion.

Crombie’s claims, repeated without any fact check by many in the media, also don’t look at new revenue being generated.

The Convenience Industry Council of Canada projects 7,000 to 7,500 new jobs will be created by this change. The study also estimates $213 million in annual tax payments being generated with 69%, or $147 million annually, going to the provincial government.

The province estimates that the LCBO will gain somewhere between $895 billion to $1.2 billion from being the exclusive wholesaler to these 8,500 new stores.

We can have a debate about the merits of Ford’s plan, including the timing and the $225 million to The Beer Store, without resorting to spreading false and exaggerated claims.

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