Trevor Dailey's Weblog

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford has announced a “buck-a-beer” will be coming to Ontario soon. I could not care any less than I already do about the price of beer, I drink so occasionally one could argue I do not drink at all, but I get annoyed when I hear Premier Ford say “a buck-a-beer” because it is dishonest. First, let us turn the clock back for a brief history lesson to explain how we arrived at this “buck-a-beer” in the first place.

In 1915, there were 49 beer manufactures in Ontario. Under the Conservative government of Premier William Howard Hearst, Ontario enacted prohibitions of alcohol by means of The Ontario Temperance Act in 1916 when there were 65 breweries in Ontario. By 1917, the number of Ontario breweries was 23. When the Conservative government of Premier Howard Ferguson ended Prohibition in Ontario in 1927, there were only 15 beer manufactures left in the province. In 11 years, the Conservative government had almost completely destroyed the beer manufacturing industry in Ontario with Prohibition.

Since 1927, the Ontario government has strictly controlled the production, distribution, sale, purchase, and consumption of all alcohol in the province of Ontario with the Liquor Licence Act. In place of prohibition, the Conservative government created the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) in 1927. The LCBO was incorporated into a Crown Corporation by the Ontario Progressive Conservative government of Premier Bill Davis in 1975. Premier Ferguson forced the remaining beer manufactures into a LCBO overseen cooperative in 1927, and over the years, as a result of sales, buyouts, and mergers, only three beer manufactures remain in the cooperative that are today all foreign owned. Labatt (49% ownership) is owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev (Belgium), Molson-Coors (49% ownership) is owned by Coors (USA), and Sleeman (2% ownership) is owned by Sapporo (Japan). This government created privately owned beer oligopoly, Brewers Retail Inc., controls about 80% of the retail beer sales in Ontario through its chain of Beer Store brand retail stores. During Ontario's Progressive Conservative government of Premier Mike Harris, the LCBO made a nonpublic agreement with Brewers Retail Inc. in 2000 giving the Beer Store exclusive right to sell the most popular brands of beer to bars and restaurants and the exclusive right to retail 12 and 24 packs of beer. In the interest of temperance and moderation, that has been at the core of the LCBO since 1927, the LCBO sets the minimum price of alcohol for sale in Ontario. The current minimum price for non-draft retail beer sold in Ontario is approximately $3.00 per litre, and that works out to be around $1.25 a bottle or can. This is where we come to the “buck-a-beer” promise.

Source: MINIMUM PRICING OF LIQUOR AND OTHER PRICING MATTERS

Premier Ford wants to reduce the minimum price of any non-draft beer with an alcohol volume below 5.6 per cent in Ontario to $1.00. The last time beer was at that minimum price was 2007.

Lakeport Brewery in Hamilton sold its beer for “24 for 24” from 2002 to 2006, and heavily advertised this, helping to increase its market share. Teresa Cascioli, who became CEO of Lakeport in 1999, brought the company far away from its 1998 bankruptcy in just eight years. Lakeport was bought by Labatt in 2007 for $201 million, the brewery was permanently closed by Labatt in 2010, 143 employees lost their jobs, and production transferred to the Labatt plant in London. Just because beer manufactures may sell a beer for one dollar does not mean they are going to do it, especially if it undercuts their premium beer brands. That is exactly what Lakeport was doing to Labatt by selling its beer for $1.00 before Labatt bought Lakeport; the brewery that had become a source of continual annoyance and trouble for the big three beer manufactures of Brewers Retail Inc.

The former Lakeport brewery, located at a historical Hamilton brewery built in 1947, was stripped of all brewing equipment and brewing infrastructure and the plant gutted and sabotaged by Labatt. The brewing equipment was sold for scrap. Concrete was poured into some of the building's drains to prevent any large scale brewery operation there ever again. Labatt refused to sell the Lakeport concern or lease the building to any beer manufacture.

The minimum retail price for non-draft beer was raised from $1.00 to $1.06 by the LCBO in 2008.

In 2018, it is improbable any beer manufacture could make a profit regularly selling its beer for only $1.00 because of the low beer quality, federal and provincial taxes, and production costs. As Teresa Cascioli said during Lakeport's "24 for 24" years:

Obviously, the business fundamentals have to be there, whether it's toothpaste or beer, supply and demand have to go hand in hand, and there has to be profitability for the manufacturer.

There may be one or two brewers willing to sell their beer at the minimum price of $1.00, but Labatt is not going to sell Budweiser, that has been one of Ontario’s top selling premium beers for decades, for a price of only $1.00 anymore than it is going to sell it for the current minimum price of $1.25. Few brewers sell their beer at discount prices at the current beer price minimum of $1.25. The motivation for this reduction in the minimum price of beer appears to be the claim by Premier Ford that lowering the minimum price of beer will create competition among beer manufactures and stop “lining the pockets” of the beer oligopoly. This is complete nonsense. The beer oligopoly is just that, an oligopoly.

Source: MINIMUM PRICING OF LIQUOR AND OTHER PRICING MATTERS

If Doug Ford was honest, he would eliminate the minimum retail price for beer, lower the provincial taxes on beer, he would get rid of the LCBO, and he would break up the beer oligopoly. This will not happen because it was the Conservative government that enacted prohibition in 1916, created the LCBO and the beer oligopoly in 1927, incorporated the LCBO into a Crown corporation in 1975, granted Brewers Retail Inc. exclusive rights in 2000, and supports temperance at the same time it collects massive alcohol tax revenues reaching a record of $5.89 billion in 2016-17.

© Trevor Dailey

This article is edited and revised from time to time.

I am not a big Kiss music fan, I do not understand the spoken language in the video, but this is the most creative and entertaining cover of a Kiss song I have heard and seen.

The song,  I Was Made For Lovin' You, was first released in May of 1979, and is from the Kiss album, Dynasty. The song went Gold, selling more than 1 million copies, in the USA and Canada. Kiss recorded the song long before these accomplished young women were even born.

They did not simulate Gene Simmon's in concert stage blood and fire breathing, but I think they did simulate Ace Frehley's in concert guitar smoke in the video.

It goes without saying how much influence the band Kiss has had on the world of music, and not just rock music.

 

This is a chapter from an unpublished book by Conservative MP Maxime Bernier that was made available online by both Bernier and his publisher regarding Canada’s supply management system.

Government imposed supply management controls the domestic production, prices, and imports of all poultry and dairy products ensuring there is no free market in these goods in Canada resulting in Canadian consumers paying unnecessarily higher prices for these products to give wealthy Canadian farmers a guaranteed income.

The first one is the control of production, so that the amount of milk, eggs and poultry on the market is restricted to what Canadians are expected to consume. A national marketing agency determines that amount and sets production quotas for each province. Provincial boards are responsible for selling quotas among farmers, who are strictly forbidden to produce any more than they’re told to.

The second pillar is the fixing, by bureaucratic agencies, of the prices that processors have to pay farmers for each category of product.

The third pillar is import control. Like any closed and rigid system controlled by government—or by semi-autonomous bureaucratic agencies that get their power from government—this one also has to prevent outside influence. The Soviet Union forbade its citizens from traveling abroad, or reading or listening to news from other countries. Preventing information from free countries from infecting the minds of Soviet citizens was a necessary “pillar” of the power of the Communist Party. In the case of supply management, beyond the very small amounts that are allowed into Canada tariff free, foreign products are hit by import tariffs that range from about 150% for turkey and eggs, to about 250% for chicken, yogurt and cheese, and 300% for butter. Obviously, no one would buy any imported good that costs three or four times more than the local one.

It should be clear that this is a transfer of wealth from the poorest to some of the richest in our society. Farming families working under supply management are indeed far richer than most Canadian families. Average after-tax income of all households in Canada is $69,100. By comparison, the average dairy farming household income is $147,800, and the number is $180,400 for poultry-farming households.

Moreover, many of these families are paper millionaires, thanks to the value of their quotas. The average net worth of a dairy farmer is $3.8 million while that of poultry and egg farmers is $5.9 million.

Supply management is a morally wrong communist based system created by the Liberal government of socialist Pierre Trudeau decades ago, and is today fully supported and defended by the Conservative Party.

It’s no surprise that the government that adopted supply management was the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau was a typical left-wing intellectual. Born to a wealthy family, he didn’t have to work to earn his living and had spent part of his adult life as a bohemian writer and traveller. He was an admirer of communist China and Cuba, and a big fan of Fidel Castro. Before running as a Liberal in the late 1960s, he had been a supporter of the CCF/NDP. He had zero understanding of economics.

From the very beginning to the very end, one policy issue was at the centre of my campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada: supply management in agriculture. This is the system established by Pierre Trudeau’s government in the early 1970s that keeps the prices of dairy, poultry, and eggs artificially high. As I said repeatedly during the campaign, it’s a cartel. It’s the total opposite of a free market, and a conservative party should not be supporting it.

© Trevor Dailey

 

Progressive Conservative Premier elect Doug Ford has mentioned he will bring the price of a single beer in Ontario down to one dollar each. Put simply, Doug Ford says a ‘buck a beer’ for Ontario.

Ways beer in the province of Ontario is controlled is: where and how beer is sold in Ontario, and the price of beer in Ontario. Beer in Ontario may only be sold through The Beer Store, that is the name of a chain of retail beer outlets that controls about 80% of the market, from retail stores attached to a brewery approved by the government of Ontario, from provincial government licenced establishments (restaurants, bars, hotels, special events, etc.), and in limited quantities at the provincial government monopoly LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) stores. The Beer Store is an oligopoly that was created by the Conservative government in 1927 at the end of Prohibition in Ontario.

There were 64 breweries in Ontario in 1916, when the Conservative government of Ontario enacted Prohibition, and only 15 left after the Conservative government of Ontario ended Prohibition in 1927. Those remaining 15 breweries were forced into a LCBO regulated cooperative by provincial legislation. Beer was to be sold from warehouses inspected and overseen by the LCBO. Minimum beer prices are set by the LCBO. Brewer's Warehousing Co., became Brewers Retail Inc., which became The Beer Store. Over the years, breweries were bought out by the other breweries until there were only three large breweries in control of the cooperative. Those three have since been sold to foreign corporations. Labatt is owned by AB InBev (Belgium), Molson is owned by Coors (USA), and Sleeman is owned by Sapporo (Japan).

The beer oligopoly’s producers and sellers want to keep their beer prices profitable. The LCBO wants to keep beer prices high claiming they are safe guarding the public by not allowing cheap alcohol to be sold through a "social responsibility" mandate of 1993 that adds to its existing temperance mandate from 1927. The provincial government wants the large amount of revenue the provincial government gets from taxing beer.

Either Doug Ford does not know what he is talking about when he says ‘a buck a beer’, or Doug Ford is lying.

© Trevor Dailey

Ontario government to bring back ‘buck-a-beer’ by Labour Day, source says

Now that the 2018 Ontario general election is over, it is time for the taxpayers of Ontario to once again pay a bill they pay after every election, and this time the bill is again expensive. Ontario MPPs (Members of Provincial Parliament), and their parliamentary assistants, get large payouts in severance pay if a MPP is defeated in an election. This payout also applies if an MPP quits during his or her term in office. With 38 MPPs fired by the electorate this election, that bill comes to an estimate of $61 million dollars in departing money for those 38 Ontario MPPs. That includes approximately $67,000 for a parliamentary assistant with four years of time put in, and approximately $249,000 for a cabinet minister with eight years or more of time put in.

Depending on the circumstance of the employment ending, the average worker in Ontario is entitled to receive in severance pay a minimum 1 week pay, from 3 months to less than 1 year employment, to a maximum of 8 weeks pay, for 8 years or more of employment. The payouts to MPPs in severance pay is more than many people in Ontario earn each year working productive jobs. It gets even worse.

On April 11, 2016, [Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne] called Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown and NDP leader Andrea Horwath into her office to tell them about the legislative changes. Brown and Horwath were not happy that the initial draft of the changes had been drawn-up without their input, but all three party leaders were happy with the news that Wynne’s government would introduce a taxpayer-funded per-vote allowance for their parties (but not for almost all other registered political parties).

The new legislation banned contributions by corporations and unions. It dramatically reduced the annual contribution limit for individuals: from $9,975 to $1,200.00. It gave the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, NDP, and Greens (but not other parties) a per-vote subsidy: every ballot would now cost the taxpayer approximately $10 (even though the price of the ballot was already paid with the blood of Canadian soldiers), and all of that money would go only to the Liberals, NDP, PC, and Greens. Freedom Party and other parties were effectively excluded from the per-vote party subsidy.  The subsidy was described as a way to replace lost corporate, union, and individual voluntary contributions, but the subsidy was made so large that it pays those parties several times more than the maximum millions of dollars each party is permitted to spend in an election. It sets those parties up for several elections into the future, making it difficult for newly emerging parties to compete with them.

-  Freedom Party of Ontario's 2018 election platform

Ontario general election results and payouts for 2018.

PC Party of Ontario
Total votes: 2, 322, 422
Payment: $23, 224, 220

Ontario NDP
Total votes: 1, 925, 574
Payment: $19, 255, 740

Ontario Liberal Party
Total votes: 1, 123, 283
Payment: $11, 232, 830

Green Party of Ontario
Total votes: 263, 987
Payment: $2, 639, 870

Total: $56, 352, 660

Will the newly elected PC government in Ontario put a stop to this these unscrupulous payouts? Will the NDP, the Official Opposition in the Ontario Legislature, demand an end to it? Will any of the four parties in the Ontario Legislature (PC, NDP, Liberal, Green) even mention it? Why would they? They are all morally corrupt socialist parties.

Update: The Ontario government has ended the vote subsidy.

© Trevor Dailey

Toronto Sun: Voting out the Ontario Liberals didn't come cheap

Freedom Party of Ontario

Ontario: Termination of employment 

Elections Ontario

If one listens to the common voice, one may conclude the Liberals were the ones who lost in the 2018 Ontario general election. The Liberals were the ones who were trounced, falling from a majority government to a party without official party status in the Ontario Legislature, the greatest defeat in the Liberal Party’s history. The Liberals lost the election, but the Liberals did not lose.

The Progressive Conservative Party called itself a ’big tent party” during the election campaign, meaning all were welcome within the PC party; socialist Liberals, communist NDP, it did not matter, everyone was encouraged to join, and many did. Liberals joined the PC Party, and some even became PC candidates appointed by PC Party Leader Doug Ford himself. When the PC Party won the election, so did a portion of the Liberal Party. This was not done through infiltration, this was done by invitation. The PC Party is a socialist party, and socialist Liberal, and communist NDP, fit right in. All three major Ontario parties, PC, Liberal, and NDP are just branches of the same socialist party. One only needs to look at the Ontario Legislature to see more evidence of this.

During the 15 years the socialist Liberals were in power, the socialist PCs were the Official Opposition in the Ontario Legislature. That would be in name only because the PCs were of little genuine opposition to the Liberals. It was difficult for the PCs to oppose the socialist policies of the Liberal government when the PCs in opposition agreeed with almost all of them. What have the results of this latest election brought? The political Left NDP now sits as the official opposition in the Ontario Legislature. The political Right PC party sits as Ontario’s government.

By thunder! Katy, bar the door! The Left in Official Opposition and the Right in government in the Ontario Legislature! Tempers will flare! Shouting! Cursing! Furious arguments! Objects may be thrown! This could be the most rowdy Ontario Legislature ever! Wrong.

The PCs are not on the Right. The PCs are on the Left, along with the NDP, the Liberals, and the Greens. They all agree on every major policy. The PCs are socialists. The NDP are socialists. The Liberals are socialists. The Greens are socialists. The socialists won the election. Freedom and capitalism lost the election.

© Trevor Dailey

The 2018 Ontario general election is almost officially in the books. Of the four parties that now hold seats in the Ontario Legislature (PC Party of Ontario - 76, Ontario NDP - 40, Ontario Liberal Party - 7, Green Party of Ontario - 1) all are socialist parties. That means 98% of the total votes cast were for these socialist parties. All these parties have either similar or identical policies. There is no significant difference between any of them regarding main policies. Not one ever speaks of freedom or capitalism because they are all socialists.

The voters of Ontario wrongly think they voted for change by giving the former majority Liberal government a devastating loss, and voting in a majority PC government. Different captain, same ship, same course, same destination, same destruction. The truth is the Liberals did nothing they were not voted in to do. The problem is most people vote without knowing what they are voting for because they do not take the time and effort required to learn what they are voting for.

The PCs are just as bad as the Liberals. The professed alternative to the Liberals, the PCs will continue on with the anti-freedom and anti-capitalistic policies of the former Liberal government. The NDP is the worst of the four, a self-proclaimed communist party, and is now the Official Opposition in the Ontario Legislature. The Green Party is a socialist party supported by the socialist PC Party to take votes away from the socialist Liberal and communist NDP parties.

My party, Freedom Party, received a very disappointing 0.04% of the total vote. I will be voting Freedom Party again in the next election. The continued destruction of the province of Ontario will not be my fault.

Anyone can be fooled. The people who are the most easily fooled are usually the people who think they can not be fooled; and they often fool themselves.

© Trevor Dailey