#LCBO

[wine-picks]

🇮🇹 🍷 TGIF! Enjoying this delicious 2022 San Marzano Talò Primitivo di Manduria (89 pts, $20) from Puglia. Arrived in LCBO VINTAGES last weekend. Great buy! Full review: https://rebrand.ly/b7k98c9

[newsfromstolenland]

Ontario's primary liquor retailer says it will not be opening some stores during the ongoing strike, walking back its initial plan to reopen select locations with limited hours, starting Friday.

In a statement posted on its website Sunday, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) said it will be "re-allocating the personnel that were planned to open LCBO retail stores for in-store shopping" to online retail sales operations.

"This pivot means that we will be able to improve how we serve Ontario bars and restaurants to help increase product selection, availability, and expedited delivery," its statement reads, adding that more details will be shared directly with its customers."

This means LCBO retail stores will no longer be open for the duration of the strike."

The company previously said it would open 32 locations for limited hours after 14 days of a strike.

Roughly 9,000 unionized workers with the LCBO began strike action more than a week ago. The Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), which represents the striking workers, has called for the provincial government to either reconsider that part of its plans for privatized booze sales or make the LCBO whole for lost revenue.

As of Friday, talks between the workers' union and the LCBO have broken off completely, with no end to the strike in sight.

Full article

Tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Whispers of dissatisfaction are echoing through the aisles of bottles and cans that fill Ontario’s liquor stores.

On Saturday, unionized staff who run the province’s alcohol stores rallied at a downtown Toronto location, calling for wage increases and the introduction of more full-time jobs.

At the heart of their concern is the question of revised wages for the past several years.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[bryanharryrombough]

We see the writing on the wall under Ford's plan. We could lose thousands, thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in public revenues

[ishomoogoo]

Just so the Ontario ppl know, the LCBO stores are on strike. I just wanted to use this space to explain why. My brother works there and has given me the deets, and I already know the radio stations are getting the reasons for the strike wrong/ are being assholes about it.

YES. Doug Ford's decision to let convenience stores sell liquor is PART of the reason.

NO. It's not the only reason, and not JUST about job security.

There were a LOT of reasons for this strike, and if Doug Ford walked back on his decision, it likely still would have happened.

Let's start with the Doug Ford reason.

Yes, this could take away a lot of GOVERNMENT union jobs away. Including all those people's good benefits. You know what it would also take away? Money that goes back into the community.

LCBO is government run, which means non-profit. All the profit gets pumped back into the community via infrastructure, schools, and healthcare. And Ford WANTS to take that away.

I don't know about you, but I work in construction, and that money helps to pay my bills too.

Now, let's talk the other reason.

Benefits. They're fighting for better benefits for casual workers, which is below part-time workers on the seniority list.

It is also the main workforce in all stores. That person checking you at the till? Casual. Item stocker? Casual. That person helping you with your selection? Casual.

My brother? Casual. He's been working with them for years, and only this last holiday season got promoted from a temp. He's autistic, and this is the happiest he's been since joining the workforce. He NEEDS this job and their benefits.

And this strike could get him that.

They rarely promote to full time, and the only part timer in his location is a NEPOTISM hire.

This strike was going to happen no matter what, and all I can do is beg you to respect it.

I understand that people like their booze and use it to help them relax after a stressful day. But PLEASE this about why this is happening and direct your anger at the correct people.

[boyingray]

fun fact for ppl in ontario: 70% of lcbo workers are casual and don't have benefits or job security

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"After beverage rooms opened in Ontario in 1934, the Board followed up with the further regulatory conditions concerning dancing and "ladies nights." The "ladies and escorts" sections "typically took up half of the beverage-room area, had their own entrances and washroooms,  and were heavily patronized from the beginning."

Even so, the very presence of women within drinking establishments in combination with unmarried men prompted a moral outcry against the potential impropriety inspired by this mixed drinking  within the male beverage rooms. In response in 1937 the LCBO drafted beverage regulations requiring licensed establishments to have "two separate and distinct beverage rooms one for men only, and the other solely for women, except where attended by bona fide escorts.” (Globe and Mail, 1937)

This regulation also applied to female servers, who contested their restriction from serving liquor within the "men only" beverage room. In repeated communications the Board stressed its strong opposition against women servers, denying women the right to work within these establishments even if they owned them or were wives of the owners. In 1944 the Board partially yielded on the matter, explaining to authority holders that they could "make use of females as waitresses in the Ladies' and Escorts' beverage room ONLY" (LCBO 1944). LCBO policy required that "authority holders desiring this privilege" within the Ladies and Escorts room to have female servers working "must make application to the Board as well as submit a medical certificate covering the proposed employee and indicating that she is free from disease" (ibid.). Having these women in male beverage rooms apparently "raised fears about prostitution, immorality and venereal disease" within anti-beverage room discourses (Marquis 2004:316; Globe 1934b; Ontario Provincial Council of Women 1944). Male servers, in contrast, were not held to this medical standard. The transfer of principle, then, was based not on exclusion, but instead on inclusionary segmentation of the space in which alcohol circulated. It continued in Ontario until the responsibility of controlling these establishments was shifted away from the LCBO and the opening of mixed "Cocktail Lounges" targeted a more temperate middle-class clientele in 1947 (Marquis 2004: 317).

Women could, of course, drink within their homes. Yet in the Board's early years even there some female drinkers who were the subject of gossip and public criticism, On the LCBO's opening day in 1927 the Globe reported on women purchasers as if they were spectacles for public consumption. Articles were critical of women who "wheeled baby carriages" when making their purchases, or of women who were assertive of their right to drink openly and questioning their ability to both drink and be effective mothers (Globe 1927h). Moreover, discourses surrounding alcoholism and motherhood in the late 1930s expressed fears over a scientifically underdeveloped and fear-based understanding of what would later become known as fetal alcohol syndrome. At a WCTU convention in 1937 a speaker expressed “science claims that alcoholic mothers give to the world either a prostitute or a delinquent, when she does not give an epileptic, an idiot or a lunatic.”

During the Board's early years many women also avoided taking out a permit of their own for fear of being stigmatized - a tendency that again increased the degree to which female gender performances concerning alcohol were mediated by male figures within their lives. When it came to Board policy, the identity of women's husbands or fathers was integrated into the purchase process: the occupations and sometimes names of these men were included on female permits, acting as the lenses through which cases of misspending and overindulgence were viewed.

Unlike men's clubs and legions, which had no trouble obtaining licenses and served as a means by which men could resist Board control over their drinking spaces, women's clubs were denied this privilege…this "issue blew up first in 1935 when the Germaine Club, which had always had a mixed membership, was ordered to stop serving beer to women." The Board held firm to its decision. It disallowed not only women in uniform from drinking but also the gender-exclusive woman's auxiliary equivalents of male clubs."

- Gary Genosko and Scott Thompson, Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO 1927–1975. Winnipeg and Halifax: Fernwood Press, 2009. p. 152-153

[stiwfssr]

In most of Canada, hard liquor is sold exclusively through government entities rather than private companies. These government storefronts are known as the "Liquor Control Board of [province name]". The Liquor Control Board of Ontario had been on strike for the last three or so weeks, but their union prevailed and the stores re-opened today -- to the benefit of my evening plans.

Thus the haggard-looking gif. It is from Trailer Park Boys, season 2, episode 1. Ricky and Julian have just been released from jail and Bubbles asks them, "So what's the plan, boys?" The gif depicts the following scene in its entirety.

I have spent the last few days near the elderly and a rotary phone and that exposure may have influenced my current interest in the aesthetics of old technology -- VCR-quality video and the like. So I made this gif.

I love how scuffed gifs used to be by necessity and I have wanted (and tried) to perpetuate that art-form born of low bandwidth.

I am drunk from the liquor for the first time in three or so weeks and thinking about art.

[babakca]

LCBO  Theft Prevention people arresting a alleged shoplifter  - Bloor West Village. June 2023  

[williamnadeaurhn]

From grape vine to the glass!

January 2024

[teledyn]

In the local LCBO last week they played an entire side of Jimi Hendrix as muzak.

[procurement-insights]

Who Did "AI Pick" As The Best Solution Provider For LCBO?

Why did ChatGPT select this solution provider as the best for LCBO?

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s post was orginally going to be a follow-up to yesterday’s post AI Tells Us How Five Solution Providers’ AI Can Help The LCBO During A Rail Strike. However, based on a question I received in the the corresponding LinkedIn discussion stream, we are going to go in a different direction today? You should use the previous link to join what is a very energized and insightful…

[foreverbeauties420]

Big Life Lesson: If the LCBO wants to go on strike they can 😂😞🙈

[boyingray]

lcbo stores make $2.5 billion in profit for ontario yearly. that money gets fed back in to support the public education and healthcare for the province. and yet doug ford is trying to give all that away.

it is suspected that privatising liquor sales in ontario will take millions of dollars away from the public. all other sources of liquor sales (licensed venues, grocery stores, lcbo outlets, the beer store, and duty free) make nowhere near as much.

ford claims that his government's plan to expand liquor sales will expand the lcbo's revenue as a wholesaler. this is a statement he has been unable to back up. currently, with the lcbo being both wholesaler and retail, it makes more to give back to the government.

currently, grocery stores are required to sell at the same prices the lcbo does. with planned reforms, this will change. either way, the province won't see much of it.

not to mention, taxes. a common (mis)perception is that the government makes most of its money from alcohol from taxation. the amount made in hst is half of what is brought in from store profits – around $1.86 billion.

tl;dr? doug ford's plan to privatise liquor sales in ontario will not benefit the province. it will be to the detriment of ontarians. most money is made from lcbo storefronts.

don't believe me, the union, or the thousands of workers? read the news

[drinkbangarang]

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[if-you-fan-a-fire]

THE IMPACT OF CLASSIFICATION

"First-hand accounts and First Nations historical texts describe how the Indian/Interdiction classification was detrimental to First Nations communities across the province. As the historian Brian Maracle (1993: 44-45) writes:

The law didn't stop or prevent Indians from drinking, but it did change the way they drank for the worse. Since Indians were forbidden to buy liquor, they frequently resorted to drinking other far more dangerous intoxicants. More ominously, Indians also had to guzzle their beer, wine or liquor as quickly as possible to keep from being arrested.

A man from Sioux Lookout told the Ontario Legislature's Select Committee on Indian Affairs that the source of Indian drinking behaviours was the differential treatment created by the classification system, arguing that ""Fire water' has been coming in ever since" the First Nations prohibition was put in place, "and we are not able to stop it."

Would [First Nations people] not feel better if they could go in the front door like men rather than creep like thieves to get liquor from bootleggers? They go to a bootlegger and pay $5 and $10 for home brew, poisonous stuff. A few drinks of it will make you crazy, but you have held the Indians down so that they have to do that. (Ontario 1953: 521-22)

Prohibition on the reserves supported bootlegging and turned drinking into hide-and-seek contests, as many chiefs have pointed out. It thus intensified and distorted First Nations consumption and heightened cultural associations of alcoholic behaviour with Indians. This was true especially in the regional centres of Northern Ontario and for people who came there from smaller, remote communities. Once in these centres, First Nations people from remote reserves were also more likely to be classified as fitting the prototype. As an Indian of Kenora noted:

I have been placed in jail here in Kenora when I was sober. And I was jailed for one week. My charge was being drunk on the streets. I hadn't had a drink" (Ontario 1953: 92).

It was, then, not only liquor that determined high-risk and related behaviours. "Indianness" also played a vital role: the classification system overrode reality by collapsing any difference. In one case a judge explained that distinguishing between an Indian and a drunk required an expert eye:

As to his manner of walking we have only the last witness for the crown, who only knew [the "Indian"] for three months, and I don't think he is in a position to judge. We do know, I think, that Indians I have seen at Kamsack very often are not particularly soldierly in their bearing. (Richards v. Cote [1962] 40 W.W.R. 340)

Even an informal apprehension of gait could be attached to the prototype and help smooth the convergence between category and reality. To this day in Northern Ontario remote small-town LCBO outlets located near reserves are flashpoints for racial tensions as Band members walk into town. Meanwhile bootleggers stock up on booze for resale to alcohol-free reserves further afield. More recently in some Northern communities, bootlegging has been displaced by the resale trade in prescription drugs.

The conjoining of the "Indian" and "drunkard" prototypes was so strong that supposed racial aspects of being Indian attached themselves to non-Indian alcohol abusers. The Interdiction or "Indian List" became culturally conceptualized as exclusively containing the names of First Nations peoples. Some white people thought that they couldn't possibly be put on the Interdiction List or be labelled alcoholics simply because they were Caucasian (LCBO Interdiction List: File no. 3). As Valverde explains

The largely impoverished and largely rural Ontarians of various European backgrounds who sought interdiction for their relatives in effect turned the alcoholic relatives into symbolic Indians.

Further, this symbolic redefinition could have extra-symbolic effects. A listed person was also conceptually an "Indian," and individuals added to the list saw the same loss of legal rights as those legally defined as Indians or Non-Treaty Indians. Under the Liquor Control Act their homes and private property could be, to use an intentionally ugly term, "reservationized" by means of conversion into a public place: the possession of alcohol would no longer be allowed within them and police would no longer be required to have search warrants to enter them. It is per ashaps no accident that Indians were very familiar with lists because they were accustomed to the membership politics of Band Lists and the registration processes of the Indian Registry (see Imai 1998: 26ff; Reiter 1991: 120).

As a means of addressing the "drunken Indian" stereotype, First Nations groups such as the Aboriginal Health Organization and others sought to re-develop the sense of First Nations identity and understanding that predated alcohol-summarized by the phrase "Drinking is not Indian (Aboriginal Health Organization cited in Campbell 2008: 118; see also Warry 1998: 139). This reconceptualization was introduced as a means of dealing with alcohol abuse and of breaking alcohol’s link in the construction and conceptualization of First Nations cultural and personal identities. Although this link between accepted discourses and alcohol abuse requires further investigation and substantiation, it nonetheless provides support for our theoretical understanding of classification and convergence. This finding parallels what others have discovered about the legal constructions of First Nations women as "bad mothers" - another area in which the ideology of motherhood, underwritten by assumptions about the race, class, and gender of First Nations women, converges with the punitive interests of child welfare law.

- Gary Genosko and Scott Thompson, Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO 1927–1975. Winnipeg and Halifax: Fernwood Press, 2009. p. 185-186.