To All the Booze Who’ve Loved Beer Store

June 19, 2024·40 min·2 clips

Ford is asked four times whether he will commit to the June 2026 election date and refuses every time, leaving the door open to an early election.

Jesse Brown arrives first. The cold open is a Canadaland crowdfunding appeal, so the first moments may sound like membership copy before the politics kicks in. Then the booze file walks in. The main thread follows the PC push for beer in convenience stores, with the master framework agreement sitting in the room like procedural furniture nobody can move. Contracts are the hinge. One host keeps circling the same problem: if the government says it stands for contracts, it has to explain why those contracts become optional when the politics gets awkward. The principle gets messy fast. The conversation reaches back to bills that protected the PCs from lawsuits and to wind farm contracts cancelled soon after they took office. Prince Edward County comes up. So do 750 other green energy projects, plus the earlier promise that taxpayers would not be stuck with the bill. The punchline is dry enough to squeak. By the account read into the episode, that promise did not hold. Power gets handled with some care here. The claim is not that governments should always lose to companies. It is that selective respect for contracts can become very useful, very quickly. Then the trail goes quiet for a while. After the late 2019 era bill seemed to fade, the convenience-store plan stayed alive without much public motion until the 2022 election frame. Highway 413 wanders through the memory too. That aside fits the show's habit of letting one policy file bump into another before it gets back to the alcohol timeline. And the timeline is the tell. By the hosts' reconstruction, the government seemed to wait out the agreement until the end of 2025, then move toward beer in convenience stores at the beginning of 2026.

As heard by us

A sharp Ontario politics read on beer retail, contract power, and the Ford government's convenience-store promise.

Wag the Doug turns Ontario's beer retail fight into a story about contracts, cabinet power, and the Ford government's taste for convenience politics.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the beer-store politics, not just the punchline.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Wag the Doug