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Likewise, the recent Artisan challenge, if successful, would benefit three Quebec brewers that receive Quebec tax subsidies exclusive to Quebec craft brewers.

Meanwhile, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall protests that Saskatoon’s Great Western Brewery will lose $6 million per year in Alberta subsidies, paid for by Albertans, while also arguing that such barriers to inter-provincial beer trade will increase costs for Alberta consumers.

The hypocrisy — or the perverse outcomes — should be no surprise given the lucrative funding. Consider Alberta’s original small brewer policy, intended to help small players compete against industry giants by providing tax relief on the first 200,000 hectolitres of beer sold in Alberta. Rather than promoting craft brewing, larger regional brewers used the generous tax breaks to heavily cut prices of low-end discount beer.

Minhas Craft Brewery, based in Wisconsin and America’s ninth-largest brewer, was the single biggest beneficiary, receiving an estimated annual tax break of more than $10 million. Small brewers based in the U.S., Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan also benefitted from Alberta’s wrong-headed subsidy, designed to comply with the international and inter-provincial trade agreements by providing the same domestic tax breaks to all small brewers.

As Premier Wall rails on about hardship for Albertans, his own beer tax policy is even harder on them

The Canada-U.S. beer trade war of the early 1990s established the rule that “beer is beer is beer” — if a small local brewer is taxed at a lower rate, all out-of-province and out-of-country brewers are entitled to the same low tax rate. If provinces want to encourage domestic craft brewing, they should not use discriminatory taxation as an economic development tool. The implication is that to give a lower tax rate to tiny Canmore, Alta.-based Grizzly Paw Brewing Company, one would also have to give the identical break to brewing titan SABMiller selling its beer into Alberta out of the United Kingdom.