How to account for Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s obsession with alcohol?

In its April 8 budget, the Ford government proposed extending serving hours for bars and even golf courses to 9 a.m. It called for importing the U.S. practice of binge-drinking, tailgate parties outside sports venues. Ford would authorize municipalities to allow drinking in public parks. The budget would cut beer prices at legion halls.

That’s a partial list of Ford’s liquor liberalizations. The premier had already scrapped a scheduled, routine increase in the beer tax.

That same budget calls for the sale of beer in more than 10,000 convenience stores (or “C-stores”), big-box outlets and supermarkets.

That would more than quintuple the number of outlets selling beer and wine in Ontario, if all of the province’s 9,000 convenience stores begin stocking six-packs of Moosehead.

Ford himself is not a drinker. Opposition MPPs at Queen’s Park are puzzled by the Ford government’s fixation with booze. Recall that Ford first arrived in office heralding “buck-a-beer,” having cut the minimum price at which beer can be sold by 25 cents. Talk of booze has pushed other concerns to the sidelines ever since.

We’ll try to unravel that mystery further down.

What matters is that additional expansion of alcohol availability is a bad idea. It was a mistake when the Wynne government embraced it in 2015. And it’s morphing into something worse as Ford doubles down on one of the Grits’ most ill-advised policies.

Let’s take the points against a further expansion of beer and wine retailing one by one:

* Booze is already abundantly available. There are more liquor outlets in this province than Tim Hortons stores. The number of outlets has jumped 23 per cent over the past five years, to 2,332 stores, a growth rate far exceeding that of Ontario’s population and average household income.

Few retailers can match the ubiquity of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), which has saturated the province with more than twice as many outlets as McDonald’s. Yet the LCBO accounts for just half of all stores selling beverage alcohol in Ontario. The Beer Store, with its additional 450 outlets, is within hailing distance of McDonald’s total Ontario store count.

The LCBO also makes more than 5,000 products available on its new mobile app, which is ubiquity squared. And it offers next-day delivery.

* A money-loser for Ontarians.

It’s well-known that Ontario taxpayers could be on the hook for as much as $1 billion in compensation to The Beer Store if the provincial government goes ahead and violates a 2015 contract with The Beer Store that limits the number of beer retailers in Ontario.

A further penalty to Ontarians is a likely reduction in the LCBO’s annual dividend to the Ontario treasury, which was $2.1 billion last year.

Beer and wine are slow-growth industries. Which means that any market share captured by C-stores will come at the expense of the LCBO and other incumbents, including the on-site stores that help support Ontario’s wineries and craft brewers.

Assume that the LCBO loses just 5 per cent of its revenues to thousands of corner stores. That would reduce the LCBO’s dividend to Ontario by about $100 million a year.

* No real increase in consumer choice. Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli’s rationale for expanded sales is “consumer choice and convenience.”

But don’t look to corner stores for choice.

Convenience stores will not stock pricey wine and beer imports, premium-priced domestic products, or Ontario wines and craft brews.

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C-stores will carry plonk and the foreign-owned beer brands Blue, Export and Coors. Those are high-volume, low-priced goods with low inventory costs.

Small-batch Ontario wines and craft beers target niche audiences and command higher-than-average prices. Such costly inventory is not a paying proposition for corner-store operators, who carry just one brand of milk, margarine and facial tissue.

By contrast, the LCBO heavily promotes Ontario wine and beer. It does so as a matter of public policy, fostering small businesses in the province. And award-winning Ontario wine and craft beers are a growing profit centre for the LCBO.

* Social harms. On making alcohol even more available for purchase and consumption, Fedeli has said it’s time for government “to treat people like responsible adults.”

It is patronizing to say otherwise, of course. But an estimated 1.3 million Canadians are alcoholics. More than 600,000 Canadian children live with at least one alcoholic parent.

The annual cost of alcohol abuse in Canada has been estimated at $14.6 billion, or $463 per Canadian. That’s far higher than the health care, law enforcement and lost productivity costs from drug abuse ($262 per Canadian).

Countless international studies have shown that reducing the cost of booze and making it more available increases the incidence of social harms. A study published last month shows a startling increase in alcohol-related Ontario emergency-department visits in the two years after the Wynne government’s liquor liberalizations.

“We’ve lost sight of the fact that continued high rates of problematic alcohol consumption are leading to a wide range of harms,” Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief health officer, warned in her latest annual report. “More needs to be done to de-normalize alcohol in Canada.” The Ford agenda puts Sam Bronfman’s legacy to shame in normalizing booze.

* Hidden agenda. Cheap populism is most often given as the political rationale for Ford’s alcohol push.

But it’s just as likely that the Tories are embarked on a gradual backdoor privatization of the LCBO, a gambit they scrapped in the Mike Harris era for lack of public support.

Ford is taken with the experiment in liquor-sales privatization in Alberta, from which Ford recruited the “booze czar” now spearheading the Ontario effort to push more beverage alcohol sales into the private sector. But the Alberta model, yielding mixed results after many years of existence, has yet to be copied by a single province.

Again, Ford is not a drinker. But he is an ardent businessman, with a Rotarian’s faith in the curative powers of the private sector. Ford is also attempting a partial privatization of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., trying to make online gambling a lightly regulated private-sector preserve.

Responsible adults that we are, Ontarians are unlikely to get snoggered on the first tee at Glen Abbey at the crack of dawn. We can’t afford the greens fees. But with our conduct at the back end of a Ford F-150 pickup outside BMO Field, there’s no telling, in a social experiment that is bound to prove costly.

Twitter: @TheGrtRecession

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