The big foreign-owned brewers shunned the Ontario Liberal Party’s major annual fundraising dinner as Premier Kathleen Wynne threatens to end the Beer Store’s private monopoly.

The Wednesday night event — where a table of 10 cost $15,500 this year — draws Toronto’s business elite ,with corporations snapping up tickets to hobnob with Wynne, her cabinet ministers, MPPs and advisers.

It’s unusual for the major brewers not to buy tables, taking part in a ritual that sees corporations flocking to a variety of Liberal, Progressive Conservative and Conservative fundraisers both federally and provincially to keep tabs on the country’s political masters.

“Molson-Coors will have a few folks there as guests, but we did not buy a table,” Gavin Thompson, head of corporate affairs for Molson-Coors Canada, said in an email before the event.

Labatt also did not buy a table and neither did the Beer Store, which declined comment.

One senior Liberal said he’s “not surprised” the foreign-owned brewers that run the Beer Store chain — Labatt, Molson-Coors and Sleeman — took a pass this year on the fundraiser that drew 1,800 people and earned $2.75 million in a cavernous ballroom at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

They’re very mad at us,” said the insider, noting Wynne’s planned changes for the sale of beer and wine in Ontario are expected in Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s spring budget.

“We need to address fairness issues in terms of accessibility for customers and for brewers across the province,” Wynne told reporters after her dinner speech.

‎As the Star revealed last December, in 2013 and 2014, the Beer Store, its foreign-based owners, and the union representing brewery workers donated more than $525,000‎ to the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, and New Democrats.

At the same time, MPPs from all three parties have held fundraisers in the downtown Toronto salons owned by Labatt and Molson. The venues and the beer were donated to the politicians by the big brewers.

The stakes are high with Ontario’s beer market worth $3 billion annually and public pressure increasing for a more consumer-friendly system of selling beverage alcohol, which has already seen Wynne allow sales of Ontario wine in farmers’ markets.

The premier said she wants more access for Ontario-based craft brewers — whose products are increasingly popular and eating into sales of mainstream beers — to the shelves the Beer Store’s 448 outlets and suggested a “franchise fee,” or royalty, be paid to the government.

“To build as we must, we need to find new dollars,” said Wynne, whose government has pledged to build more public transit while slaying a ‎$12.5 billion deficit before the next election in 2018.

“We are looking at recycling provincial assets . . . whether it is our alcohol distribution system or Hydro One,” she added, in a nod to the possibility of selling a piece of the electricity distribution company.

“I can’t give you numbers right now because we don’t have them. That’s just being worked out.”

The premier has said beer and wine could be sold in larger supermarkets, such as Loblaws, and big-box retailers like Costco, which would increase sales and revenues to the government.

Executives from Loblaw, which sells beer and wine at its stores in Alberta and Quebec, sat at a table with their Shoppers Drug Mart subsidiary at the fundraiser, where guests dined on Ontario beef tenderloin with mushrooms and bartenders served a mix of craft and mainstream beers including Steam Whistle, Budweiser and Miller.

The “franchise fee” was first suggested by former TD Bank chief executive Ed Clark, a trusted Wynne adviser who headed an expert panel reviewing ways to maximize the value of Ontario’s assets as the province struggles to eliminate a $12.5-billion deficit by 2018.

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That fee would compensate the government, and in turn the taxpayers, for the value inherent in the private monopoly held by the Beer Store, whose outlets sell about 80 per cent of Ontario’s beer under a 14-year-old secret agreement — first uncovered by the Star Queen’s Park columnist Martin Regg Cohn — with the province and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

The other 20 per cent of sales are through hundreds of LCBO stores, which are now limited to selling single cans and bottles and six-packs – not cases of 12 and 24. Clark recommended the LBCO be allowed to being selling 12-packs.

But the Beer Store balked at the franchise fee, saying it would result in increased costs for beer drinkers and announced reforms making it easier and cheaper for craft beers to sell through Beer Stores – a move many craft brewers dismissed as too little, too late.

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