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Each kind of alcohol has its own rules. Beer has one set, wine another, apple cider a third, hard liquor a fourth. At the moment, the Liberal government likes artisanal alcohol in general: little breweries, wineries, cideries and distillers create jobs in rural areas and boost tourism, they’re hip and they have a dash of back-to-the-land romance. They buy local produce, too: “grain to glass” is the mantra for craft distillers, like “field to table” for locavore cooking. Cideries are really big on Ontario apples.

But the government worries about people drinking too much, so it controls the distribution of alcohol tightly. The government also really likes money, so it taxes the hell out of the stuff.

Microdistilleries are a new (or at least newly revived) industry. Having been around three years, North of 7 is the third-oldest member of the province’s craft distillers’ association, Lipin said. The government doesn’t seem to know what to do with them.

The specific thing that brought us to where we are is a 61.5-per-cent sales tax on hard liquor. Hardly any startup could get a new product out the door, whatever it is, having to pay a 61.5-per-cent tax on it.

Beer and wine are taxed by the litre, like the flat taxes on gasoline. The hard-liquor tax is a percentage: if your product is really good and you can charge more for it, the government gets more. Plus there’s a small per-litre tax anyway, and the usual bottle deposit.

What other alcohol-producing provinces do is charge little to no tax on the first several thousand litres a boozery makes but increase the tax rate as sales rise, so the closer you get to competing with Diageo, the more like Diageo you’re treated. Ontario has a version of that for beer, with a tax regime that distinguishes between microbreweries and macrobreweries. Distillers were expecting their own version in legislation last fall but didn’t get it. The government slightly lowered the tax on liquor sold at distillers’ own counters but the basics stayed in place.