Do you know where your teenage children are?

Be afraid, very afraid. Better hope they never ever hang out at your local convenience store, lest they be plied with alcohol — and parted from their money.

That’s the dark message from a new media blitz bankrolled by The Beer Store. Perhaps you’ve seen the ad campaign on TV, in which our foreign-owned beer monopolist maligns Ontario’s family-owned small businesses?

One commercial shows a posse of fresh-faced boys buying booze in a cramped convenience store: “Have fun tonight, boys,” the unsavory proprietor chuckles ominously as he takes their cash.

By way of contrast, another ad introduces the wholesome manager of a local Beer Store who boasts of always checking IDs. “It’s just the right thing to do,” he intones.

The multi-million-dollar media buy is backed by a “Beer Facts” propaganda pitch that attacks from every angle. Using robocalls, the Beer Store is sweet-talking beer drinkers by telephone. In-store brochures and online appeals warn of price hikes if its monopoly is diluted.

You get the idea. Without The Beer Store safeguarding our money and morality, we’d pay a heavy price.

Our children would not only be served underage, but overcharged. Not just turned into hosers, but hosed at the cash register.

So goes the double-barrelled storyline. But on social media, the campaign has been mocked as cheesy and sleazy. It’s foolishly evocative of a David and Goliath narrative, with foreign-owned brewing monoliths moralizing us — and demonizing rivals.

The Beer Store ads hammer us with two-by-fours to protect its monopoly on two-fours. Let’s unpack the case it’s making on TV.

Opposition Leader Tim Hudak is threatening to liberalize our beer sales if he wins power. Ahead of a possible spring election, the Beer Store wants to turn public opinion against the Progressive Conservative plan by sowing fears of a monopoly-free future.

The strategy is deflection. Seen as the big bad Beer Store, it’s trying to make a bigger bogeyman of convenience stores — corruptors of our youth, fleecers of the common man.

The first allegation, about underage drinking, is the weakest.

Why fear corner stores if they have a proven track record of enforcing age restrictions when selling tobacco — unless our public-spirited beer monopoly wants to take over cigarette sales too? This is pure scaremongering, a diversionary tactic to occupy the moral high ground from which to fight a bigger battle on pricing.

The president of Ontario’s beer monopoly, Ted Moroz, cites higher prices in Quebec’s depanneurs as proof of what’s ahead if our own convenience stores get a piece of the action.

Boasting that Ontario has a “world-class beer retailing system,” Moroz warns against dismantling his monopoly. “Prices will go up — make no mistake,” he cautioned in a February speech to our business elite that targeted family businesses.

The Beer Store is making a straw man of mom-and-pop corner stores. But they are a mere side show — phantom enemies in Moroz’s phony war.

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Ontarians don’t need a propaganda campaign to tell them what they already know: corner stores don’t really compete on price — whether bottles of cooking oil or beer — because their unique selling point is convenience.

The real threat to our creaky monopoly comes from the likes of Loblaws and Costco, not Mac’s and other milk stores. Moroz knows that Big Box stores would eat The Beer Store’s lunch, because they have economies of scale and marketing savvy.

Let’s remember what The Beer Store is (a foreign-owned quasi-monopoly) and isn’t (a government operation). Unlike the LCBO, it has been privately-held since 1927.

(Its only significant retail competition comes from the LCBO, which has a mere 20 per cent share of the beer market largely because it abides by a voluntary agreement to sell only six-packs. Goodness knows why the government goes along with this.)

More recently, its domestic owners — Labatt, Molson and Sleeman — have been swallowed up by multinationals based in Belgium and Brazil (Anheuser-Busch Inbev), the U.S. (Molson Coors) and Japan (Sapporo). Moroz argues it still keeps distribution costs low, thanks to a unified fleet of trucks that avoids duplication.

But what monopolists dismiss as duplication, others call competition. Despite Moroz’s claims, it’s not so much a co-op as a cartel — with Communist-style prohibitions on consumer choice.

What is to be done with our Stalinist-era monopoly, frozen in a 1950s time warp? It needn’t be sold off or privatized, because it’s already privately held. All the government need do is remove the outdated laws that prevent other retailers from competing.

The Beer Store needn’t disappear. There might still be a market for no-nonsense beer drinkers who like buying boxes in bulk off a conveyer belt instead of browsing for new brands in a modern setting.

Would prices rise or fall? Depends on where you shop (North Korea being a persistent exception to this rule).

No one is promising prices would plummet. But retail markups should be determined by free markets — not safeguarded by foreign monopolies.

Liberating our beer isn’t about lowering prices or corrupting youth. It’s about allowing consumers to choose from among competing retailers.

Ignore the smokescreens, straw men and scare tactics. No amount of Beer Store propaganda about selling suds should brainwash our beer drinkers or belittle our corner stores.