LCBO

In the course of our first day in Ontario, we found out that, in the main, one cannot buy booze in the supermarkets and one cannot buy booze in convenience stores. If you want booze, you go to a bar or a restaurant (nearly all those that we visited had booze), a wine grower at home or a wine grower in a shop or a shop run by the LCBO (see reference 1).

The shops run by the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) seem to account for a large proportion of the booze sold for consumption at home or on picnics and their web site is an interesting cross between the web sites operated by the big brand drinks and those operated by people who sell things, like Waitrose. The one nearest us was that at Rideau and King Edward (http://lcbosearch.com/stores/38-rideau-and-king-edward). This was quite a large shop, a lot bigger than the average off-license with us (not that there are that many of them left these days), with the ground floor offering the every-day-value stuff and the basement offering the taste-the-difference stuff, all of it being presented in tasteful wooden cabinets of the sort which you only get our fancier outlets, for example Laithwaites. Downstairs there was a good range of wine, a similar range to that you might get in, for example, Waitrose, but with the big difference that there was a lot of wine from Ontario itself. The wine we tried from Ontario was fine. One day, for example, we took a 2012 Riesling from Burning Kiln called Horse & Boat, a take on the former tobacco fields on which the grapes involved were grown, the boat being the contraption which the horse dragged between the rows of tobacco during the harvest. Is there an opportunity for enterprise here, to import the stuff from Ontario to the UK?

Much better selection of wine than spirits. I did not see, for example, much in the way of Irish whisky, despite the number of plastic paddy pubs in the area and despite the big Irish contingent in Ottawa, indeed in Ontario and Canada more generally.

We thought that LCBO was a good way of doing things, keeping the booze out, in large part, of the supermarkets and convenience stores. Booze was much less visible and much less available to children than it is with us. There was less booze on the streets. A model one might usefully extend to the sale of recreational drugs (perhaps from the already mentioned people at http://www.tweed.com/).

Then I learned this morning that all this came about because Canada went through a milder version of the prohibition of the US in the first part of the twentieth century. I leave as an exercise for readers the comparison of the two articles on the subject to be found at references 2 and 3. Are there any differences of fact? Are the articles intended for different audiences? Compare and contrast generally.

Reference 2, the government site, reminded me of the US site at http://www.dp.la/, a perhaps similar if rather larger operation, although the Canadian site was much less ambitious and was correspondingly easier to use. At least it was a competitor for wikipedia, this last being in danger, to my mind, of getting too big for its boots. Going forward, will the wikipedians be able to manage their success without spoiling what they have got now?

Three other points of interest. First, Quebec was very strong against prohibition. Second, near-neighbouring Prince Edward Island (of Green Gables fame) was very strong for it, being the first place to introduce full blooded prohibition and the last to repeal it. Third, the federal booze referendum of 1898 was narrowly won by the prohibitionists, but the government of the day decided that a bigger majority, more of a consensus was needed for such drastic action. Another lesson which we, with our first past the post style of doing business, might usefully learn here.

Reference 1: http://www.lcbo.com/content/lcbo/en.html#.VFsYNvmsUhY.

Reference 2:http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/prohibition/.

Reference 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Canada.