Liquor in Ontario plus other letters, July 14: ‘Ontario residents should separate the need for enhancing existing LCBO operations from Doug Ford’s desire to pad the pockets of private business’A person walks past shelves of bottles of alcohol on display at an LCBO in Ottawa on March 19, 2020.: “More accessible booze is hard to fight against, especially when we now have weed shops on every corner.”
Ontario residents should separate the need for enhancing existing LCBO operations from Doug Ford’s desire to pad the pockets of private business. Is LCBO management working to maximize benefits to Ontario residents, or are they working for Mr. Ford? Keep me as a “shareholder” of LCBO stores. I think I am not alone, although I may be part of an endangered speciesBob Nixon, as what was then called the treasurer of Ontario, used to drolly respond in private whenever the issue of selling the LCBO came up. Like so: “Well, sure, I’d do that tomorrow when somebody tells me where I can find the billion dollars a year the province would lose.” This year that number will approach $3-billion.
As harm-reduction advocate Euan Thomson recently noted in his own response to this op ed, “We are not in an ‘addiction crisis,’ we are in a mass poisoning that is not addressable through conventional treatment.” Not to mention that conventional treatment can be a Wild West of unregulated programs, with little in the way of evaluation and accountability.
: I had been to the Deutsches Museum in Munich in the 1950s, when I was a diplomat at the Canadian embassy in Belgrade. I had come away impressed with the hordes of schoolchildren working on the museum’s interactive exhibits, and obviously preparing themselves to contribute to the dynamism of the West German economy.
I admired the innovation and ingenuity of the concept when we took our four sons for a first visit. The architecture and creative design in a ravine is extraordinary, a harbinger of what is inside.