Consternation In Ontario: A State Monopoly For The Sale Of Cannabis

In Ontario, an otherwise dynamic province, the government now seems to be the solution to almost every problem. As for small businesses, they can’t be trusted for anything.

What else can we conclude from the most recent decision of Kathleen Wynne’s government, announced last Friday, to create a state monopoly for the sale of cannabis instead of simply entrusting this task to the private sector through the mean of regulation?

Bureaucrats and unions must be very happy. This new task, led by the LCBO, will create 2,000 jobs for bureaucrats and generate the opening of 150 points of sale across the province.

As mentioned last week, when a member of the Parti Québécois had the same absurd idea, imagine the astronomical costs:

• To create a whole new bureaucracy to oversee this activity;

• To hire 2,000 unionized and well-paid bureaucrats to sell pot;

• To find locations, set-up and open 150 stores;

• To ensure the supply, negotiation and distribution of several varieties and types of cannabis;

• To set-up online sales, etc.

Why by all means couldn’t the private sector take care of all this, at its own expense?

And how can we not clearly see that the huge waste and costs generated by such inefficient bureaucracy will be passed on to consumers through higher prices that will NEVER be competitive with the black market.

The stubborness of Wynne’s government is such that we realize how deeply entrenched her agenda is towards big government and against small businesses, to the very detriment of taxpayers.

It is also a government that cultivates an overall contempt for the convenience store industry:

• Mediocre efforts to tackle contraband tobacco, with Ontario still having the highest contraband tobacco rates in the country;

• Extremely severe tobacco regulation and taxation;

• Allowed the sale of beer outside the Beer Stores but ONLY in a few hundred supermarkets, NOT in any convenience store;

• Imposed a $15 /hour minimum wage as of January 1, 2019.

The problem for us here, in Québec, is that Ontario is fast becoming a very bad influence. Its unbridled socialism fuels the most radical movements here – trade unions, leftist parties, small groups and others – towards their collective vision that always entails the limitation of individual freedoms, property rights and reduction of private sector to the benefit of the public one. It is a debilitating approach that has never worked and will never work, and yet they strive to reproduce it.

Isn’t this the definition of insanity according to Einstein? Always do the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result?