Ford makes good on promise of beer and wine in corner stores

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Heading home from work in Montreal, I used to stop off at my local convenience store and pick up some beer or wine for the night. That’s been illegal in Ontario until now, and as the province joins much of the civilized world, Premier Doug Ford is being accused of putting people’s health at risk.

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Alcohol, they say, is dangerous and not something that the people should be trusted with.

Of course, the same people saying that alcohol sales should not be expanded support handing out opioid pills under so-called safe supply and advocate for masking against COVID-19 now. If you think I’m crazy, then you haven’t met a doctor you may think is crazy named Raghu Venugopal, an emergency room doctor at Toronto’s University Health Network.

Venugopal has advocated strongly on social media and elsewhere that allowing beer and wine in convenience stores will overwhelm the health system.

“Alcohol ‘is the all-time, undisputed champion of death, destruction and social harms in the emergency department’ and Ontario signed up for an extra tutorial on this lesson,” Venugopal recently posted to X.

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This same doctor has used his social media platforms to rail against the Ford government’s decision to close injection sites and so-called “safe supply” locations within 200 metres of schools. The locations have been hubs for crime, ands overdose deaths have doubled since they opened.

There is no push for addiction treatment, but activists, or doctors like Venugopal, want them to remain open while opposing you getting a bottle of wine at the corner store.

“The policies of Premier Ford will kill, there is no more plain way to say it,” Venugopal posted recently, regarding Ford’s policies on drug consumption sites and safe supply.

Which is why Ford ended up with the type of question that annoyed him earlier this week.

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“My question premier is: Why are two drugs not OK to be located close to schools, yet alcohol — as statistically more dangerous — is?” reporter Richard Southern from City News asked.

“You know, Richard, let’s, let’s be fair, you’re comparing a convenience store to a safe consumption site, injection sites. Last time I checked, the convenience stores don’t have needles lying around the front of their stores, and they’re well-equipped,” Ford said.

Consumption sites see people using heroin, fentanyl, crack, cocaine, meth and more, all of which are more dangerous than alcohol.

Between 2017 when Ontario opened its first so-called “safe” consumption site and the end of 2022, overdose deaths more than doubled while emergency room visits rose by an even greater amount. There is no doubt that there are societal harms caused by alcohol; we have long known that and that is why there is regulation.

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To compare it to heroin, fentanyl, other opioids, crack, meth or cocaine is to ignore reality. The activists, including the activist doctors who push these issues, want you to think that beer and fentanyl are the same, they clearly are not.

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Both can be abused, both can lead to bad outcomes, but fentanyl is clearly the worse choice.

The push some on the so-called “progressive” side of Ontario politics shows that the left has taken up the mantle of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union which advocated for prohibition before the province adopted the idea in 1916. We emerged from the legal ban on alcohol sales in 1927, and it seems that many of the so-called “progressives” would like us to stick with the near century old way of selling alcohol.

What is fascinating is that these same political parties and groups didn’t object when the former Wynne Liberal government adopted a similar expansion plan more than a decade ago.

That fact alone should tell you all you need to know about Ford’s opposition.

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