The Alberta Disadvantage – Alberta Reinforces Socialist Liquor Monopoly

The Alberta Disadvantage – Alberta Reinforces Socialist Liquor Monopoly

 (For many; ok just some like me, but in actuality for all since monopoly inception.) Those who read this blog (me) know that I have reflected on wine once or twice.  I like the mild, drinkable Central European reds, as well as the fine whites that emanate from this region and that compete with just about anything anywhere, in a good year.

Now I see Alberta’s government monopoly has once again appeared to de-list yet another two of the only wines I really liked, from Croatia (and more specifically, Dalmatia).  Oh, sure, you can still get gallons of Australian motor-oil plonk for gallons to the penny (how I hope that, from Sydney to Perth, from Adelaide to Darwin, Australians are buying boxes of Manitoba wine in 4L boxes for $4.99), but choice has once again been reduced by the Alberta government monopoly, liquorconnect.com, or Connect Logistics. 

This continues an ongoing eradication of consumer choice in Alberta, going back to the alleged “privatization” of Alberta liquor stores in the Klein years of the early 90s.  (Perhaps no accident on that one, as Ralph was known to show up half-cocked at 2 a.m. at homeless shelters and throw coins at people and tell them to get jobs while his taxpayer-funded chauffeurs looked on.)   A constantly declining selection has been the hallmark of Alberta's "privatization." I feel like I'm in wine wonderland when I go to other, less corrupt jurisdictions in Canada or the U.S.

Privatization, of course, was a myth, but it is striking how enduring this myth has been.  When Alberta “privatized,” the government kept its complete monopoly by dictating that all liquor sellers had to sell from the government monopoly seller, Connect Logistics.  Connect Logistics got the exclusive monopoly; the government got all the same revenues it always did--but government property could be sold off, at a profit, normally to those with the best Progressive Conservative party connections, as so many at the time observed.  I wonder if party membership and store ownership would be considered just a “coincidence?” Hm. Anyway, in true “privatization” capitalist monopoly totalitarian actuality, this means that there is one book, and one book, alone, that any alcohol seller in Alberta can sell from.  It looks like a big book when a seller shares it with you, but what it doesn’t show is that surely virtually no seller in Alberta would use it all, its contents are incredibly restricted, compared to what other provinces, such as Ontario, can get, and obviously few sellers would even try to stock much of it, anyway, because they’re in the business of small, mom & pops, Biff n’ Jack $4.99 6-pack hole-in-the-wall outlets.  Sellers will tell you frankly that there’s no way they’re bringing in many things that *are* available, even from Connect Logistics, just because you want it, because it is much better business to sell $4.99 6-packs to beggars from behind a steel grate than it is actually to stock a wine someone might *choose.*  It’s supply and demand, and if Big Bear 10% is what sells where the hookers and the schoolkids waiting for the bus stand, that’s what gets ordered.

In provinces like Ontario, of course, you can make your own wine at private shops—you’d sure never find that in Socialist Alberta.  Independent store-owners, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople are prevented by the government from owning such operations because the government couldn’t get their monopoly revenues.  And besides, small business owners??  Pffft.  I remember talking to one guy who ran a tidy, enthusiast wine shop in Calgary (now gone), and he told me how his Progressive Conservative MLA told him, flat-out, no way are we gonna let you make wine on your premises—“your golf tournaments aren’t as good.”  A little Putinesque candor, Alberta-style.

 In Ontario, say, you get stores that are clean and well marked, with professional staff.  The selection is much larger than in Alberta, the vast, vast majority of the time.  The prices are what the prices are—there is none of the constant confusion endemic to Alberta, where much of the store might not even have prices, or price tags.  Staff in Ontario ask for ID, and are even monitored to do so, something I have never, ever, once seen in Alberta.  Not once.  Ever.  That kid who just killed your daughter on the roads tonight?  That’s what’s called “the Alberta advantage.”  Ralph Klein brought it in. The prices are all but the same.  Sometimes, in Ontario, they’re cheaper.  Yes, the provincial sales tax will usually bump prices up, but sometimes not even enough to cover the Alberta disadvantage.  It’s true that, in Alberta, store by store, particular brands will pitch to particular stores, so that you can, say, get some barrel-reject Peller consumers’ blend plonk for $4.99, or Jim-Bob’s All-American Brew for $4.99 a 6-pack, but is that what you wanted, when all your money is going back to the government, just as it always did, anyway?  Now and then, in Ontario, a boutique beer will go a bit on sale.  You’ll think it’s funny what a small sale it is, until you reflect that you will never, ever, as long as you live, see a sale like that in Alberta.

 There are 3 kinds of liquor stores in Alberta—the boutique high-end ones with limited stock for “real” housewives; the mid-range ones—all 7-11-type chains where the owners could buy up massive numbers of locations and set up oligopolies--with decent selection and predictable loss-leaders of atrocious plonk, Australian urine for $7.99, etc.; and hole-in-the-wall 6-pack sellers with bikini posters open through 2 a.m. that are blights on their neighourhoods and crime magnets.  In one of these several years ago, I surveyed the cameras and grates and so on and jokingly asked the taciturn English guy at the till if he’d really ever been robbed before, and he said deadpan: “three times this month.” 

 And the great thing about Alberta is that all *3* varieties of stores can typically be found all on just about every single city block.  Endless choice, without choice.  I think this is what it was like in Soviet Russia.  You could get a bottle of vodka just about anytime, anywhere, depending on your connections.  You maybe couldn’t get what you wanted, but you could get something.  And this is Alberta now.  Choice, without choice, at uncompetitive prices, alongside a studied effort to shut down business, initiative, and entrepreneurship to serve ruling party interests.

 zr

Alberta Votes, Redux:  How Danielle Smith and the Wildrose Managed to Lose Huge

Pollsters, Pundits, the Media, and Academics Ironically Make Danielle Smith Lose Election

I chose the word “manage” in the title above.  Losses can be managed every bit as well as can wins. As I noted in a prior post, the 2012 Alberta provincial election was an extraordinarily strange one, in the sense that, in true Presto Manning (Presto long, longingly, and lovingly presaged an apocalyptic bouleversement of the right in Alberta, resulting in earnest/in another prairie fire; shed no tears for Presto, though, for he can always watch it on SUNtv from the afterlife) fashion, pollsters, pundits, the media and academics decided from day one that Wildrose would sweep to a massive majority.  But nowhere, just by being a human being, walking around, doing things human beings and citizens do daily, could one find any evidence that this foregone conclusion could be met.  After I wrote my blog post, Calgary-based writer Will Ferguson had some similar observations in the Glib and Stale for April 27, 2012.  He said that, if pollsters wanted to get it right, maybe they should talk to actual people, instead of robocalling or spamming them.  When it becomes not only cost-effective but massively profitable to send robots bearing cans of spam to people’s dwellings, this eventuality shall certainly event.

But in the meantime, let’s consider, again, why pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics got so behind Danielle so fast (it wasn’t just those boobs on wheels), and how it may have hurt her.

Obviously, in Canada, the only mainstream media there is is right wing.  People like Lawrence Martin long ago pointed out this piece of obviousness, and people who had lived in Canada for decades prior had lived it as a perpetual consequence of their lives being lived in Canada.  The further right you can go on the political spectrum, the more you can promise in terms of complete freedom from any kind of regulation or moral obligation or civic responsibility.  Since capitalism tends not towards competition but towards monopolies and oligopolies (routine gas-price fixing that now and then gets a tap on the wrist, etc.), it’s just obvious that the canwests, the murdochs, the bellglobemedias, the rogers’s, the shaws, etc., will just naturally back a party like Wildrose that promises to let them assemble price-fixed monopolies (Enmax, anyone?) and mutually-fulfilling oligopolies.  So duh, it is completely in the interests of the univocal (right-wing) media and its pundits to force, at any cost (money, truth, whatever) the election of the furthest right party, the Wildrose.  A media pundit who refused to back the Wildrose would be. . .hypothetical.

Pollsters need to make money.  Pollsters go where the money is.  There is just no percentage in purveying polls that show centre-left parties doing well.  Who pays for polls?  Who pays the pollsters?  In most cases, it’s the media oligopolies themselves and the moneyed parties themselves.  How could pollsters ever, ever come up with a poll that supported anything other than the richest furthest right party?  To do otherwise would be to go out of business.  You don't like it?  Ask the mafia.  You don't support the mafia, you get kneecapped; you don't support the right, you go out of business. 

As for academics, well, duh, pollsters, pundits, and the media are NOT going to talk to academics who don’t toe their party lines.  Duh. So they get Jack Mintz on speed-dial; if Jack isn’t already doing it, I could provide his pro-forma right-wing responses fresh n’ ready via recording on my answering machine each day by 8 a.m. Give me a week and I’ll have Jack Mintz’s responses media-ready on a daily basis through 2014 (then my rates go up). As against this, an eternal stereotype is that academics trend left (funny no-one at Texas-based University of Calgary ever got that memo), but it’s a fact that academics need exposure, too, and it is simply career-crucial to get to the heart of the high-rise fire and see and be seen. . .and to do that, you’ve gotta jump when they tell you.  I could spell this out in greater and more refined detail if anyone wanted, but no-one should be surprised that even academics who should know better get co-opted into the right-wing mediaspeak—they’ve just got too much to gain by so doing.

So why, with the massive support of pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics, did Danielle Smith lose?

Well, the first thing is, is that people just don’t like to be told.  Even very, very stupid people do not like to be told what they’re about to do.  Smoke a joint?  Maybe, whatever.  Go to jail for it?  Damn straight, I gotta try that!  People do not like to be told what to do. 

Secondly, by being lovingly and lavishly coronated hourly by pollsters, pundits, media, and academics, Danielle no doubt began to feel very queenly.  So when her candidates, some of whom even the Tories had rejected, started to come out as racist and homophobic, she was all about free speech, not just plain knowing when what’s wrong is wrong is wrong.  Perhaps if she hadn’t been told she was going to handily win a huge majority, she might have been a tiny little bit more thoughtful, and thought to herself, “gee, maybe I might just need those pederast votes somewhere.”   Yes, it seems like a bit of a reach, but because pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics kept telling Danielle she was sweeping to a majority, she ran like a frontrunner, one wanting to avoid any kind of controversy, and simply pooh-poohing everything and never answering, never confronting, never engaging, and only lamely stating, following her mentor Steve, “we will not legislate on contentious social issues.”  

(Parenthetically, it is also funny how tone-deaf the Wildrose was by constantly repeating how the Tories had been doing this or that wrong for “40 years.”  Uh, duh, when you’re not even elected and didn’t take opportunities to try to get elected, and when your sitting rump traitor caucus is essentially comprised of Tory defectors, and when you spent a lifetime supporting the Tories and building your career out of it, it just looks beyond silly to complain about the last four decades.  The (er,) densest voting bloc in Alberta has been voting Tory for 40 years, and Danielle keeps repeating that something has been going wrong for “40 years”?  You just told the majority of Alberta voters for nearly half a century that they are idiots, you idiot. Who was her campaign manager?  Tom Flamesagain?  Some Texas turnip?  People that stupid get hung in Dallas for not having a better lawyer or a cousin named Duke who knows one.)

So anyway, pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics have a bit of a task on their hands.  They all got behind Danielle for as much as they were worth—in for a penny, in for a pound.  They spared no cost or obligation to get her elected, but voters shut them down.  What will the PPMA do next?  More attack ads, is my guess, about which I will have more to say later.  For now, though, pollsters, pundits, the media, and academics can reflect on how they, by their lust for cash, desire to be on the winning team, aggressive refusal to consult with voters, and primping and prompting of Danielle Smith, created a devastating loss for the Wildrose.
-zr