Canadian distillers pushing for equal access to Ontario grocery store customers

It isn’t fair Ontario allows wine and beer to be sold in hundreds of grocery stores but not spirits – including the Crown Royal Canadian whiskey to be made at a new distillery to be built in St. Clair Township – says an industry group for Canadian distillers.

Jan Westcott, president of Spirits Canada, brought that message to a small gathering at the Royal Canadian Legion hall in Corunna as part of an information tour July 26.

“We want to be sold in the same places wine and beer can be sold,” he said.

“Why does beer from Mexico and wine from France and Chile. . . get better access to Ontario consumers than a bottle of whiskey made in Windsor, soon to be made in Lambton County?”

Corunna is a short distance from the site of a $245-million distillery Diageo, a multinational beverage alcohol company that owns the Crown Royal brand, said last year it’s planning to build on land next to Highway 40 in the township.

“That’s a big deal,” Westcott said. “That’s the first new commercial distillery in Canada in 50 years.”

The company said previously the new distillery was expected to be running in 2025.

When the previous Liberal provincial government extended sales of beer and wine to some Ontario grocery stores, “they specifically excluded spirits,” Westcott said.

“We never could get any kind of reasonable answer out of them why that happened,” he said.

Westcott said Kathleen Wynne, who was the Liberal premier when the decision was made, “was a person who used terms like ‘hard liquor.’ She had a particular point of view.”

When Premier Doug Ford and the Conservatives were elected, “we thought there was an opportunity. . . so we’ve been battling for a long period of time,” Westcott said.

Currently, retail sales of products made by Canada’s distilleries are limited to about 600 LCBO stores, as well as its agency stores, he said.

At the same time, beer and wine producers have many more retail options, including 450 grocery stores, Westcott said.

“Our companies have a lot less opportunity to be in front of Ontario consumers than do all of our competitors,” he said.

“We’re trying to get some equity into this situation.”

Westcott points to the earlier experience in Quebec when in 1982 that province allowed beer and wine sales in large chain grocery stores as well as convenience stories.

At the time of the decision, spirits had 40 per cent of the beverage alcohol market, he said.

“After about six or seven years our market share collapsed to 14 per cent,” Westcott said.

“When consumers had the opportunity to buy a bottle of wine or beer when they went to get their groceries each week, they just didn’t go to the ‘liquor store’ as often,” he said.

“Our sales went through the floor” and most Quebec’s distilleries have closed, Westcott said. “It devastated the business.”

Ontario “is the home of the distilled spirits business in Canada” and if the same trend shows up in the province, “it doesn’t bode well for the industry,” he said.

“We’re not a huge industry, but we generate employment for somewhere between 6,500 and 8,000 people in Ontario,” Westcott said.

“We’re very proud of the fact that we source, literally, 100 per cent of our grain from Ontario farmers,” he said. “Very few businesses can say that.”

Distillers use “significant amounts” of grain from farms in Lambton County, Westcott said.

The amount of grain distillers buy in Ontario ranges from 225,000 to 250,000 tons annually, mostly corn, as well as rye, wheat and some barley, he said.

“We are attached at the hip to the farm community,” he said. “What I say to farmers is, ‘if you don’t do what you do, we can’t do what we do.’”

Other industries buy more Ontario grain but “we’re a local customer that is taking that grain and turning it into a very highly finished product,” Westcott said.

Distilling spirits, in particularly whisky, is “among the highest value-added activity” in agriculture, he said.

Also, about 75 per cent of what Canada’s distillers make is exported, Westcott said.

“We’re taking local products and making it into a high-value product and, literally, selling it all over the world, and in the process creating economic activity and jobs, particularly in rural Ontario,” Westcott said.

The information tour began in Windsor and has been to Chatham, Guelph and Collingwood and went to London next.

“We’ll probably go another seven or eight places” to encourage residents who support the group’s stand to contact their local MPP, Westcott said.

“We’ve had good meetings with the government and I think we’re making process,” he said.