Newsstand: November 2, 2015

News today: a beer tax increase, teachers still negotiating with the province, and an end to LCBO wine clubs.

By Tannara Yelland • Illustration by Matthew Daley

As of yesterday, the provincial beer tax is three cents higher per litre—which works out to 25 cents more for a 24-pack. However, that increase may or may not trickle down to consumers. Premier Kathleen Wynne wants larger brewers to swallow the increase until 2017. This is the first of four three-cent beer tax increases to be phased in over the next three years, and all of those are on top of regular annual increases to the tax.

It’s Nov. 2, and elementary school teachers in Ontario haven’t yet reached a deal with the province. They’ve passed the Nov. 1 bargaining deadline set by Wynne, meaning the province might move ahead with Wynne’s threat to dock teachers’ pay if job actions continue. According to the government and public school boards’ association, the remaining issues at the negotiating table are health and sick benefits.

The LCBO has spent three years and more than $250,000 fighting an order to get rid of unnecessary information it collected from wine, spirit, and beer club members. After all of that, it has decisively lost and is deleting the information in addition to winding down the club program, which allowed members to access products and volume discounts not available to regular customers. After operating the program for nearly a decade with no member information beyond names and addresses, the LCBO began recording details and quantities of customers’ orders in 2012, leading club members to become concerned that the LCBO was tracking their consumption, which is not the case for average LCBO customers. Then-privacy-commissioner Ann Cavoukian agreed the information was unnecessary and ordered the information no longer be collected, and for the collected information to be destroyed.