Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Aug 2025A brew of barley, licorice, figs, and sugar
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1393The myth persists that everyone was drunk in the Middle Ages because no one drank water, only alcohol. While many people preferred to drink ale, wine, or mead, people drank water all the time. Having a source of fresh, clean water was the basis of the location of many cities and towns.
Clean water isn’t just an issue of the past, either. Today, 1 in 10 people don’t have access to clean water. For the month of August, I’m joining thousands of creators across the internet to form Team Water with the goal of raising $40 million to supply 2 million people with clean water which will flow for decades. You can support Team Water by donating at teamwater.org, or by watching and sharing the episode for this recipe. I’ll be donating all of the ad revenue from this video to Team Water!
This sweet tisane is an herbal tea made with barley, licorice root, figs, and sugar. I really enjoyed it, even though the flavor of the licorice and figs didn’t come through. It kind of reminds me of the milk after you’ve eaten a bowl of Raisin Bran, which I like.
Sweet tisane.
Take some water and boil it, then for each septier of water add one generous bowl of barley — it does not matter if it is all hulled — and two parisis’ worth of licorice; item, also figs. Boil until the barley bursts, then strain through two or three pieces of linen, and put plenty of rock sugar in each goblet. The barley that remains can be fed to poultry to fatten them.
— Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393
January 27, 2026
Did People in the Middle Ages Drink Water?
January 20, 2026
Feeding the Great Mongol Khan
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Jul 2025Mastic stew with black rice, spices, and lamb, garnished with cilantro
City/Region: Mongol Empire | China
Time Period: 1330The grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan doubled the size of the largest land empire the world had ever known by conquering China. We actually know quite a bit about the foods that fueled his empire-expanding efforts. Shortly after his death, Yinshàn zhèngyào, or The Proper and Necessary Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink, was written, and its recipes include ingredients from across Kublai Khan’s vast empire.
The mastic in this stew is a resin from the mastic tree in the Mediterranean, and it has a bitterness along with cedar or pine notes. I really like it in sweet things, but there is no sugar in this dish. The stew is aromatic and smells of cardamom and cinnamon, but they don’t come through in the flavor. The bitterness of the mastic and the lamb dominate the dish, but Kublai Khan was eating this dish to invigorate his chi, so maybe the flavor didn’t matter as much.
I used black rice, or forbidden rice, so named because supposedly it was only eaten by the emperor and his court for much of Chinese history, and it makes the stew a deep purple. You can use long grain white or brown rice, which will make for a lighter colored dish.
Nourishes, warms the middle and grants chi. Leg of mutton, five tsaoko cardamoms, 2 ch’ien cinnamon, one half sheng chickpeas, mash and remove the skins. Boil the ingredients together to make a soup, strain it. Cut up the meat and set aside. Add 2 ho of cooked chickpeas, 1 sheng of aromatic rice, 1 ch’ien of mastic. Mix well with a little salt. Add chopped meat and cilantro.
— Yinshàn zhèngyào by Hu Sihui, 1330
December 22, 2025
The Great Eggnog Riot at West Point Military Academy
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Dec 2024Boozy, creamy eggnog with foam and nutmeg on top
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1887At West Point in 1826, with alcohol prohibited on campus, students smuggled in large quantities of booze to make eggnog for a secret party on Christmas Eve. Drunkenness led to a riot that involved firearms, swords, broken windows, and barricades.
If you’ve never made homemade eggnog, I highly recommend it. It’s creamy, boozy, and so much more delicious than what you buy at the store. Is it good enough to start a riot over? I’ll leave that judgement up to you.
I have an allergy to raw egg whites, so in the video I used 12 egg whites worth of reconstituted dry aquafaba instead, and it worked great.
Egg Nog
Beat the yolks of twelve eggs very light, stir in as much white sugar as they will dissolve, pour in gradually one glass of brandy to cook the egg, one glass of old whiskey, one grated nutmeg, and three pints of rich milk. Beat the whites to a froth and stir in last.
— The White House Cook Book, 1887
August 6, 2025
QotD: Modern English night life
There are few sounds more frightening than that of the English young enjoying themselves. The English, it was once said, take their pleasures sadly; but now they take them loudly, which is far, far worse. Their pleasures are brutish, and the sounds the men emit while experiencing them are indistinguishable from those of a mob indignantly beating someone to death. As for the women, they never speak but they scream, as if being chronically raped. Of course, they all have to raise the level of their vocalizations because there is the perpetual background throb and thump of background music, or para-music, turned up to maximum volume, so that the ground vibrates beneath you like a ripple bed in an intensive care unit.
Recently I stayed overnight in a charming small cathedral city in England, genteel by day and Gomorrah by night. It is a little like H.G. Wells’ story The Time Machine, set 3,000 years hence, when humanity has divided into two: the effete, gentle, vegetarian diurnal Eloi, and the ugly, vicious, carnivorous nocturnal Morlocks, who emerge from underground once the sun goes down and prey on the Eloi.
I had booked no place to stay until the last minute, and found only a room above a cavernous, darkened bar, for me an antechamber of Hell, where the Morlock youth of the cathedral city gathered to enjoy themselves — or at least to pretend to do so, for I have long thought that those who cannot enjoy themselves without shouting and screaming are really hysterics, trying to convince themselves that they are enjoying themselves when actually they do not really know how to do so.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Evening Above the Hell-Bar”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-12-16.
May 13, 2025
Gout – The Disease of Kings
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Jan 2025Sliced roast venison with a spiced red wine sauce and a sprinkling of salt
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1723Gout has plagued people for thousands of years, but mostly the rich people. It often follows an indulgent diet full of red meat and alcohol, so for a long time only the rich had regular access to a gout-inducing food.
This recipe from 1723 is delicious, as well it ought to be as it flies in the face of the rules you should follow to prevent gout with venison (red meat) served with a wine sauce (alcohol). Venison is best when it’s not cooked past medium, and this recipe is tender and flavorful with the rosemary coming through. The sauce could really go on anything, and you could swap out the red wine for something different. Port would be delicious, though I would reduce the amount of sugar a bit.
I don’t expect most people will have a larding needle on hand, and I think you could probably skip the larding and still end up with a flavorful, tender dish.
To roast a Haunch of Venison.
First lard it with Bacon, and stick it thin with Rosemary; then roast it with a brisk Fire; but let it not lye too near it; bate it with fresh Butter; then boil a Pint of Claret with a little beaten Ginger, Cinnamon and Sugar, with a half a dozen whole Cloves, and some grated bread; and when they have boil’d enough, put in a little Salt, Vinegar and fresh Butter; dish your Venison, strew Salt about the Dish, and serve it with this Sauce.
— The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary: Or, the Accomplish’d Housewives Companion by John Nott, 1723
April 1, 2025
QotD: Jeeves proves his talent for the first time
“If you would drink this, sir,” he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into a sick prince. “It’s a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcestershire sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.”
I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if someone had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the treetops and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.
“You’re engaged!” I said, as soon as I could say anything.
P.G. Wodehouse Carry on, Jeeves (1925).
March 10, 2025
QotD: The “Basic College Dude” of the 2020s
But mostly it’s just because none of them stick in my memory. The #1 characteristic of the Basic College Dude is that even if he’s there, he’s not there. He’s checked out — mentally, emotionally, spiritually (if that even means anything anymore). Unlike the girls, all of whom seem to be in 72 different clubs and organizations (and list them all on their email auto-signatures, such that by junior year, their honorifics are longer than my entire resume), the guys don’t seem to do much of anything. How do they while away their hours? I assume with social media, like everyone, and with video games and blackout drinking …
… the latter of which I have seen, a lot, and if you’ll permit a brief digression, if you really want to know how fucked our society is, go to a student bar on a Friday night. I myself was a bit of a party animal in college, and like everyone I went over the line a few times, but college kid drinking these days is almost Soviet — they’re aiming to get knee-walking, gutter-puking, total-blackout shitfaced, and they set about it as grimly and efficiently as possible. The girls, too, with the added bonus that they’re all on Ambien and Klonopin and every other happy pill you’ve ever heard of, which makes for some interesting, by which I mean terrifying, behavior …
[…]
But mostly it’s because college dudes have had their libidos beaten out of them. […]
Not only does the BCD not know how to do this, as Nikolai says, he apparently doesn’t actually want to. Constant stimulation by blinking screens, shit diets, and a lifetime of indoctrination have reversed the sexual dilithium crystals. Heartiste used to go on about this, and while I’m no biochemist, either, I think his theory is sound: There’s so much environmental estrogen floating around that men develop the emotional equivalent of gynecomastia, while women turn butch. Throw nth wave feminism into the mix, and you’ve got women acting like the crudest, most obnoxious male stereotypes (they call this “being strong and empowered”), while the men mope and sigh to their diaries.
The end result is that the BCD walks around like he’s shellshocked. He does the bare minimum, hoping to just grind it out without any further affronts to his basic human dignity … but so mal-educated is he, that the phrase “basic human dignity” doesn’t even register with him.
Severian, “The Basic College Dude”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-05.
January 22, 2025
Discover the ‘Lost’ Big Dipper Rum Cocktail Recipe
Glen And Friends Cooking
Published 2 Oct 2024Today on Cocktails After Dark we explore the fascinating history of Gander Airport’s iconic Big Dipper bar, once a bustling stopover for the world’s rich and famous during the 1940s to 1960s. This video dives into the golden age of aviation when propeller planes made Gander, Newfoundland, a key refuelling point for transatlantic flights. Discover how legends like Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, and Frank Sinatra sipped cocktails at the Big Dipper while planes refuelled, and learn how to make the bar’s signature cocktail using the infamous Newfoundland Screech rum. If you’ve ever been curious about Gander’s aviation history, old-time airport bars, or unique cocktails, this video has it all. Plus, find out how “Screech” became a part of Newfoundland’s folklore. Whether you’re a history buff, cocktail enthusiast, or simply curious about this legendary airport, you won’t want to miss this journey back in time. Grab your shaker, some rum, and let’s make history — one drink at a time!
The Big Dipper
1½ ounces Newfoundland Screech
1 ounce Cointreau
¾ ounce lemon juice
1 teaspoon simple syrup
(more…)
January 18, 2025
Incentives matter even to “objective” scientists
A 2019 Canadian “study” ideally illustrates that scientists are just as human as anyone else where they are incentivized to provide “desired” outcomes:
“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Earlier this year, a major Canadian study on alcohol policy provided an excellent illustration of this. As news headlines across the country reported, 16 scientists and researchers at various universities and institutions had, through their Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation, shown that provincial governments are “failing to address alcohol problems”.
The scientists evaluated provincial government policies and assigned a grade in the “D” range to seven of Canada’s 13 provinces or territories, while five received an “F”. The policy evaluation, however, was a curious one. Strangely, the policy evaluation did not evaluate whether government policies were beneficial to those who want to buy or sell alcohol.
Instead, provincial governments were evaluated more favorably if they devoted greater efforts toward afflicting buyers and sellers of alcohol through punitive taxes, price controls, heavy restrictions on the sale and marketing of alcoholic beverages, higher minimum legal drinking ages, and so on.
Even in the most restrictive markets, the researchers found that alcohol was too cheap, or that its purchase was too convenient, or that governments did not do enough to discourage or restrict its sale and consumption.
Predictably, and perhaps exemplifying Berlinski’s point on scientists grasping for government funds, the report authored by 16 scientists whose livelihoods involve raising public alarm about alcohol consumption concluded that there ought to be more government funding for public education on the dangers of alcohol consumption.
The report also advocated more government funding for bureaucracies to discourage drinking, more government funding for a lead organization to implement restrictive alcohol policies, more government funding for independent monitoring of such implementation, and more government funding to track and report the harm caused by alcohol consumption.
Like the CEO of a domestic automobile company insisting that tariffs against car imports — which would cause a massive wealth redistribution from consumers’ wallets into his own and those of the company’s shareholders — are in the national interest, the anti-drinking scientists insisted in the name of public health and wellness upon income redistribution from taxpayers and consumers to their own industry.
January 1, 2025
3,500 Years of Hangover Cures – Kishkiyya from Baghdad
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 31 Dec 2024A slightly sour lamb stew with herbs, chickpeas, and fat, eaten as a hangover cure in 10th century Baghdad
City/Region: Baghdad
Time Period: 10th CenturyWhere there are hangovers, there are hangover cures. Throughout history they’ve varied from having a good wash, drinking lemonade while drinking alcohol, and the dubious prairie oyster. This stew is kind of like 10th century Baghdad’s version of my favorite hangover food: a greasy burger and fries.
Fatty lamb is stewed with kishka (a dried yogurt-like dairy product), verjuice, chickpeas, herbs, and greens, along with some olive oil just to make sure there’s enough grease involved. It doesn’t look all that pretty, but it tastes good. It’s complex and layered, with each flavor following the last, and the variety of textures is wonderful.
Wash 3 ratls meat and put it in a pot. Add ½ ratl chopped onion, ¼ ratl fresh herbs, a handful of chickpeas, 1 piece galangal, and ¼ ratl olive oil. Pour water to submerge the ingredients in the pot. Let the pot cook until meat is almost done. Add any of the seasonal green vegetables and a little chard. When everything in the pot is cooked, add 3 pieces of sour kishk, and ½ ratl kishk of Albu-Sahar, Mawsili, or Bahaki. Pound them into fine powder and dissolve them in 1 ratl (2 cups) ma’hisrim (juice of unripe sour grapes).
When kishk is done, add 2 dirhams (6 grams) cumin and an equal amount of cassia. Add a handful of finely chopped onion. Do not stir the pot. When the onion cooks and falls apart, add to the pot 2 danaqs (1 gram) cloves and a similar amount of spikenard.
Stop fueling the fire, let the pot simmer and rest on the remaining heat then take it down, God willing.
— Kitāb al-Tabīkh by ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, 10th Century, translation from Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchen by Nawal Nasrallah
December 21, 2024
Alton’s Eggnog | Food Network
Food Network
Published 1 Dec 2014Alton’s making eggnog, the drink that thinks it’s a custard pie.
Get the recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/al…
(more…)
October 8, 2024
Making the Black Mead of Medieval France – Bochet
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 25, 2024Black mead, or bochet, made with spices and wood chips
City/Region: Paris
Time Period: 1393Mead was very popular from Russia to England, but started to lose favor in part due to the rise of cheaper brews like vodka and hopped ales. Mead was often still drunk for its medicinal properties, especially when it was infused with herbs and spices.
This mead has some of those wonderfully warming spices, and I added wood chips from the local brewing store to mimic the wood barrels that it would have been fermented in. The burnt caramel scent softens and mellows out during fermentation, and the resulting mead is not sweet at all and is more complex than many meads I’ve had.
To make six sextier of bochet, take six pints of very sweet honey, and put it in a cauldron on the fire and boil it, and stir for so long that it starts to grow, and you see that it also boils with bubbles like small blisters which will burst, releasing a little bit of dark smoke. Then add seven sextier of water and boil so much that it reduces to six sextiers, and keep stirring. And then put it in a vat to cool until it is lukewarm; then strain it through a cloth, and put it in a barrel and add a pint of yeast from ale, because that is what makes it piquant, (though if you use bread yeast, it makes as good a flavor, but the color will be duller), and cover well and warmly so it ferments.
If you want to make it very good, add an ounce of ginger, long pepper, grains of paradise and cloves in equal amounts, except for the cloves of which there should be the least, and put them in a cloth bag and toss it in. And when it has been two or three days and the bochet smells of spices and is strong enough, take out the bag and wring it out and put it in the next barrel that you make. And so this powder will serve you well up to three or four times.
— Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393.
September 8, 2024
The last dispatch from Toronto before the catastrophe began
Toronto, in fact all of Ontario, may no longer be there when you get up tomorrow morning. As Chris Selley explained in his brave, final communiqué from the doomed province:
Doug Ford, the form of the destructor Ontario chose.
Dear non-Toronto friends,
This city is in crisis. This may be my last communiqué before the telex goes down for good, and I feel honour-bound to tell the world of my city’s plight. If the worst should occur, which it almost certainly will, please tell our story.
The unthinkable has occurred: Doug Ford’s madmen and women at Queen’s Park have licensed hundreds upon hundreds of new locations — called “convenience stores”, in local parlance — to sell beer, wine, cider and pre-mixed cocktails.
They did this instead of fixing health care, if you can believe that. And, outrage upon outrage, the government even made a map of such locations — as if delivering fallen Ontarians one by one to Mr. Booze himself.
Why, within just a few hundred metres of where I write, through my tears, I can discern on the map more than five such new locations. There’s Mei Convenience, Mimi Variety, Lucy Grocery and Meat, Queen & Jarvis Convenience … the list goes on, and on, my God. Church attendance is reportedly soaring as Torontonians steel themselves for the forthcoming.
Ford’s government did this entirely to solicit corporate donations to his party (some say that’s actually illegal, but whatever) from his buddies at convenience-store empires 7-Eleven and Couche-Tard … and presumably from Mimi and Lucy, whoever they are. Very rich women, clearly.
Instead of fixing health care!
Until recently, some semblance of sanity prevailed: The nearest government-run liquor store to where I sit now is a 15-minute walk away; the nearest Beer Store, the privately owned former quasi-monopoly where you’re still supposed to return your bottles and cans, is nearer to 20 minutes.
And now, suddenly, a bottle or can is shockingly near to hand. And this will lead to more alcohol-related harms. Of this there is no doubt, as one expert recently told the Toronto Methodist Star: “Harm will increase in Ontario. That is straightforward.”
It is true that many jurisdictions around the world report similar or lower levels of alcohol consumption and related harms than Ontario despite having much greater access to retail alcohol — Italy, Greece, the United States — but that is not germane to this discussion. Ontarians are not like other people. Ontario is not like other places. We are worse. Or maybe better. Or some combination of the two.
It’s true! Even saintly Bowmanville has been sullied with the demon liquor thanks to Premier Ford’s diabolical plan:
July 14, 2024
When the Ontario Progressive Conservatives backed away from LCBO privatization
In the National Post, Terence Corcoran posts an excerpt from last year’s The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier edited by Alister Campbell:
“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
.
Almost 30 years ago, in 1995, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government led by Mike Harris promised to privatize the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). “We will sell off some assets, such as the LCBO,” said the party’s famed election document, the Common Sense Revolution (CSR). The LCBO could have been a true privatization — a full-fledged divestiture of a government monopoly into a new open and competitive market, but it never happened.
The failure to privatize the LCBO, lamentable from a consumer and economic perspective, remains a significant lost opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of privatization. If Harris had successfully de-monopolized the alcohol market, the whole concept of privatization would have been given a major boost. Instead, the government backed away from privatization of the alcohol market, preferring instead to allow the corporation to substitute modern marketing and retail razzle-dazzle to give the false impression it was offering the public the best of all worlds.
The LCBO failure is also a demonstration of the degree to which the Common Sense Revolution’s starting principles fell short in grasping the essential benefits of private versus public ownership and control. Neo-liberalism isn’t exactly a fine science. The Wikipedia entry on “Neo-liberalism” is a 30-page effort (including 400 footnote links to hundreds of warring academic papers), reflecting an economic and ideological scramble that dates back more than a century. But when the Harris government came to power, major elements of the free-market model were often overshadowed by fiscal policy objectives. With the LCBO, the Harris government veered off the neo-liberal course in pursuit of standard political objectives.
In 1995, the LCBO was a government owned and operated province-wide corporation that controlled liquor and wine wholesale and retail markets. Another private monopoly player, the Beer Store chain, while owned and operated by the brewing industry, was also essentially a government-sanctioned beer monopoly. The CSR neo-liberal objective should have been to privatize the alcohol market by selling the LCBO, deregulating the Beer Store monopoly and allowing beer sales through supermarkets and even corner stores. More importantly, dismantling the LCBO would allow other corporations to enter the alcohol retail business and provide consumers much more choice, which has been the Alberta experience. Notably, Alberta achieved a successful and deregulated approach without sacrificing provincial revenues.
The neo-liberal objective of privatization is to benefit consumers and enhance economic productivity through competition. Instead, the Harris government fell into the fiscal policy trap that routinely captures politicians, bureaucrats and corporate insiders. Instead of aiming to benefit consumers, the objective soon became how to maximize the fiscal return to government. Never mind the consumer and the market. The objective became preserving — and enhancing — government revenues.
At the time, anti-privatization advocates frantically pointed at the Alberta experience of privatization of their provincial liquor monopoly, which (briefly) generated a lot of retail horror stories that Ontario newspapers gleefully republished (and, likely, emphasized out of proportion to the actual Alberta market). You can still hear Ontarians casting aspersions on the Alberta market as if nothing at all had changed after the initial rough patch. From what I’ve heard from Albertans, they have far wider choices of alcoholic beverages in stores much more conveniently sited with better open hours than anyone in Ontario enjoys. The Alberta government still gets at least as much in tax revenues from alcohol sales without needing to be in the distribution or retail business. It doesn’t seem to be the utter disaster that Ontario media portrays it to be … rather the contrary.
July 7, 2024
Ontario’s LCBO strike may be both justified and counterproductive
Ontario’s main importer and distributor of wine, beer, and spirits is now facing its very first actual strike, as the negotiators couldn’t come to an agreement by the strike deadline on Friday morning. On the face of the dispute, the union certainly has some solid grounds for the strike, as pay hasn’t been keeping pace with (official) inflation and far too many of the LCBO’s workforce are on work schedules that keep them from earning full-time wages. On the other hand, over the last decade or so, both Liberal and Progressive Conservative provincial governments have been making piecemeal changes to the market so that the LCBO is far from the only place Ontario drinkers can purchase their preferred booze. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the alternative options now available to Ontario consumers:
“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .
- The Beer Store, Ontario’s other (foreign-owned) booze oligopoly for beer and cider is still operating normally at all their retail locations and agency stores. They also have online ordering for delivery available to ordinary consumers.
- The LCBO is still offering online sales — not same-day, but free delivery.
- Ontario’s vast array of craft brewers are still able to sell individual cans or bottles of beer from their bottle shops or storefront locations (pre-packaged 6-, 12-, 24-container or other types are still limited to the Beer Store oligopoly, of course).
- Ontario’s wineries are similarly still operating normally for retail sales at the winery or (for a few older wineries who still have grandfathered privileges from earlier licensing regimes) stand-alone retail stores.
- Ontario’s much smaller — but growing — number of distilleries are also operating normally and are able to sell their locally produced whiskey, gin, vodka, etc. from their tasting rooms/bottle shops.
- Many, many grocery stores in the province now sell wine, beer, or both, and are all operating normally. They may be slower to replenish the shelves as the LCBO’s limited number of non-union staff will be handling re-supply.
In addition, if the strike continues for more than two weeks, the LCBO will open a select number of their stores for limited hours across the province (again, limited by the number of non-unionized staff available to operate the stores). With all of this (and I’m sure I’m missing some options in my list), consumers may begin to draw the conclusion that the LCBO isn’t as essential as it once was:
On Thursday evening, Colleen MacLeod, chair of the team bargaining on behalf of government liquor-store employees, declared the summer of 2024 utterly ruined.
“Tonight, (Premier Doug) Ford’s dry summer begins,” said MacLeod, of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), hours before the first ever strike in the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s (LCBO) history became official.
Desperate? Delusional? That’s up for debate. OPSEU’s press release announcing the strike suggests “delusional.” At one point it claims the LCBO is “Ontario’s best-kept secret.”
What could that possibly mean?
The release then quotes OPSEU president J.P. Hornick as follows: “We told Ford not to ruin everybody’s summer, but now he’s closed the Science Centre and forced a dry summer for Ontarians by refusing to offer a deal that would be good for LCBO workers and Ontario.”
The Ontario Science Centre is a tired old children’s destination in North Toronto that has been neglected in every way by consecutive provincial governments. I’m quite sure few people in Ottawa, Windsor or Thunder Bay have ever even heard of it. Mashing it together with the LCBO, just because OPSEU represents employees at both, suggests the union really doesn’t understand the fight it’s getting into.
If the Ford government is willing to dig in its heels and fight — which isn’t something it’s particularly known for — this could be a great win for the Ontario consumer.
It’s not 1990. The LCBO shutting the doors to its retail stores is really only a minor pain in the rear end, thanks to years of piecemeal, needlessly complex and and too-slow but nevertheless significant liberalization that really kicked into gear under former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. (Ford is often mocked for being obsessed with alcohol, but Wynne was nearly beyond parody. If her government woke up in a crisis Monday morning, it was safe to say she’d find herself announcing more beer and wine in supermarkets by Thursday afternoon.)
Anecdotally, as I was in on Thursday picking up a small selection of wine and beer, I overheard a conversation with one of the staffers and another customer where the staffer didn’t believe there’d actually be a strike and that the only result of the brinksmanship at the bargaining table would be that they would have to do more re-stocking next week after the (understandably) higher sales during the past week.
