{"id":44720,"date":"2018-08-31T03:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T07:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44720"},"modified":"2018-08-30T11:28:42","modified_gmt":"2018-08-30T15:28:42","slug":"farewell-buck-a-beer-publicity-stunt-we-hardly-knew-ye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/08\/31\/farewell-buck-a-beer-publicity-stunt-we-hardly-knew-ye\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell, buck-a-beer publicity stunt, we hardly knew ye"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Selley<\/a> on the all-too-brief publicity stunt of cheaper beer for Ontario:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

President\u2019s Choice is ending its buck-a-beer promotion on Sept. 3, just days after it started: We get one week, one long weekend and then out of the pool, party\u2019s over, back to class. PC-branded beer will rocket back up to $1.38 a bottle when you buy 24 at The Beer Store or $1.65 when you buy 12, which highlights just how steep \u2014 and presumably unsustainable \u2014 the discount really was. We shall see how long the two other participating breweries\u2019 offers last, but they made it quite clear, as did PC, that this was a limited-time offer prompted by Doug Ford\u2019s most shamelessly blunt populist pledge.<\/p>\n

My goodness, though, what a commotion it will leave in its wake. Some brewers quite understandably took the opportunity to note the impact of aluminum tariffs on their bottom lines, to complain that Ford\u2019s government was playing favourites by giving away expensive product placement in LCBO stores for $1 beer, and to note the government is actually raising taxes on beer.<\/p>\n

Others, however, waxed utterly scandalized. \u201cHow about buck a pound of steak? Who would eat that?\u201d asked one Toronto brewer who had perhaps not entirely thought through his rhetorical question. \u201cWe haven\u2019t even given two thoughts about this,\u201d Great Lakes Brewery\u2019s communications manager, Troy Burtch, told the Toronto Star. \u201cWhy would anyone do this?\u201d Burtch and Great Lakes have signalled their total uninterest by tweeting incessantly about it.<\/p>\n

The Canadian Taxpayers\u2019 Federation went after some of the affronted craft brewers for accepting taxpayer subsidies for their higher-end products. People on social media lined up for and against buck-a-beer, vowing to boycott the participants or those complaining about the program.<\/p>\n

The whole thing was a dumb Ford Nation stunt, no question. But good grief. You can hardly blame the breweries, either for participating or for not: they were just trying to wring as much publicity as they could from the situation. No one is really any worse off, or at least not much. What we were really seeing among the chattering classes was a rerun-by-proxy of the June 6 election: to drink Ford\u2019s swill was to vote Ford Nation; to boycott it was to stand bravely against their entire agenda.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Selley on the all-too-brief publicity stunt of cheaper beer for Ontario: President\u2019s Choice is ending its buck-a-beer promotion on Sept. 3, just days after it started: We get one week, one long weekend and then out of the pool, party\u2019s over, back to class. PC-branded beer will rocket back up to $1.38 a bottle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,6,53],"tags":[210,1188,87,1171,118],"class_list":["post-44720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-beer","tag-dougford","tag-ontario","tag-populism","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bDi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44720"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44723,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44720\/revisions\/44723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}