Once upon a time, the government and public service unions controlled every aspect of beer production and sales in Alberta..Unionized, government run liquor stores offered only a handful of brands of warm beers and sales were only available during banking hours. Breweries were unionized as were the trucking companies delivering beer to bars and stores. That meant that almost every summer, one of those unions would go on strike and there would be a beer shortage in the province. I remember the massive lineups outside liquor stores as people would clean them out in anticipation of strikes. Getting a case of Kokanee beer from BC was considered exotic as outside suppliers of beer were blocked. .Big Rock Brewery was a small brewery formed in Calgary in the 1980s. They struggled to establish themselves as unionized government liquor stores fought against carrying their beers. They sold from a small outlet in Southeast Calgary and directly to bars. .Then the unions finally overplayed their hand..Breweries went on strike in the summer of 1984 but something had changed. Albertans flocked to Big Rock and bought their beer as fast as the brewery could produce it it. People discovered that there were beers beyond Labatt’s and Molson and many never went back..It was the beginning of the end of the monopolies. Albertans wanted choice and new breweries began to set up shop. .Ralph Klein certainly loved his beer and one of his first acts when he became Alberta’s premier was to privatize liquor stores..Suddenly consumers could choose from dozens of beers, sold chilled and at all hours. There was no going back..With a solid base of independent liquor stores they could sell to, small breweries began to form and flourish..Now there are hundreds of beers to choose from. Beer quality is higher and there are never shortages or strikes..Citizens won..The Canadian Union of Public Employees overplayed their hand when they held Ontario parents hostage with outrageous demands for a double digit raise for education workers as the nation creeps toward a recession. Tired citizens and parents whose children had already had their education disrupted by two years of pandemic lockdowns called on Premier Doug Ford to intervene..Ford overplayed his hand by pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause to violate the Charter and try to force education workers back to their jobs. CUPE went on an illegal strike and within days, Doug Ford blinked and backed off..So who won in all of these political games?.It’s hard to say..The clear losers though are the students..Students across Canada will continue to lose due to a lack of choice in schools..Oh sure, there are some private schools and charter schools, but for the most part the government has a monopoly on providing education and it is all unionized..When there is a lack of choice and when consumers can’t vote with their feet or wallets, the consumers will always lose. Quality and stability will suffer..Education is a product and students are the consumers..Its time to move to models that best serve those consumers and those models involve more school choice. Dollars need to truly follow the students and schools both public and private should be able to compete for those dollars. Students should be treated as assets to be drawn in and schools need to be incentivized to attract them..Union based pay scales protect teachers who are mailing it in while pursuing a pension while underpaying some of the exceptional teachers who give it all they have. Schools should be competing for the better teachers as well. Merit based pay systems improve quality, but the union hold must be broken..The strikes, standoffs and instability won’t end until the system changes. Unionization can’t be banned, but their monopoly on education can be broken. Let the unions compete for teachers as well..Monopolies and near monopolies stunt innovation and quality. It doesn’t matter if the monopoly is government run or private. The end users of the product will lose in the end..The unions may have won the day in Ontario, but they may lose the war in the long run. Parents won’t forget being put over a barrel like that..If we want to see some of the best educational and healthcare outcomes on earth, we need to break the union dominated monopolies. Spending more on those systems as they are is just throwing good money after bad.
