Thank you very much.
I'm here from Alberta, which apparently is the only province that has a system that is different from the rest of Canada. With that in mind, I'll let you know that the Alberta Liquor Store Association, or ALSA for short, represents 1,200 private liquor retailers throughout Alberta, which again is the only province in Canada with a privatized retail liquor industry. The majority of these stores are independently owned or family owned, and all of them would be affected by passage of Bill C-311.
The Alberta Liquor Store Association appreciates the intent of the bill. We don't have a problem with the bill itself. We do appreciate that increased interprovincial trade is needed; however, the implementation of the bill may have many unintended consequences.
The Alberta model is an open market model. Currently, liquor retailing in Alberta is a $2 billion industry that provides thousands of jobs in private sector investments in communities across the province. Provincial revenue from sales of alcohol last year alone was $700 million. Currently, there are over 17,000 liquor products available in Alberta to anyone who wants to go to a liquor store and buy them. Mr. Albas will be happy to know that there are over 1,200 types of B.C. wines available in Alberta, and last year we sold 10 million bottles of B.C. wine alone in Alberta, so the industry is thriving very well.
To address a point, Alberta does not have limits on the quantity of wine products that people can bring with them across provincial borders for their own personal consumption or limits on their frequency of travel, meaning that you can go back and forth to B.C. as many times as you like and bring back as much wine as you like, as long as it's for your personal consumption and you bring it with you. As a matter of fact, Albertans are able to order wine directly from wineries right now, whether from B.C., Nova Scotia, or France. All they have to do is just do it through a local store and go through the AGLC, which is a regulatory body in Alberta. Wine can actually be delivered to your front doorstep, if that is desired.
As I mentioned, we do have some concerns with the bill, the main one being that it would bypass a regulatory body in Alberta, which would then lose the revenue from this domestic liquor product. Most importantly for my stakeholders, it would bypass retail stores, which would also see a decline in sales. Should the Alberta government increase taxes on the rest of the liquor products to make up for this loss of revenue, it would present a compounded negative effect to store owners and their margins of profit.
Underage drinking is also an issue for my members. Social responsibility is something that we take very seriously. As stated in the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, alcohol is indeed a controlled substance, and by allowing direct sale to consumers, Bill C-311 would bypass provincial regulation, making the market vulnerable to underage drinking without any means of monitoring. Anybody, any kid, can grab a parent's credit card and basically order wine, and it can be delivered to the doorstep without having anyone ask for ID.
Bill C-311 says that the province can impose limits on the quantities of wine a person can bring into the province. As Alberta would lose its revenue on domestic wine with Bill C-311, it stands to reason that the provincial government would impose restrictions on quantities that one can bring into the province. In other words, we would be imposing restrictions on a market that is currently open and without barriers, going backwards in some ways.
Bill C-311 would provide a precedent for other domestic liquor products such as beer and spirits to follow in the same path of being able to be sold directly to consumers. ALSA is of the view that Bill C-311 would be the beginning of a slippery slope for all other liquor products to be granted the same rights. Right now in Lethbridge there's a distillery that makes rum, so from the Alberta perspective we would be pushing the idea that they should be able to sell directly to consumers as well.
Bill C-311 could potentially create serious problems with Canada's various trade agreements, including NAFTA and GATT, which call for Canada to treat domestic wine and imported wine the same in terms of tax treatment. As B.C. wines already receive preferential treatment over other wines, this would create an even bigger platform for challenges under our trade agreements.
In conclusion, we again would like to emphasize that we appreciate the goal of this bill. However, we believe that the intended outcome of this bill can be better achieved by working under the federal-provincial agreement on internal trade. In this manner, the Canadian government can achieve its goal of better interprovincial trade in wine products while engaging and consulting all the parties necessary within government, provinces, and the liquor industry to ensure a successful outcome.
Thank you.