Published: Friday, March 23, 2018
Excerpt from Free this wine! Finally a plan to break down the provincial borders blocking our bottles | Financial PostThe Canadian Vintners Association has offered advice to the ABWG with the goal of formulating a federal-provincial/territorial recommendation for a direct-to-consumer protocol, which would create an acceptable interprovincial wine-delivery system across Canada.
With potentially broader implications, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the Comeau case in December 2017. A federal law passed in 1928 gave provincial governments the exclusive authority to “import” alcohol into their territory. Every province has similar restrictions. A few provide very limited allowances for personal consumption, while in the rest the legal limit is zero. The current legislative landscape across Canada is divergent, sporadically enforced, and usually misunderstood.
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Let’s hope the Supreme Court strikes down these relics of Prohibition, reasserting the spirit of Canadian confederation for the next 150 years. And let’s hope that the Alcohol Beverage Working Group delivers on Canadian consumers’ wish to have a simple direct-to-consumer system in place to support the interprovincial purchase and delivery of hard-to-find premium wines from Canada’s wine regions.