THE MAYOR OF LIQUORVILLE (an excerpt)
…snip … "And once you’ve absorbed that injustice, then this sort of thing happens: you get to hear about the plight of one small man and watch it get tied up into more theories of your organization’s malicious scheming.
LARRY PATERSON IS A CUSTOMER SERVICE CLERK at an LCBO store in Peterborough. He’s a shy man with unstylishly large wire-rimmed glasses and thinning straw-coloured hair, and his most remarkable attribute is that he’s famously enthusiastic about Ontario wine. He operates an award-winning Web site named after himself, littlefatwino.com, which covers events in Ontario’s wine region. He helps organize a yearly wine and food festival in the tiny community of Buckhorn, near Peterborough. He talks up Ontario wines with any LCBO customer who cares to listen, and at least once decorated his store’s Christmas tree with labels from Ontario wines. And the LCBO’s official response to all his passion and effort has been not celebration, but suspicion.
“Dear Mr. Paterson,” began the letter sent to him on June 5, 2002, by Paul Forsyth, manager of District 8. “The purpose of this letter is to advise you that as a result of a perceived conflict of interest, disciplinary action may be taken against you.” The letter detailed his possible offences, including his promotion of Ontario wines, his involvement with provincial grapegrowing and winemaking associations, and his Web site. It suggested that his personal interest might be affecting his judgment and promised further investigation.
“It’s threatening as hell,” says Paterson, who speaks nervously when he speaks at all about the treatment he’s getting from management. “I just go where they put me,” he tells me when I visit him at the Peterborough store. “I come in and do my job.” Privately, he nurtures an ambition to last a couple of years until early retirement, when he can take his pension and “grow grapes somewhere,” like the vintners he admires. Paul Forsyth now insists that a letter was sent a month later declaring the matter closed. But when the LCBO selected employees in each of its A- and B-ranked stores to become official Ontario wine advocates, Larry Paterson’s name was refused.
“No, I reject that out of hand,” says Brandt to the notion that an employee might be getting grief for a connoisseurship that dare not speak its name. “The more I think about it, the more it annoys me. That is not possible within our system.”
But in the view of some Ontario winemakers, it is typical of the system: why, of course the LCBO is persecuting an Ontario wine lover. Look at the shrinking shelf space given to the province’s wines, down according to the Wine Council of Ontario from 38 to about 30 per cent in the past two years. Look at how hard it is to get listings. Look at the fact that Tim Hudak had to practically force Andy Brandt to install Ontario wine advocates in his stores in the first place.
“Andy loves to come out for dinners and say, oh, we really support the Ontario wine industry,” says one Niagara winery owner. “That’s a bunch of crap as far as I’m concerned.”
“I’ve won Andy Brandt’s trophy three or four times in my life,” says winemaker Jim Warren, “yet I doubt the man would recognize me if I bumped into him.” And Warren, the founder and former owner of Stoney Ridge Cellars, who’s now a consultant to several craft winemakers, has a familiar-sounding theory on what’s behind the liquor board’s indifference: “They perceive the Ontario industry as a threat—for its ability to make money.”
…snip …