As part of the Premiers’ meeting in PEI, the Premiers of 9 Provinces announced a ‘landmark’ DTC agreement today that may possibly assist with the removal of barriers to the interprovincial sale and shipment of wine across provincial borders. But it may not help at all … and it’s still not clear if or when any actual substantive progress will be made.
The text of the agreement is located here: Operating Agreement on Direct to Consumer Sale of Alcoholic Beverages.
The substance of the agreement indicates that the Provinces (AB, BC, SK, MB, ON, NB, PEI, NS, NL) commit to establishing DTC systems for sale from manufacturers to consumers in another province … but may require licenses or permits … or registrations or authorizations … and may also require the collection of taxes/fees and liquor markups. The devil will be in the details on these issues … if the administration is too complicated or if the fees are too high, then the systems may not work for wineries or consumers.
Unfortunately, there appears to be no universal system … and no blanket permissibility for DTC without the above mentioned potential caveats. As a result, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to judge whether this agreement will produce a resolution to the problems for wineries or even as to whether this constitutes any progress at all.
Notably, the agreement ONLY applies to direct to consumer sales by manufacturers … so it does not resolve or address any of the issues related to inter-provincial sale by retailers or to businesses. In addition, it does not apply to products that are bottled in another province but not manufactured there (e.g. imported wine bottled in another province).
The Schedule appears to provide limited additional information as some Provinces are indicating that they will not require DTC authorizations (MB, NB) while all the others indicate that they will require some type of authorization.
I also note that there appear to be no deadlines or even target dates for the implementation of these systems … and the agreement specifically states that it is not legally binding and creates no enforceable legal rights at all.
As noted above, there appears to be positive intent (spin?) here … but insufficient detail to judge whether or not this will amount to any meaningful change.
An analogy might be this … suppose as a university student you are assigned a term paper in first year English that’s worth 100% of your grade. You make various excuses and never hand it in … the patient professor waits 4 years without receiving it. It’s now your graduation day … and instead of handing it in, you tell them that you have just finished an outline of things that you might want to write about. And then you announce that you still want to graduate.
That’s what just happened here. The Premiers are still kicking the can down the road. After waiting decades for this, wineries and wine consumers deserve more substance and actual measurable progress.