BC Labour Committee
On May 29, the BC provincial government implemented a policy allowing licensed restaurants, bars and pubs to purchase alcohol from private liquor stores instead of through the publicly owned BC Liquor Distribution Branch (LDB). The change places hundreds of unionized jobs at the LDB and BC Liquor Stores at risk while shifting another part of the province’s liquor distribution system into private hands.
The government justified the change by citing operational needs related to the FIFA World Cup. Critics, including the BC General Employees’ Union, argue that the policy represents another step toward privatizing liquor distribution. Announced as a “three-year trial,” this drive to privatization undermines the public liquor distribution system, threatens unionized jobs and undercuts the power of working people in the BC public service over their employer.
Hundreds of workers at BC Liquor Stores and at BC LDB warehouses are members of the BCGEU, which has stood in strong opposition to this change and states that it was not consulted on these cuts to the public distribution system. The union has argued that privatizing the once exclusively public purchasing right threatens their jobs, the public revenue source of the liquor distribution system, and their powers to strike in the future.
The union has voiced intense frustration with the provincial government, which advanced this policy at the behest of industry lobbyists without consultation, despite past commitments made to the union to do so.
During the historic BC public service strike last year, worker-members of BCGEU leveraged their collective power against their employer, the BC government, when around 25,000 workers walked off the job. At the head of the charge were those employed by the BC LDB and BC Liquor and Cannabis Stores, which serve as a significant revenue source for the government. At the height of the strike in October 2025, all 234 provincially operated retail stores, the distribution warehouses and the LDB head offices were struck.
The provincial government has weakened one of workers’ most significant sources of bargaining power by reducing the central role of the public liquor distribution system.
The gutting of the public liquor distribution system has been a long-term process of austerity. Beginning in the 1990s, the government allowed land-based wineries using 100 percent BC grapes to bypass the LDB warehouse system and deliver to restaurants and private retailers directly. Then, in 2002, a special license was introduced allowing small craft breweries to do the same. In 2013, small-batch craft distilleries were granted the same privilege to bypass public processes. Most recently, in 2026, this privilege was expanded again to allow producers of coolers and premixed cocktails to distribute directly.
This latest change represents another step in a decades-long process of expanding private participation in liquor distribution. Measures introduced as limited exemptions or “pilot projects” have repeatedly become permanent features of the system, representing a new normal.
At the end of the day, it is working people who suffer the impacts of public service austerity through the loss of good union jobs, skyrocketing prices and ever-diminishing public revenue streams.
Public sector austerity is a long-term structural tendency of monopoly capitalism. Privatization is a deliberate drive to create new areas for profit by reducing the scope of publicly provided services.
The struggle to defend the public liquor distribution system is part of the broader struggle against privatization and austerity in British Columbia.
The BCGEU has launched a petition calling on the provincial government to reverse this policy and defend BC’s public liquor distribution system. Everyone who supports public services, union jobs, and democratic control over public assets should sign the petition and share it widely. Enough is enough – stop liquor privatization now!
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