The union that represents Manitoba Liquor Mart employees has collected 300 signatures in just a few days on a petition asking Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries (MBLL) to shelve plans to shut down their outlet in Churchill and contract liquor sales to a private vendor instead.
“We started a petition a couple of days ago and actually it’s amazing, we’ve gotten over 300 signatures already on it as of today so people are in support of this across the province,’ said Michelle Gawronsky, president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU), which has four members employed at the Liquor Mart in Churchill, including one full-time employee on term assignment from Winnipeg and three part-time employees who are residents of the town. “They’re not 300 people from Churchill. This is across the province. People understand that a good-paying job in a small community, if you take those away, that’s a local community and a local economy that’s going to hurt.”
Plans to move liquor sales to a private vendor in the Hudson Bay port town were first reported in October, with MBLL saying that sales had dropped at the store because of the opening of a liquor store in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
An MBLL spokesperson said officials would be visiting Churchill retailers early next year to provide expression of interest documents and that those applications would be evaluated to select the best-suited store to sell liquor.
“This is our standard process for evaluating retailer applications to establish a liquor retail outlet in rural communities, and we expect the process to be complete toward the end of March 2019,” said the spokesperson.
MBLL says sales and operating costs are the main factors when considering whether to open a Liquor Mart of a liquor vendor in a particular community and that a community the size of Churchill is “well-suited to support the private rural liquor vendor model rather than a Liquor Mart.”
The MGEU president says the timing of the move is confusing, especially with things in Churchill just starting to get back on track after a year-and-a-half without rail service, and that MBLL says the store is still profitable, just not as profitable as some others.
“My question becomes who’s next on the chopping block because if this isn’t the highest-profit store and you close it now we have another one that’s not the highest-profit store."
Gawronsky also says that the knock-on effect of losing four union jobs would be less money being spent at other businesses in town.
“The local economy is going to hurt and one person who already has a business in town that is making a profit is going to make a bigger profit and that money is not going to be returned to the community now,” she said. “It’s going to hurt the community, no two ways around it. It’s not like the new store’s going to be hiring anybody, he’s just going to sell the bottles off his shelf. The sale of alcohol in Manitoba, it brings in millions of dollars and that money goes into our provincial coffers and then it’s used for schools and education and health care and programs for kids and families so some of that money we know would have been returned to the community of Churchill. Now it’s going to go into a private pocket and make someone rich instead of giving back to the community.”
Gawronsky said she also fears this is the top of a slippery slope.
“The government that’s in place right now seems hell bent for leather on privatizing everything that they possibly can,” Gawronsky said. “We need to be supporting the north. We can’t be providing any more closures or any ways of being able to privatize any of the services that are up there.”
