Even if you don’t live in Ontario, you might have heard about cheap beer—like, really cheap beer. Buck-a-beer is back in the province - at least for now - because the Conservatives made it a promise to deliver discount suds to the masses by labour day. After this weekend though, one of just three breweries offering the cheap stuff will stop its promotion, and the other two may not be far behind. Will dollar bottles disappear as quickly as they appeared? Yeah, probably. Because there’s a reason beer doesn’t cost a dollar anymore.
When premiere-to-be Doug Ford promised during the campaign to bring back buck-a-beer, the key words in that promise were really “bring back”. You may have heard that those who don’t learn from history really are doomed to repeat it. Christine Sismondo, author of the Canadian Moments column in Maclean’s, as well as books on booze, gives us all a remedial lesson.