The BC LCLB Speaks!
I just received this little note in response to my rantish letter a few weeks back about Bring Your Own Wine:
There is a lot of legal, policy and committee work involved in changing legislation. When bring your own wine was being contemplated government had been extensively lobbied for bring your own wine, with very little call being made for bring your own beer from either restaurant associations, the public or business. This is still the case. There is no plan to allow bring your own beer.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to write back to this address or to call our Help Desk, toll-free, at 1-866-209-2111.
Now, before y’all get worked up into a tizzy over this, I should say that I like this answer. Well, at least I like it a lot more than the previous one, which frankly was both baffling and insulting.
This answer, on the other hand, makes sense. It plainly outlines a reason for not including beer in the legislation, and as sucky as that reason might be, it is logical. Why wasn’t beer included? The answer is right there: the beer lobby wasn’t loud enough, and a quiet lobby isn’t worth spit in politics. That’s just the name of the game.
However, this letter cuts both ways. Now that we know why beer was left out, we also know how to fix that and get beer included. If we want craft beer to be taken seriously in this province, we need to get organized and get loud. We kinda suspected it before, but now we have it in writing.
There’s definitely a lot of sideline sitting going on in this. At the moment there are only 264 signatures on CAMRA’s BYOCB petition. There are over 700 members in CAMRA BC, there should be 700+ signatures right there!
Mike
24 Aug 12 at 15:37
Ideally, it would have been nice if the government had considered the bigger picture and considered that people may want to bring something to a restaurant other than wine. I guess it’s a bit much to expect anything beyond answering those with the most grease for the wheels.
It is now clear that if you don’t ask for, nay demand anything, you get nothing. So, people, if you want things to improve for the craft beer landscape in BC, join CAMRA now and get behind the Campaign!
Rick
24 Aug 12 at 15:45