Can I Help You Pay for That? What Rampant LCBO Theft Really Costs Us

LCBO staff are told never to stop theft in progress. Here's what daily, unpunished robbery is really costing Ontario taxpayers.

In 2016, I worked the Christmas season at the LCBO.

Ten years later, two things still stand out from that job.

The first - every morning I opened the store, two men were waiting. One was a French businessman who’d buy two mickeys of Smirnoff and quickly stuff one into either pocket. The other was a scraggly vagabond who went straight to the fortified wines and grabbed a bottle of Kelly’s — the best bang for your buck, alcohol-content-wise, in the store. The lesson: addiction can impact anyone.

The second standout was the training seminar. Specifically, the one directive broke my mind at the time: if someone is stealing from the store, do not intervene. That’s what security is for, and your safety is not worth a couple bottles of scotch. As a 25-year-old with a bit of a temper, I knew this would be a challenge.

The one time I witnessed a robbery in broad daylight, a man walked in with two large backpacks and began shovelling bottles of Oban into them. One of my colleagues tried to stop him. She screamed. The manager restrained her. Despite the adrenaline, I kept my cool.

My colleague was disciplined with a warning.

We were reminded that the only acceptable move in that scenario is to ask the thief: “Sir, can I help you pay for that?”

This policy remains in place today. I knew that it happens with some regularity — videos surface online from time to time. Recently, a friend of mine was fired from the LCBO. Their offence: failing to report a colleague who’d tried to intervene in a robbery.

Then the other day, I got to relive my youth: while heading into my local liquor store, I noticed four grungy looking people outside. It’s not uncommon to see a poor soul and their dog panhandling by the entrance of this location. But these four stood out — I was pretty sure they were smoking crack. This store is next to a school.

A few minutes later though, while exploring the vintages section, I noticed my four friends from earlier out of the corner of my eye in the store looking at buying some whiskey. I suppose I’d misjudged them. Then it happened. Straight to the scotch: two of them cramming bags full of bottles, the other two keeping watch. Everyone in the store stood by. The customers, the employees, even the security guard. The guard it seemed had actually cleared a path so the group could get out without friction. An employee asked, “Can I help you pay for those?”

I got the final moments on video.

After watching this go down, I approached the employees and expressed my sympathy for their plight. I explained that I used to do their job. They confirmed it. The directive hasn’t changed: don’t intervene. The employee’s safety isn’t worth it. As it turns out, the security guards operate under that same directive.

What floored me about that conversation with the young cashier is that she mentioned that this happens every day. I pushed back — “literally, every day?” “No, but like five or six times a week is totally normal.”

This is the part that’s so soul-crushing: the resignation of our citizens to the normalization of this kind of criminality. The quiet acceptance that this is simply a fact of life. That there’s nothing they can do about it. That there’s nothing anyone else will do about it either.

Then comes the surreal moments after — standing in line for the privilege of paying for your own wine. Those four walked out with dozens of bottles for free. We pay $20 for a bottle of wine that costs $3 in Europe, because that’s what the social contract asks of us. That’s the civil thing to do. But for a fleeting moment, you picture it: walking out the front door yourself, bottles in hand, not paying, as an act of protest. A glorious little act of defiance. This injustice cannot stand.

I tap my Mastercard. “Would you like to donate $1 to the children’s hospital?”. “No thanks”. No revolution today.

You can get over that double standard quickly enough. You get over the feeling of danger. But what hurts the most is that the LCBO — the Liquor Control Board of Ontario — is a provincial institution, funded by taxpayers. We are the ones who are paying the taxes. So all of this theft can and should be considered as directly stealing from all of us.

This normalization is insidious precisely because it is the first crack in the social contract. Those cracks lead to a frayed society. When you see this low-level criminality happening in plain sight, you begin to wonder who else is watching, and what lesson they’re taking from it. For some, the lesson will be that breaking the law does not lead to consequences. In other words, there is no deterrence.

Now, on any individual account, the policy of non intervention by liquor store staff makes sense. No employee should be encouraged to physically stop a robbery. You never know how out of their mind a thief is, or whether they’re armed. Their lives are not worth a couple bottles of Oban.

There is also the broader civic argument: some would say this kind of low-level theft is cheaper, city- and province-wide, than funding the policing, jail time, and rehabilitation these people would otherwise need — people driven to criminality by unfortunate circumstances none of us can fully account for.

We can sympathize with these people, but it has gotten out of control. This needs to stop because it is wrong, but even more importantly because of what it represents.

Without a social contract, we have no shared reference point. When the institutions meant to enforce the law visibly fail to do so, when they fail publicly, again and again, citizens stop trusting them at all. It’s part of why private security has become such a booming business in Toronto. Walking through the more affluent neighbourhoods in the city, you can see that many have already lost that trust.

So where is the leadership on this? Who is or who should be responsible for stopping it?

There are some likely candidates that might logically be held accountable. You can picture their responses though. The CEO of the LCBO? He’d simply call it shrinkage, The same way any other retailer prices in theft and damaged goods. The Premier? He’d call it a local issue. The OPP doesn’t police Toronto after all. The Toronto Police Chief? He’d say it isn’t a priority, that the crime is victimless, and no one is getting hurt. The police will be focusing on using their limited resources on other files. The Mayor? She would surely say that this is a policing matter, and because she doesn’t sit on the police board, she couldn’t possibly be held accountable.

A grand exercise in finger-pointing. “It’s not my responsibility.”

And yet the Premier is happy to turn American booze at the LCBO into a political football. The previous CEO was plenty proud of his sustainability record. The Police Chief and the Mayor keep advertising the apparent record lows in crime.

None of them take the responsibility. All of them take the wins.

This has become the standard retort to any systemic issue. “That’s not my job” has become the default answer.

Perhaps no one is injured, but what about the ruined lives of the people doing the stealing? The mental health of the employees and the witnesses? The dollars stolen that could have gone toward healthcare, treatment, or addiction care instead?

All of it gets forgotten, but none of it is unrelated. Taxpayers are footing the bill either way. They are doing their part, working hard, and being asked to ignore what their eyes and ears are telling them about the grand bargain. That is what’s really at stake here: the social contract.

If you do not have faith in the social contract, it promotes corruption. If there is no rule of law, it promotes criminality. Some empathy for criminals is warranted, but that empathy cannot override the basic tenets of a democratic society. We are a long way away from failed state territory, but we are flirting with the first step towards failure - apathy towards state institutions.

The solutions are not complicated, but they require courage. First, a real commitment from leaders to stamp this criminality out. Long term solutions that prevent the theft, and diminish the conditions by which people are driven to criminality. Second is the shorter term solution. Actual law enforcement with simple principles: The law needs to apply to everyone, equally. Criminals need to be arrested. Arrests need to lead to charges. Charges to convictions (where appropriate). Convictions to sentencing.

This kind of scenario is the tip of the spear. It might look small — a few hundred dollars of scotch don’t move the needle on their own. It doesn’t really affect our day-to-day lives. So it is easy to move past. But the trends and forces of apathy towards criminality slowly erodes our social compact.

Trust in institutions matters.

Let’s do something to restore it.