Yesterday the opposition Wildrose Party (not to be confused with Calgary’s Wild Rose Brewing) in Alberta released a policy plan (read here) around the beer industry. It is a response to the NDP government’s recent series of announcements (read here for background). They call it their “6-Pack Plan for Alberta Beer Producers and Consumers”.

I was sincerely interested in what the Official Opposition’s take on this might be. They have been strangely silent in recent weeks on the matter. So, I went to read the plan to work out what it might mean for beer in the province.

Except there is no plan. Not even close.

It consists of six vague bullet points (even the “read the full plan” link). I will quote the whole thing (it doesn’t take long):

1. Improve Free Trade: Promote inter-Canadian free trade and fight unfair trade barriers faced by Alberta brewers in other markets;
2. Lower Beer Taxes: Reverse beer tax increases imposed by the NDP government;
3. Encourage Growth: Support new breweries and encourage expansion of existing ones by ending minimum capacity regulations and retroactive markup rates for small and medium-sized breweries;
4. Protect Consumers: Maintain our open access approach that ensures Alberta consumers have better access to the beer of their choice than Canadians in any other province;
5. Fight Protectionism: Make the staff who are studying the trade barriers we are lobbying to remove available to brewers to help navigate the obstacles and red tape in other provinces; and,
6. Stabilize Business: Put in place a clear, predictable regulatory and tax regime for brewers that is consistent with our trade agreements and the Canadian constitution.

Even though a piece of me thinks that responding to this piece of media puffery is giving it too much credit, allow me to make a few points about how the plan is not a plan.

Let me start with the easy stuff. First, the level of vague generality is laughable. Most of the bullets are rhetoric with not a substantive policy plank to be found. Numbers 1 and 5 are basically the same point. And number 6 is platitude that offers nothing of substance.

Numbers 2 and 4 essentially amount to returning Alberta to the pre-election status quo. Open borders with a mark-up regime that provides a lower mark-up to every small and medium brewery on the planet. How well did that work for Alberta breweries?

The Wildrose nod to Alberta brewers is found in number 3 – except that is addressing issues that were solved in 2013!! They seem to proclaiming themselves saviours of problems solved THREE YEARS AGO!! (Note to Wildrose MLAs: there is neither a minimum production capacity nor a retroactive mark-up increase anymore. You can thank Alison Redford for that.)

Sure, they also talk about defending Alberta breweries by fighting against inter-provincial barriers. That point I can get on board with. But what are you going to do? What steps are you going to take to bring down decades-old laws that restrict imports? Promises like that are easy. How are you going to actually persuade other provinces to change their rules to let Alberta beer into their stores? A one-page glossy isn’t good enough for what is a complex inter-provincial trade issue. Besides, what do you do in the meantime, while small Alberta breweries face the full onslaught of international competition (due to your policy of returning to the previous regime’s approach)?

There are legitimate complaints about the new Alberta government policy around beer. Small western Canadian breweries have a legitimate beef, as do many importers who have made their livelihood bringing good beer into the province. There is space to have a legitimate policy debate around this issue. But the policy announcement today doesn’t does none of these things.

All this “policy” announcement demonstrates is that the Wildrose Party understands nothing about the nature of the beer industry in Canada. Their “solutions” are essentially the previous status quo, which mired Alberta in the back of the pack in terms of local craft beer. It might satisfy their friends in the arch conservative Fraser Institute and Canadian Constitution Foundation (who are supporting a trade complaint against Alberta’s beer mark-up policy), but their position has no connection at all to the realities of trying to brew and sell beer in Alberta.

Sure, in their press release they offer faint, passing words of support for Alberta’s burgeoning craft breweries, but somehow you get the sense that when push comes to shove, Brian Jean and Derek Fildebrandt will fall over pretty fast. I would have had more time for their press release had they admitted honestly that they are siding with imported beer over Alberta beer (a perfectly fair position to take, by the way). Their attempt to have it both ways, however, falls flat on its face.

At the end of the day, their announcement is mostly just embarrassing. There is no excuse to demonstrate this degree of ignorance over a public policy issue – even on a topic as narrow as beer. With a few hours work their researchers should have been able to at least get them up to speed on what the rules actually are. (Hell, they could have called me and I would have filled them in within a half hour!)

Their six-pack of policies prove instead to be a case of mistreated empties. But to satisfy the metaphor, allow me to offer a six-pack of adjectives to describe it: vacuous, contradictory, out-of-date, vague, ill-informed, and – mostly – embarrassing.

Personally, I expect more from Her Majesty’s Official Opposition.

[Edited Sept 8, 10:45 to clarify the role of the Constitution Foundation in the trade complaint]