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WINE AND BEER CONVIENCE CAMPAIGN

Introduction to News Media

Introduction – Social Media, Wine and Beer Convenience, Ontario Election 2011

The Wine and Beer Convenience Campaign is a social media drive to make wine and beer available to responsible adults at Ontario convenience stores.

Our campaign has already gained substantial first-page placement on search engines. Before reading further we invite you to Google this:

lcbo wine and beer

Our aim is to make wine and beer at the corner store a virally-propelled key issue in the October 2011 Ontario election.

News value in following and covering the Wine and Beer Convenience Campaign

The Election Story: The majority of Ontarians wants it and has for years. A 2010 Angus Reid poll shows 63 percent of Ontarians want to buy wine and beer at convenience stores. The Ontario government is responsible for the provincial liquor laws and they are heading to an election in the fall.

Social Media and the Ontario Election: The recent federal election demonstrated the national parties are not equipped to use one of the most powerful opinion-shaping tools in the political arsenal – social media. Their provincial counterparts have an even looser grasp of the instrument leveraged to such great advantage by, for example, President Barack Obama.

In fact, the online public has a much more commanding understanding of how to wield social media as an instrument for democratic discourse and as a means to shape political outcomes. Specifically, in the lead-up to the election, our growing social media community will be asking for changes to provincial liquor laws – legislation that does not reflect a changing society, competitive business principles, the rights of taxpayers or the will of voters.

Simply put, the candidates will not get to decide if this is on the table for debate during the election

campaign; the public will.

Next Steps

We invite you to follow our progress as the Wine and Beer Convenience Campaign gains further traction on search engine first pages and in the minds of the Ontario public.

As well, we have attached here for your interest five news media questions for the LCBO. These are questions we think Ontarians would like the news media to pose to the Crown agency. We will be posting our answers next week.

Each week, we will post five questions the news media might ask of the wine-and-beer-convenience players, for example: The Beer Store; Premier Dalton McGuinty; Finance Minister Dwight Duncan; Consumer Services Minister John Gerretsen; Tourism Minister Michael Chan; and Opposition leaders Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath. There will be questions for stakeholders as well, for example: the Ontario Craft Brewers; Niagara Wine Council; and independent Ontario wineries.