Jon Liedtke joins Gene Valaitis on 610 CKTB to critique Ontario’s retail alcohol theft crisis, arguing the LCBO traded forty years of secure vault-and-wicket history for open-shelf vulnerabilities. Highlighting Windsor’s $500,000 Crown Royal trailer heist and convenience store worker dangers, Liedtke urges bail reform and adopting Manitoba’s ID-scanning vestibule model.
Liedtke’s Got a Take! is on 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis Show every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, & Friday morning!
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Love live radio. Um, hey, uh, this is a great take today. Um, you know, between 1927 and 1969, the LCBO operated on this strict, uh, vault and wicket system that made, uh, theft, uh, from the LCBO, uh, impossible. You know, I remember as a little kid going to the LCBO with my uncle, and what you would do is you would go up to this, uh, sort of a stand, you would, uh, get this little form, you would get the shopkeeping unit number, you would put that down, uh, quantity of what you wanted, you know, one bottle, and at the bottom, you would write in a price. You would go to the cashier, you would pay for that. The cashier would give this slip to somebody who worked in the back, and a couple of minutes later, a clerk would come out and that bottle would be wrapped up in regular brown paper, just making it impossible to steal anything.
But after decades of modernization, making the, uh, places look upscale, um, you know, uh, basically we turned liquor stores into a buffet for organized crime and bad guys. I was on Twitter, uh, a couple of days ago, and, uh, I witnessed a robbery that somebody taped in, uh, an LCBO in Etobicoke. And, you know, these guys just very calmly filling up their shopping bags, walking out the front door, uh, but security guards hold no special police powers. And while the Criminal Code permits citizens’ arrest for offenses committed on the property, guard companies and retailers routinely mandate hands off. And basically, the thieves can just walk out the door with thousands of dollars in liquor while the guards stand back and watch.
Uh, I witnessed a theft in an LCBO, uh, about a half a year ago, and I said to the woman, I said, “Why aren’t you going to do anything?” And she said, “I make just over minimum wage, and I have two children, and I’m not going to put my life at risk, and perhaps my kids won’t have a mom to come home to today because some guy who’s probably half hammered wants to steal a 40-pounder of vodka.” And how can you blame her?
Jon Liedtke: Oh, you can’t blame her whatsoever, Gene, and this is the problem, right? We’re not paying for security at these establishments, at our liquor stores across the province. We’re essentially doing low-budget versions of The Wizard of Oz and renting human scarecrows to try to scare people away. We spend millions to park unarmed guards—and they’re not even fluorescent vests down here in Windsor, they’re black vests—and they hang out at the door, and the actual job is to sort of be like, uh, they’re just polite eye-contact greeters, and they act as state-subsidized witnesses to robberies.
The store says don’t touch the criminals, the guard firms don’t want the liability, so again, the guard functions almost as a Walmart-type greeter who watches you steal public assets paid for by you, me, and the rest of Ontario taxpayers.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. I remember, uh, last year in May, uh, bad guys stole a whole transport trailer truck containing over 1,000 boxes of Crown Royal from a secured yard in Windsor, with police reporting a retail replacement value of just over a half a million dollars. Only 66 boxes were recovered by the time the eight people were arrested. So, does this prove that Ontario liquor crime has expanded far beyond simple shoplifting into organized property crime targeting regional logistics?
Jon Liedtke: I think so, Gene. I mean, look, nobody accidentally shoves a thousand boxes of Crown Royal down their sweatpants, right? I mean, you don’t walk up to on a—you don’t wander up to a half-million-dollar tractor-trailer, hitch a semi to it, and drive off because you wanted to have a couple drinks with the boys on the weekend.
So I mean, eight people arrested, only 66 boxes recovered—the rest was obviously flipped into the black-market pipeline before the tires on the truck were cold. So I mean, the entire supply chain has been compromised, and as you said up at the beginning, it’s really almost an open buffet drive-through right now for organized crime syndicates, whether it’s in the stores or out of the stores. The entire supply chain is compromised.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Um, the Convenience Store Owners Association chair, his name is Terry Yaldo. Uh, he’s warning that solo clerks are facing escalating confrontations and it’s only a matter of time before somebody, uh, sadly loses their life because of these thefts. Now, um, I stopped in at a gas station/Timmies this morning, and, uh, the young lady working behind the counter was maybe 5’4″ and, uh, I don’t know, 90 pounds soaking wet. And I was just thinking, my goodness, you know, and I said, “Do you work overnight?” And she said, “Yes.” And I was just thinking, why is she there alone at 3:00 AM in the morning?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, that’s—and that’s what’s worrisome, Gene, because at the end of the day, the corporate balance sheet doesn’t bleed. It’s the 19-year-old clerk working the midnight shift who could end up bleeding.
Queen’s Park expanded our alcohol sales into variety stores. There was huge fanfare, they took victory laps around, the Convenience Store Association was happy, and the government and everyone else walked away from the potential of the security fallout. And lo and behold, crime still exists.
So if a grocery chain loses stock, the accountant can write it off. When a corner store gets hit, it’s that solo worker, often a student, who would be staring down the aggressive crew over a 12-pack of beer, which is not worth it. Treating minimum-wage workers’ safety as an acceptable cost of doing business—that’s just bankrupt.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Um, you know, the new stores, self-serve, aesthetically, they’re very beautiful. Um, but, uh, you know, beautiful to my eye, but, uh, a shopping—well, like I was saying before, you know, a buffet of free alcohol. Um, the old stores were very antiseptic-looking, very, you know, the bright lights. And just like the story I was telling off the top here, uh, when I would go into the store as a little kid in about Grade 4 with my uncle, you had to fill out the form, they went to the back. You know, in spite of the aesthetics and, uh, the way the stores look like now, should we turn back the hands of time and go back to that system so there will be no loss of life of a security guard and the massive amount of shoplifting will just simply come to an end?
Jon Liedtke: I don’t know if we need to go back to exactly that model, although there is something nostalgic, at least for me who didn’t experience that idea of almost like the bankers-type environment that the LCBO was. Um, for me when I was growing up and I went with, uh, you know, family members, they used to have the wine chiller at the front with the rubber duckies that would go around in circles and it was all cold, and that was, you know, an evolution as well.
But I like to put the hypocrisy into a context of when we legalized cannabis here. They mandated that windows be covered so you can’t see anything, IDs were checked at the door, every single gram is locked in the back of the business, you can’t touch it until you buy it. They literally copied the 1927 LCBO playbook and strapped a green sticker onto it.
But when it came to expanding LCBOs or putting it into corner stores, they didn’t decide to do any of that. So we’re treating low-potency weed gummies like it’s enriched uranium, but we’re treating hard liquor like it’s chewing gum. I mean, it’s nuts. We took all of that institutional knowledge and threw it out, and then tried to duplicate it for something that’s not nearly as harmful.
Gene Valaitis: Well, it’s interesting. I noticed that the Ontario government is thinking of mandating that you have to have two people in a cannabis store, whereas like the young lady, um, in the gas station/Timmies place, uh, it’s loaded with wine and beer and all the rest, but it’s just her alone in the middle of the night.
You know, do you think Ottawa should reconsider existing criminal legislation and whether it adequately addresses repeat organized retail theft?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, I think so. Um, look, the syndicates read the code, Gene. They know the dollar thresholds, they know the police response times, they know the system has zero teeth, so organized crime is treated like a minor nuisance in our society.
You know, and that’s the biggest problem that we have, and we also have a revolving bail door system that we’ve talked about before where before the officer finishes paperwork, the guy’s back out on the street. So Ottawa needs to treat repeat retail theft rings as criminal conspiracies with escalating penalties. Ontario needs to get serious on bail reform, and we just need to get serious about this. It’s taxpayer money at the end of the day.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Um, I know that after Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries Corporation introduced what they called controlled double-door vestibules, mandatory photo ID scanning after way too many thefts in 2019, uh, rip-offs dropped 90%. You think this is something Ontario should take a look at?
Jon Liedtke: I think so, absolutely. They were spending about $60,000 a pop in Manitoba. They spent two and a half million across 45 targeted locations, and the thefts dropped 90 points. But we don’t need to do it across all of our LCBOs, of course. You don’t need to do airlocks in quiet cottage country, but you can retrofit the top 150 high-shrink urban stores, and, you know, that wouldn’t be that expensive—less than 1%—I did some of the math—of the LCBO’s annual dividend.
And then for, you know, mom-and-pop corner stores, you could have an AGCO security grant that could cover, I don’t know, like $5,000 for barriers at the counter, for panic buttons, for locks for the coolers to ensure people can’t walk out of it.
But I think at the end of the day right now, what we need is the second you scan a government ID before someone touches a bottle, we need the criminal business model to evaporate with that. So we should pilot the Manitoba model, we should fund basic counter security, and we should close the open bar that we’ve decided to open here in the province.
Gene Valaitis: Well said, great take. Um, have a fantastic day. We will talk to you 9:15 Friday morning.
Jon Liedtke: Looking forward to it, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Jon Liedtke’s got a take.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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