Ontario will not consider raising the drinking age or restricting stores selling alcohol
Ontario is not considering raising the drinking age or reducing the number of stores selling alcohol, despite health-related concerns made by the province’s top doctor.
“We believe in treating people like adults,” Premier Doug Ford said at a news conference in Vaughan, Ont. on Wednesday. “You get to go into a retail store, a big box store, and buy a bottle of wine with your steak and maybe a six pack of beer like the rest of the world. That's what we believe in.”
In December, the Ontario announced it would allow for the sale of beer, wine, cider and ready-to-drink cocktails in convenience stores, big box stores and all grocery stores in Ontario by 2026. It's is one of the biggest changes in alcohol sales in the history of the province and gives the citizens of the province more choice and convenience.
Earlier this week, Dr. Kieran Moore, the province's chief medical officer of health, called on the province to immediately enact policy to restrict access to alcohol, vapes and cannabis, as the number of people who have died or visited a hospital due to using multiple substances has spiked in recent years.
Specifically, he recommended Ontario "explore the value of increasing the legal minimum drinking age from 19 to 21" and "work with the federal government to require that all alcohol products have warning labels and signage that describe the risks and harms of drinking booze.
“I'll always support Dr. Moore in the job he's doing. Do we disagree? Yes, we disagree,” Ford said, adding that if an individual who is 19 can be enrolled in the military, they should “be allowed to have a beer.”
In his report, Dr. Moore noted that Ontarians, especially youth, have also been a part of a "disturbing trend" in recent years of binge drinking and vaping.
The report, citing recently released data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, found 33% of adults said they used cannabis in 2020, an 8% increase from 2019. And when it released its cannabis survey in 2022, Health Canada reported the number of Ontarians who died of alcohol toxicity rose 16% between 2018 and 2021.
"We have also seen concerning changes in substance use patterns and harms more broadly, including higher rates of vaping among non-smokers, increased unintentional poisonings in children from cannabis ingestion, and an ongoing high burden of hospitalizations and cancers caused by alcohol," Moore said in the report.
He said that's why efforts need to be made to "shift social norms by making Ontarians more aware of new evidence on alcohol-related harms."
He suggested in the report, for example, that more restrictions on how legal substances are marketed can be implemented to educate people on the harms of substance use.
"The province does prohibit advertising of alcohol to minors on traditional media outlets like television, radio or print, but neither the federal nor the provincial government limits advertising on social media platforms, which is where youth get most of their information," Moore said.
-with files from The Canadian Press
