Modernizing the Crown outlines the reform of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) from the mid-1980s to the present day. Showing how it went from a stodgy distributor set on “controlling” beverage alcohol consumption to the efficient, dynamic retailer we see today, and illuminating both the process and the rationale for this shift.

As the central actor in Ontario’s alcoholic beverage market, the LCBO’s transformation challenges several common assumptions: that privatization is the only option to improve state-owned firms or that partisanship is a predictor of a government’s behaviour – it was the Mike Harris Tories, after all, who kicked its modernization drive into high gear in the 1990s. Like other firms owned by states, the LCBO must manage a host of demands from a variety of stakeholders, including its state owner, various powerful interests, and the citizen public, among others, and thus must juggle complex and competing commercial and policy imperatives.

Drawing from primary and secondary empirical sources, Malcolm G. Bird articulates the corporate, institutional, and political dynamics that both explain the board’s evolution and that underpin the province’s unique alcohol retail marketplace, including the recent drastic expansion of the retail landscape.