After reading Sachin Phadkar’s blog, “BYOB to restaurants – who does it benefit?”; I began to ponder whether this new law that allowed guests to bring their own bottles of wine would hurt or help the restaurant industry.  I do not completely agree with Sachin’s prediction of the effects that the new BYOW law will have on the restaurant industry; although I do agree with Sachin that restaurants do not fall into one homogeneous group.

I strongly believe that the implication of the BYOW law will help the restaurant industry as a whole.  Inexpensive restaurants that target the middle-class will be able to compete with the more high end restaurants throughout British Columbia.  People with average incomes are going to be more willing to go out for dinner if they can bring their own bottle of wine and pay a small corkage fee (determined  by the restaurant); as opposed to paying for a ridiculously overpriced bottle of wine.

In contrast, Sachin seems to think that the BYOW law will hurt fine dining restaurants as they would lose the revenue from alcohol, a big player in the fine dining experience.  Well this is not exactly true.  For restaurants that generate a large percentage of their revenue from alcohol, Rich Coleman, the Minister Responsible for Housing and in charge of liquor control, has made it clear that BYOW is optional and restaurants will be able to choose if they want to participate.  With that key factor in mind, there is no denying that the new BYOW law will give “industry the needed flexibility to get people out and din[ing] more” (Tostenson).

The Canadian Competition Law monitors the reliability of advertisements and provides consequences for misleading advertising.  This Act requires that companies be able to prove the performance of their product using an “adequate and proper test” before making a claim.  By doing so, this Act is diminishing a company’s ability to make a false claim about it’s product.  For example, the Nutella company is no longer able to persuade parents to buy their children Nutella by advertising it as a healthy food since it contained dangerous levels of saturated fat and was more than 55 percent processed sugar.  With these fines and strict laws in place, I hope to see the frequency of false advertisements decrease in Canada and internationally.

Many people are seemingly impressed with the unexpected 52,000 jobs that were added to the Canadian economy this past month.  To Canada’s delight, the gain was more than the roughly 10,000 new jobs that economists polled by Bloomberg were expecting.  At face value, this new discovery seems both promising and encouraging for Canadian citizens; however, should we really be impressed?

Notice how reporters are not taking into account the population of Canada.  From 2010 to 2011, Canada’s population has risen from 34.1262 million to 34.4828 million making the growth in Canadian jobs look very small in comparison.  With this large increase in Canada’s population, the demand for certain goods in Canada will also rise, causing supply to rise (or vise versa).  Simple logic tells us, that in order for that to happen, companies and services will require more employees.  So the real question should not be whether or not the number of jobs in Canada has increased; but rather we should be looking at the unemployment rate.  By doing this, Canadians will realize that this discovery is not so exciting as Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti noted there are now five unemployed workers for every job opening across the country. “Our economy is sluggish and there is very little prospect on the horizon for real job growth,” Georgetti said in a release.