Last day will be October 19
LITTLE CURRENT—The local Beer Store in Little Current will be closing its doors for good on October 19, leaving Manitoulin Island without a standalone retail location. Staff learned of the decision early Monday, becoming the latest group affected by a province-wide wave of store closures as the company restructures in response to shifting alcohol sales and an ever-changing market landscape.
For the Little Current Lions Club, the news came as an unwelcome surprise. Lion President Bruce Burnett said the outlet has long been central to preparing for community events such as Haweater Weekend and Winterfest. “We usually get about 70 to 80 cases of beer for those events,” he explained, noting how convenient the local store had been. “I guess we’ll need to figure out another option. Hopefully, the Espanola location stays open, but at this point, we just don’t know. There are other potential options in Mindemoya and Manitowaning, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to handle that kind of order.”
Until recently, many of those agency stores had relied on the Little Current outlet as a distribution point, a practice that ended about two years ago.
Reaction from Manitoulin’s breweries was mixed. Manitoulin Brewing Company manager Alex Inman said the change may not hurt their business at all. “We haven’t really been in the Beer Store for about a year and a half now,” he noted. “Once we heard they were going to be closing something like 10 stores a day, we knew we had to make changes on our end.” The brewery has shifted sales toward the LCBO, grocery outlets and approved corner stores, and Mr. Inman suggested that the closures may even be helping. “We’ve actually seen a bit of an uptick in business since these changes started.”
The Beer Store, which began in 1927 under the name Brewers Retail, has long been a unique part of Ontario’s landscape. Owned collectively by brewers from its inception, the system today is controlled primarily by Molson, Labatt and Sleeman. These multinationals together hold most of the shares, although roughly 30 Ontario-based craft breweries also maintain a stake in the franchise. The ownership structure allows all qualified brewers to list their products equally, setting their selling prices within limits approved by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).
Prior to 1949, Little Current had been dry as a result of the Canada Temperance Act (CTA). However, the region was permitted to hold a referendum to repudiate the CTA which was successful, and soon after both the liquor and beer stores were opened. In its early years, Ontario’s beer industry was tied closely to the railways. Large breweries in southern centres shipped their products north by train, while empty bottles were sent back down the line for cleaning, relabelling, and refilling. As a result, many Beer Stores across Northern Ontario were built alongside rail spurs, and Little Current appears to be no exception. Located where once the terminus of the rail line to Manitoulin Island, the community was a natural site for such a facility, its store serving for decades as both a retail outlet and a supply hub for surrounding agency stores. Though rail shipments have long since ceased, the legacy of that system can still be traced in various communities in the North. The Little Current Beer Store was the last stop on the CPR line.
In 2024, the company delivered 2.92 million hectolitres of beer to more than 13,000 customers and collected some 1.6 billion alcohol containers through its recycling program. Yet despite its storied history, the Beer Store has been steadily shrinking its retail footprint recently, citing the rise of supermarket, big-box, and convenience store sales. This new competition has placed mounting pressure on its smaller outlets. In recent closure announcements, the company has described each shutdown as a “difficult decision” driven by “changes in the retail market.”
Much of that change stems from the Ford government’s decision last year to expand alcohol sales to grocery and corner stores. To break the Beer Store’s long-standing exclusivity agreement, the province provided $225 million in compensation to the company. Under the agreement, the company must maintain at least 300 outlets until the end of this year, after which it can reduce its network at will.
For Little Current, the closure means the loss of a familiar storefront that has served both locals and visitors for decades. It also leaves residents and organizations asking the same question: where to turn next?
