There is broad support for Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s plan to remove Crown Royal whiskey from the shelves of the LCBO — although voters are wary of harming other provinces in the process, a new poll has found.
Liaison Strategies polled 1,000 Ontarians over two days last week, asking about Ford’s plan to remove Crown Royal from the LCBO if international drink maker Diageo closes its southwestern Ontario bottling facility.
Sixty-nine per cent of those surveyed agreed Ford should use his power over the LCBO to pressure companies to keep jobs in the province. At the same time, 63 per cent said harming Crown Royal jobs in other provinces, like Manitoba, should be avoided.
That is broadly Ford’s public position — that he doesn’t want to hurt workers in other provinces but needs to send a message to Diageo over its planned plant closure.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, however, is urging Ford to call off his planned boycott. He has suggested that if Crown Royal sales dry up in the country’s most populous province, workers in Manitoba could pay the price.
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David Valentin, principal at Liaison Strategies, said the poll results show Ford’s public push appears to be resonating in Ontario.
“Premier Ford has definitely tapped into the right sentiment with that move,” he said. “However, the same voters are also drawing a boundary around how that leverage should be used. There isn’t an appetite for punishing other provinces.”
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The poll asked if Ontario should prioritize fighting for Ontario jobs or avoiding harm to other parts of the Canadian economy. Forty-eight per cent said Ontario should come first, while 41 per cent believe the national economy is more important.
Ford first suggested he would force a boycott of Crown Royal in the summer, after Diageo announced it would close a facility with roughly 160 jobs in southwestern Ontario.
The premier said he would remove Crown Royal from circulation in Ontario if the company did not reverse course, even suggesting he could take other Diageo products like Smirnoff Vodka away.
In the months that followed, Ford slowly softened his tone. He has clarified that only Crown Royal will be removed when the plant closes at the end of February, recently offering an “olive branch” to the company.
“If Diageo comes and says, I’m going to replace these 200 workers by manufacturing bottles, doing their cartons, doing other things, more advertising, so on, so forth, and they can show me on paper, then we’ll sit down and I’ll be open,” he recently said at a news conference. “I’m pretty easygoing.”
The Liaison poll found just 25 per cent of those polled thought it was “inappropriate” for Ford to use the LCBO as a negotiating tool.
The bottling facility is scheduled to close in February.
METHODOLOGY: Liaison surveyed a random sample of 1,000 Ontarians from January 19 to January 21, 2026, using Interactive Voice Recording (IVR) technology. To ensure a representative sample, participants were reached through random digit dialing (RDD) across both landline and cellular phone networks. The margin of error is ±3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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