Corner Brook restaurant shelves alcohol delivery over customer privacy concerns
CBC News | Posted: May 13, 2020 12:28 PM | Last Updated: May 13, 2020
Licensees must record name and address of customer, along with quantity and type of ID
A restaurant in Corner Brook is not going to deliver alcohol due to concerns about Newfoundland and Labrador's delivery legislation, especially the amount of information that will need to be collected about what customers like to drink.
Earlier this month, the province announced changes to allow restaurants to sell alcohol with takeout and delivery orders.
But Jerry George, who delivers for the Pho Vietnam restaurant, had the advertising of alcohol delivery ready to go, but he and his wife — who owns the business — decided to pull the plug after reading the province's new regulations.
Licensees must record the name of the customer and the address where the food is being delivered, along with the date of delivery, the name and address of the restaurant, the kinds and amounts of liquor purchased, the price paid, and the type of ID used to validate the customer's age. IDs must be validated regardless of the age of the customer.
George said the privacy concerns were too significant.
"For some reason we're creating a database of all the alcohol that's purchased either on takeout or delivery for every resident that comes in and wants to make a purchase," George told CBC Newfoundland Morning.
Data needs to be kept for 12 months
The recorded data must also be kept for a year after the day of delivery, which is also a concern, George said.
For some reason, I have to have a qualified course in order to be able to deliver an unopened beer. - Jerry George
"As an operator, my wife and I would feel obligated to have to tell the customers in advance of the information that we're going to be required to record," he said.
"And that would mean a rolling year, a year from the date of every purchase.… Depending on how long this continues, there would be an extended period of time we would be collecting what I consider to be private information on individuals who live here in the province."
Delivery drivers must also take a training course on responsible drinking in order to deliver alcohol, a course usually meant for servers in restaurants, bars and lounges.
"The hurdles that are put in front of an operator in order to try to provide this enhancement, supposedly, of service to help us to be able to survive in the COVID-19 era… for some reason, I have to have a qualified course in order to be able to deliver an unopened beer," he said.
George said the regulations around recording people's information are both an ethical and a safety issue for the couple, which has moved them to stop delivering alcohol entirely.
"It would probably more than double the time of interaction," he said. "I'm now going to be in a situation where I'm going to be handling ID, recording information while the customers food is getting cold.… I'm [also] not sure a customer would participate if when they called or came in to take an order, if we told them the kind of data we had to collect."
'Some form of misunderstanding,' says CEO
Bruce Keating, president and chief executive officer of the Newfoundland and Labrador Liquor Corp., said the regulations are in place to ensure alcohol delivery is being handled responsibly.
"I think part of this here is that there's been some form of misunderstanding about what those requirements are," Keating said.
"First in terms of placing the order, what the regulations and what the legislation require is not that that information be collected at the doorstep, but that is information that if you and I were placing an order with a restaurant for delivery, that would typically be the information that we would be providing anyway … the name, the address, the details of the order."
Keating said "it makes sense" in terms of regulation for records to be kept.
"[Then] we can confirm the delivery service is being handled in a responsible way," he added. "Secondly, should there be complaints or anything like that … then we have the ability to investigate that."
Keating said keeping the records for a year is meant to help NLC review the operation and alcohol sales of restaurants around the province.
"Putting delivery aside, if we're reviewing the operations of a restaurant, we are doing that kind of using the records they already have through the normal course of their operation," he said.
"All we're doing then is using the records that they're already creating in the delivery service and using that for regulatory function, rather than kind of creating some new requirements on the restaurant. [Through] that we would then create more demands and more bureaucracy that they don't need right now."
Keating said the added time of viewing an ID should only be "a matter of a few seconds," as delivery drivers don't necessarily have to handle IDs in order to view them.
He said while the NLC is comfortable with the regulations in place, the Crown corporation is seeking direction from the privacy commissioner after hearing George's concerns.
Corrections:- A previous version of this story said delivery drivers must record several pieces of information related to the alcohol order. In fact, while that information must be recorded and kept by the licensee, the information does not necessarily need to be collected by a delivery driver. May 13, 2020 7:02 PM