RED STAR CHINESE RESTAURANT
3731 50th Ave.
Red Deer
403-309-5566
• Owners
Edward Li and Sunny Deng
• Type of business
Restaurant specializing in authentic Cantonese and north-Chinese cuisine.
• Opening date
May 4
H&M
Bower Place Shopping Centre
Red Deer
403-346-3751
• Manager
Derek Deschamps
• Type of business
Clothing retailer with products for men, women and children.
• Opening date
April 30
No more freebies for liquor workers
Liquor board workers in Ontario have been ordered to stop accepting freebies from the big distilleries and breweries. For years, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario has allowed its employees to accept free tickets to hockey games, concerts, curling matches and stage shows from the companies that supply their stores with liquor, beer and wine.
But tough new rules imposed by the Ontario government have ended the gravy train, forcing workers to refuse the hundreds of ticket offers they once accepted.
The ban was imposed last August, and the agency issued revised guidelines to its workers in March this year. An internal report estimates that no-charge tickets represented about a third of all the supplier-paid benefits enjoyed by a key group of employees. The rest were mostly business meals, which are still allowed.
The report, created in anticipation of the tougher rules, also found that the official forms employees are required to file when they accept freebies are too often vague and incomplete.
“There is a significant amount of activity for sporting and entertainment events,” says the document, obtained by The Canadian Press under the province’s freedom-of-information law. “There was inconsistent documentation of the business reason for the various activities, and inconsistent levels of detail provided with respect to company or individual host names.” LCBO auditors examined monthly reports filed by 95 workers, mostly in sales and marketing, who routinely work closely with suppliers. The reports document each occasion in which an employee accepts a freebie, whether a gift, a meal or a ticket to a hockey game or other event. But the practice was severely curtailed when the liquor board was brought under the Public Service of Ontario Act, which sets out tough ethical standards for the province’s government workers.
