herbie herbie:
You mean you don't have private liquor stores at all in Ontario? I didn't know that.
There is some private liquor sale allowed in Ontario
You can buy alcohol directly ar any brewery, distillery or winery.
Last year, the province approved 150 grocery stores to sell small quantities of wine and beer, with an eye to further expansion in the future.
There are a few private wine retail chains, such as Wine Rack, each owned by different consortiums of Ontario based wine makers. Combined, they total about 300 private wine stores across the province. The downside is that they tend to mostly stock their own products.
Since prohibition days, the Ontario-based beer industry has held province-wide monopoly rights to private sale of beer through a retail chain called The Beer Store, which sells about 80% of the beer sold in Ontario, including the sales to bars and restaurants. People rightly complain that the stores are unattractive and many are warehouse-like with just an order counter and the beer comes rolling down a roller belt from a store room in the back. Also due to corporate mergers and acquisitions, the 30 "Ontario brewers" who once owned the Beer Store are now owned by three multinationals: Molson-Coors, Labatt (Anheuser-Busch InBev) and Sleeman (owned by Sapporo). This consortium has been accused of abusing the monopoly to favour their products and particularly overcharging/understocking independent craft beers. Under a formal written agreement, LCBO sells only a limited selection of beer in markets where Beer Store has a presence (and in singles and 6-packs only) in a tragic case of crony capitalism (I won't say which premier ordered that agreement but I'm sure you can guess).
I have no complaints about LCBO, the stores are attractive, there are numerous convenient locations and with the exception of the beer issue mentioned above, selection and variety is great. Over the past couple of years they've been stocking a lot more independent craft beer in response to backlash over the beer store.