Ontario recently expanded the availability of wine and beer in stores. Now you can pick up your favourite beer at pretty much any corner store, grocery store, or gas station. It’s about time.
The beer, wine, and spirit market in Ontario has been over-controlled since prohibition was rescinded nearly 90 years ago. Many other provinces long ago cast off the shackles of nanny-state, mother-may-I regulation when it came to alcohol.
Rolling out this rapid expansion of options in Ontario has been interesting to observe. Where I live, most convenience stores have applied for and received a licence to sell. More than 4,100 stores in Ontario are licenced. That certainly beats the over-400 Beer Stores and over-650 LCBO Stores. Yes, the hooch is flowing in Ontario now.
I have been experimenting with artificial intelligence tools when it comes to managing data.Sure, I can play with spreadsheet tables all day, but if there is a tool out there that can cut that day to a few minutes – and be accurate – I’ll take it.
As an experiment, I took the Ontario government’s list of locations licenced for beer and wine sales, and the most recent census data from Statistics Canada and fed it into two different AI systems: ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Using AI, which is a relatively new tool that I have only played a little with before, I asked for the top-30 cities in Ontario and what their store numbers were. Of course, Toronto was number one.
Then I wondered about something else: per capita, out of the top-100 municipalities in Ontario, which has the most number of licenced outlets. Both AI tools returned the same result – Windsor. A quick fact check using my own spreadsheet model confirmed what the AI said. I always trust but verify the data, which is why most political press releases get vetted closely.
Having been to Windsor a few times in my teens and early 20s, I get why it has the highest number of licensed sales spots — no offence, Windsorites.
Overall, I support the expansion of alcohol sales in stores because the legal drinking age is what it is (19) and we are all not babies that need to have our hands held through life. I do have one concern about this expansion though – service centres. On the list of government licenced sales locations are the 22 OnRoute convenience stores along the 400-series highways.
This concerns me because it tempts fate on our busiest highways in the province. We may not be children, but not everyone is at an equal level of personal responsibility. The service centres on Highway 401 having alcohol readily available makes it really easy for those who are inclined to make poor decisions to do so in the easiest way possible – while driving on the busiest roads possible.
I know many people who see the benefit of being able to grab a six-pack of beer on the way to a friend’s house or on the way home from work. I can’t see any of them doing so on Highway 401.
Admittedly, this does sound hypocritical to say that I support opening the market, but not on the major highways. If a person is going to drink and drive on the 401, they will still do so whether they shop at the OnRoute or pull off the highway to go to a convenience store. In the case of pulling off the highway, it provides the driver with more opportunities of rethinking poor life decisions that could impact the lives of others before returning to the highway with a cold one.
Being treated like responsible adults is a good thing. Needing less oversight in day-to-day life is also a good thing. When it comes to this specific measure from the provincial government, they got it mostly right. When more freedom is granted, personal responsibility is expected to kick in. Hopefully.
This column was originally published in the November 13, 2024 print edition of The Leader.
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