Why Can’t I Buy Beer With My Groceries
It’s done everywhere else in North America that I have ever been to. It’s done in Europe. In Paris you can buy vintage wine in the corner store. Stop at the corner store for a few quick items, grab a six pack of Guinness while I’m at it. 
Beer at the grocery store is hardly some new, untried concept. It is used, and has worked in hundreds of jurisdictions in the world, and there’s no reason it can’t work here.
I’ve posted before on this, back during the Ontario election where John Tory was tentatively prepared to study the idea:
Now granted, nothing drastic from our man Tory. Just a few trial locations, study the question: as if Quebec, Alberta and B.C., the U.S.A. and Europe are not test location enough. Really, the data exists, the idea works. But from baby steps like this comes full fledged working policy, so I’ll take what I can get.
Now, Halton Conservative MP, Ted Chudleigh, has a petition to allow beer to be sold in grocery stores, and is prepared to present it at Queens Park. There is an on-line petition, however according to MP Chudleigh’s blog: “Actual paper signatures are necessary to ensure authenticity.”
Ending the Soviet style marketing approach would lower prices, increase convenience of both purchase and bottle return, increase accessibility to the market for small brewers especially in local markets, and would bring Ontario into the 21st century.
The petition is here, print it off, sign it (and get others to), and mail it to:
Derek Forward, 2000 Appleby Line, Suite232, Burlington, ON L7L 7H7
It’s time that Ontario joined every other jurisdiction in the 21st century.
Of course a petition from an opposition MP is hardly the stuff of government policy, but if enough people sign the petition, it becomes harder to ignore. It may not be policy, but maybe it’s the start of something.
freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy, pimply minions of bureaucracy
How is Alberta a test case for that? You can’t buy beer in grocery nor convenience stores here; it even seems like the Alberta government is moving toward MORE restrictions on alcohol, with their new “minimum drink price” laws, which are OBVIOUSLY designed to get people to start drinking more at home BEFORE they go to the bar (to quote the head of the AGLC, “pre-drinking is something I’d never heard of until this week” and is “a problem that deserves further study” or something like that) so that the government can then step in to deal with the “problem” of people drinking too much in their own homes.
I thought you guys had it – Do you at least have private sales of alcohol? Maybe that’s why I thought you had grocery store beer.