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Comment by jbeales | Hacker News Reader

At least until April, a government website is the only legal way to buy pot in Ontario. Since they're selling it, they set the prices.

In a lot of provinces the only legal way to get pot is through a government pot store. Alcohol works the same way; Ontario recently allowed the sales of wine & beer in some grocery stores, but everything else is at the LCBO, (government liquor stores), and the Beer Store, (which I think might be government run, but even if not it pretty much has a monopoly on beer sales).

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The Beer Store is an even worse story: it’s a monopoly that’s owned by the breweries!

Very similar to how pot will be sold in any province that doesn't have the government selling the pot. Local jurisdictions have, or will have, so many restrictions on when, where and how pot can be sold that competition will be extremely limited.

Saskatchewan was especially egregious. They had a lottery system to determine who would get a license to sell pot.

It was worse before Brewers' Retail (the name before The Beer Store). You needed to go to Molson for Molson, Labatt's for Labatt's, Carling for Carling, Dow for Dow, etc., and there was nowhere to buy anything brewed in Canada but not in Ontario since the LCBO could only sell international imports (by written order, with nothing on display).

If anyone has watched the move “Strange Brew”, that’s exactly what the LCBO stores looked like in the 1980’s.

No advertisements, no product on the shelves, just a person standing at a register taking orders and you case of beer magically arriving on a conveyor belt.

Weird to think about now.

That's what the Beer Stores looked like (and still do where I live). The LCBO stopped looking like that in the 1970s, except no conveyor belt: they would hand you your package in a brown paper bag, and you had to sign your order form. Also, the LCBO did not sell beer because that monopoly went to Brewer's Retail.

The Beer Store is owned by two foreign-owned multinationals (the Belgian AB InBev and the American MolsonCoors). Not government run, but like many Ontario monopolies is has government in its pocket.

How would the government exit this deal ?

I thought it was something like that - it used to be owned by a conglomerate of major Canadian breweries, but through sales & mergers it's ended up as InBev & MolsonCoors.

Yet they still have a near-monopoly on beer sales!

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