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Why couldn’t that balance be achieved with corner stores?

“What we know is that it’ll create greater access to youth to alcohol,” MADD CEO Andrew Murie said. “They’ll be more likely to serve intoxicated people with alcohol, and it will increase incidents of impaired driving.”

Even with hyper-rigorous enforcement and draconian penalties? That seems counterintuitive, no?

“You could have a situation where you’d have marijuana and beer and wine beside the candy bars,” said the premier (referring to Ford’s musings about a freer market in cannabis, which he has since repudiated). “That’s the image that I think we have to reconcile. Is that really what we are looking for?”

Photo by Craig Glover/The London Free Press/Postmedia

Beer and candy bars! Living together! There are absurdities piled on absurdities here, but perhaps the biggest is this: Minus cannabis, Wynne is literally threatening Ontarians with the status quo. There are hundreds of convenience stores, corner stores, general stores and other kinds of retail operations in rural areas of Ontario that are licensed to sell beer, wine and liquor. The most general of these stores also sell cigarettes, fireworks, bait and tackle, firewood, various jerkies and, yes, against all reason and sanity, candy bars and potato chips.

I am not making this up. The province even provides a convenient online map of these so-called “agency stores.”

I’ve been banging on about this in columns for years, but Twitter seemed to take uncommon notice of the situation on Tuesday and unleashed a hurricane of mockery. Folks posted photos from Wynne’s various press conferences announcing beer and wine in supermarkets that clearly show candy, chips and other snackables for sale alongside. How could she not have noticed?