After 12 years of trying, there is now beer and wine on the shelves at Kirk's Gas in Sprucedale.

Kelsey Cummins says her in-laws who own the business credit the Ford government's election promise to bring alcohol to convenience stores like theirs.

"When we got accepted it was a shocker in a sense, but it was very exciting for us and everyone in the community," says Cummins, who is now managing the outlet in the family gas station.

But Sprucedale, a rural community of a few hundred southwest of Burk's Falls, is not what most people had in mind when the PC government pledged to put alcohol in corner stores.

Neither is Larder Lake, a former gold mining town of 700 people between Kirkland Lake and the Quebec border, that saw its LCBO store close a few years ago.

"When I first heard about the opportunity, like everybody else I thought it would be in the bigger cities," says Josh Dudgeon, the owner of Larder Sports Bait and Tackle.

His shop now sells beer and wine, along with live bait, snowmobile helmets and rubber boots.

"Nobody really thinks is very strange, everybody is just very happy about it," Dudgeon says with a laugh, adding that alcohol is now about one third of his business.

Since the fall, the LCBO has started selling in dozens of new convenience stores across the province, including 17 in northern Ontario.

But all of them are in small towns and rural areas.

That's because this is not a new policy, as much as an expansion and a re-branding of the LCBO's agency store program, which for decades has seen alcohol sold by general stores in towns without a full liquor store.

Even before this expansion, there were already 74 of these agency outlets in northern Ontario, on top of the 107 LCBO stores in the region, plus a couple of dozen grocery stores that now carry beer and wine.

One big change the government has made is that while agency licenses used to be restricted to businesses that were at least 10 km from an existing LCBO, these new "convenience outlets" can be at least 5 km from a liquor store.

No one from the provincial government or LCBO was made available for an interview, but the Ministry of Finance says that the province's alcohol distribution system is still under review.

Dave Bryans, CEO of the Ontario Convenience Stores Association, says his members are getting "anxious" on the government's promise to expand beer and wine sales. (Keith Burgess/CBC)

Dave Bryans, the CEO of the Ontario Convenience Stores Association, says he is still waiting on the government to fulfill its campaign promise.

"Our members are getting anxious, not discouraged as much as anxious as when is this going to happen," he says.

Bryans says his association wants to see an open market on alcohol, where the owner of a store could deal directly with breweries and wineries and not with the bureaucracy at the LCBO.

"Keep in mind there's winners and losers when you have an agency model. One store in town gets it, if there's two stores, the other store loses all the traffic, so it's not really what I call an open environment for small business," he says.

Bryans also points out that a convenience store with an agency outlet has to pay for the shipping costs, which sometimes means a northern Ontario craft brewery shipping its beer to an LCBO warehouse in southern Ontario, only to get trucked back north.

At Kirk's Gas in Sprucedale, Cummins says they get 10 per cent from each sale, but with the delivery bill, it's closer to 6 per cent.

Which she says is still well worth it for her family's business.