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The amazing thing about the Ontario government’s new rules for selling wine in grocery stores isn’t how dazzlingly complicated they are, it’s how hard everyone had to work to make them that way.

It’s billed as a big liberalization. Premier Kathleen Wynne and Finance Minister Charles Sousa trooped out to a luxury grocery store in Wynne’s Toronto riding Thursday morning to wave some bottles around and say they’re going to do what’s being recommended by their privatization czar, former top TD banker Ed Clark. He and a panel of experts have been labouring away for well over a year on how on earth we can let Loblaws and Metro and smaller grocers sell wine without destroying everything we hold dear.

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Well, now they’ve got it: They’re going to license them. But not too many.

They’ll start by auctioning off 70 wine-vending licences — half of which will be full licences and half of which will be restricted ones that let their holders sell a limited selection of wines for three years but will then convert automatically into full licences.