Article content continued

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Goldsbie: Yes. There just needed to be an opening — a newly revealed, specific, and arbitrary injustice — into which to inject public resentment. The broad, overarching silliness of the Beer Store enterprise wasn’t sufficient; it had been thoroughly baked in to the tolerable status quo of Ontario society. But when the Star broke the news of the secret and apparently anti-competitive agreement with the LCBO to limit the public retailer to selling six-packs, that appeared to be too much. Not because it was an outrage in itself but because it was such a spectacularly unjustifiable move that seemed to confirm suspicions about how the government has colluded with big business to subdue Ontario beer-drinkers into a captive population to be experimented upon. That is, we had placed our trust in government to regulate liquor sales, and they abused it. From there, the Star did that thing they do where they pile on one story after another until the subjects — and those with the power to oversee them — are shamed into responding. It’s arguably the most effective advocacy model out there these days. I’m not counting on transformative change in the short term, but it no longer seems out of the question.

Selley: It’s a weird dynamic: Everyone knew the LCBO didn’t sell 12- or 24-packs, and everyone who paid any attention to the issue at all knew that was the product of a specific agreement with TBS — one that couldn’t possibly have had any logical justification. But seeing the agreement brought it to another level. And most of us seemed content to live with the smelly, unfriendly, inconvenient status quo until we found out the status quo was to politicians’ concrete benefit, at which point some of us seem to have discovered we really don’t like that status quo. But hey, I’ll take it. Indeed, I’m already looking ahead to the day when the LCBO comes under fire for some of its own inherent weirdnesses.