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Kathleen Wynne, 62, smiled when she was asked for proof of age as she purchased a pack of Rhyme & Reason from Toronto’s Collective Arts Brewing at a Loblaws store, starting the long-promised rollout of beer sales in select grocery outlets across the province.

“It’s nice to be carded,” she joked with the cashier before announcing that 58 grocery stores across Ontario can now legally sell beer.

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On Sept. 16, Wynne and the Ontario government came under fire for the $5.7 million handed out in bonuses to Pan Am Games executives. The next day, the province issued a release announcing the new growler station at the Summerhill LCBO in Toronto, as well as plans for 25 craft beer stations at LCBOs across Ontario. And on Tuesday, Wynne declared that beer would now be on sale at 58 grocery stores in the province, a little more than a week after the auditor-general released a damning report on the plethora of problems plaguing Ontario, and a couple days before the Ontario Provincial Police would lay charges against two former McGuinty staffers in relation to the gas plant scandal.

I’m not saying that the timing of any of this was necessarily deliberate: I’m just saying that I instinctively reach for my wallet ever time I see a media release from the Ontario government with the words “beer” or “LCBO.”

The first beer sales in grocery stores in Ontario were treated as our province’s own liberation of Paris. Premier Wynne was first in line at the Loblaws on Lake Shore Boulevard East in Toronto to check out a six-pack of Hamilton Rhyme & Reason beer, an exercise she proudly deemed to be “the biggest shakeup to alcohol sales since the end of Prohibition.” (That’s probably true, which is all the more depressing to consider.) Finance Minister Charles Sousa, who was also on hand, boasted that he was “double-fisting” as he picked up his selections, asking Wynne before they checked out, “Did you get the snacks, Premier?”