Professor Tim Stockwell:

There is a glorious range of policies and availability. If one goes to Quebec, one could believe one is in Paris or somewhere.

French-speaking Canadians have a very different way of handling alcohol and there is much less regulation in respect of alcohol in supermarkets. In my home province of British Columbia, a decision has just been made to allow alcohol to be sold in supermarkets for the first time. This is being done against the advice of health and safety officials. However, there will be a restriction and they have an interesting way of doing it. They have a mixture of Government-owned liquor stores. This is a hard thing to get one's head around but the Government there is in the business of selling alcohol and it has a monopoly on its distribution. It sells liquor to every private liquor store, bar and club and it is introducing a rule whereby a new liquor outlet - it could be a supermarket, corner store or whatever - cannot be opened within 1 km of an existing outlet. Our research shows that density matters. It is not nearly as important as price, however. Minimum price trumps physical availability but both are important. They are also related because if there is high density, there is also a great deal of competition and this drives down the price. Virtually any policy of which one can think is being tried in the Canadian provinces, sometimes with good results and sometimes with poor results.