Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Common card · No. 258551

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO, French: Régie des alcools de l'Ontario, RAO) is a Crown agency that retails and distributes alcoholic beverages throughout the Canadian province of Ontario. It is accountable to the Legislative Assembly through the minister of finance. It was established in 1927 by the government of Premier Howard Ferguson to sell liquor, wine, and beer. Such sales were banned outright in 1916 as part of prohibition in Canada. The creation of the LCBO marked an easing of the province's temperance regime. By September 2017, the LCBO was operating 651 liquor stores. The LCBO maintained a quasi-monopoly on the trade in alcoholic beverage sales in Ontario for nearly a century after its creation: for most of this time, LCBO stores were the only retail outlets licensed to sell alcohol in Ontario, with the notable exceptions of beer (The Beer Store had a quasi-monopoly on retailing beer during most of this period) and a number of wine shops, which had once been relatively...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Xander Wu, CC BY-SA 4.0