And to think, when I was a kid, Ontario was a totally bluenosing hyper-Protestant place that even locked up playgrounds/messed up the equipment on Sundays (Sunday shopping wasn't a thing until the 1990s, and it was one of the last provinces, except for maybe Nova Scotia, I think, to have it), which is why their liquor laws are still so weird.
Yeah, Nova Scotia only gave in when Pete Luckett ingeniously loopholed the "convenience stores can open Sunday, drugstores and supermarkets can't" law so hard it made the government look like idiots.
Simply put, he split his one supermarket up into sixish smaller legal entities, each one independently fitting under the rules for a convenience store (and all of them outsourcing their money-handling duties to the one store at the door that had no product but all the cash registers). As I recall the province dragged him into court but he won, because he was following the letter of the law precisely. It caused a slew of imitators, notably drugstores who'd just cordon off whatever floor space made them not a convenience store every Saturday evening (the rules were a description of what made a convenience store that could open Sundays, not a specific legal designation or a permanent state, so there was nothing stopping them from simply flagging X retail space as "not retail space" and just not selling the stuff in it on Sunday). It became so common the government had to relent.
And to think, when I was a kid, Ontario was a totally bluenosing hyper-Protestant place that even locked up playgrounds/messed up the equipment on Sundays (Sunday shopping wasn't a thing until the 1990s, and it was one of the last provinces, except for maybe Nova Scotia, I think, to have it), which is why their liquor laws are still so weird.
Yeah, Nova Scotia only gave in when Pete Luckett ingeniously loopholed the "convenience stores can open Sunday, drugstores and supermarkets can't" law so hard it made the government look like idiots.
Simply put, he split his one supermarket up into sixish smaller legal entities, each one independently fitting under the rules for a convenience store (and all of them outsourcing their money-handling duties to the one store at the door that had no product but all the cash registers). As I recall the province dragged him into court but he won, because he was following the letter of the law precisely. It caused a slew of imitators, notably drugstores who'd just cordon off whatever floor space made them not a convenience store every Saturday evening (the rules were a description of what made a convenience store that could open Sundays, not a specific legal designation or a permanent state, so there was nothing stopping them from simply flagging X retail space as "not retail space" and just not selling the stuff in it on Sunday). It became so common the government had to relent.
Pete Luckett is a hero of capitalism.
And the downfall of society