Tentative steps towards beer freedom

Ontario has taken some tentative, stumbling steps into the 21st century with its plan to break the stranglehold the Beer Store has over beer sales in the province.
Soon I may not have to embarrass myself when I explain to confused out-of-country visitors that they can only buy beer from the beer store and liquor from the liquor store, oh, except for this inexplicable foible here and that inconsistent exception there... But don't get too excited: this is far from a transparent opening up of the alcohol retail sector, despite their #FreeTheBeer hashtag. It is more of a cash grab combined with an exercise in political optics.
Publicly promoted as a scheme to allow up to 450 grocery stores to sell beer (those "big enough to set up a separate area for the beer"), in fact only 150 stores in urban areas will be eligible to receive a licence at first, and that not until May 2017. I guess it will take a couple of years for them to get their shelves ready... Convenience stores, even larger ones like 7-Elevens, will definitely not be eligible.
Those stores that do receive licenses will need to sell the beer from physically separate spaces that keep the same hours as the Beer Store, employees will apparently need special training, pricing will be fixed so that the Beer Store does not experience any undue competition, and the stores will be limited to selling individual bottles or six-packs. To call this tentative would be vastly overstating the case.
The Beer Store, a syndicate run by three foreign-owned private beer companies, will therefore retain its monopoly over 24-packs (the Great Canadian Two-Four), and in general even over 12-packs, although it will have to open up its shelves a little further to smaller brewers, and is under orders to "improve the experience of its customers" in some way. Meanwhile, the provincially-owned LCBO, which currently restricts itself to selling 6-packs, is to take part in a special limited 10-store pilot study to investigate "the viability of offering 12-packs" (as though this required some kind of special skills). There is even to be a Beer Ombudsman - I kid you not! - "to hear complaints from brewers and customers regarding operational issues".
Oh, and, of course, there is an additional tax to be levied, equivalent to about $1 on a pack of 24, presumably for the privilege of our being able to buy beer from a regular store, like you can pretty much everywhere else.
Well, Ontarians have been waiting for some movement on this issue for decades, and finally we have something. But I not convinced that many people will be impressed with these half measures.