It's the same in some of the provinces in Canada. I'm not sure of all of them, but at least in British Columbia and Ontario you have to buy liquor from Governme

It's the same in some of the provinces in Canada. I'm not sure of all of them, but at least in British Columbia and Ontario you have to buy liquor from Government owned stores, though not beer and wine... in Alberta however, you can buy liquor, beer and wine from regular private stores. At least in Ontario, whoever is in charge of procurement seems to do a relatively decent job of making sure the stores have a reasonably high quality selection, so it's not so bad. In B.C. when I lived there though, it sucked, you could barely get anything that wasn't run of the mill. Admittedly, that was 6 years ago and things may have changed since then.