The word Prohibition may make you think of Al Capone and fast cars racing through the night with tommy guns blazing. But you might not know that Alberta went through its own period of Prohibition before the U.S. experienced Prohibition during the Great Depression.
From 1916 to 1923 it was mostly illegal to sell booze in Alberta. I say mostly because with a prescription you could buy booze from a pharmacist. But there were no liquor stores and bars could only sell low-test beer.
The anti-liquor laws were actually quite tight at first. During WWI, the federal government banned even the sale of mail-order liquor across provincial borders. But when the war ended, it became possible again to buy mail-order booze from sellers outside the province. Most Albertans voted in 1920 to again ban mail-order booze.
However, a time lag in bringing in the law allowed stocks of booze to be squirrelled away in Alberta warehouses. Bootleggers then did a brisk business, hawking their stocks of booze to those who would buy it. Emilio Picarello was a busy bootlegger in the Crowsnest Pass. On several occasions, police chased Picarello’s night-runners, and shots were fired by both sides. Three police officers were killed while trying to enforce Prohibition. Picarello and his moll Florence Lassandro met grisly ends - they were hanged in Fort Saskatchewan, in May 1923.
Around that time a petition signed by thousands was submitted to the Legislature, asking for an end to Prohibition or at least a referendum on the issue.
The United Farmers, a forerunner of today’s NDP, had come into government in 1921. The prohibition law was already on the books by then. But it had been largely the women’s wing of the UFA, the United Farm Women, that had forced the previous Liberal government to bring in Prohibition. So it was a bit of a backslide for the UFA to now dismantle the law. But the government was willing to take action before more died.
The UFA promised that any change would come about only if a majority of voters were in favour. The government formulated four options to put to voters. None of the four options were to allow private operators to sell hard liquor. The options were: to keep Prohibition; to allow government liquor stores (but no privately-owned ones) and privately-owned beer parlours; or no sale of hard liquor but to allow either drinking in bars or government stores to sell beer that would be consumed at home.
With that many options, if the usual simple X voting system was used, there was no guarantee that the most-popular choice would be supported by a majority (more than half) of the voters. So the government decided to apply a voting system known as Instant-Runoff Voting, also known as Alternative Voting. Each voter would mark their choices in order of preference. If no option took a majority of votes in the first count, votes for the least-popular choice would be transferred according to the next preference marked on the ballot. Transfers would be done until one choice had a majority.
For many voters this was their first experience casting ranked ballots, but Calgary voters had been casting ranked ballots for several years in city elections. In the Prohibition referendum, government liquor stores and private beerhalls received a majority of votes on the first count.
Despite there having been no need to use back-up preferences marked by voters, the new voting method was accepted by voters and for the next 30 years Alberta voters would cast ranked ballots in provincial elections, whether to elect a single MLA or to elect five or more at a time in city-wide districts in Edmonton and Calgary.
Ranked voting is not used today, and a great number of votes are wasted under the system we use in provincial and federal elections currently. It is common for many elected representatives to be elected with less than half the votes cast in their district. A court case recently asked a judge to rule that first past the post is in fact unconstitutional because voters do not have equal political power. (We’ll have to see what the judge says.)
So when Alberta voted to cancel prohibition in 1923, the decision was never to bring back wide-open drinking. It took a while but government stores were opened in May 1924 in Edmonton and Calgary. It soon became clear that government liquor stores under the UFA were not bent on profit. They sold the booze but they did not try to promote sales. And the new “licensed” beer parlours were designed to be boring. There was seldom any entertainment. It was illegal to stand or move around with your drink. If you wanted to move to another table, you were supposed to ask the server to carry your drink for you. This was mostly the case until the 1980s. Private liquor stores came to Alberta in 1993. Prior to that, government liquor stores, using union labour, had brought in millions of dollars of profit each year.
Meanwhile in some communities Prohibition stayed in effect even after the 1923 vote. The UFA government allowed “local option” votes to be held on whether or not liquor stores would be allowed. A hundred municipalities held local option votes -- voters sometimes favoured having liquor stores. But sometimes the vote was in favour of Prohibition.
One such town was Cardston. This small town in the south, and parts of nearby Cardston County and Warner County, were largely settled by Mormons who had strict rules against liquor. Local law said you could drink in private homes but there were no bars or liwuor stores. Those who wanted to drink could go to the Legion just outside Cardston town limits. Voters re-affirmed the town’s prohibition law in 2014.
But in 2020 the provincial government decided to cancel the Prohibition law in Cardston and the two nearby counties. The issue was finally decided by a vote held in Cardston this last spring. Votes cast saw 494 in favour of change while only 431 voted for Prohibition. Town council voted out the bylaw in September. With the end of the town’s 100-year-old law, "licensed" restaurants will be allowed to serve but still no liquor stores are to be allowed.
The government’s move to cancel the local prohibition law was a surprise to Cardston town council. This reaction is somewhat similar to the mixed reviews the government is hearing for some of its other initiatives. Opening the Eastern Slopes to coal mining may seem the right business decision. As might splitting off Alberta workers’ pensions from the Canadian Pension Plan. But they don’t show reverence for tradition, despite the government’s conservative label. They open us to new risks and potentially great harm. If most people are willing to get less income (or give up some personal freedoms) to avoid the dangers that they would risk by doing otherwise, then forcing change is not only risky but also undemocratic.
A balance must be struck between public order and personal freedoms, private greed and public safety. A hundred years ago the United Farmers government said it would no longer try to stop people from buying booze. But also it said that private greed had no place in selling hard liquor, and towns where most people wanted prohibition could still have it. The UFA struck a balance based on democratic will, casting a critical eye at short-term profit and business greed.
You might say “that was then - the world has changed,” but I see the basic human predicament as pretty much how the Farmers’ government saw it. How about you?
(this article was originally published in the Millwoods Mosaic October 2023)
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