draconian, straddling the fine line between absurdity and inexcusably intrusive in how it would affect everyday Canadians’ ability to cross the border for family or work, your instincts are right. After all, they have plenty of echoes of the last time Americans have worried that Canada posed a threat to the moral health of the people of the United States, resulting in tensions at the border. During Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, key anti-alcohol forces in the U.S. devoted considerable energy into pressuring Canada to change its drug policy, even often overstepping its jurisdiction, all for the sake of preserving American morality.
For 25 years, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the American anti-alcohol group, took aim at a most ambitious goal: changing the U.S. Constitution. It sought to ban the manufacturing, transport, and sale of intoxicating liquors — and in 1919, Congress officially passed the 18th Amendment, doing just that.
It was a crowning achievement for an organization that had successfully transformed a women-led grassroots temperance movement into a powerful, well-financed lobby group that effectively invented “pressure politics.” And riding the high of accomplishing this seemingly impossible feat, the ASL turned its sights to global domination, immediately establishing the World League Against Alcoholism (WLAA), a group designed to pressure the rest of the world to follow America’s example. First stop? Canada.
At that point, Canada was already mostly dry itself, owing to the War Measures Act, which had suspended some normal rights including drinking. But unlike the U.S., Canada had no hard-and-fast, permanent federal law around alcohol, so provinces were free to settle their own fate after the Armistice, and Quebec’s “prohibition” was the first to be called off in 1919.
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The ASL’s argument was that there were serious practical border issues around this, from smuggling to Americans being tempted to take a quick weekend trip to Montreal for an alco-holiday. As the prolific and militant ASL activist Ernest Cherrington wrote in his 1922 book, America and the World Alcohol Problem: “The boundary line between Canada and the United States extends for 3,898 miles … The single province of Quebec, Canada, on our northeastern border, imported, during the fiscal year 1921, more Scotch whisky than had been imported into that province during the entire 10 years proceeding.” That whisky, he argued, wasn’t for Quebecers’ personal use, but was just passing through on its way to southern Ontario, where he claimed that 1,000 cases of contraband liquors were smuggled across to Michigan every 24 hours.
© Used with permission of / © Rogers Media Inc. 2018. Liquor is unloaded from rum runner boat Mary Mother Elizabeth after it was seized by the Coast Guard at Jones Inlet on Dec. 10, 1929. (John Tresilian/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images) Cherrington used this shocking (and frankly, suspicious) argument to justify the location for the WLAA’s 1922 convention — Toronto. In November 1922, the WLAA held a five-day event that the Toronto Star dubbed a “monster temperance convention,” thanks to the many foreign and local dignitaries in attendance — delegates from 20 countries, including Japan, Peru and Finland, as well as Toronto Mayor Alfred Maguire, Ontario Governor Harry Cockshutt and, of course, Cherrington himself. There were keynote speeches, banquets at the King Edward Hotel, public health seminars, and prayers, plus a seminar by a lawyer on the “Ways and Means of Securing Action Through Government Officials for the Enforcement of Law” — a crash course, effectively, in how to pressure local police and city politicians into making more arrests.
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But the convention didn’t work. Instead, by 1925 — just three years after the WLAA event — Ontarians were quaffing back Fergie’s Foam (4.4 per cent beer made legal by Premier Howard Ferguson) and, two years after that, witnessed the introduction of retail liquor stores, leaving only two dry provinces (P.E.I and Nova Scotia). The tables had turned on Prohibition and the ideas that fuelled it in Canada; one political poster framed it as a victory for progressives, who had seen the “falseness and dishonesty” of Prohibition, which had been built on a “foundation of bigotry and intolerance.”
That aspect of Prohibition — that it was a pretext to increase surveillance and incarceration of minorities — wasn’t just dawning on Canadians. Every violent day in the United States made it clearer that bigotry was built into the booze ban. Consumption was legal in private homes and the rich could afford to pay fines when caught in public, while minorities who couldn’t afford the fines were being jailed. In places with uneven enforcement, the Ku Klux Klan’s night riders even took it upon themselves to raid speakeasies and burn crosses on the lawns of Italians and Jews who were suspected of being bootleggers.
For 25 years, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the American anti-alcohol group, took aim at a most ambitious goal: changing the U.S. Constitution. It sought to ban the manufacturing, transport, and sale of intoxicating liquors — and in 1919, Congress officially passed the 18th Amendment, doing just that.
It was a crowning achievement for an organization that had successfully transformed a women-led grassroots temperance movement into a powerful, well-financed lobby group that effectively invented “pressure politics.” And riding the high of accomplishing this seemingly impossible feat, the ASL turned its sights to global domination, immediately establishing the World League Against Alcoholism (WLAA), a group designed to pressure the rest of the world to follow America’s example. First stop? Canada.
At that point, Canada was already mostly dry itself, owing to the War Measures Act, which had suspended some normal rights including drinking. But unlike the U.S., Canada had no hard-and-fast, permanent federal law around alcohol, so provinces were free to settle their own fate after the Armistice, and Quebec’s “prohibition” was the first to be called off in 1919.
READ MORE: How will marijuana legalization change the U.S. border for Canadians
The ASL’s argument was that there were serious practical border issues around this, from smuggling to Americans being tempted to take a quick weekend trip to Montreal for an alco-holiday. As the prolific and militant ASL activist Ernest Cherrington wrote in his 1922 book, America and the World Alcohol Problem: “The boundary line between Canada and the United States extends for 3,898 miles … The single province of Quebec, Canada, on our northeastern border, imported, during the fiscal year 1921, more Scotch whisky than had been imported into that province during the entire 10 years proceeding.” That whisky, he argued, wasn’t for Quebecers’ personal use, but was just passing through on its way to southern Ontario, where he claimed that 1,000 cases of contraband liquors were smuggled across to Michigan every 24 hours.
Also watch: Florida's largest medical cannabis producer seeing 'huge transition' from opioids to marijuana treatment: CEO (Provided by CNBC)
But the convention didn’t work. Instead, by 1925 — just three years after the WLAA event — Ontarians were quaffing back Fergie’s Foam (4.4 per cent beer made legal by Premier Howard Ferguson) and, two years after that, witnessed the introduction of retail liquor stores, leaving only two dry provinces (P.E.I and Nova Scotia). The tables had turned on Prohibition and the ideas that fuelled it in Canada; one political poster framed it as a victory for progressives, who had seen the “falseness and dishonesty” of Prohibition, which had been built on a “foundation of bigotry and intolerance.”
That aspect of Prohibition — that it was a pretext to increase surveillance and incarceration of minorities — wasn’t just dawning on Canadians. Every violent day in the United States made it clearer that bigotry was built into the booze ban. Consumption was legal in private homes and the rich could afford to pay fines when caught in public, while minorities who couldn’t afford the fines were being jailed. In places with uneven enforcement, the Ku Klux Klan’s night riders even took it upon themselves to raid speakeasies and burn crosses on the lawns of Italians and Jews who were suspected of being bootleggers.
