The Impact Of Alcohol Prohibition On Canada

I chose the prohibition as my historical event because it was like an experiment gone bad. But it did have a great effect on the present and the time after the prohibition. It occurred at different times in different provinces in the early 1900’s.

Prohibition in Canada banned the selling, manufacturing, and purchase of alcohol. There have been both short term and long-term effect of the prohibition. “Prohibition was the result of generations of effort by temperance workers to close bars and taverns, which were the source of much drunkenness and misery in an age before social welfare existed”.

Drinking now a days is used for celebratory reasons. Celebrating the best events or milestones of people’s lives. I don’t drink personally but it is part of human nature now a days. Having a glass of wine with a stake dinner. Some people just drink to get the edge off but most people drink on special occasions like birthdays. It never really affected my family because we don’t drink. We are Muslim and drinking is forbidden in our religion. If you didn’t want to bother getting a doctor’s prescription, you could always head over to an illicit establishment to get your fix. While all the bars and liquor stores were closed, speakeasies, also known as “blind pigs, ” which sold alcohol were everywhere during the prohibition era. Speakeasies were usually hidden within another establishment. You could find them in hotels, the backs of stores, and restaurants, but sometimes they were even inside private residences and barns. Often one did not even need to travel to a speakeasy; the alcohol came to them via taxi rides and traveling door-to-door salesmen. The question I kept asking myself was who supplied speakeasies with booze? Why bootleggers and rum-runners, of course.

While “wet” provinces like Quebec produced a fair amount of the illegal imported alcohol in “dry” provinces, many rum-runners got their booze from home-based breweries. Selling moonshine was a lucrative side hustle for men and women throughout the 1920s because even after some provinces repealed their bans early, dry markets still existed elsewhere. Thanks to bootleggers and the high number of speakeasies across the country, many citizens thought it was easier to obtain alcohol during prohibition than it was before. During WWI, prohibition was a tactic used by the government to ration fruits and grain. There was a general decrease in crime, but on the other hand, organized crime, smuggling from Canada to the US.

The most significant thing the prohibition has had an effect on is women’s equality. Of course, during those times women were just looking for the right of suffrage, and have come a long way since. Prohibition provided women in Canada with one of the first platforms where their opinions would be included with men, and the more fronts that women had equal rights as men the more equality there was. However, even if there was a decline, any progress was erased when the Great Depression hit. Alcohol consumption in Canada steadily increased every decade until the 1980s.