British Columbia did not close its bars by a single dramatic act. It did it town by town, through a mechanism called local option, which let any municipality vote the sale of liquor in or out and which had already been quietly reshaping the province for decades before the province-wide prohibition of 1917 arrived. The local option vote is the interesting part, because it put the decision in the hands of a neighbourhood rather than a legislature, and it is the reason a handful of communities voted themselves dry while neighbours kept their hotels and breweries.
How Local Option Shaped Provincial Temperance
- Two federal statutes set up the system, because the Canada Temperance Act of 1864 known as the Dunkin Act and the Scott Act of 1878 extended the local choice across the country.
- Sacramental and medicinal sales stayed legal throughout, and closing those two gaps is where most of the campaigning before 1917 happened.
- Repeal in 1921 brought state-controlled stores rather than open bars, and hotels only won the right to sell beer by the glass in 1925.
- The drinking laws still on the books descend from the 1921 choice to sell liquor through government stores instead of reopening the bars.
How Local Option Worked
Local option came to Canada in two steps. The Canada Temperance Act of 1864, known as the Dunkin Act, let a city or county prohibit liquor sales by a majority vote of its residents. After Confederation the Canada Temperance Act of 1878, the Scott Act, extended that local choice across the country. Under it, a municipality could vote itself dry and its neighbours could vote to keep selling, and the line between a dry town and a wet one could fall in the middle of the same county. It was prohibition by plebiscite rather than by parliament, which is why it spread so unevenly and lasted so long.
Even under local option two exceptions always remained. The sale of liquor for sacramental use in a church and for medicinal use under a doctor stayed legal, and a lot of the campaigning in the years before provincial prohibition turned on closing those gaps. The breweries and the working-class districts that drank in them fought the local option votes hard, and it took more than one attempt in many places before a community voted itself in or out.
The Province Votes Dry
The campaigns that had spent decades arguing at the municipal level finally produced a province-wide result in 1917, when British Columbia enacted provincial prohibition. This was the end of the local option era rather than its beginning, because from that point the sale of liquor was prohibited across the province rather than decided town by town. The federal war years added their own pressure, and British Columbia was in the middle of the national prohibition that began in 1918.
The ban did not last. British Columbia repealed prohibition in 1921, earlier than several other provinces, and the way the province handled the return of beer is the part most people remember. Repeal did not bring the bars back. It brought state-controlled liquor stores, and drinking in public stayed illegal after 1921. It was not until 1925 that legislation allowed hotels to run beer parlours and sell beer by the glass. So the road from a local option vote to a beer you could actually sit down and drink took more than a decade, and passed through a period when the legal answer to the question was still mostly no.
The Argument Was Never Just About Sobriety
Temperance in British Columbia, as elsewhere, was a fight about more than drinking. The prohibition movement drew heavily from Protestant churches and from reformers who saw the saloon as the centre of working-class political life and of the violence and poverty that went with it. The other side, made up of the breweries, the hotel keepers and much of the organized labour vote, argued that the local option and prohibition campaigns cost working people their jobs, their cheap recreation and their say, and that the communities voting themselves dry were often the ones that then watched their taxes and trade shrink. Neither side is easy to flatten into a hero and a villain, and the record shows real drinkers losing real ground to well-organized campaigns over several decades.
For British Columbia specifically, the shape of the story is the drift from local option to provincial ban and back to a controlled, licensed return. Almost no part of the modern legal arrangement in the province, where liquor is sold by a provincial authority rather than left entirely to private bars, is a leftover from the temperance years, and a lot of what looks like ordinary provincial regulation in Canada today is a direct descendant of the decision this province made in 1921 to keep selling liquor through government stores instead of simply letting the bars reopen.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does local option mean?
Local option meant that a city or county could decide for itself whether to allow liquor sales, by holding a majority vote of its residents rather than waiting for the province or Parliament to decide. It is the reason prohibition in nineteenth-century Canada looked like a patchwork instead of a single switch, and it is the difference between a dry town next to a wet one, which is the arrangement that prevailed in British Columbia and much of the rest of Canada before the provincial bans of the 1910s.
Did any part of British Columbia vote itself dry?
That is exactly what local option allowed, and it happened in many places across Canada during the decades before provincial prohibition, in individual municipalities and counties rather than province-wide. Under the local option system a community could vote the sale of liquor out while its neighbours kept theirs, which produced the patchwork of dry and wet towns that is a distinctive part of the temperance era in British Columbia and across the country.
When could people drink beer by the glass again in BC?
Repeal came in 1921, but the bars did not reopen with it. After repeal, liquor was sold only through special government stores and drinking in public remained illegal. It was 1925 before legislation allowed hotels to operate beer parlours and sell beer by the glass, so the practical return of a glass of beer with a meal in British Columbia came several years after the legal end of prohibition in the province.
Why The Manner Of Repeal Matters
The useful thing to take from the temperance years is not a verdict on either side, it is how long it took to undo. British Columbia spent years deciding whether to be dry town by town, then closed the province, then reopened it slowly through state stores, then finally allowed a glass of beer in a hotel four years after the repeal. Almost none of that happened quickly, and every step of it is a reason the drinking laws in this province still look the way they do.
