Your humble narrator has been known to poke fun at our neighbours to the south for that failed social experiment called Prohibition back in the 1920’s.
A few kind readers have written letters to the editor, pointing out that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, especially since our own fair province Alberta has laboured under the cruel yoke of Prohibition not once, but twice!
Yes, gentle reader, Alberta was a dry province from 1875 to 1892, and again from 1916 to 1924. Similar to the attempts to ban the demon liquor south of the border, our own attempts at Prohibition in Alberta were also an abject failure, with widespread availability of illicit hooch.
Realizing the futility of the law, the Alberta government repealed Prohibition in 1924. Calgary’s own Palliser Hotel was the first establishment to be granted a license to operate a beer parlour, and it still operates to this day!
However, there is one small town in Southern Alberta that has remained a dry town to this present day.
I refer, gentle reader, to the Town of Cardston, located 250km south of Calgary, with a population just shy of 3600 people.
Cardston was founded back in back in 1887, by a Mormon missionary named Charles Card, who led a wagon train of Mormon familes from Utah to Canada to escape prosecution in the USA for polygamy, which was all the rage in Utah at the time.
Cardston was the first Mormon settlement in Canada, and remains one of the most staunch supporters of traditional bible-belt values, which just happens to include abstinence from alcohol.
So, even though the provincial government abolished Prohibition in 1924, it did give local towns the option to “stay dry”, and Cardston did just that. Here we are, 90 years later, and Cardston remains dry to this day. Indeed, there is nary a drop of the demon liquor to be purchased anywhere in the town limits.
The more cynical readers in the audience might suspect that Cardston is dry in name only, with the liberal attitudes of the modern age leading the town residents to smuggle in booze from the next town over, to be consumed on the down-low behind closed doors, out of the watchful eyes of the busybodies next door.
One can only imagine the effort taken to hide the empty bottles in the recycling bins, so as not to reveal oneself as a drunken reprobate by the discovery of a few cans of Coors Lite in the trash.
The last plebiscite on the question of allowing the demon liquor to be sold inside the town limits was held in 1957, and was met with an overwhelming NO from the townspeople.
However, a lot has changed since 1957, and there is another plebiscite schedule for next month, which has many of the more conservative residents all aflutter, worried that their neighbours get just a little less god-fearing every year, and that the time of being able to knock back a pint at the pub may be close at hand.
Due to a few Prohibition-era laws still on the books, the Alberta Gaming & Liquor Commission considers Cardston a “Local Option Zone”, which means it will not issue liquor licenses within the municipality until a binding plebiscite shows that the demon liquor is no longer unwelcome.
Since the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly, it might take another year or so for the taps to start flowing, even if the townspeople vote YES next in next month’s plebiscite.
It’s hard to tell who is more worried about the plebiscite; the long-term residents who don’t want the idyllic character of their small town to be besmirched by the demon liquor, or the many bootleggers who live the high life on the profits of smuggling booze into town for illicit resale to the local youth.
There are only a few dry towns left in Canada, and their numbers have been steadily dwindling as societal attitudes change. However, Cardston is still 80% Mormon, so they might be able to keep their town dry, at least in name if not in practice for a few years more.
Let’s all raise a glass to Cardston on October 6, and hope they make the right decision!
