ATTITUDE TOWARD 'BUD' EMBARRASSINGLY PROVINCIAL

In the 11 years between 1909 and 1920, legislators in Victoria appealed
directly to the people on three separate occasions to learn which way they
should go on laws dealing with a popular drug. In this case, it was alcohol.

Though the questions put to the people varied over the course of those
tumultuous years, there is no doubt change had washed over them. There can
be no argument that the change was a result of the hugely altered outlook
of a people suddenly awakened to the wide world outside the province.

In 1909, a majority of 54.4 per cent of the province, along with 53.6 per
cent of Vancouverites, voted in favour of their municipalities taking
control over the sale and distribution of alcohol away from the province.
The question was whether the provincial legislature in Victoria or the far
more locally controlled city halls should decide whether and how alcohol
could be sold. The government ignored the results and continued to allow
the distribution of alcohol throughout the province.

By 1916, a stronger majority of provincial voters favoured a complete
prohibition of alcohol - 56.4 per cent of the province, and an even larger
56.8 per cent of Vancouverites, voted to ban alcohol entirely. This time
the government acted and put into place legislation to prohibit alcohol.

But by 1920, now on the other side of the First World War, a different tilt
in attitudes appeared. Now the government asked the people whether they
wished prohibition to continue, or if they wanted alcohol back, under tight
provincial government control. A huge majority of the province-62.4 per
cent-voted for alcohol to be brought back. The option was greeted even more
enthusiastically in Vancouver.

In the official published results of the 1916 prohibition referendum, votes
by soldiers were separately broken out from those cast by civilians,
providing key evidence to the change that later came over the province.
While the civilian population of B.C. voted 56.4 per cent in favour of
prohibition, soldiers voted a whopping 72.4 per cent against prohibition.

The dramatically different result cannot be explained by the fact that the
armed forces population would have been mostly young males who could be
expected to be in favour of drinking. The official results provide a
further breakdown between soldiers at home and those overseas. These two
groups would presumably be composed of much the same demographics. The
soldiers at home voted 52 per cent for prohibition, pretty much in line
with the larger civilian B.C. population. But those soldiers who went
overseas to Europe voted nearly 82 per cent against prohibition.

Four years later, nearly two-thirds of the province, obviously influenced
by those soldiers returning from Europe, now voted against continued
prohibition, marking a dramatic swing in public opinion on the subject
amounting to nearly 20 points.

One might be tempted to argue that the more relaxed attitude toward alcohol
among soldiers serving overseas was a result of the trauma they experienced
in the awful trench warfare of the First World War. But only a minority of
those soldiers serving overseas saw such action directly. By far the more
obvious factor in their changed opinion was their exposure to different
places besides the stuffy confines of small town British Columbia, and
specifically to the eye-opening thrill of huge European capitals, even if
it was during wartime.

It is remarkable to note that even during what we look back upon as an
insufferably uptight period of social constriction, the people and their
government were open-minded enough to conduct several referenda on such
huge questions as alcohol prohibition. Compare that attitude to our
situation today regarding the continued prohibition of marijuana. True,
marijuana is a federal matter where alcohol is a provincial matter, but
it's still revealing to note how far away we are even from the idea of a
public referendum on whether marijuana should continue to be prohibited.

Before 1916, not many B.C. residents had been outside the country, and they
showed themselves to be very closed-minded to liberal social policies as a
result. But after widespread exposure to the wider world, led by soldiers
shipped to Europe, B.C. rapidly became more liberal.

Today, we are again mired in closed-minded social policies, most starkly
evidenced by our laws prohibiting marijuana. We may not know it, but what
we are suffering from in this province is a deep poverty of experience with
the outside, wider world. We may have become embarrassingly provincial all
over again.