Description
Book SynopsisCultural pastime, profitable industry, or harmful influence on the nation? Liquor was a tricky issue for municipal, provincial, and federal governments after Confederation. Liquor and the Liberal State traces how the Ontario provincial government's takeover of liquor regulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved both discrete local politics and expansive constitutional questions.
Dan Malleck explores how notions of individual freedom, equality, and property rights were debated, challenged, and modified in response to a vocal prohibitionist movement and equally vocal liquor industry. While the liquor licensing regime helped build a vast patronage base for the governing Liberal Party, some believed it exceeded the constitutional authority of the province. The drink question became as political as it was moral a key issue in the establishment of judicial definitions of provincial and federal rights and, ultimately, in the crafting of the moder
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Arguing over Liquor and Liberalism
Part 1: Managing the Province’s Liquor Problem
1 The Place of the Government in the Drinks of the People
2 Centralization, I: The Crooks Act
3 Power and Influence in the New System
4 Politics, Law, and the License Branch
Part 2: The Complications of Liquor in a Federal Liberal State
5 How Drinking Affects the Constitution, 1864–83
6 McCarthy and Crooks Enter a Tavern, 1883–85
7 Attempting to Water Down the Scott Act, 1884–92
8 Plebiscites as Tools for Change? 1883–94
9 Talking and Blocking National Prohibition, 1891–99
10 Dodging Decisions at the End of the Liberals’ Era, 1894–1905
11 Drinking in Whitney’s Conservative Liberal State, 1905–07
12 Centralization, II: Beyond the Crooks Act, 1907–16
Conclusion: Liquor, Liberalism, and the Legacy of the Crooks Act
Appendix 1: Questions Sent by the Select Committee
Appendix 2: Liquor-Related Laws in Force in Ontario
Notes; Index
