Liquor and the Liberal State

Cultural 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 an active prohibitionist movement and equally active 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 modern state.

Liquor and the Liberal State demonstrates the challenges governments faced when dealing with the seemingly simple, but tremendously complicated, alcoholic beverage. This lively and meticulous work shows how commentators of all stripes fit the liquor question into a complex conception of liberalism, typically seeing either prohibition or excessive consumption of liquor as an infringement of personal liberty and a threat to the fundamental values of the nation.