When the Fraser Valley voted to go dry—and give women the vote

Sept. 14, 1916, was a day of change in British Columbia. On that day, voters headed to the polls to elect a new provincial government. A century later though, the defeat of the provincial Conservative party is less interesting than the results of two referendums on the ballot.

Because on that September day 108 years ago,, BC voters headed to the polls to decide on two big questions: whether women would have the right to vote provincially, and whether alcohol would become illegal.

Earlier this week, we wrote about a 21st Century battle over alcohol policy. Today, The Current looks back on the 1916 vote that made alcohol (briefly) illegal, along with the suffrage referendum that occurred alongside it.

As voters prepared to head to the polls to decide the future of liquor consumption in BC in 1916, readers of the local newspaper could sense which way the winds were blowing locally.

In August, Ben Spence, a Toronto preacher who became known as “Mr. Prohibition of Canada,” spoke before a large audience at Chilliwack’s Imperial Theatre to rally local temperance advocates to the cause.

Prohibitionists often focused on the manner in which alcohol and alcoholism divided and broke up families. But as war raged overseas, Spence made a global, world-changing case for the abolishment of alcohol. The Progress reported:

“In opening Mr Spence stated that the freedom of the world had been saved because of the enactment of prohibition in Russia and France, while British efficiency had been increased through the curtailment of the drink evil. The movement was world wide, he said, and he predicted that within twelve months that there would not be an open whiskey selling store in the Dominion, outside the province of Quebec.”

Anti-alcohol groups were feeling confident of success. Local prohibition groups packed the Progress with large ads denouncing drink, and the paper itself wrote a long editorial begging readers to outlaw booze.

“Let the voter before he casts his ballot for liquor, make sure that the justification he pleads to himself outweighs the appeal to his conscience to lend a hand in this great enterprise of lessening in this province the damage done by drink. No man of heart or intelligence can have any illusions as to what the bar is in character and in results. Every man who has reached middle life knows, at least by observation, what the bar can do in ruining lives and breeding poverty and crime.”

The Sunday before the vote, prohibition was the subject of a debate at the city’s opera house. On one side was G.H.W. Ashwell, the president of the local prohibition movement. On the other, was P.S. Sutor, the owner of the Empress bar and leader of the anti-prohibition forces.

The audience, though, was stacked against the bar owner and J. Fleming, a Vancouver lawyer he had recruited to make his case.

“Even considering the evident unpopularity of Mr. Fleming’s side of the debate and the lack of inspiration from an audience 90 per cent hostile, his attempt to defend King Alcohol must be counted as weak.”

By contrast, The Progress reported the crowed roared with applause at the arguments of an anti-booze doctor.

The Progress, of course, had shown its hand. But it also wasn’t wrong in reading the anti-alcohol sentiment among its readership.

The following Saturday, voters in Chilliwack, and across the Fraser Valley and BC, headed to the polls to decide the fate of bars around the province.

In Chilliwack, 404 votes were counted in favour of prohibition and just 192 against. Across the entire riding (which was also named Chilliwack), only voters in Bradner rejected the ban on booze.

Across the entire riding 1,090 votes were cast in favour of prohibition and just 440 against.

To the west, in the Delta riding that included Aldergrove and Langley, results were more narrow, but still in favour of prohibition.

Across the region, prohibition clocked 383 votes in favour and 273 against. And with that booze was forever illegal.

Or not. Prohibition came into effect a year later, on Oct. 1, 1917. Three years later, voters headed back to the polls for another referendum. Prohibition had not been a rousing success, with critics pointing to problems in enforcement. Anti-prohibition forces endorsed a new strategy—one dubbed “government control” that would legalize alcohol with strict regulations.

In Chilliwack and the surrounding area, prohibition remained popular with 1,159 voters in favour of it continuing and just 664 in favour of regulated legalization. Residents of Mission, Matsqui also backed prohibition. But provincially, the tide had turned in the other direction and just three years after alcohol had been outlawed, 62% of BC voters endorsed an end to prohibition. Residents in Hope and Abbotsford reversed course and sided with the pro-alcohol side in 1920.

By 1920, Abbotsford was becoming a destination for Americans looking for booze. A photo of Essendene Avenue in the 1920s shows a line of American cars parked downtown waiting for the liquor store to open.

The other vote

The prohibition referendum of 1916 might have turned out to be a less momentous event that its backers had predicted, but British Columbian men did make one permanent change to their society that year: they finally gave (some) women the right to vote in provincial elections. (Since 1873, BC women who owned property had the ability to vote—but not run for office—in municipal elections.)

“The men of the province on Thursday decided by a majority of nearly 10,000 votes to give the women of British Columbia the same political privileges as they have themselves,” The Progress reported.

The suffrage was not universal. Asian and Indigenous women still lacked the right to vote and hold office.

In the Fraser Valley, pro-suffrage vote margins were overwhelming. No voting station in either the Chilliwack and Delta ridings voted against the suffrage question, although “Parson’s Hill”—the old name for the Ryder Lake area—had the ignominy of being the only voting location in the region where the votes were split evenly.

Unlike prohibition, there was no going back on suffrage; by 1918, BC had elected its first MLA. Still, progress has been rocky. It would take nearly a century before the province got its first female premier and one part of the Fraser Valley—central and southern Abbotsford—still hasn’t had a women represent them in Victoria.

1916 suffrage results:

Chilliwack

Delta