Media companies Bell and Rogers recently announced increases to the rates charged to sports bars for live-streaming sports events. The broadcasters have realized that showing hockey and football games increases bar revenues, and want some of those revenues for themselves.
Sports-bar owners will be paying thousands of dollars more in fees each year to broadcasters. If they want to stream major sporting events on their TVs — and bring in sports-viewing patrons and their wallets — they’re at the broadcasters’ mercy.
This is just the latest change in the landscape in which B.C. bars operate — a landscape that has recently seen the biggest overhaul of the province’s liquor laws and policies in a century.
Since 2015, the B.C. government has been rolling out legislative, regulatory and policy changes that implement the 73 recommendations that parliamentary secretary John Yap advised in 2014 to modernize the way alcoholic beverages are sold in B.C. Changes made early in the process addressed, for example, wine sales in grocery stores, changes to liquor wholesale pricing, beer and wine sales at farmers’ markets, interprovincial agreements for sales of Canadian wine, and the return of “happy hour” at local pubs.
The process climaxed in January, when the new Liquor Control and Licensing Act and accompanying regulations came into force. With this, the province has redefined B.C.’s liquor landscape in a way that hasn’t been done since it enacted Prohibition in 1917.
While it has modernized liquor sales and the conditions under which they can occur, the province hasn’t turned back the clock completely. As Glen Mofford details in Aqua Vitae, his new book about the pre-Prohibition evolution of Victoria’s liquor-dispensing landscape, selling liquor and providing incentives to drinking customers was a wide-open field in the community’s earliest days.
The saloon business in Victoria was unregulated then, with no licence required to sell beer or spirits. Anybody with inclination and capital to build a venue, import the brew, and staff a bar could open and operate a saloon.
Customers, however, were limited. Victoria’s 1854 census records just 232 residents. Although drinking was a popular and socially accepted pastime — at home, in public, at work, all day, every day — those few residents could support only so many saloons. And when Governor James Douglas implemented a £120 annual liquor sales tax in 1853 to raise revenues for the Colony of Vancouver Island, two of the three saloons in town promptly closed.
The transfer of the Royal Navy’s Pacific Squadron to Esquimalt and the gold rushes of the 1850s and ’60s changed everything. The resulting population booms made bars and saloons viable business opportunities. Hotels built to meet growing numbers of travellers included dining halls and bars to diversify revenues.
Standalone saloons proliferated. By 1871, 56 saloons served a community of just 6,000 residents, as well as a transient, seasonal population that came and went with the whaling, sealing and fishing seasons.
Competition was fierce. To attract customers, some hotel and bar owners staged onsite entertainments and offered free meals to drinking patrons. Games of chance were popular. Saloons raffled off yachts, livestock and even racehorses. Some venues installed billiard tables or bowling alleys or hosted high-stakes gambling. Some seedier venues — particularly along what is now Johnson Street — became known as places to go for a brawl.
But as the decades passed, attitudes toward drinking changed, with proponents of temperance and the prohibition of liquor sales making the first inroads as early as the 1850s.
Regulation tightened bit by bit. As of 1878, any saloon caught with anyone under age 16 on the premises was fined $50. An 1892 law shut down saloons on Sundays and forced them to close at midnight during the week (11 p.m. on Saturdays).
More restrictive hours were imposed in 1910, and standalone saloons were denied liquor licences in 1914.
When Prohibition became law in 1917, the city’s 80 hotel bars closed.
Even after Prohibition’s repeal in 1920 in favour of government-controlled liquor distribution and sales, Victorians narrowly voted in favour of dry establishments, rejecting the opportunity to receive the province’s first post-Prohibition liquor licences.
Today’s landscape is a long way from both extremes the province experienced a century and more ago. But one thing remains consistent — our need to tinker with the way we manage alcohol.
