Alberta town keeps its booze ban
The southern Alberta town of Raymond has voted to remain legally dry, perpetuating — for now — a tradition that dates back to the founding of the community in 1901. Raymond, population 4,241, is not the most colourful place in the world, but it is interesting and special; it has always produced a lot of high-achieving people, like other communities dominated by the Mormon faith, and few towns of its size on the continent can match its heritage of sporting success and philanthropy. Some of today’s non-mormon residents were attracted to the town by its dry status and the strong family-values atmosphere that goes with it, coincidentally or not.
Its alcohol-free status was originally preserved — before there was a province of Alberta — by land-title covenants. The town originally had a single proprietor, the Mormon mining magnate Jesse Knight (18451921), who was a survivor of the persecution of the early church and its cross-country hegira from Nauvoo, Ill., to the far west. The Latter-day Saints always had a strong temperance streak, but it is often forgotten that absolute opposition to liquor was not part of the church’s official doctrine until 1921. Before that time some church institutions, even in Utah, sold quite a lot of liquor.
In (and around) Raymond, Knight saw to it that nobody did. He was, in this, a man slightly ahead of his time. Before long Alberta was engaged in an experiment with provincewide liquor prohibition: when that collapsed in the 1920s, the new provincial laws on liquor control contained a “miscellaneous” regulation outlawing liquor licences in the Mormon area of the province, including Raymond. That provincial safety net was removed as part of a liquor-law reform in 2020, leaving town councils in the Mormon belt to decide for themselves whether to stick with prohibitionist tradition.
Raymond’s council attacked the problem somewhat indirectly. They could have just gone ahead with a yes/no town plebiscite, but instead they organized an informal survey, claiming that opinions on Raymond’s openness to alcohol were somewhat multi-dimensional and that they wanted to gather data that weren’t merely binary. A whole new internet forum called Let’s Talk Raymond was devised, and technologically backward residents were allowed to answer the questionnaire in person. A total of 459 respondents said they’d prefer that Raymond remain dry, 166 were willing to allow liquor licences for restaurants only, and 238 argued for the unconditional “wet” status that almost all other Canadian communities enjoy.
This suggests that the plebiscite might have been a close-run thing, depending on what questions appeared on the ballot. In a “community engagement session” held March 23 to introduce and explain the survey, the genuine complexity of the issue facing Raymond became obvious as citizens gave brief and generally articulate summaries of their views.
Most of those who spoke at the session, as you can see for yourself on Youtube, like the town the way it is and don’t see a need for change: they understandably see local toleration of liquor sales as an irreversible oneway street. Many spoke of alcohol as unwelcome and harmful socially, offering their own knowledge of its harms — and although “temperance” and alcohol prohibition are somewhat discredited among us bigcity newspaper columnists, there isn’t a lot anyone can offer in direct rebuttal to testimonies like these.
The economic costs of excluding alcohol from the town are nonetheless uncertain and contested. Although Raymond still runs the country’s oldest professional rodeo — modern bronc saddles and rodeo chutes were invented there — no one will hasten to hold some other spectator event or conference in a community where the nearest lawful liquor sales are a half-hour away by road. Raymond loses a little money every time someone makes that trip, and in the background, the council itself has identified “inclusiveness” as “one of the town’s major weaknesses.”
Inclusiveness should not require every community on the face of the Earth to have the same rules. To the degree that it does require this, it may be a wicked thing in itself. But the council seems aware, whether the populace is or not, that the liquor question is a complicated exercise in signalling. Is local prohibition just another way of saying “keep out” to those whose presence would change the status quo in unpredictable ways? Knight’s land covenants still cover much of Raymond and the surrounding area, and whether those covenants could be broken in litigation depends heavily on community sentiment and town policy: either way there might be some upfront public expense involved in saying “yes” to booze. Whatever your own beliefs, you can’t help feeling some small tug of hope that a unique place can stay that way.
MOST OF THOSE WHO SPOKE .... LIKE THE TOWN THE WAY IT IS AND DON’T SEE A NEED FOR CHANGE.