Sobering punishment for breaking Temperance Act
A regular weekly look back at some offbeat or interesting stories that have appeared in the Citizen over its 175-year history.
A century ago, Ottawans were among those whose lives were affected in one way or another by the then-four-year-old Ontario Temperance Act, which largely led to the prohibition of alcohol in the province.
There were, or course, exceptions: medical doctors and drug stores, for example, could prescribe and dispense alcohol.
It's been estimated that Ontario doctors wrote more than 650,000 prescriptions for alcohol in 1920 alone, or roughly one for every 4.5 men, women and children in the province.
Not everybody, however, played by the government's rules.
In December 1920, for example, George A. Keith, an Ottawa osteopath, was found guilty of prescribing a bottle of sherry wine without the required medical licence, to a Mrs. Cleore Nelson, and was levied the minimum $25 fine, plus $2 in court costs. (Keith was additionally fined an identical amount for practising “surgery” — bandaging a fractured rib — without a licence. Both offences were considered breaches of the Medical Act).
Magistrate Askwith was not without a measure of solicitude towards Keith.
“While I sympathize with this man, who is evidently doing good work in the community, I must be guided by the act,” Askwith said.
Ottawa barber C. Gagnon, meanwhile, found much less favour in court, despite having come up with one of the most inventive excuses for why, when the morality squad dropped by his St. Patrick Street “tonsorial parlors” a day earlier, he was found in possession of a flask of “highwines” — typically a distilled spirit with 20 to 65 per cent alcohol by volume.
As Gagnon explained to the officers, he needed to keep the flask nearby, “as sometimes when he was working his blood slowed up so much that he had to take a drink of highwines.”
A further search of his barbershop revealed five one-quart liquor bottles, one of them still containing spirits.
Gagnon initially pleaded not guilty, but afterwards “changed his mind and paid the fine,” a princely sum of $312, the equivalent today of about $3,700.
At least neither was tossed in jail. A story in the Citizen on Dec. 7, 1920, quoted an unnamed United Farmers of Ontario MPP as saying that the coalition government led by premier Ernest Drury might start a large pulp and paper mill in Northern Ontario.
The mill would have the dual purpose of “experimenting in economic working of the government timber limits” while also assembling in one “model town all the jail inmates of the province, particularly offenders against the Ontario Temperance Act, and employing them in cutting and hauling the pulp wood and in work in the pulp and paper plants.”