Parliament ran its own tavern for 49 years. Sober and sadder are today’s holidays on Parliament Hill. Old-timers recalled the tavern fondly. Here the Fathers of Confederation took a bracer or entertained visitors. It was a “very natural” place, John A. Macdonald enthused.
The bar “accounted for the fine, free flow of language in the press and the House,” one senator wrote in his memoirs. “When the cold hand of prohibition closed the bar, something went out of the House.”
Another Parliamentarian recalled, “It was quite an ordinary thing for at least 50 percent of the members to be more or less under the influence of liquor when the House adjourned around midnight.”
Specialties of the House are today lost to history. Sessional Papers are silent on the question of what parliamentarians drank, though the tavern was so convivial reformers twice tried to shut it down, in 1874 and 1881.
Modern mythology depicts 19th century drinking as crude and violent. This is untrue. An 1844 creditors’ notice for a bankrupt Toronto grocer details all the ingredients of a first-rate holiday party: claret, Madeira, brandy and Muscovado sugar with ginger root, cloves and nutmeg.
One 1824 diarist wrote that Canadians seemed “very partial to Jamaica spirits, brandy, shrub and peppermint.” Shrub was a cocktail of berries boiled in vinegar and sugar. “Peppermint” was a mix of peppermint oil, whiskey and burnt sugar. The Ontario Historical Society detailed such early recipes in a 1989 booklet Consuming Passions: Eating and Drinking Traditions in Ontario.
What did the Fathers of Confederation drink? Not water, surely. Ottawa suffered periodic epidemics of cholera. An 1832 outbreak killed 1,421 people. And the city suffered occasional plagues of typhoid as late as 1912. To drink unboiled municipal water was to risk sickness or death.
Nor were pioneers partial to beer. The 1852 census showed Upper Canada had nearly twice as many distilleries as breweries. An 1859 visitor reported that ale was “rather a novel thing” in Canada compared to England.
The House tavern would have featured “fancy sugars, bitters, limes, lemons – quality citrus,” says historian Dr. Julia Roberts of the University of Waterloo. “I think they would have had a staggering array of incredibly good liquor: port, champagne, whiskey, rum. Rum was very, very popular.”
Dr. Roberts in her 2009 account In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada calculated early Canadians downed nearly five ounces of liquor a day, more than eight times today’s rate of consumption. “They didn’t drink for relaxation,” she said.
“These were hard-labouring people who needed calories,” said Roberts. She calculated in the 1840s Upper Canada had nearly 1,500 taverns, the equivalent of one roadhouse for every 300 settlers.
Rum was so popular the Royal Canadian Navy maintained the tradition of serving sailors a noon-time tot until 1972. “Today only in very rare and exceptional circumstances,” a Navy spokesperson said as late as 2012, “commanding officers in the Royal Canadian Navy can still permit a celebratory issue of spirits to sailors of legal age.”
The House tavern did a roaring trade until it burned in 1916. Its location today is unmarked.
By Tom Korski
