You needed a passport-style permit book to buy a bottle until 1957
The LCBO
Ontario's government-run liquor retailer was created in 1927 to replace outright prohibition with something more controlled — and it took more than 40 years before shoppers could actually browse a shelf themselves.
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Our Junction guide covers one neighbourhood's extreme, decades-long alcohol ban. This page is about the province-wide system that replaced outright prohibition — and just how controlled it stayed for decades afterward.
Created to replace prohibition, not repeal it
Ontario introduced province-wide prohibition in 1916. When it ended in 1927, the province didn't simply legalize open retail sale — it created the Liquor Control Board of Ontario under the Liquor Control Act, 1927, opening its doors to the public on June 1, 1927 with just 12 stores, six of them in Toronto. The stores were deliberately designed to look more like banks than shops, and tucked away from main streets rather than displayed prominently.
A permit book to buy a bottle
From 1927 to 1957, buying liquor legally required a passport-sized permit book, recording the holder's personal information alongside a running log of every purchase — a level of individual government tracking of alcohol consumption that would be unthinkable in most of the country today. The permit book system was finally phased out in 1957.
No browsing until 1969
Even without the permit books, customers still couldn't simply walk in and pick a bottle off a shelf — purchases went through a clerk at a counter. Self-service didn't arrive until 1969, more than 40 years after the LCBO's founding, when a pilot self-serve display of Canadian whiskies went up in a store in the Weston area of Toronto — the small, specific first step toward the browsable retail format Ontario shoppers take for granted today.
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Sources
- BlogTO — The History of the LCBO in Ontario When They Had Counter Service
- TVO Today — Buzzkillers: A Brief History of the LCBO
- Wikipedia — Liquor Control Board of Ontario