Albertans drinking way less booze than they used to, lead the country in cannabis sales
CBC
It's been well documented by now that Canadians are drinking less than they used to, but no other province has seen a greater reduction than Alberta.
You know those giant bottles of vodka you can get at Costco? The 4.5-litre ones? That's how much less booze the average Albertan drank last year, compared to how much they drank in 2008.
Put another way: 107 fewer beers, per person, per year.
Back at its peak in 2008, Alberta led all provinces in drinking, with 9.7 litres of pure alcohol consumed per person aged 15 and over.
It has since relinquished that title to Newfoundland and Labrador, which last year led the country at 8.3 litres per person.
Alberta rang in at 7.6 litres per person last year, a decline of 1.9 litres from its peak consumption. That ties it with Saskatchewan for the largest decline from peak in the two decades' worth of data tracked by Statistics Canada.
(You might be wondering: Why is age 15 used for the per-capita calculation, instead of 18, the legal drinking age? Statistics Canada has adopted this cutoff as it's the standard used internationally for per-capita alcohol sales.)
At the same time, cannabis sales in Alberta have been on the rise. They've grown in every year that Statistics Canada has tracked this data.
Albertans led the country in legal cannabis consumption by a substantial margin last year, with an average of $248 spent per person of legal age to buy it.
The next closest province was Saskatchewan, at $205.
Quebec saw the least in cannabis sales, at just $96 per person.
It might seem easy to connect the dots here and assume Albertans are drinking less because they're consuming more cannabis instead, but it's not quite so simple to draw a one-to-one connection between the two trends, says Michael Armstrong, a professor at Brock University's Goodman School of Business, whose research has focused on this topic.
Looking at the big-picture numbers, he says there "was no obvious, sudden drop" in alcohol consumption once cannabis was legalized in Canada in 2018.
"No large number of Canadians suddenly said, 'Hey, I'm going to start smoking joints instead of drinking beer,'" Armstrong said.
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