As Dry Feb begins, is there a ‘growing desire’ for alcohol abstention?

With campaigns such as Dry Feb and Dry January, and the growing popularity of non-alcoholic drinks, the stigma of not drinking alcohol may be starting to shift.

Can you abstain from alcohol for a month?

That is the core question of the Canadian Cancer Society’s Dry Feb, a fundraising campaign challenging Canadians to hold off on consuming their favourite alcoholic beverages for a month, while raising funds for cancer research.

With campaigns such as Dry Feb and Dry January, and the growing popularity of non-alcoholic drinks, the stigma of not drinking alcohol may be starting to shift, said Ciana Van Dusen, advocacy manager of prevention and early detection with the Canadian Cancer Society.

“The interesting thing about alcohol is it’s actually one substance where we almost have reverse stigma, a stigma for not consuming as opposed to stigma for consuming,” she told Global News.

“The ability to say no to drinking alcohol is getting a lot more normal or acceptable … and you get less questioning.”

A 2021 Statistics Canada study showed drinking habits among Canadians were changing.

At the time, the agency reported almost 5.1 million people, or 15.6 per cent of Canadians aged 12 years and older, engaged in heavy drinking – defined as having five or more drinks for men and four or more for women, on one occasion, at least once a month in the previous year.

Nevertheless, it was the lowest level of heavy drinking since Statistics Canada first asked in 2015. Canadians aged 18 to 34 years (1.7 million people) were most likely to report being heavy drinkers in 2021, down 10.1 per cent from a year earlier, and 31.5 per cent lower compared with 2015.