Most of Canada's clubs were founded during the Victorian era and used similar rules to their British counterparts, including: a proscription on discussions about politics and religion, silence in reading rooms, and a ban on smoking in dining areas.
[1] Meanwhile, Peter C. Newman stated that the clubs that "really count" were the York, Toronto, National, Mount Royal, Saint James's, Rideau, and Vancouver.
[2] Bryan Palmer described this process as a shift in "self-conception away from an age-old attachment to empire, in which comfort could be taken from a prideful understanding of keeping alive European traditions.
Another reason was that the baby boomer generation that had come of age during the countercultural revolution was skeptical of authority, tradition, and formality,[4] all of which gentlemen's clubs embodied.
In his 1975 tome The Canadian Establishment, author and journalist Peter C. Newman devoted a chapter to gentlemen's clubs, entitled "Clubland on the Rocks."
The new-breed wheelers are dealing downtown in the smart places where they can sniff out the fast money, looking past their luncheon companions' shoulders to see who's breaking bread with their competitors.