In 1937 Ontario passed a law that required bars to have separate entrances and drinking areas for men and women - one source, now only available on the Wayback Machine, quotes a now removed article from a Burnaby NewsLeader, a BC newspaper, which said "...this seems to have been part of an anti-VD campaign in Canada.
.in the late 1930s, the Provincial Division of Venereal Disease Control launched a major campaign against hotel beer parlours alleging that they were spreading venereal disease and that prostitution was the main source of VD. 'You read these official records and it’s only women who spread disease,' Campbell [probably Robert Campbell, a Capilano College, now University, history professor] said with a laugh. 'They never acknowledge that they got it from a man. Only women.'
The campaign intensified with the Second World War during which VD was seen as undermining the war effort by infecting young men. In 1942, the provincial government ordered that beer parlours erect physical barriers between two separate areas with separate entrances designated for men only and for ladies with escorts. The latter would allow women either alone or with their husbands and boyfriends. "The whole idea was to try to separate unattached women from unattached men."
Campbell published a study on Gender Segregation in British Columbia's bars before the end of WWII.
There had to be some kind of barrier between the side in the bar where women sat and where men sat, but it was "Ladies and their (male) Escorts" on the women's side and no women on the men's side. To this day many old bars in Ontario still have two doors, although the separation barriers are long gone.
This was in effect up at least into the 1970s, and in Quebec many taverns were off limits to women in practise until the 1980s - in 2007 a woman was refused service at a gay bar in Montreal.
This is a building on Beckworth and William streets, in Smith Falls, Ontario in 2008 that probably was a hotel with a bar - sign is now gone.
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