John Edward Brownlee was Premier of Alberta, Canada, from 1925 to 1934 as leader of the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) caucus in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. After a number of early successes, his popularity and his government's suffered from the hardships of the Great Depression. In 1934, he was embroiled in a sex scandal when a family friend sued him for seduction. Though Brownlee denied the events she alleged, when the jury found in her favour he announced his resignation as premier.
Brownlee became premier on November 23, 1925, when, at the request of the UFA caucus, he took over from the indecisive Herbert Greenfield, in whose cabinet he had served as attorney-general. After winning the 1926 election for the UFA, Brownlee achieved a number of successes. In 1929 he signed an agreement with the federal government that transferred control of Alberta's natural resources to its provincial government, which had been a priority of his three immediate predecessors as premier. In 1928 he divested the government of the money-losing railways it had acquired after the syndicates that founded them went out of business, by selling them to Canadian Pacific and Canadian National. This was part of his program to balance the provincial budget, at which he was successful beginning in 1925. His government also introduced a controversial sexual sterilization program to prevent the mentally disabled from procreating.
His government's fortunes entered a decline following the 1930 election. Agricultural prices collapsed, throwing many of Alberta's farmers into abject poverty. Urban unemployment shot up, and the government had no choice but to return to deficit spending. Brownlee tried to broker deals between farmers and banks, but found neither side eager to compromise. Political radicalism increased, as communism, the new Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and William Aberhart's social credit movement gained new adherents. The UFA itself elected as its president radical socialist Robert Gardiner. In 1933, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett named Brownlee to the Royal Commission on Banking and Currency as a representative of western interests and unorthodox viewpoints. In this capacity, Brownlee travelled the country questioning witnesses, especially bankers and farmers. While he concurred with the commission's ultimate recommendation for the creation of a central bank, he also made a series of recommendations of his own, including that the central bank be controlled entirely by the government.
In 1934 Brownlee was sued for the seduction of Vivian MacMillan, a family friend and a secretary in his government's attorney-general's office. MacMillan claimed that she and Brownlee had carried on an affair for three years. Though Brownlee denied MacMillan's story completely, and though his lawyer exposed inconsistencies in cross-examination, the jury sided with MacMillan. In deference to public outrage over the charges, John Brownlee resigned as premier July 10, 1934, and was succeeded by Richard Gavin Reid.
Brownlee became Premier on November 23, 1925, when Lieutenant Governor of AlbertaWilliam Egbert, at the behest of much of the UFA caucus, asked him to form a government.[1] Previously, Brownlee had been Attorney-General in the government of Herbert Greenfield. Greenfield was a weak and indecisive premier, and UFA Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) began increasingly to look to Brownlee to leadership.[2] Though Brownlee resisted early calls to assume the premiership out of loyalty to Greenfield, he was eventually persuaded by the advice of UFA President Henry Wise Wood and Greenfield's assurances that he would happily step aside in Brownlee's favour.[1]
When Brownlee became premier it had already been more than four years since the
John R. Boyle had predicted a Liberal victory.[4] Boyle had since been appointed to the bench,[4] and the party was now led by Joseph Tweed Shaw. Shaw had served as the Labour Member of Parliament for Calgary West from 1921 until 1925; in this capacity he had been endorsed by and enjoyed warm relations with the UFA. Now, running against the UFA government, this previous relationship and his recorded sentiments about it were handicaps.[5]
The Conservatives were led by A. A. McGillivray,[5] an outstanding courtroom lawyer and friend of Brownlee's who the latter had, as attorney-general, hired to prosecute Emilio Picariello.[6] McGillivray had released his party's entire platform shortly after becoming leader in 1925, and so had little new to say during the campaign. While Brownlee admired his intellect, he considered that he was out of touch with voters' views, likening him to federal Conservative leader Arthur Meighen.[5]
During the campaign, Brownlee travelled the province speaking to public meetings. He emphasized his record and the UFA's, pointing to the province's improving financial position and to its involvement in the establishment of the Alberta Wheat Pool.[3] He touted the period since the last election as "five years of progress".[7] In keeping with the UFA's view of good government as being the non-partisan administration of business rather than any clash of ideologies, he concluded his speeches by asking "Are we going to return in this Province to Government based on the two-party system, or are we going to continue to work for a better [way]?"[8]
The UFA contested 46 of Alberta's 60 seats, including lawyer John Lymburn's candidacy in Edmonton (the first time the rural UFA had run a candidate in either of the province's two major cities). Of these 46 candidates, 43—including Lymburn and Brownlee, who was acclaimed in his Ponoka riding—were elected.[9] This was an increase from the 38 who were elected in 1921. Seven Liberals and four Conservatives were elected. The remaining six seats went to Labour candidates who were generally friendly with the UFA, though Labour MLA Alex Ross, who had served in Brownlee's cabinet, was defeated in Calgary.[10]
Relationship with King government
At the time that Brownlee became premier, provincial governments were still the junior partners in the Canadian federation. Amendments to the Constitution of Canada expanding provincial powers were still years in the future, as was the advent of the welfare state, which expanded the importance of such provincial responsibilities as health care and education. Brownlee was reliant on cooperation from the federal government for virtually all of his major objectives. LiberalWilliam Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister of Canada for almost all of the first five years of Brownlee's premiership.
During this period King led a minority government that relied for its survival in the House of Commons of Canada on a block of Progressive and allied members of Parliament (MPs). Eleven of this group sat as members of the UFA, and Brownlee met with several of them shortly after taking office to coordinate strategy on Alberta's objectives.[11] These MPs were doubly influential with King because of his desire to absorb them into the Liberal Party; he viewed Progressives as "Liberals in a hurry". In Saskatchewan, Liberal Premier Charles Avery Dunning remained in office with the support of the progressive farmers' movement, but in Alberta Brownlee and the UFA were strong enough to govern without the support of the provincial Liberals, who remained bitter opponents of his government.[12]
The relationship between Brownlee and King was helped by the former's preference for the Liberals over the
King–Byng Crisis.[13] Moreover, not all of King's ministers shared his desire to cooperate with Progressives: his cabinet's Alberta representative, Charles Stewart, was implacably opposed to Brownlee and the UFA, which had defeated him in the 1921 provincial election when he was the Liberal Premier of Alberta.[15]
King held Brownlee in high regard: he considered recruiting him to his cabinet as a replacement for Stewart in 1925.[16] He put this plan on hold when Brownlee became premier, but did not abandon it.[17] When he made another attempt in 1929, Brownlee expressed interest, reasserting his support for the federal Liberals, but indicated that he was not politically ambitious and that he would expect the right to resign if he disagreed with government policy. King found this response discouraging, and decided to await the results of the 1930 election before pressing the issue.[18] King's defeat in the 1930 federal election rendered the question moot.[19]
Natural resources
On no issue was Brownlee's relationship with the King government more critical than it was for the control of natural resources. The terms under which Alberta, like Saskatchewan and Manitoba, entered Canada left control of its natural resources with the federal government; the British North America Act gave control of the older provinces' natural resources to their provincial governments. While Alberta did receive compensation in the form of an annual grant, Brownlee, like his three immediate predecessors, felt that it was insufficient.[20] The federal government had been committed since 1920 to the principle of transferring resource control to the province; only the specific terms of the transfer remained to be established.[21] Alberta, though willing to give up the grant, felt that it was owed compensation for land grants and mineral leases that were made by the federal government, but which Alberta would be expected to honour after the resources were transferred.[22]
After years of wrangling between the federal government and
Roman Catholic schools. Brownlee took exception to this, less from any objection to funding Catholic schools than on the principle that education was a matter of provincial jurisdiction, but King would not allow him to rescind his agreement. In fact, the change had been made at the instigation of Ernest Lapointe, King's Quebec lieutenant, who wanted to placate Quebec nationalist leader Henri Bourassa,[27] and in Tim Byrne's opinion "was obviously a political move that had little to do with the agreement".[28] Brownlee countered by putting a modified version of the agreement to his legislature, one that replaced the offending language with "organized in accordance with the laws of the Province". It passed unanimously.[3]
This remained a point of contention until 1929, when Brownlee and King agreed on a new wording: "organized in accordance with the laws of the Province, but in keeping with the letter and the spirit of the constitution."[29] The federal government had already agreed to continue the resource subsidy in perpetuity,[30] but Brownlee objected to its plans to base the amount on Alberta's 1929 population, which would see it receive less than Saskatchewan in perpetuity despite having a much faster-growing population.[29] When the federal Turgeon Commission recommended that Manitoba, in addition to a perpetual subsidy, receive a one-time payment of more than $4 million, Brownlee demanded the same for Alberta.[31] King countered that the purpose of that one time payment was to compensate Manitoba for years during which it, unlike Alberta and Saskatchewan, did not receive a subsidy; Brownlee responded that the federal government had given away more than three times as much of Alberta's land as Manitoba's to the railways.[31][32] King left the meeting in protest against this new demand, but he was determined to settle with Manitoba and Alberta in order to isolate Saskatchewan Premier James Thomas Milton Anderson and his more extravagant demands.[33] He eventually accepted Brownlee's terms, and an agreement was signed December 14, 1929. The agreement provided for an annual subsidy of $562,000 until Alberta's population reached 800,000 and $750,000 until it reached 1,200,000, after which it would be $1,125,000.[34]
Brownlee was hailed as a hero in Alberta; he had succeeded where every previous premier had failed. Despite sub-zero temperatures, 3,000 people greeted him at the railway station on his return to Edmonton, where he was feted by a band, a bonfire, and fireworks.[35] As Lakeland College historian and Brownlee biographer Franklin Foster wrote, Brownlee was "at the peak of his political career".[36] In Byrne's view, "this was the greatest achievement of Brownlee's career as premier" and would, had he retired at the time, allowed him to "[enter] history as one of Alberta's great premiers".[37]