Charles Stewart (premier)

Hon. Charles Stewart
3rd Premier of Alberta
In office October 30, 1917 – August 13, 1921
Preceded by	Arthur Sifton
Succeeded by	Herbert Greenfield
Member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for Sedgewick
In office March 22, 1909 – 1922
Preceded by	New district
Succeeded by	Albert Andrews
Alberta Minister of Railways and Telephones
In office October 16, 1917 – August 31, 1921
Preceded by	Arthur Sifton
Succeeded by	Vernor Smith
Alberta Provincial Secretary
In office October 16, 1917 – August 28, 1918
Preceded by	Archibald J. McLean
Succeeded by	Wilfrid Gariépy
Alberta Minister of Public Works
In office November 28, 1913 – October 16, 1917
Preceded by	Charles R. Mitchell
Succeeded by	Archibald J. McLean
Alberta Minister of Municipal Affairs
In office May 4, 1912 – November 29, 1913
Preceded by	New position
Succeeded by	Wilfrid Gariépy
Member of the Canadian House of Commons for Edmonton West
In office October 29, 1925 – October 14, 1935
Preceded by	Donald MacBeth Kennedy
Succeeded by	James Angus MacKinnon
Member of the Canadian House of Commons for Argenteuil
In office February 28, 1922 – October 29, 1925
Preceded by	Peter Robert McGibbon
Succeeded by	George Perley
Canadian Minister of the Interior and Mines
In office December 29, 1921 – June 29, 1926
Preceded by	James Alexander Lougheed
Succeeded by	Henry Herbert Stevens
In office September 25, 1926 – August 6, 1930
Preceded by	R. B. Bennett
Succeeded by	Wesley Ashton Gordon
Personal details
Born	August 26, 1868 Strabane, Wentworth County, Ontario
Died	December 6, 1946(1946-12-06) (aged 78) Ottawa, Ontario
Political party	Alberta Liberal Party Liberal Party of Canada
Spouse	Jane Russell Sneath
Children	Eight: George Sneath, Catherine Isabel Doris, Charles Herbert, Christiana Munro Sneath, Robina Jane Millicent, Frederick John, Roseanna Alice, and Henry Alexander Russell
Profession	Farmer

Charles Stewart, PC (August 26, 1868–December 6, 1946) was a Canadian politician who served as Premier of Alberta from 1917 until 1921. Born in Strabane, Ontario, in Wentworth County, Stewart was a farmer who came west to Alberta after his farm was destroyed by a storm. There he became active in politics and was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta in the 1909 election. He served as Minister of Public Works and Minister of Municipal Affairs—the first person to hold the latter position in Alberta—in the government of Arthur Sifton; when Sifton left provincial politics in 1917 to join the federal cabinet, Stewart was named his replacement.

As Premier, Stewart tried to hold together his Liberal Party, which was divided by the Conscription Crisis of 1917. He endeavored to enforce prohibition, which had been enshrined in law by a referendum during Sifton's premiership, but found that the law was not widely enough supported to be effectively policed. His government took over several of the province's financially troubled railroads, and guaranteed bonds sold to fund irrigation projects. Several of these policies were the result of lobbying by the United Farmers of Alberta, with which Stewart enjoyed good relation; even so, the UFA politicized during Stewart's premiership and ran candidates in the 1921 election. Unable to match the UFA's appeal to rural voters, Stewart was defeated at the polls and resigned as premier.

After leaving provincial politics, Stewart was invited to join the federal cabinet of William Lyon Mackenzie King, in which he served as Minister of the Interior and Mines. In this capacity he signed, on behalf of the federal government, an agreement that transferred control of Alberta's natural resources from Ottawa to the provincial government—a concession he had been criticized for being unable to negotiate as Premier. He served in King's cabinet until 1930, when the King government was defeated; in 1935, so too was Stewart. He died in December 1946 in Ottawa.

Early life

Charles Stewart was born August 26, 1868 in Strabane, Ontario, in Wentworth County, to Charles and Catherine Stewart. Charles Sr. was a stonemason and farmer. As a child, Charles Jr. accompanied his father to Carlisle to hear Sir John A. Macdonald; according to family lore, Macdonald noticed the young future Premier and told him that he was a fine boy who would make a good politician someday. When Charles Jr. was 16, he moved with his family to a farm near Barrie. Seven years later, on December 17, 1891, he married Jane Russell Sneath; the pair would have eight children. After marrying Sneath, he converted to her Church of England faith.

Stewart's farmhouse in Killam; Stewart himself is standing at lower left.

In 1892 Charles Sr. died, leaving his son in charge of the family farm. Twelve years later, this farm was destroyed by a storm, and Stewart decided to move west. He settled near Killam, Alberta in 1905. His family endured a cold winter—the warmest place on their shack was on the kitchen table, so they kept the baby there—and in the spring their crops were destroyed by hail. As he was unsuccessful at farming, he supplemented his income by putting to work the stonemason's skills he had learned from his father: he laid foundations for the Canadian Pacific Railway, worked on the High Level Bridge in Edmonton, and dug Killam's town well. He later worked in real estate and as a farm implement dealer, at which he was successful enough to buy a new and larger homestead in 1912.

Stewart was also active in the community: he was the first chair of the Killam School District, attended the first meeting of Killam ratepayers January 19, 1907, and was involved in the incorporation of Killam in January 1908. In 1909 the Alberta Liberal Party, which had dominated provincial politics throughout Alberta's short history, came seeking a candidate to run in the new riding of Sedgewick. Stewart agreed to run and was elected by acclamation in the 1909 election.

Early political career

At the time of Stewart's acclamation, Premier Alexander Cameron Rutherford seemed unassailable: he controlled a majority of 36 of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta's 41 seats (including Stewart's), and his Liberals had just won nearly sixty percent of the vote in their re-election bid. Months later, however, Rutherford and his government were embroiled in the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway scandal, and the Liberal Party was split. Initially Stewart remained loyal to Rutherford, and went so far as to allege in the legislature that insurgent Liberal John R. Boyle had offered two MLAs who were also hotel keepers immunity from prosecution for liquor violations if they would support a new government in which Boyle was Attorney-General. As additional details of the scandal emerged, however, Stewart himself became an insurgent. He was pleased when Arthur Sifton replaced Rutherford as Premier.

In May 1912 Sifton expanded his cabinet, and Stewart was made the province's first Minister of Municipal Affairs. As was required by the custom of the day when an MLA was appointed to cabinet, he resigned his seat to run in a by-election, in which he defeated Conservative William Watson handily. In cabinet, he became known as an advocate of public ownership of utilities, which placed him more in sympathy with the Conservative opposition that with Sifton. Despite this position, he backed Sifton's 1913 resolution to the Alberta and Great Waterways problem, which involved partnering with the private sector; this vote marked the first time that the Liberal caucus was united on the railways question since before the scandal broke in 1910.

In December 1913, Sifton moved Stewart from Municipal Affairs into the Public Works portfolio. In this capacity, Stewart played a major role in the incorporation of the Alberta Farmers' Co-operative Elevator Company, which was a farmer-run co-operative with a charter to own and operate grain elevators.

Premier

Shortly after the 1917 provincial election (in which Stewart and the Liberals were both soundly re-elected), Canada found itself embroiled in a conscription crisis. The federal Conservative government, led by Robert Borden, supported implementing conscription. The opposition Liberals, led by Wilfrid Laurier, nominally opposed conscription, but many English-speaking Liberals in fact supported it. The crisis was resolved when Borden formed a Union government composed of Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals. Sifton, falling into the latter group, was chosen as Alberta's representative in that government, and resigned as Premier in October 1917. Lieutenant-Governor Robert Brett, deferring to Sifton's choice of successor, asked Stewart to form a government. His only serious rival for the position of premier was Charles Wilson Cross, who was opposed to conscription and was therefore not a palatable choice for much of the Liberal establishment.

Party division

The Alberta and Great Waterways scandal had opened up a rift in the provincial Liberal Party, between those who remained loyal to Cross and Rutherford and those who did not, led by William Henry Cushing and Frank Oliver. Sifton had papered over, if not in fact healed, this rift, and it did not burst open again until the conscription crisis. This time, however, the fault lines were different: Cross and Oliver had put aside their long time enmity to join in opposing conscription, and Sifton, who had been selected Premier in part because he was not identified with either faction in the old feud, was Alberta's most prominent pro-conscription Liberal.

Stewart was a supporter of conscription and of the Union government, but did not take any active part in the acrimonious 1917 federal election, which was fought on the issue. Several of his ministers were no so circumspect: Attorney-General Cross, Education Minister Boyle, and Municipal Affairs Minister Wilfrid Gariépy campaigned for the Laurier Liberals, while Public Works Minister Archibald J. McLean and Treasurer Charles R. Mitchell stayed out of the fray while leaving no doubt of their support for Union. During the first legislative session after this election, Stewart came under attack from members of his own party: Alexander Grant MacKay criticized his failure to take advantage of the recent conference of premiers to press for the transfer of rights over Alberta's natural resources from the federal to the provincial government (Sifton had made this a priority during the pre-war years, but had large ceased his advocacy on the breakout of hostilities), and James Gray Turgeon attacked the government's policy of levying taxes for the support of soldiers' dependents on the grounds that he considered it a federal responsibility.

Stewart (behind the plow) at a sod-turning event in St. Albert, soon after becoming premier

Divisions within the provincial Liberals came to a head in August 1918, when Stewart fired Cross as Attorney-General. It later emerged that Cross had refused to fire two detectives in his department after Stewart had concluded that there work would be better done by the provincial police, and that Stewart had found Cross's work to be generally poor. He had asked for Cross's resignation, received no response, and rescinded the order in council appointing him. In an effort to secure Cross's departure from politics, Stewart offered him the position of Alberta's provincial agent in London; Cross refused it, and Stewart was criticized for using appointments for political advantage.

Prohibition and democratic reform

Alberta had implemented prohibition in 1916 as the result of a referendum supporting by the powerful United Farmers of Alberta lobby group. By the time Stewart took office, it was becoming apparent that the policy was not being universally complied with: Conservative MLA George Douglas Stanley alleged that judges were often hungover when they sat in judgment of those accused of violating liquor laws, and Cross's replacement as Attorney-General, John Boyle, admitted that in his estimation 65% of the province's male population broke the Prohibition Act. In 1921 the government realized profits of $800,000 on alcohol legally sold for "medicinal" purposes, and Boyle estimated bootleggers' profits at nine times that figure. Stewart blamed the problems on insufficient public support for the law, but even as he did so it was clear that there also wasn't enough support to repeal it.

Prohibition was not the only UFA-policy to have been passed by Sifton's government: indeed, the legislation that allowed for citizen-initiated referenda of the sort that had led to prohibition was itself the result of UFA advocacy. Once Stewart became Premier, he committed to the introduction of another UFA-favoured democratic reform—proportional representation. However, a committee struck to examine the possibility disintegrated in over what historian Carrol Jaques calls "battles within the group and a general dislike of the concept".

Public works

Railways had dominated the premierships of both of Charles Stewart's predecessors and, while they had lost some of their primacy as a political issue, they had not disappeared. Though Sifton had established a railway policy in 1913 that was satisfactory to all wings of the Liberal Party, the outbreak of the First World War the following year had all but put an end to railway construction across Canada. Once peace came, Albertans living near promised but as yet unbuilt lines began to clamour for their completion. The private companies with whom the government had partnered, however, were in no position to undertake the construction. The Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway was taken over by the Canadian Pacific Railway, with a clause in the agreement requiring the provincial government to spend $1 million to improve the route, and the Alberta and Great Waterways was taken over by the Alberta government directly (J. D. McArthur, the line's previous owner, retained an option to repurchase it, but it was never exercised).

Irrigation projects also occupied much of Stewart's attention as Premier. As with railways, the First World War had disrupted planned irrigation projects, and Albertan farmers, especially those from the arid south, were eager to see them resumed. Specifically popular was a project to irrigate 500,000 acres (200,000 ha) in Lethbridge County, but when bonds were issued to finance the project they did not sell. Stewart sought federal backing of the bonds, but Prime Minister Arthur Meighen declined. Stewart reluctantly agreed to offer a provincial guarantee, but to avoid negative reaction from northern Alberta he linked the enabling legislation to one allowing for drainage in northern areas.

Stewart and the United Farmers of Alberta

The United Farmers of Alberta had its beginnings as an organization formed to advocate for the interests of farmers; Stewart, a farmer, had joined it. The UFA had achieved several successes in dealing with the Sifton government, and Stewart also endeavored to cooperate with it. The irrigation project was strongly-supported by the UFA, as was Stewart's action on proportional representation. When Peace River MLA William Archibald Rae introduced legislation to allow Imperial Oil to build a pipeline in the province, UFA President Henry Wise Wood sent Stewart a telegram of protest, as he believed that pipelines should be common carriers; Stewart read it in the legislature, and Rae's bill was withdrawn. Even given these victories, the UFA was not satisfied with the government's record: in 1918, it found that the government only took action on three of the many resolutions the UFA had sent to it.

Stewart's official portrait, by V. A. Long

Some in the UFA had long favoured contesting elections directly as a political party instead of remaining on the sidelines as a pressure group, but Wood and other UFA leaders were implacably opposed to the idea. During the war, however, the political wing began to gain momentum, and at the 1919 UFA convention it was decided that UFA candidates would contest the next provincial election. In fact, it would do so somewhat sooner: in 1919 Charles W. Fisher, Liberal MLA for Cochrane died as a result of that year's influenza epidemic, and a by-election was necessitated to replace him. The UFA's Alex Moore defeated his only opponent, Liberal Edward V. Thomson, by 835 votes to 708.

Stewart felt betrayed: "It has been my fight ever since I became a minister to see that the farmers of the province were having a square deal," he remarked, "and I think I have done this with some success." Despite his general sympathy with the aims of the UFA, however, he could not support their transition into a political party. For one, he disagreed with the UFA's belief that politics should be conducted along class, rather than ideological, lines. Stewart believed that "the more strongly armed the classes become the harder will it be to get the things we really need in our government", and asserted that "I never did and never will have any desire to form a coalition with anybody except with men who think the same as I do."

Given the UFA's formal adoption of the goal of replacing Stewart's Liberal government with a Farmer government, it remained surprisingly friendly towards the Premier. While campaigning for Moore during the Cochrane by-election, Wood called Stewart "an honourable, upright citizen, doing the best he could under difficult circumstances" and boasted that "if I have got to tear down the character of an honourable man to build up something that I want, I am not going to build it up." When at last the general election came, in 1921, the UFA declined to run a candidate in Stewart's Sedgewick riding as a sign of respect to the Premier. After the UFA swept to victory, there was even speculation that Stewart, still a UFA member, would stay on as Premier of a new Farmer's government (as part of its opposition to "old style politics", the UFA had contested the election without designating a leader), but he announced otherwise.

Defeat and legacy

Main article: Alberta general election, 1921

Though he emphatically denied that there would be an election in the spring of 1921 (the last one had been held in June 1917, and four years was the normal life of a legislature in Canada), Stewart eventually called one for July 19. Though the Liberals' fortunes had been sagging in the post-war years, there remained no doubt that they could again defeat the Conservatives; their real challenge was evidently from the newly-politicized UFA. Bolstering this challenge by increasing farmers' discontent was a collapse of agricultural prices. The UFA had no leader, no fixed platform, and no inclination to attack Stewart or his government. What it did have was superior organization, and on election day this organization made itself felt in the form of thirty-nine UFA members elected to fourteen Liberals. Stewart announced that he would resign as Premier as soon as the UFA had selected somebody to replace him. Once it had selected Herbert Greenfield, Stewart made good on his pledge, and Greenfield replaced him August 13.

Stewart with his family, c. 1930

In Jaques' view, Stewart was defined by what he was not: "he was not involved in any of the railway scandals, current or past; he was not conspicuously involved in any of the personal battles that had consumed Alexander Rutherford, Frank Oliver, the brothers Arthur and Clifford Sifton, Charles Cross, or any of their followers; he was not a high-powered flamboyant Liberal partisan; he did not let himself get involved in federal Liberal Party machinations over issues such as the conscription crisis; nor did he seem to be high-handed or dictatorial—a criticism levelled at his predecessor, Arthur Sifton." She argues that he was a "decent family man" whose career was a product of the circumstances in which he found himself. Historian L. G. Thomas recognized Stewart's admirable qualities, but criticized him for lacking Sifton's "ruthless and forceful leadership" and claimed that "few provincial premiers have been more universally praised by their opponents and more unanimously deplored by their supporters." Even so, he acknowledged that the decisive factor in Stewart's downfall was not anything that he did, but the decision by the UFA to run candidates in 1921; in Thomas's view, Sifton would have been defeated in 1917 if he had had to contend with a politicized UFA.

Federal politics

Following the 1921 federal election, William Lyon Mackenzie King's Liberals came to power in Ottawa. They had not won any seats in Alberta, and Stewart was invited to join King's cabinet as Minister of the Interior and Mines (which included responsibility as Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs). He won a 1922 by-election in the Québec seat of Argenteuil before shifting to the more familiar territory of Edmonton West in the 1925 election; he was re-elected there in 1926 and 1930. In the 1935 election he ran in the new riding of Jasper—Edson, where he went down to defeat at the hands of Social Crediter Walter Frederick Kuhl.

The signing ceremony for the resource transfer agreement; Stewart is seated second from left.

As a cabinet minister, Stewart aggressively marketed Canada's coal both domestically and internationally, for which he was honoured by Alberta's coal producers at a banquet and later awarded the Randolph Bruce Gold Medal in Science by the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. He also took a great interest in water power, and advised the government on jurisdictional issues surrounding the Niagara, St. Mary, and Milk Rivers. In 1927 he served as Canada's representative at the [[League of Nations. Ironically, given the attacks he had sustained as Premier from Alexander Grant MacKay, he was also part of the federal delegation that finally negotiated the transfer of resource control from the federal to the Alberta provincial government in December 1929. Despite this, however, Stewart's relationship with Alberta's UFA government remained frosty: Lakeland College historian Franklin Foster, in his biography of John Edward Brownlee, alleges that this antipathy influenced Stewart's preference for private corporations over the Alberta government in granting hydroelectric power permits. He also feuded with then-Premier Brownlee over development in Alberta's national parks (Stewart favouring large-scale private development and Brownlee opposing it), causing King to record in his diary "Brownlee strikes me as...being superior to Mr. Stewart, who is handicapped in his dislike of [Brownlee]." When King sought to absorb Progressives into his Liberal Party to form a stronger coalition against the Conservatives, Stewart opposed cooperation with the UFA leaders who made up a large part of the Progressives' Albertan base.

Post-political life

Charles Stewart in 1940

After Stewart's defeat in 1935, he was appointed by George V to chair the Canadian section of the International Joint Commission in recognition of his expertise on international water boundary issues. In 1938 he was appointed chair of the Canadian section of the British Columbia-Yukon-Alaska Highway Commission. He died December 6, 1946, leaving an estate of $21,961.

Born in Ontario, he had moved west for economic opportunity, become an important political voice in an emerging province, and then gone to Ottawa to be that province's national voice. As MacKenzie King eulogized him, "in more respects than one, Mr. Stewart's career mirrored the development of Canada itself."

Electoral record

As party leader

1917 Alberta provincial election
Party		Party leader	# of candidates	Seats			Popular vote
				1913	1917	% Change	#	%	% Change	United Farmers		45		38		86,250	28.92%		Liberal	Charles Stewart	61	34	15	-67.6%	101,584	34.07%	-14.07%	Labour		10	1	4		33,987	3.17%	+7.87%	Independent		18	2	4	+100%	28,794	9.66%	+3.83%	Conservative		13	19	-	-100%	32,734	10.98%	-30.81%	Independent Labour		7		-		10,733	3.06%		Labour Socialist		2		-		2,628	0.88%		Independent Liberal		1		-		1,467	0.49%
Total			157	58	61	+5.2%	298,177	100%

As MLA

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1921 Alberta general election results (Sedgewick)			Turnout N.A.
Liberal	Charles Stewart	Acclaimed
1917 Alberta general election results (Sedgewick)			Turnout N.A.
Liberal	Charles Stewart	1,657	63.1%	Conservative	John R. Lavell	971	36.9%
1913 Alberta general election results (Sedgewick)			Turnout N.A.
Liberal	Charles Stewart	889	70.1%	Conservative	W. Watson	371	29.9%
1912 by-election results (Sedgewick)			Turnout N.A.
Liberal	Charles Stewart	2,022	67.7%	Conservative	W. Watson	963	32.3%
1909 Alberta general election results (Sedgewick)			Turnout N.A.
Liberal	Charles Stewart	Acclaimed

As MP

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1935 Canadian federal election results (Jasper—Edson)
Social Credit	Walter Frederick Kuhl	7,208	49.1%	Liberal	Charles Stewart	5,405	36.8%	CCF	George Elzy Bevington	2,067	14.1%
1930 Canadian federal election results (Edmonton West)
Liberal	Charles Stewart	9,223	50.7%	Conservative	Frederick C. Jamieson	8,960	49.3%
1926 by-election results (Edmonton West)
Liberal	Charles Stewart	Acclaimed
1926 Canadian federal election results (Edmonton West)
Liberal	Charles Stewart	7,223	55.6%	Conservative	Frederick C. Jamieson	5,772	44.4%
1925 Canadian federal election results (Edmonton West)
Liberal	Charles Stewart	6,394	48.8%	Conservative	James McCrie Douglas	4,706	35.9%	Labour	James East	2,007	15.3%
1922 by-election results (Argenteuil)
Liberal	Charles Stewart	Acclaimed

References

• Foster, Franklin L. (1981). John E. Brownlee: A Biography. Lloydminster, Alberta: Foster Learning Inc. ISBN 978-1552200049.
• Jaques, Carrol (2004). "Charles Stewart". In Bradford J. Rennie (ed.). Alberta Premiers of the Twentieth Century. Regina, Saskatchewan: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina. ISBN 0-88977-151-0.
• Mardon, Ernest; Mardon, Austin (1993). Alberta Election Results 1882–1992. Edmonton: Documentary Heritage Society of Alberta.
• Rennie, Bradford (2000). The Rise of Agrarian Democracy: The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta, 1909–1921. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, Incorporated. ISBN 0-8020-8374-9.
• Thomas, Lewis Gwynne (1959). The Liberal Party in Alberta. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.