1921 Alberta general election

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox election The 1921 Alberta general election was held on July 18, 1921, to elect members to the 5th Alberta Legislative Assembly. The Liberal government is replaced by the United Farmers of Alberta. It was one of only five times that Alberta has changed governments.

The Liberal Party, which had governed the province since its creation in 1905, led by Charles Stewart at the time of the election, was defeated by a very-new United Farmers of Alberta political party. The UFA, an agricultural lobby organization formed in 1909, was contesting its first general election. It had previously elected one MLA in a by-election.

Under the Block Voting system used in Edmonton and Calgary, each city voter could vote for up to five candidates. Medicine Hat also used block voting. Voters there could vote for up to two candidates. All other districts remained one voter – one vote, with the winner decided by first-past-the-post voting.

No party ran a full slate of candidates province-wide. The UFA ran candidates in most of the rural constituencies, and one in Edmonton. The Liberal Party ran candidates in almost all the constituencies. The Conservatives ran a bare dozen candidates, mostly in the cities. Labour mostly avoided running against UFA candidates, by running candidates in the cities and in Rocky Mountain, where it counted on coal miners' votes.

The United Farmers took most of the rural seats, doing particularly well in the heavily Protestant south of the province. A majority of the votes in the constituencies where the UFA ran candidates went to the UFA.

Labour took four seats, two in Calgary. Alex Ross, Labour MLA, was named to the UFA government cabinet, in a sort of coalition government.

The Liberals took all the seats in Edmonton, due to the block-voting system in use. This multiple-vote system also skewed the vote count.

The campaign

Liberals and the AGT scandal

The Liberal Party, which had governed the province since 1905, were led into the election by its third Premier and leader, Charles Stewart.

The Alberta Government Telephones scandal broke before the election. Albertans learned that the Liberals had tried to garner support and votes by directing the government-owned Alberta Government Telephones company to buy telephone poles and have them crated and shipped in big stacks to remote communities. This was intended to give the impression that if the Liberal government was re-elected, AGT would install phone lines there, when the government had no such plan.

United Farmers

File:Herbert Greenfield - circa 1921-25.jpg

Herbert Greenfield's Premier portrait

The United Farmers of Alberta under the leadership of President Henry Wise Wood was contesting its first general election. The UFA's political wing, as a party, had come into being after the UFA had voted to no longer be content with being a lobby group. It merged with the Non-Partisan League of Alberta, which had formed before the 1917 general election and had two sitting members. Non-Partisan League activists were significant within the political machinery of the United Farmers.

The political strength of the merged party grew significantly after deciding to participate in elections directly. It won its first victory with the election of Alexander Moore in the Cochrane district in 1919 and achieved a coup when Conservative leader George Hoadley crossed the floor. The two Non-Partisan League MLAs, despite not changing their affiliation, caucused with the two new United Farmers MLAs.

Wise Wood knew midway through the election campaign that his party was going to form government. In a famous speech he gave in Medicine Hat on July 8, 1921, he was quoted as saying "Farmers may not be ready to take over government, but they are going to do it anyway". He also said in that speech that he would have preferred that only his 20 best candidates were elected, to form the opposition, but he said he expected there would be a lot more than that elected.<ref name="moar">Template:Cite news</ref>

The UFA's sitting MLAs - George Hoadley, Alexander Moore and James Weir, formerly of the NPL - were re-elected in 1921.

Split in the Labour forces

The campaign was contested by two provincial labour parties: a main party named the Dominion Labor and a separate group in Edmonton named the Independent Labor Party.

The Dominion Labor Party ran candidates in the primarily urban ridings of Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. Its President Holmes Jowatt declining to seek office himself, instead devoting his energies help other candidates.

At the beginning of the election Independent Labor Party offered to nominate Edmonton area candidates at a joint convention with the DLP, to prevent the splitting of the labour vote and use the co-operative good-will to eventually unite the parties. The Dominion Labor Party declined the offer, stating that to do so would divide its own ticket.

Among the ILP candidates was pioneer photographer Ernest Brown, soon after to lead meetings of the Communist Party, which had been formed in May 1921.<ref name="labourdivided">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Conservatives

The Conservative Party, which had been the primary opposition in the province since it was created in 1905, had suffered a split in the ranks under the leadership of George Hoadley. The caucus divided into two separate Conservative caucuses. Then Hoadley left the Conservative party to sit as an Independent and then won the UFA nomination in Okotoks. The party replaced Hoadley by selecting Albert Ewing, an Edmonton area Member of the Legislative Assembly, as party leader.

Conservative candidates spent the campaign criticizing the wasteful and extravagant spending of the Liberal government. They also reminded Alberta voters of the Alberta Government Telephones telephone pole scandal. The Conservatives campaigned for reforms to the provincial tax code, provincial resource rights and voter list reforms in the Election Act.<ref name="conplatform">Template:Cite news</ref>

Despite the split in the party the Conservative campaign attracted some high-profile support. Former Liberal Premier Alexander Rutherford a big supporter of Ewing, led the campaign for the five Conservative candidates contesting for Edmonton seats.<ref name="rutherford">Template:Cite news</ref>

The Conservative party was a long time recovering from the split in the party. Supporters of Hoadley and their rural base moved to the United Farmers. The change caused by amalgamating the districts in Calgary and Edmonton to a city-wide district in each city did not help Conservative candidates. Nor did the block voting system that was imposed. In Edmonton the Liberal block, although just a minority of the votes cast, dominated and all five seats were captured by Liberal candidates. The only Conservative to return was Lethbridge MLA John Stewart. Albert Ewing went down to defeat in Edmonton.

Socialist Party of Canada

The Socialist Party had been in decline in Alberta since Charles O'Brien lost his seat in the 1913 general election. Two Socialist candidates ran in this election, under the banner Labour Socialist, Frank Williams in Calgary and Marie Mellard in Edmonton. Marie Mellard joined the new Communist Party within the year.

Calgary, Edmonton and Medicine Hat voters cast multiple votes

Liberal candidates won a larger share of the votes cast than the UFA (about 34%, compared to 29% for the UFA). But the popular vote numbers exaggerate the actual number of Liberal party supporters.

Urban voters in Calgary and Edmonton were allowed to place five votes and Medicine Hat voters 2 votes, as the block-voting system was used in the cities and Edmonton and Calgary contained 5 seats each and Medicine Hat 2 seats. Voters in the other constituencies, most of which were contested by the UFA, only had one vote each under the first past the post electoral system. The United Farmers ran no candidate in Calgary and only a single candidate in Edmonton. Thus it did not benefit from the multiple city vote.

This over-representation of big-city voters was so significant that more than 120,000 more votes were counted than there were voters voting. This is significant as no single party received more than 102,000 votes. The Liberal Party received 28,000 votes in Edmonton and 20,000 votes in Calgary, almost half of their total across the province, under this system where each big-city Liberal voter could lodge five votes for the party. If you give the Liberal Party only one-fifth of their vote tally in Edmonton and Calgary, the Liberal Party total vote count decreases to well below the UFA total. Now it could be that each voter in Edmonton gave one of his/her votes to the Liberals (but not likely), but even so the Liberal candidates in Edmonton received 8,000 more votes in Edmonton than there were voters who voted. This 8,000 is more than half the difference between the Liberal's and the UFA's tallies province-wide.<ref>A Report on Alberta Elections, 1905-1982</ref>

As well, in Calgary 17,000 voters cast about 76,000 votes. As none of these went to UFA candidates (none ran in Calgary) this massive multiple voting going elsewhere gave the UFA a lower proportion overall.

It was also noted by defenders of the government that the UFA's percentage of total seats (62 percent) was identical to the percentage of votes it received in the constituencies in which it did run candidates.

Aftermath

The result of the election radically and forever altered the political landscape of the province. The United Farmers won a majority government, mostly with rural MLAs predominantly from the south of the province, while the Liberals, formerly in power, were moved to the opposition side of the Chamber with MLAs in the cities of Calgary and Edmonton and some northern strongholds. The Liberals have never won power again; the closest they have come since then was winning 39 seats and opposition status in 1993.

As well from 1921 to 1971, the Alberta provincial government was not the same as either of the two largest parties in the House of Commons. From 1917 to 1979 the Alberta provincial government and the House of Commons were not controlled by parties of the same name. (This made for interesting meetings between premiers and the Prime Minister, later conducted under the name First Ministers' Conference.)

The 38 MLAs who attended the first United Farmers caucus meeting voted unanimously for UFA President Henry Wise Wood to lead the government as premier. Wood declined becoming premier saying he was more interested in operating the machinery of the United Farmers movement rather than crafting government policy. He had actually opposed the UFA becoming a political party for fear that political in-fighting would break up the movement. He said he feared that the UFA would repeat what had happened elsewhere when farmers movements engaged in electoral politics, rose to power and tore themselves apart. He said he wanted to remain focused on the farmers movement as a non-partisan movement and as an economic group instead of as a political party.<ref name="notpremier">Template:Cite news</ref>

The UFA vice-president, Percival Baker, had won his riding with a majority of votes, but had been badly injured in a tree-falling accident during the campaign. He died the day after the election. It was speculated he would have had at least a place in the cabinet if he had lived.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

The United Farmers caucus finally chose Herbert Greenfield, a UFA executive member who had not run in the election, to become premier.

Results

Template:Alberta provincial election, 1921 Template:Bar box Template:Bar box

Members elected

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10 by-elections were held in the months after the election. Some were held to sit several UFA MLAs and one Labour MLA in the new cabinet. Herbert Greenfield after being chosen to serve as premier ran for a seat in a by-election. John Brownlee after being chosen to serve as a cabinet minister ran for a seat in a by-election. Another was held after a Liberal MLA (Andrew Shandro) was thrown down for taking a seat under suspicious circumstances. All were successful for the UFA (and one Labour).

Calgary

5th Alberta Legislative Assembly
	District	Member	Party Template:Canadian party colour	Calgary	Alex Ross	Dominion Labor Template:Canadian party colour	Robert Edwards	Independent Template:Canadian party colour	Fred White	Dominion Labor Template:Canadian party colour	Robert Marshall	Liberal Template:Canadian party colour	Robert Pearson	Independent

Edmonton

5th Alberta Legislative Assembly
	District	Member	Party Template:Canadian party colour	Edmonton	Andrew McLennan	Liberal Template:Canadian party colour	John C. Bowen	Liberal Template:Canadian party colour	Nellie McClung	Liberal Template:Canadian party colour	John Boyle	Liberal Template:Canadian party colour	Jeremiah Heffernan	Liberal

Notes

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References

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External links

Elections Alberta

Template:AlbertaElections

1921 Alberta general election

Contents

The campaign

Liberals and the AGT scandal

United Farmers

Split in the Labour forces

Conservatives

Socialist Party of Canada

Calgary, Edmonton and Medicine Hat voters cast multiple votes

Aftermath

Results

Members elected

Calgary

Edmonton

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

Navigation menu

1921 Alberta general election

The campaign

Liberals and the AGT scandal

United Farmers

Split in the Labour forces

Conservatives

Socialist Party of Canada

Calgary, Edmonton and Medicine Hat voters cast multiple votes

Aftermath

Results

Members elected

Calgary

Edmonton

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

Navigation menu

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