Charles Stewart (August 26, 1868 – December 6, 1946) was a Canadian politician who served as the third premier of Alberta from 1917 until 1921. Born in Strabane, Ontario, in then Wentworth County (now part of Hamilton), Stewart was a farmer who moved 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 endeavoured to enforce prohibition of alcoholic beverages, 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 (UFA), with which Stewart enjoyed good relations; even so, the UFA was politicized during Stewart's premiership and ran candidates in the 1921 election. Unable to match the UFA's appeal to rural voters, Stewart's government was defeated at the polls and he was succeeded as premier by Herbert Greenfield.
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. Stewart also served as Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs between 1921-1930 and held the position of Minister of Immigration and Colonization for a short period in 1925 - 1926. He served in King's cabinet until 1930, when the King government was defeated, but remained a member of Parliament until he lost his seat in 1935. He died in December 1946 in Ottawa.
Early life Charles Stewart was born on August 26, 1868, in Strabane, Ontario, on 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 Canadian Prime Minister 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 had eight children. After marrying Sneath, he converted to her Church of England faith.
In 1892, Charles Sr. died, leaving his son in charge of the family farm. In 1905, on July 8, this farm was destroyed by a tornado, and Stewart decided to move west, settling near Killam, Alberta in 1906. His family endured a cold winter—the warmest place in 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 using 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, earning enough to buy a new and larger homestead in 1912.
Stewart was active in his local community: he was the first chair of the Killam School District, attended the first meeting of Killam ratepayers on 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 36 of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta's 41 seats (Stewart's being one), 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 members of the legislative assembly (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, and 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 easily defeated Conservative William John Blair. In cabinet, he became known as an advocate of public ownership of utilities, which placed him more in sympathy with the Conservative opposition than 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, accepting 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 opposed 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, with the latter group being 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 longtime 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 not so circumspect: Attorney-General Cross, Education Minister Boyle, and Municipal Affairs Minister Wilfrid Gariépy campaigned for the Laurier Liberals; 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 largely 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' dependants on the grounds that he considered it a federal responsibility.
Divisions within the provincial Liberals came to a head in August 1918, when Stewart dismissed Cross as Attorney-General. It later emerged that Cross had refused to fire two detectives in his department after Stewart had concluded that their 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, England; 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 supported by the powerful United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) 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 was not enough support to repeal it.
Prohibition was not the only UFA-endorsed policy to have been passed by Sifton's government: indeed, the legislation that allowed for citizen-initiated referendums 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 formed to examine the possibility disintegrated over what historian Carrol Jaques calls "battles within the group and a general dislike of the concept".
Public works