Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Good news: I’m blogging after four whole days without blogging¹.  Bad news: I’m back to writing boring blog postings about ancient BC premiers.

And, with that, here’s all the information you never wanted to know about the 21st Premier of the Province of British Columbia!

	Name	Thomas Dufferin Pattullo
	Born:	January 19, 1873 in Woodstock, Ontario
	Died:	March 30, 1956 in Victoria, BC
	Party:	Liberal
	Held Office:	November 15, 1933 – December 9, 1941

• the Pattullo Bridge was named after T.D. Pattullo.  This is the only reason I’ve ever heard of this guy before now and the reason why people swear in his name every day during rush hour
• early jobs included: journalist, editor, secretary to the Commissioner of the Yukon (a position he got due to his father’s connections), acting assistant gold commissioner, real estate/insurance business, member of the Dawson City council
• 1908: moved to Prince Rupert, BC; became mayor
• 1916: won the seat for Prince Rupert, a new riding, in the provincial legislature; appointed Minister of Lands
• 1928: became leader of Liberal Party, who had lost the government to the Conservatives; thus, he was now the Leader of the Opposition
• 1933: became premier when the Liberals took the government back. This was pretty easy though, since the Conservative party didn’t run any candidates in this election as their party was all messed up
• as premier during the Great Depression, he :attempted to extend government services and relief to the unemployed”²; “frustration with the limitations of provincial power led to a battle with Ottawa that resulted in a reappraisal of Canadian federalism”³.
• 1937: won the election on a platform of “socialized capitalism”
• 1941: won only a minority government as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF; the forerunner to the New Democratic Party, NDP) was on the rise. Refusing to form a coalition with the Conservatives, his party ousted him as the leader and formed the coalition anyway
• 1945: lost his seat; retired from politics
• 1956: died

In conclusion, I have no idea why the Patullo Bridge was named after this guy.

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. Yay photos from prior to 1949!

Footnotes and References:

1. You may pick from one of my many possible excuses, including: work is busy, teaching is busy, I spend 7.5 hours per week driving to and from work, I’m lazy [↩]
2. Wikipedia, the reference of champions [↩]
3. Canadian Encyclopedia [↩]

Tags: BC, BC premiers, British Columbia, politics

The 20th Premier of the Province of British Columbia was Simon Fraser Tolmie. I have no idea if he was related to the explorer Simon Fraser after whom the University, the river and a billion other things in BC were named. He doesn’t appear to have been a direct descendant, as Simon Fraser the Explorer immigrated to Canada from Scotland, settling in Quebec, in the 1780s, while Simon Fraser Tolmie’s father was born in Scotland and immigrated to Canada, arriving at Fort Vancouver, in 1833.  I’m sure there’s a very good chance they are related, but (a) there seemed to have been tonnes of people named “Simon Fraser,” including the lion’s share of the line of “Lord Lovats.” At this point in my research¹ my head hurts, so we’ll just leave this issue as “currently unresolved)).  And now, onto the useless fact-listing!

	Name	Simon Fraser Tolmie
	Born:	January 25, 1867 in Victoria, BC
	Died:	October 13, 1937 in Victoria, BC
	Party:	Conservative
	Held Office:	August 21, 1928 – November 15, 1933

• he had a “pioneer lineage” on both sides of his family:
  • his father: “Dr. William Fraser Tolmie, a prominent figure in the Hudson’s Bay Company and a member of both the colonial assembly of Colony of Vancouver Island and the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia”²
  • his mother: Jane Work, “daughter of John Work, a prominent Victoria resident, Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor, and member of the former colony’s assembly”³
• 1891: graduated from vet school at the Ontario Veterinary College⁴
• 1917: entered federal politics as an MP for Victoria City in the Unionist Party; served in this role until 1928, although under the Conservative banner after his first Parliament
• 1919-1921 and 1926: federal Minister of Agriculture
• 1926: elected leader of BC Conservative Party (although stayed as a federal MP until the next provincial election in 1928)
• 1928: elected as a provincial MLA in Saanich and, as his party won the most seats (32 of 48), he became the Premier and Minister of Railways
• his party had a “commitment to applying “business principles to the business of government”"⁵, which really didn’t work so well when the Great Depression hit
• the whole Conservative Party fell into chaos after this, with a Royal Commission that Tolmie established (at the request of the business community) suggesting drastic cuts to social programs to fix the dire finances of the province – and people freaking out over this suggestion. The party was in such disarray, in fact, that they didn’t run *any* candidate in the 1933 election
• 1933: some former Tories ran as independents or “independent Conservatives” or Unionists (if they supported Tolmie) or “Non-Partisans” (if they supported former Premier Bowser); not surprisingly, with all the vote splitting, the Liberals won a majority government and the NDP-forerunner party, the Coopeartive Commonwealth Federation, became the Official Opposition.  Tolmie lost his seat.
• holds the dubious distinction of being the last Premier of BC for the Conservative Party⁶
• 1936: won a federal by-election in his old riding of Victoria
• 1937: died

In summary, he killed the BC Conservative Party⁷.

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. w00t!

Reference:
Wikipedia, the reference of champions

1. i.e., goofing around on Wikipedia [↩]
2. Wikipedia [↩]
3. Wikipedia [↩]
4. which is now at the U of Guelph (go Guelph!), but at the time was at U of T [↩]
5. Wikipedia [↩]
6. there have certainly been other conservative premiers, including the current one, but they’ve used other names, like SoCreds and the current BC so-called “Liberal” party, but none using the Conservative Party name [↩]
7. in name anyway. Their pro-business agenda lives on in Gordon Campbell and his ilk [↩]

Tags: BC, BC history, BC premiers, Canada, history, politics, Simon Fraser Tolmie

Today’s entry in my BC Premier Series is going to be short, as apparently John Duncan MacLean was the least memorable person in history. There’s a teeny tiny entry on him in Wikipedia and there isn’t even an entry on him in the Canadian Biography Online and you know as well as I do that I’m way too lazy to go beyond those two sites to find out more¹.

A visual approximation of John Duncan MacLean2	Name	John Duncan MacLean
	Born:	December 8, 1873 in Culloden, Prince Edward Island
	Died:	March 28, 1948 in Ottawa, Ontario
	Party:	Liberal
	Held Office:	August 17, 1927 to August 21, 1928

• practised medicine (presumably he went to medical school for this, but I have no idea when or where. According to Wikipedia, John Duncan MacLean and his medical practice sprung fully formed from the sea in 1916. The Mason’s website indicates he traveled west in 1892 and was a school principal before he became a doctor)
• 1916: was elected to provincial legislature
• Minister of Education and Provincial Secretary under both Brewster & Oliver
• 1924: Minister of Finance under Oliver
• 1927: was designated Premier when Oliver died. The Liberal Party wasn’t doing so hot then and MacLean didn’t, or couldn’t, do anything to fix the situation.
• 1928: defeated in the election; the Conservatives took over as government
• 1928: ran in a federal by-election as a Liberal candidate; lost by fewer than 100 votes
• became the Chairman of the Canadian Farm Loan Board.
• 1946: received the title “Commander of the British Empire (C.B.E.)
• 1948: died in Ottawa

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. GNU Free Documentation License.

References:
Wikipedia, the reference of champions
Grand Lodge of BC and Yukon

1. OK, I did go to the Mason’s website. But beyond that – I’m just too lazy [↩]
2. I couldn’t find any freely avaiable pics [↩]

Tags: BC, BC premiers, British Columbia, history, politics

	Name	John Oliver
	Born:	July 31, 1856 in Hartington, England
	Died:	August 17, 1927 in Victoria, BC
	Party:	Liberal
	Held Office:	March 6, 1918 to August 17, 1927

• from a farming family that immigrated to Maryborough Township, Ontario, Canada in 1870
• his mother died from rheumatic fever in 1875
• moved west at age 20 and found work with the Canadian Pacific Railway, where he worked for a summer to save enough money to buy a farm in Surrey, BC
• while building his farm, he also became involved in community affairs (e.g., establishing a rural school, becoming municipal clerk and tax collector), then sold his land and bought a farm in Delta, where he also became involved in community affairs (e.g., as a school trustee and later as a reeve on municipal council)
• ran for the seat in Westminster-Delta in the June 1900 provincial election – was one of only 6 people from the Joseph Martin faction to be elected
• the snooty politicians liked to make fun of his “unsophisticated clothes, heavy boots, and often crude use of the English language”¹ – but he was determined to show them that a regular person could be part of the political process, so he studied parliamentary procedures
• when the party system came to provincial politics, Oliver ran as a Liberal – he was “an anti-establishment figure, yet his own brand of liberalism was shaped by his rural conservative roots”²
• 3 Oct 1903 – re-elected in Delta, served in the Liberal opposition
• 2 Feb 1907 – re-elected again in Delta, again as part of the Liberal opposition
• he reluctantly became the Liberal leader in autumn 1909 when the then-leader, James Alexander MacDonald³ was appointed to the bench, leaving Oliver with not much time to prepare for the upcoming election against a popular Conservative party
• 25 Nov 1909 – lost his seat in Delta, as well as the seat in Victoria for which he also ran
• he went back to the farm, but couldn’t stay out of politics for long – he was soon elected to school board, then served as a reeve again, followed by running in – and losing – in the 1911 federal election and the 1912 provincial election
• 14 Sept. 1916 – the Conservative party, suffering from a worldview recession at the start of WWII as well as charges of corruption,  lost the government to the Liberal party, with Oliver winning the seat in Dewdney and being appointed to cabinet in two positions: agriculture and railways⁴
• wrote the “Land Settlement [and Development] Act,” which provided soldiers returning from war the opportunity to own their own rural farms, when he was inspired in the middle of the night – it was dubbed the “nightshirt act” because he wrote it in his nightshirt
• 6 March 1918 – was elected Liberal Party leader and became Premier after Premier Brewster died on 1 March 1918
• his government introduced “social legislation that limited work to an eight-hour day in certain industries, improved working conditions, [...] minimum wage for women, mothers’ pensions [...], maintenance for deserted wives, and improve[ments in] both health and educational services [...] All of these initiatives were based on the belief that direct government intervention was the best way to deal with the problems that beset the province.”⁵
• some turmoil arose during this time, including farmers forming their own party (the aptly named “United Farmers of BC”), workers striking in sympathy with the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and complaints that he should have immediately called an election upon becoming Premier to let the voters decide if they really wanted him as their leader.  He eventually called for an election on Dec 1, 1920 and this would be the first election in which women could vote.  “Women would be casting ballots for the first time in British Columbia and Oliver had been advised that an earlier date in the autumn would be inconvenient for them because it coincided with church fairs and the making of preserves.”⁶.  The Conservatives came out for a big fight and Oliver and his Liberals barely held onto power.  Oliver would find opposition from both the young people within his own party and the business-y types who supported the Conservatives
• 20 Oct 1920:  referendum on Prohibition was defeated, with a preference for the government-controlled sale of alcohol; the government stores that were allowed to sell booze became known as “John Oliver’s drug stores”
• 20 June 1924 – leaders of all the provincial parties, including Oliver, lost their seats in the provincial election; the Liberals held on to the government with a very slim minority government and Oliver won a seat Nelson in a by-election on Aug 23 , 1924; the economy got better, however, and Oliver and his Liberals held on for a while
• passed Old-Age Pension, which he considered one of the most important things he did, on March 7, 1927
• July 1927: tearfully resigned, having found out that he had incurable cancer; his colleagues refused to accept his resignation, and so he stayed on as Premier until his death, with “J. D. MacLean, his long-time lieutenant, [...] named premier designate”⁷
• Stuff that’s named after him:
  • John Oliver Secondary School (Vancouver)
  • Mount John Oliver⁸ in the Cariboo Mountains
  • Oliver, BC (a town in the Okanagan)

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. w00t!

References:
Wikipedia, the reference of champions
Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online

1. source: Dictionary of Canadian Biography online [↩]
2. source: Dictionary of Canadian Biography online [↩]
3. not to be confused with John Alexander MacDonald [↩]
4. agricultural, presumably, due to his farming background and railways because he’d been a big opponent of the Conservative government’s railway policy [↩]
5. source: Dictionary of Canadian Biography online [↩]
6. source: Dictionary of Canadian Biography online [↩]
7. source: Dictionary of Canadian Biography online [↩]
8. which kind of sounds like an instruction: Hey, you, mount John Oliver already [↩]

Tags: BC, BC premiers, British Columbia, history, John Oliver, politics

There is very, very little information available online about the 16th Premier of the Province of British Columbia – William John Bowser!  And I’m too lazy to go to the library and read actual books, so today’s entry is a short one!

	Name	William John Bowser
	Born:	December 3, 1867 in Rexton, New Brunswick
	Died:	October 25, 1933 in Vancouver, BC
	Party:	Conservative
	Held Office:	December 15, 1915 to November 23, 1916

• 1890: called to the bar after studying law at Dalhousie
• 1901: moved to Vancouver to practice law
• 1903: first elected to the provincial legislature as a Conservative
• 1904-1905: Grand Master of the provincial Masons
• 1907-1915: served as Attorney General in the McBride administration
• 1916: lost the election to Harlan Carey Brewster’s Liberal party.  Bowser inherited a very unpopular Conservative party from McBride, suffering from accusations of corruption and their ignored the public’s demands for women’s suffrage and prohibition didn’t help either.
• 1916-1924: served as the leader of the opposition
• 1924: lost his seat in the legislature
• 1933: his attempt to return to the provincial legislature leading a non-partisan group was hampered by his dying during the election campaign

In summary, no one appears to care much about this guy.  The end.

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. w00t!

References:

• Wikipedia, the reference of that only had a stub entry about Bowser.  So, I added some stuff – specifically, I added the box on the right hand side that has a summary of birth date, death date, etc. Because I’m awesome like that.  Although I had trouble with adding the photo, so if anyone out there is a Wikipedia editing superstar, let me know if you can figure out how to fix it!
• Canadian Encyclopedia
• Masons – Grand Lodge of BC & Yukon

Note: there were a few other websites that showed up in my Google search for W.J.B., but all of them were just plagairized from Wikipedia.

Tags: BC, BC premiers, British Columbia, Canada, history, William John Bowser

Sir Richard McBride, the 15th Premier of the Province of British Columbia.

	Name	Sir Richard McBride, KCMG
	Born:	December 15, 1870 in New Westminster, BC
	Died:	August 6, 1917) in London, UK
	Party:	BC Conservative
	Held Office:	June 1, 1903 – December 15, 1915

• considered the founder of the (now pretty much defunct¹) BC Conservative Party
• September 1887: went to Dalhousie Law School. While there, he did really well in the mock Parliament and, in a bit of foreshadowing that my grade 9 English teacher would have loved, he was the mock Parliament Premier in his third year
• 1896: ran in the federal election for the oddly named Liberal-Conservative party (no idea who their opponents were), but lost
• 1898: elected to the provincial legislature in the Westminster-Dewdney riding; given the nickname “Dewdney Dick”
• 1900: appointed to Dunsmuir’s cabinet as the Minister of Mines, having done a bunch of legal work sorting out mining claims in the mining boom in the northwest part of the province during recess between legislative sittings;
• fall 1900: elected president of the BC consverative organization (not Party, ‘cuz they didn’t quite have provincial parties yet)
• September 1901: he resigned from Dunsmuir’s cabinet when Dunsmuir appointed a Joseph Martin ally to his cabinet, as Dunsmuir had said he was going to work against Martin
• Feb 1902: chosen to be the leader of the Opposition
• Sept 1902: not re-elected as the president of the provincial Conservative organization, but since the guy who was elected didn’t have a seat in Legislature, he remained the leader of the Opposition.  This led to…
• June 1, 1903: appointed Premier by the Lieutanent Governor. He felt that the no-party system was lame, so he declared his administration to be a Conservative Party one (which seems slightly odd, given that he was specifically not elected as the leader of the Conservatives, but so it was) and that he’d fight the fall election as the Conservative Party
• October 3, 1903: won the first partied² Government with a two seat majority (22 of 42 seats).  This party tried “to stablize the economy by cutting spending and raising new taxes”⁵ and implemented “progressive reforms of the province’s labour law”⁵- you know how Conservatives love labour and higher taxes³.  Also, like many politicians of the time I’m discovering as I write this series of blog postings, he was a big fat racist who called for “a halt to Asian immigration”⁶
  

  “He shared the widespread belief in “a white B.C.,” called for “Mongolian exclusion,” and sought to shut out the “Asiatic hordes.” His particular concern was “cheap” Japanese labour competing in the fisheries and in “everything the white man has been used to call his own.” He endorsed anti-Asian measures in order to bring the “Asian problem” to the attention of eastern Canadians, and he employed the federal government’s repeated disallowance of the province’s legislation on the matter, notably the so-called Natal Acts which imposed a language test on prospective immigrants, in his “Fight Ottawa” crusade. After the Conservatives formed the federal government in 1911, he urged Borden to honour a promise to legislate against immigration from Asia. By then McBride also perceived a Japanese military threat.”⁶

  On the other major racial issue that seems to come up in this period of BC history:

  “McBride’s approach to Indian peoples, whom he had known from his boyhood and legal practice and with whom he could converse in Chinook Jargon, was paternalistic. As a young lawyer he got a charge of murder reduced to manslaughter because his drunken client “was an Indian.” He believed the Indians had “been treated fairly and equitably,” and thought they “should play a very important part in the material advancement and welfare of the community.””⁶

• 1907: won another election, this time with 26 of the 42 seats
• 1908: decided that the province should have its own provincial university (UBC, which opened in 1915), because Conservatives love higher education³, and promised more railway lines
• 1909 & 1912: kicked serious ass in these elections, which 38 of 42 seats and 40 of 42 seats, respectively.
• was BFFs with Robert Borden’s federal Tories
• during WWI: in response to rumours of German ships in the North Pacific, he bought two submarines from Seattle and then sold them to the federal government at the same price for which he bought them. He was accused of making some coin on the transaction, but a Royal Commission “determined that the whole transaction was “of blameless character””⁶
• in addition to his racism, he was also sexist and “never believed”⁶ in women’s suffrage
• 1915: called an election for April 10, then three days later postponed it indefinitely under the dubious explanation of “unexpected difficulty in revising the voters’ lists and getting ballot boxes to remote areas”"⁶
• 1915: UBC opened
• as seems to be the downfall of many early BC politicians, the railway did McBride in. An economic downturn along with “mounting railway debts”⁵ caused the people to like his government a lot less, so he resigned as Premier on December 15, 1915 and became BC’s rep in London, UK.
• 1917: having suffered from nephritis and diabetes for several years, McBride went blind (presumably from the diabetes, not the nephritis)
• 1917: died in London, less than three months after resigning. His body was returned to Victoria, BC for burial.
• things that are named after him: the town of McBride, BC; the McBride River in Northern BC; Sir Richard McBride Elementary School in Vancouver⁴.

In summary, a racist and a sexist (though both of those seemed to be quite common at the time), McBride did very well in politics when times were good, but didn’t seem to have the skills to pay the bills when times went bad.  Also, I suppose I have him to thank for the creation of one of my alma maters, UBC.

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. w00t!

Footnotes:
¹It’s not totally defunct, as you do see candidate running on the Conservative banner in elections, but I don’t I’ve seen a Conservative party candidate win an election in the entire time I’ve lived in BC. And really the conservatives MLAs are all hiding over in the BC so-called-Liberal Party.
²Is *too* a word.
³I wish there were an “I’m joking” font…
⁴This is where I’ve heard of him. I used to run a science outreach program that put volunteers into elementary schools to teach science to the kids, so I know the names of most of the schools in Vancouver.

References:
⁵Wikipedia, the reference of that also likes to party party.
⁶Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online

Tags: BC, BC history, BC premiers, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian, Canadian history, history, politics, Premier, Sir Richard McBride

The 14th Premier of the Province of British Columbia, Mr. Conflict-of-Interest McElection-Rules-Violations.

	Name	Edward Gawler Prior
	Born:	Dallowgill, England on May 21, 1853
	Died:	December 12, 1920 in Victoria, BC
	Party:	none
	Held Office:	November 21, 1902 to June 1, 1903

• came to BC after practising as a mining engineer until 1873
• 1886: won a seat in the BC provincial legislature
• 1888-1896: won a seat in the Canadian House of Commons (MP for Victoria)
• December 1895 – July 1896 and 1897: Controller of Inland Revenue (federal)
• 1901: lost his federal seat for “violations of election rules”³
• 1901: apparently his election rule violating at the federal level didn’t prevent his from being elected at the provincial level and he rejoined provincial legislature
• 1902: became the Premier – the last one to lead a government in the non-party system
• 1903: kicked out of the Premiership by the Lieutenant Governor because he gave his own hardware company a really important contract (hello conflict of interest¹)
• 1904: lost his seat in the provincial election; also lost an attempt to return to the Canadian House of Commons – apparently the voters finally realized that this guy was a wee bit on the immoral side
• however, it appears that people have a short memory, as despite the fact that he was fired from being the Premier by the Lieutenant Governor, in 1919 he was appointed as… the Lieutenant Governor.  Then he died.
• he was a Mason
• he holds the dubious distinctions of being the last Premier to be dismissed by a Lieutenant Governor and the only BC Lieutenant Governor to die in office

In summary, despite being kicked out of positions at both the provincial and federal levels for his shady behaviour, he somehow became the Lieutant Governor. Awesome.

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. w00t!

Footnotes:
¹Unless you read the Masons’ website, in which he was dismissed for “non-confidence.”

References:
²Library of Parliament
³Wikipedia, the reference of that has very little to say about Prior
⁴Lieutant Governor of BC website
⁵viHistory (University of Victoria)

Tags: BC, BC premiers, British Columbia, Edward Gawler Prior, Edward Prior, history, politics, Premier

Look at me – posting in my BC Premier series two weeks in a row! Go me!

This week’s installments gives us James Dunsmuir, the 13th person to be Premier of BC and (possibly) the guy that Dunsmuir Street is named after.

	Name	James Dunsmuir
	Born:	July 8, 1851 in Fort Vancouver
	Died:	June 6, 1920 in Cowichan Bay, BC
	Party:	none
	Held Office:	June 15, 1900 and Nov 21, 1902

• he and his wife Laura Miller Surles had twelve frickin’ children¹. Twelve!  The youngest was born when he was 53.  53!
• born to Scottish immigrants, Dusmuir grew up in a life of steadily increasing wealth, with his dad going from a being a miner to a mine supervisor to a mine owner²
• at 16 Dusmuir started an apprenticeship as a machinist, but after his daddy discovered all that coal, he went to “Dundas Wesleyan Boys’ Institute in Dundas, Ont., for some higher learning and polish [emphasis mine]“⁴ and then went to Virginia to study mining engineering
• he managed his dad’s mine in Wellington from 1876 to 1881 and although the mine did exceptionally well under his leadership, he lived very much in the shadow of his father; he became more responsible for the company after he transferred to the corporate office when his dad became a politician
• his father’s sudden death in 1889 lead to family turmoil – although the company was being run by James and his brother Alexander, the father left his shares & voting power to his wife (James’ mom) Elizabeth.  After much legal wrangling, James managed to gain control over the entire vast company
• in the early 1890s, Dunsmuir moved to Victoria and built a residence with “every modern convenience,” such as electricity
• his political life:
  • elected as an MLA in Comox in 1898
  • became premier in 1900 – but he was really just keeping the seat warm as BC was trying to get its act together to introduce a party system
  • became lieutenant governor in 1906
• it seems he was a bit conflicted on the issue of Asian immigration – he suggested that the federal government should increase the head tax on Chinese immigrants and promised to get rid of his Chinese workers  from his operations in Nanaimo when he was running for office,  but he also fought against anti-Asian legislation – not because he cared about Asian people, but because he used Asians as cheap labour in his mines and didn’t want there to be laws to prevent that.  Further, he docked the pay of Chinese workers to pay for the law suits to fight against government restrictions on the hiring of Asian workers.
• he, like his father and many mine owners of the time, was fiercely anti-union and would fire and blacklist union organizers and hire scab workers during strikes
• he also supported some laws that didn’t benefit him directly (and that even went directly against his own financial interests), such as redistribution that gave more political power to the mainland over the island (and he lived on the island), including the elimination of his own seat; a number of taxes on mines, as well as income tax.  Apparently he had something to do with the Master and Servant Act, which isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds.
• he became a director of the Canadian Pacific Railway in a deal where he sold off some of his company and later sold his mining empire to the Canadian Northern Railway
• he retired to a life of lesiure – hunting, fishing, golf, hanging around his giant mansion in Esquimalt
• his end was rather anticlimactic:

“With his eldest son devoting his life to globe-trotting in an alcoholic stupor, a second son a victim of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and his daughters, who generally had married into British-based, upper class, military families, leading frivolous lives, there was to be no worthy third generation of Canadian Dunsmuirs. The lifestyle and Old World pretensions so carefully cultivated by the family disintegrated before his eyes. After his death at his fishing lodge in 1920, the children squandered the fortune in one generation.”⁴

• interesting fact: along with two of his employees, he “created British Columbia’s first telephone from information supplied by the Scientific American;”⁴ he used it to connect the mine in Wellington with the corporate office in Departure Bay

Image credits: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. w00t!

Footnotes:
¹9 girls, 3 boys
²after he discovered a bunch o’coal

References:
³Wikipedia, the reference of that had very little to say about Premier Dunsmuir.
⁴Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
⁵Miss 604’s blog posting on the Dunsmuir family.

Tags: BC, BC premiers, British Columbia, Canada, history, politics

Hey, remember when I used to write postings every Sunday about BC Premiers? And then I got all busy and such and said I was proroguing my series until the classes I was teaching were done?  And then my classes ended by I’ve just been lazy since then?  Yeah, while I’m totally making a comeback, and it’s only a month and bit late! w00t w00t!  I know you are all very excited that the BC Premiers Series is back!  So here we go with BC Premier #12: Fightin’ Joe Martin.

	Name	Joseph Martin
	Born:	September 24, 1852 in Milton, Ontario
	Died:	March 2, 1923 in Vancouver, BC
	Party:	none (but he was later a Liberal, as the province of BC instituted the party system just after he stopped being the Premer, and then later ran as part of the Asian Exclusion League, because he is a racist)
	Held Office:	February 29, 1900 – June 15, 1900

• OH MY GOD, this guy was born in the town where I grew up!! I’m pretty this means I will be the Premier of BC.
• There’s a street in Milton called Martin St., named after the town founder, Jasper Martin¹. I wonder if he’s related?
• His wife, Elizabeth Jane Reilly Eaton, was the widow of George Washington Eaton – I wonder if he was from the famous Eaton family?
• Schools attended:
  • public school in Milton until 1865
  • Michigan State Normal School²,
  • Toronto Normal School², from which he got expelled for “unruly behaviour”
  • University of Toronto (from which he did not graduate)
• Somehow after being expelled from the TNS, which is a teachers college, he was hired as a teacher in Ottawa, where he “embraced liberalism and developed strong anti-French sentiments”⁴ (you’ll see that this combo of liberalism + racism is a bit of theme with Fightin’ Joe)
• Then somehow after not getting a degree at U of T, he went on to practice law, being called to the bar in Manitoba in 1882.
• His random assortment of jobs included telegraph operator, teacher, principal, lawyer, politician, newspaper founder.
• Political Life:
  • Member of Parliament (provincial) in Manitoba:
    • he ran as a “Provincial Rights Party” candidate in Portage la Prairie in 1883; he won at first, but the results were overtuned
    • won the 1883 by-election
    • in 1888 was appointed Attorney General and Commissioner of Railways
    • in 1889 he employed his French-hating ways by announcing that his government would  “reform the dual public school system [I believe this means that he wanted to eliminate French schools in Manitoba] and end government printing in French”⁴
  • Member of Parliament (federal):
    • lost the 1891 election as an Liberal candidate for Selkirk
    • won a by-election for a seat in Winnipeg in 1893.
    • then he lost the 1896 election when he tried running in Selkirk again.
    • then he lost the 1908 election in which he ran as a candidate for the Asian Exclusion League (there’s that racism again) the Vancouver City riding.
  • Member of the Legislative Assembly (BC):
    • in 1898 he won election in Vancouver City and became Attorney General and Acting Minister of Education under Premier Semlin
    • became the Premier in 1900 (officially taking over on Leap Year Day that year)
    • in the 1900 election he ran in two ridings (who knew that was possible?), losing in Victoria but winning in Vancouver; he also lost the Premiership in this election
    • served as the Opposition leader until 1903, when he resigned (fearing that he was going to be ousted anyway) and then lost his seat that year
  • Member of Parliament (federal, United Kingdom):
    • within days of moving to Britian (in either 1909 or 1910 – my sources aren’t very clear on this), he won the Liberal nomination in the Warwickshire, Stratford-on-Avon Division, calling for “abolition of the House of Lords, votes for women, a land tax, and free trade”⁴ ; he lost that election.
    • he won a seat in St Pancras East in the UK Parliament in 1910 and stayed there until 1918
    • just to keep things interesting, he crossed the floor to the Labour Party just before the 1918, but then didn’t run in that election (probably ‘cuz his riding was eliminated)
  • mayoralty of Vancouver:
    • ran and lost in 1914 (yeah, he was still a representative in Britian at this time)
• He moved from Manitoba to BC when he was appointed the solicitor for the Canadian Pacific Railway.  Apparently BC didn’t really want him, with one newspaper editorial suggesting that BC would rather Manitoba sent one of their blizzards to BC instead!
• He passed legislation legalizing champerty (“a sharing in the proceeds of litigation by one who agrees with either the plaintiff or defendant to help promote it or carry it on“)  in both Manitoba and BC (I’m sure it’s totally coincidence that he happened to be a lawyer who stood to gain financially from this legalization).
• He was apparently liberal (e.g., pro-labour (introducing “controversial” legislation supporting a mere 8-hour work day, which the mine owners weren’t too happy about) and pro-women’s rights (calling for the vote for women when he was a British politician)) and a racist (introducing the Alien Exclusion Act “to prevent Chinese from owning mining claims”³, adding clauses to the properties that he owned in BC preventing them from being sold or leased to Asians, and running in the 1908 federal election as part of the “Asiatic Exclusion League”)
• Premier Semlin asked for his resignation because he “neglected departmental business to work on his own legal practice, had revealed cabinet’s private business, and, “while the worse for liquor,” had lost his temper when heckled by irate mine owners at a banquet”.  Martin didn’t like this too much, vowing “vengence” against those he felt were responsible and so he got all up in Semlin’s face, leading a strong opposition against him. In 1900, the Lieutenant-Governor, Thomas R. McGinnis, dismissed Semlin and asked Martin to form the government.  It really didn’t go all that well – like a 28-1 non-confidence vote against him not well (gee, I wonder who the one vote in favour of him was?).
• James Dunsmuir was the only one who could form a government after that election and Martin was the leader of the Opposition until he lost the next election in 1903.
• Best Martin story: the 1903 BC provincial election was the first one in which they had actual parties. Martin was the leader of the Liberal Party and believed he was the leader of the Opposition. Unfortunately leader of the Conservative Party, Richard McBride, also claimed to be the leader of the Opposition.  So they got into a shoving match over the possesion of the Opposition Leader’s chair.  Like the actual physical possession of the actual physical chair, right in the chamber of the Legislative Assembly! Why do our politicians these days never get into shoving matchs?
• Random interesting fact: he was the first person in Vancouver to be treated with insulin.  Go Banting & Best!

Image credit: Accessed from Wikipedia. In the public domain. w00t!

Footnotes:
¹Jasper Martin is totally the Jebidiah Springfield of Milton.
²You know, as opposed to the Michigan State and Toronto Abnormal Schools.

References:
³Wikipedia, the reference of champions
⁴Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online

Tags: BC, BC premiers, British Columbia, history, politics

It’s my one year anniversary of moving from Blogger to WordPress.com.  So, now I’m moving to WordPress.org. It’s true what they say: WordPress.com is just a gateway platform to the harder stuff.

In fact, I’m all set up to make the shift.  I’ve got a domain (which I’ve actually had for a while), I have a server, and WordPress.org has been installed (thanks to Kalev, who rocks).  I’m only lacking one magical ingredient: time.  This semester is insanely, insanely busy.  In addition to my day job, I’m teaching two new courses: the UBC one and one at SFU¹ and I’m playing on two hockey teams.  Oh yeah, and I’m supposed to be training for a half marathon. So I won’t be making the shift until I get a few minutes to breath².

In the meantime, I need all you techies to answer this question: What are your favourite WordPress plugins?

Kalev has suggested this one, which, among other things, allows commenters to preview their comments before posting them.  What other ones should I get?  You know, for when I stop being insanely busy and get a chance to make the jump.

And speaking of being insanely busy, I’ve decided to prorogue my BC Premiers series until after the end of the semester.  Writing the BC Premier series postings, which I usually do on Sundays, takes up a fair bit of time since I know pretty much nothing about BC Premiers.  Unlike my usually postings where I just blather about whatever is spinning around in my brain, I actually have to read stuff.  And I know that I just don’t have time to do that until the semester is over.  So I’ve asked the Governor General of my blog³ for a prorogation of the BC Premier series and she has graciously agreed to allow it. Expect the series to start back up in late April, at which time I’ll present a budget.

¹Which, mercifully, is online (so I don’t have to go up the mountain) and has a TA (who does tonnes o’ work and also rocks)
²Perhaps over reading break?
³As it turns out, I’m the GG of my own blog. What a lucky coincidence!

Tags: BC premiers, blog, busy, plugins, WordPress.com, WordPress.com is a gateway platform, WordPress.org