Артур Сифтон: Премьер Альберты (1910–1917)

Premier of Alberta from 1910 to 1917

Arthur Lewis Watkins Sifton (October 26, 1858 – January 21, 1921) was a Canadian lawyer, judge and politician who served as the second premier of Alberta from 1910 until 1917. He became a minister in the federal cabinet of Canada thereafter. Born in Canada West (now Ontario), he grew up there and in Winnipeg, where he became a lawyer. He subsequently practised law with his brother Clifford Sifton in Brandon, where he was also active in municipal politics. He moved west to Prince Albert in 1885 and to Calgary in 1889. There, he was elected to the 4th and 5th North West Legislative Assemblies; he served as a minister in the government of premier Frederick Haultain. In 1903, the federal government, at the instigation of his brother (who was then one of its ministers), made Sifton the Chief Justice of the Northwest Territories. After Alberta was created out of a portion of the Northwest Territories in 1905, Sifton became the first Chief Justice of Alberta in 1907 and served until 1910. In 1910, the Liberal government of Alberta premier Alexander Cameron Rutherford was embroiled in the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway scandal. The Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, George Bulyea, was a Liberal and determined that for the sake of the Alberta Liberal Party, Rutherford had to be pushed aside in favour of a new premier. When other prominent Liberals declined it, the position was offered to Sifton, who accepted it. As premier, Sifton smoothed over the divisions in the party that had caused and been exacerbated by the railway scandal. He made attempts to break with the Rutherford railway policy; when these were rebuffed by the courts, he adopted a course similar to Rutherford's. He unsuccessfully pursued the transfer of rights over Alberta's natural resources from the federal government, which had retained them by the terms of Alberta's provincehood. While Sifton was premier, the United Farmers of Alberta rose as a political force. Sifton tried to accommodate many of their demands: his government constructed agricultural colleges, incorporated a farmer run grain elevator cooperative, and implemented a municipal system of hail insurance. Outside of agriculture, the UFA was instrumental in the Sifton government's implementation of some direct democracy measures (which resulted in prohibition) and the extension of the vote to women. During the conscription crisis of 1917, Sifton supported the Conservative prime minister, Robert Borden, in his attempt to impose conscription to help win the First World War. He backed the creation of a federal Union government composed of Conservatives and pro conscription Liberals. In 1917, he left provincial politics and became a cabinet minister in the Union government. Over the next three and a half years, he served briefly in four different ministries and was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. He died in Ottawa in January 1921 after a brief illness.

Arthur Sifton was born on October 26, 1858, in Arva, Canada West (now Ontario), to John Wright Sifton (1833–1912) and Catherine "Kate" Watkins (1832–1909). He was the older brother of politician Clifford Sifton. He attended public schools across southern Ontario, culminating with a boys' school in Dundas and high school in London. His father was a devout Methodist and a staunch Reformer and, later, Liberal. These allegiances permeated his home life; the Sifton household was often visited by clergy, laity, businessmen, lawyers, and politicians. In 1874 or 1875, Following his graduation, he and Clifford attended Victoria College, then located in Cobourg, Ontario. In 1880, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. While in Cobourg, he was not a devoted student: he skipped many classes, and was judged by his classmates to be "intellectually, morally, physically and erratically preeminent in virtue and otherwise, especially otherwise". Upon graduation, Arthur Sifton returned to Winnipeg to article with Albert Monkman until 1881, when he followed his father to Brandon. John hoped to take advantage of a local real estate boom; nominally, Arthur was running a Brandon branch of Monkman's law firm, though he had not yet finished his articling and was accordingly unqualified to practise law. moved a resolution calling on the Sifton government to "take such steps as may be deemed necessary to acquire the control of all such natural resources as are of purely local concern". Sifton responded that it was already the intention of his government to begin negotiations with the federal government to this end. He asserted "I have always believed  that we should administer our mines and timber. The question is not now whether we would like to control our natural resources, but what is the best way to get them." Soon after, Sifton made a trip east and spoke on the subject of provincial resource control to the Canadian Club of Toronto, where his points were well received. In May 1910, Sifton and Saskatchewan Premier Walter Scott met with Laurier in Ottawa, where he was able to secure the Prime Minister's agreement that if the Liberals were re elected in the 1911 federal election they would transfer to Alberta control over its resources. This election was fought primarily on the issue of reciprocity, which was popular in Alberta, and Sifton campaigned actively for Laurier (distinguishing himself from his brother, who broke with Laurier on reciprocity). Despite winning six of Alberta's seven seats, the Liberals were defeated nationally by Robert Borden's Conservatives. Initially, this did not appear to be a problem; Borden had long called for the transfer of resource control to the prairie provinces, but when Sifton and Scott raised the issue with the new Prime Minister, little action resulted. Borden stalled for some time, and it emerged that he did not wish to buoy the fortunes of the provincial Liberal parties by giving them the political victory that would result from the transfer of resource control. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, the issue fell out of public prominence, and it was not until 1930 that Alberta achieved this long time objective.

Sifton's time as Premier corresponded with the rise of the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) as a political force. Formed in 1909 by the merger of the Society of Equity and the Alberta Farmers' Association, the UFA later became a political party and governed Alberta from 1921 until 1935. During Sifton's tenure, however, its entry into direct politics was still several years away, and it confined itself to advocating for farmers' interests. In a province in which 50,004 people voted in the 1909 provincial election, the UFA claimed an initial membership of 2,100, which climbed to 9,400 in 1913. Moreover, these figures did not include the many farmers who were active in the organization without paying dues; the UFA was a force to be reckoned with, and Sifton took notice. The UFA's first provincial victory took place in 1910, and involved the construction of agricultural colleges. Premier Alexander Rutherford, always a stalwart ally of the University of Alberta, approved a plan to locate Alberta's first agricultural college on the university's campus, in Rutherford's home town of Strathcona. At the 1910 UFA convention, a resolution proposed putting the college in southern Alberta, though it was supplanted by an Edward Michener motion calling for the UFA's leadership to consult with the province on a mutually amenable location. After consultation with the UFA, Sifton agreed that, in addition to the college, agricultural schools would be built around the province, and that farmers would be guaranteed representation on the college's board. In fact, Sifton held off on the establishment of the college all together in favour of the creation of seven demonstration farms in different regions of the province. In 1912, the government announced the creation of agricultural colleges in connection with three of these farms (all of them in the ridings of provincial cabinet ministers: Duncan Marshall's Olds, Claresholm in Archibald McLean's Lethbridge District, and Sifton's Vermilion). Another of the UFA's policies called for a single tax on land to replace most other forms of taxation. The farmers hoped that this tax would help replace tariffs, which made it harder for them to export their produce, and shift the tax burden towards cities, where land values were higher. They also called for a surtax on undeveloped land to curb land speculation and encourage the sale of land to farmers. On this demand too, Sifton acted: in 1911–1912 he allowed municipalities to levy property taxes and required that rural municipalities tax only land, and in 1914 he imposed a provincial tax on undeveloped land to discourage land speculation. Other UFA motivated acts by Sifton's government included abandonment of a 1912 plan to privatize hail insurance (it instead enacted a municipal insurance scheme) and the prohibition of contract clauses that allowed farm machinery companies to avoid responsibility for their products. Perhaps the most important piece of farm legislation passed by Sifton's government was the incorporation of the Alberta Farmers' Co operative Elevator Company (AFCEC). Though the UFA's first preference was for government ownership and operation of grain elevators, which Sifton refused, it gladly accepted the AFCEC, in which only farmers could hold shares and which was supported by provincial startup loans. Hall writes that "the Sifton government in effect responded wholly or in part to practically every resolution from the 1913 UFA convention related to provincial powers." This rate could not sustain itself, however, especially once the First World War began to occupy an increasing share of the province's attention and resources. During the 1916 legislative session, the government acted on only two of the UFA's twenty three demands of that year — one to allow the sale of gopher poison by UFA locals, and one dealing with brand inspection.

It was not only in agricultural policy that the UFA spread its influence. The organization had a strong progressive bent, and advocated direct democracy, women's suffrage, and prohibition. In response to the first of these, Sifton in 1913 introduced the Direct Democracy Act. Though it went somewhat less far than the UFA would have liked—for example, it made no provision for recall of elected officials—it did allow for Albertans to call a referendum directly by submitting a petition including the names of eligible voters totalling ten percent of the votes cast in the previous provincial election, including at least eight percent in each of eighty five percent of the province's ridings. The Conservatives were on record as supporting direct democracy, and could therefore criticize the bill only in detail. The large number of signatures required (beginning with the 1913 election, 9,399 signatures were required) entitling him to the style "The Right Honourable". Sifton was one of four Canadian delegates to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, along with Borden, Charles Doherty, and George Eulas Foster. There, he acted as vice chair of the Commission on Ports, Waterways, and Railways, and served on the Commission on Aerial Navigation. In these capacities he argued for Canada to be treated as an independent state at a time when its foreign policy was still managed by the United Kingdom. On June 28, 1919, Arthur Sifton was one of two Canadians to sign the Treaty of Versailles.