Charles Stewart (Canadian Politician) - Federal Politics

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 Quebec 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 was defeated by Social Crediter Walter Frederick Kuhl.

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 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. As Minister of the Interior, he oversaw the 1927 creation of Prince Albert National Park. Ironically, given the attacks he had sustained as Premier from Alexander Grant MacKay, he was part of the federal delegation that finally negotiated the transfer of resource control from the federal to the Alberta provincial government in December 1929. The same agreement transferred resource rights to Saskatchewan and Manitoba. After it was signed but before it took effect, Manitoba Premier John Bracken concluded an agreement with the Winnipeg Electric Company, a private concern, to develop a hydroelectric dam at Seven Sisters' Reach. Because resource rights were still controlled by the federal government, the deal required federal approval. Stewart advocated withholding this approval in deference to Manitoba public opinion, which favoured public ownership of such projects, but King honoured a provision of the resource transfer agreement that required the wishes of provincial governments to be respected until the transfer was complete and granted approval. Stewart's preference for public over private ownership extended to King's planned creation of the Bank of Canada; Stewart wanted the new institution entirely under the control of the government, but King preferred an arrangement whereby half of its directors would be appointed by the government and half by private shareholders and suggested that advocates of public ownership might find themselves more at home in the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation than in his Liberal caucus.

Despite Stewart's involvement in transferring resource rights to Alberta, his relationship with the UFA government that had defeated him in 1921 was frosty: Lakeland College historian Franklin Foster, in his biography of UFA Premier 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 ." 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. While King was inclined to view UFA politicians, like Progressives elsewhere, as "Liberals in a hurry" who were fundamentally comfortable with his government and preferred it to the Conservatives, Stewart understood that the UFA was a distinct group whose members were in many respect more conservative than liberal. King dismissed his minister's views as being the result of Stewart's acrimonious history with the UFA.

In fact, Stewart did not enjoy King's confidence. Though he brought him into his cabinet in 1921 in part at the urging of Progressive leader Thomas Crerar, King found Stewart to be an inadequate protector of western interests—especially in his advocacy of tariff reduction, which King found lacklustre—and did not trust his political advice on the west. By 1925 he was considering appointing Stewart to the Senate, to remove him from active political involvement, but was handicapped by the absence of any other Alberta representation in his cabinet. In 1926 Stewart served as an emissary from King to recruit Saskatchewan Premier Charles Avery Dunning to the federal cabinet; the mission fulfilled, King kept Stewart in cabinet but wrote in his diary that all matters pertaining to Alberta were to be "left to Dunning to do as he thinks best". By 1927, King complained that Stewart had "no grip" on the province of which he had once been Premier, and in 1930 he wrote "Organization in Alberta is terrible. Stewart is worse than useless, is like an old woman, with no real control of situation." In the 1930 federal election Dunning and Crerar were both defeated; King complained that it was "perfectly terrible to have Stewart alone representing the West." When Stewart too went down to defeat in 1935, King was pleased "not to have to consider him" in assembling his new cabinet, and opted instead to leave Alberta unrepresented to punish it for failing to elect any Liberals.