Life and Career in British Columbia
At the time of McCreight's arrival in Victoria in 1860, it was the capital of the Colony of Vancouver Island, which at the time was governed by the powerful and autocratic Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, Sir James Douglas. In 1862, McCreight was called to the British Columbia bar, and opened a practice in Victoria. By all accounts, he led a quiet and solitary life in the city, his main occupations outside of his work being his involvement in the local Masonic Lodge and as an active layperson in the congregation of the local Anglican cathedral.
By 1866, the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia had merged. Although the united colony did not join the Canadian confederation when it was effected in 1867, the worrisome economic and strategic situation soon made such an arrangement attractive. British Columbia joined confederation on July 20, 1871, and McCreight joined the interim transitional cabinet as Attorney General. During the first provincial general election that October, McCreight won a seat for Victoria City in the legislature, and Sir Joseph Trutch, the Lieutenant Governor, chose him to be British Columbia’s first premier. He continued to hold the attorney-generalship as well.
By all accounts, McCreight was temperamentally ill-suited to public life. His colleague, Henry Pering Pellew Crease, described the Premier as "bad tempered and queer...by fits & turns extremely credulous & extremely suspicious...excessively obstinate in the wrong places...close and reserved in his daily life... utterly ignorant of politics". Nonetheless, McCreight's administration was a productive one, passing three dozen pieces of legislation in less than a year. His inability to form alliances and mollify the sometimes narrow and sectional interests of MLAs led to a loss of support, however, and in 1872 he resigned after losing a motion of no confidence following the Speech from the Throne.
Read more about this topic: John Foster McCreight
Famous quotes containing the words british columbia, life, career, british and/or columbia:
“There is much to be said against the climate on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska; yet, I believe that the scenery of one good day will compensate the tourists who will go there in increasing numbers.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“The great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)
“The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women’s broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)