Peter Lougheed

Peter Lougheed was born in Calgary on July 26, 1928, the son of Edgar Donald Lougheed (1893–1951)[7] and Edna Alexandria Bauld (1901–1972).[8][9] His paternal grandfather was Sir James Lougheed, a successful lawyer, federal cabinet minister, and senator.[10] James accumulated a sizable fortune before his death in 1925, but the Great Depression wiped out much of it, and the first years of Peter's life were spent moving from one rented accommodation to another.[10] He was educated at the Strathcona School for Boys, Earl Grey School, Rideau Park School, and the Central Collegiate Institute, all in Calgary.[9] At the last of these, he proposed the formation of a students' union and became its first president.[11] He also excelled at sports, particularly football.[10]

Upon graduating from Central Collegiate, Lougheed enrolled at the University of Alberta from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1950 or 1951[9][11] and a Bachelor of Laws in 1952.[9] He played football for the University of Alberta Golden Bears and, in 1949 and 1950, the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League.[9][12] He also served as president of the Students' Union in 1951 and 1952, and was a writer in the sports section for The Gateway, the University of Alberta student newspaper.[13] While studying at the University of Alberta, he lived for a time in Rutherford House as a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity.[14] In 1952, he married Jeanne Rogers, whom he met during his schooling.[10] Soon after the wedding, the couple went to Massachusetts, where Lougheed went to Harvard University to pursue a Master of Business Administration, which he earned in 1954.[11] While still a student at Harvard, he worked for a summer with Gulf Oil in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he witnessed an oil boom town after the oil ran out; political scientist Allan Tupper has suggested that Lougheed saw here a possible future of Alberta.[15]

After Harvard, Lougheed had to make decisions about his career. He believed that people should avoid excessive specialization in favour of maximizing their diversity of experience.[16] He anticipated spending time in business, law, and politics.[16] In pursuit of business, he took a management position with Mannix Corporation, a Canadian construction firm.[16] Later, he left the company to establish a law practice.[16] During the early 1960s, he began to turn his attention towards politics.[16]

Lougheed came from a Conservative family, and it was with that party that he decided to pursue his political career. At the time, Alberta was represented almost entirely by Progressive Conservatives in the House of Commons of Canada.[16] While that might have made federal politics appealing to Lougheed, he viewed it as a drawback; he considered the field of federal PC politicians from Alberta to be crowded, and the life of a backbencher held little appeal for him.[16] Instead, he turned his attention to the provincial Progressive Conservatives. The party had never formed the government since Alberta joined Canada, and had captured only 13% of the vote in the 1963 election and did not win a seat in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta.[16] The province had been governed by Social Credit since 1935, and the government had been led by Premier Ernest Manning since 1943.[16] Manning was popular and had led the Socreds to 60 of 63 seats in the legislature in 1963, but Lougheed felt that the time was ripe for change.[16] He believed that Albertans were beginning to find Social Credit too rural and insufficiently assertive in intergovernmental relations.[16] In Lougheed's view, Alberta should be a senior partner in Confederation, and Social Credit was out of touch with the province's potential.[16] He resolved to capture the leadership of the provincial Progressive Conservative party and to navigate it into government.[17]

At the party's leadership convention in 1965, Lougheed defeated Duncan McKillop, a fellow Calgary lawyer who had been the party's candidate for Calgary Queens Park in 1963, on the first ballot.[18] Another candidate, Edson town councillor John Scott, had withdrawn on the convention's first day.[18] Lougheed was nominated from the floor by Lou Hyndman and Charles Arthur Clark, father of future Prime Minister Joe Clark.[18] Vote totals were not released.[18]

Lougheed's first challenge as leader was a 1966 by-election in Pincher Creek-Crowsnest. The riding had been represented for eighteen years by Socred William Kovach, who had died.[19] While the Tories finished third, Lougheed viewed it as only a minor setback; his real focus was building up momentum for the next general election. In the 1967 election, Lougheed was elected to the legislature in Calgary-West along with five other PCs, and he became Leader of the Opposition. All but one of the new PC MLAs were from Calgary and Edmonton.

Manning retired as premier a year later, and Harry Strom succeeded him. However, after three decades in power, Social Credit had become tired and complacent. The first sign of a momentum shift came soon after Manning's retirement, when the PCs won his former seat in a by-election. Over the next three years, the Tories built their tiny caucus up to ten members with one other by-election win and defections by two MLAs from other parties.

During the 1970 spring session, Lougheed moved to position the PCs as a credible alternative to the Socreds. His party introduced 21 bills, an unusual number for an opposition party in a Westminster system.

Strom called a snap election for August 1971. For the campaign, Lougheed crafted a simple slogan, "NOW!", symbolizing his goal of increasing Alberta's clout in Canada. His platform combined fiscally conservative economic policies with a modern, urban outlook. Lougheed's urbane image also struck a responsive chord with the electorate, making a marked contrast with the dour Strom. Over the last three years, Lougheed had consistently gotten the better of Strom, helping establish his Tories as the main alternative to the Socreds.

In the election, Lougheed and the Tories swept the Socreds from power, ending one of the longest unbroken runs in government at the provincial level in Canada. While the PCs finished only five percentage points ahead of the Socreds, 46 percent to 41 percent, they reaped a major windfall in the cities. They took every seat in Edmonton, and all but five in Calgary. The nature of the first past the post system, which awards power solely on the basis of seats won, gave Lougheed a strong majority government, with 49 seats to the Socreds' 25 and the NDP's one. As it turned out, this would be the most opposition Lougheed would face during his 14 years in office.

Lougheed spent most of his tenure as premier in a bitter fight with the federal government over control of Alberta's resources. His first term also saw the start of a decade-long development boom, and he later established the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, which used oil revenues to invest for the long term in such areas as health care and research. He won an even stronger mandate in 1975, reducing the opposition to only six MLAs in total (four Socreds, one New Democrat and one independent) on a record 62.7 percent of the popular vote, more than Manning had drawn during the height of Social Credit's power in the 1950s. He would lead the party to two more landslide victories in 1979 and 1982. His last victory netted the PCs a staggering 75 seats out of 79: in terms of percentage of seats won, the second-largest majority government in the province's history. As a result, he governed with very large majorities for virtually his entire tenure and was in a position to enact practically any program he wanted. Indeed, the six MLAs he faced in 1975 would be the most opposition he would face during his last decade in office. That served him well, since he was a Red Tory leading a party whose base was dominated by social conservatives in rural parts of the province.

Lougheed retired in 1985. Don Getty, a member of the original PC caucus from 1967 and later a longtime member of the Lougheed cabinet, came out of retirement to succeed him.

Lougheed had long been suffering from a heart condition and high blood pressure. In early September 2012, his health severely deteriorated and he was taken to hospital, where he died of natural causes at the hospital named after him in Calgary.[20] His body lay in state from September 17 to 18 inside the main rotunda of the Alberta Legislature Building.[21][22] The national and provincial flags were flown at half-mast throughout the province.[23] After lying in state, Lougheed's body travelled back to Calgary in a motorcade from Edmonton that followed a procession through the city, passing places of significance to Lougheed.[24] A state memorial was held on September 21, 2012, at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary.

In response to his death, Prime Minister Stephen Harper described Lougheed as "one of the most remarkable Canadians of his generation."[25] Alberta Premier Alison Redford cut short her trip to Asia in order to attend his funeral. Alberta's opposition leader Danielle Smith, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (who was the Minister of Justice during negotiations to patriate the Canadian constitution), federal opposition leader Thomas Mulcair and Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi issued statements condoling his death.[25] Former Prime Minister Joe Clark wrote a special commentary in The Globe and Mail praising Lougheed.[26]

In Alberta's Camelot: Culture and the Arts in the Lougheed Years, Fil Fraser explores how Lougheed government programs created a period of unprecedented growth for provincial arts sector, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s.[27]

The Tories were in office without interruption from 1971 until 2015, usually with large majorities but nowhere near as large as the ones Lougheed enjoyed.

Lougheed was styled "The Honourable" for the duration of his membership in the Executive Council of Alberta from 1971 to 1986. When he was appointed a privy councillor (postnominal: "PC") on April 17, 1982, the style "The Honourable" was extended for life. In 1986, he was named a Companion of the Order of Canada (postnominal: "CC"), and in 1989 he was named to the Alberta Order of Excellence (postnominal: "AOE"). In 2001 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

The Peter Lougheed Provincial Park was named after him in Kananaskis, Alberta. In Calgary an acute care hospital was named the Peter Lougheed Centre, where he would spend his last days. After his death proposals were made to rename Calgary International Airport in his honour.[28] At the University of Alberta in Edmonton, a residence hall was named after him.

• Perry, Sandra E.; Craig, Jessica J. (2006). The Mantle of Leadership : Premiers of the Northwest Territories and Alberta. Edmonton, Alberta: Legislative Assembly of Alberta. ISBN 0-9689217-2-8.
• Fraser, Fil (2003). Alberta's Camelot: Culture and the Arts in the Lougheed Years. Lone Pine Publishing. ISBN 1-55105-393-4.

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