The 1905 Alberta general election was the first general election held in the province of Alberta, Canada, shortly after the province came into existence on September 1, 1905. The election was held on November 9, 1905, to elect twenty-five members to the 1st Alberta Legislative Assembly.
The Alberta Liberal Party, led by the recently appointed Premier Alexander C. Rutherford, received a majority of the votes cast and took twenty-three of the twenty-five seats in the new legislature, defeating the Conservative Party.
The Conservatives were led by young lawyer Richard Bennett, who later served as prime minister of Canada. The Conservatives had no strong leader to rally around at the time as the North-West Territories de facto-Premier Frederick Haultain had moved to the province of Saskatchewan.
The election was held using the first past the post system. The number of seats won by the Liberals was far above its portion of the popular vote. The Liberals received 57.6 per cent of the vote and 92 per cent of the seats.
The election took place just after the formation of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, composed of parts of the North-West Territories. Numerous high-profile issues arose prior to the election, including education rights for French Catholics through separate schools with public funding, the federal government retaining rights to public lands and minerals, and the competition between the cities of Edmonton and Calgary to be selected as the capital of the new province.
Background Government in the North-West Territories After Confederation in 1867, the new Dominion of Canada sought to expand westward and fulfilk the provision of the British North America Act providing the option to admit Rupert's land to the Dominion. In that same year, Canada's Parliament expressed this desire to the United Kingdom and soon after entered into talks with the Hudson's Bay Company to arrange for the transfer of that Company's territory, Rupert's land."Correspondence relating to Surrender of Rupert's Land by Hudson's Bay Company and Admission into Dominion of Canada". House of Commons Papers. 43.
After the Deed of Surrender was enacted, the United Kingdom transferred ownership of Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory from the Hudson's Bay Company to the government of Canada. However, integration of the territories into Canadian Confederation was delayed by the Red River Rebellion around the Red River Colony. Eventually, the territories were admitted into Canadian Confederation on July 15, 1870, as the North-West Territories; barring the area around the Red River Colony, which was admitted into Canadian Confederation as the province of Manitoba.
The unelected Temporary North-West Council was formed under the Temporary Government Act, 1870, but the first appointments by the Government of Canada were delayed until December 28, 1872. The unelected body existed until The North-West Territories Act of 1875 came into force in October 1876, and the temporary council when it was replaced by the 1st Council of the North-West Territories, which consisted of appointed members, but with provisions for the election of members. A district of an area of having 1,000 people could become an electoral district and elect one North-West Territories Council member. This created a patchwork of unrepresented and represented areas (areas directly represented by an elected member), and there was no official or independent boundaries commission, all electoral law at the beginning was under the purview of the Lieutenant Governor.
The boundary between Manitoba and the North-West Territories was in flux for some years. The North-West Territories population grew considerably along the Manitoba border during the 1870s. This drove calls for franchise by settlers in the region, and many settlers expressed a desire to be incorporated into Manitoba. In 1880 three electoral districts were created in the North-West Territories, two of which bordered the province of Manitoba. The federal government heeded the calls of the settlers and expanded the borders of Manitoba westward on July 1, 1881, encompassing much of the densely populated areas of the Territories.
Beginning in 1881, elected members began to sit in the North-West Territories Council. Under the terms of the North-West Territories Act of 1880, eligible electors were males who had reached the age of majority, which was 21 years of age at that time. The act specified that electors must be bona fide males who were not aliens or unfranchised Indians. Electors must also have resided in the territory for at least 12 months to the day of the writ being dropped. The first by-election occurred on March 23, 1881, in the Lorne district with Lawrence Clarke being elected to the council. The election was conducted by voice vote, a qualified elector would tell the returning officer at a polling station who he was going to vote for and the results would be tallied.
The ad hoc by-election system continued to operate until 1888 when the Temporary North-West Council was replaced with elected, somewhat responsible government by the establishment of a Legislative Assembly selected in the 1888 North-West Territories general election, and some legal experts appointed by the federal government. Robert Brett, the representative for the Red Deer district was appointed the Chairman of the Advisory Council, a cabinet like structure making Brett the de facto Premier of the North-West Territories.
Members at first were elected as non-partisan politicians, but some such as Frank Oliver were clearly members of a political party (Oliver was known to be a Liberal). The 1898 North-West Territories general election was a significant step toward party politics in the Territories as Frederick W. A. G. Haultain's Liberal-Conservative Party defeated Brett's Liberal Party to form government.
Drive to provincehood
The earliest calls for provincial autonomy in Alberta were made by Robert Brett in 1896, when he proposed the creation of a new province from the District of Alberta and the District of Athabasca. However, Brett's proposal was opposed by Premier Haultain who preferred the Territories form a single large province. In 1900, Haultain secured unanimous approval of a resolution asking the Government of Canada to inquire into the terms for provincial status of the Territories. A year later Haultain and Arthur Sifton met with the federal cabinet and submitted a draft constitution for a new province in the North-West Territories. Wilfrid Laurier's government was unwilling to consider the proposals, due to concerns about religious education, the delegation of authority, and general apathy towards provincehood by Frank Oliver and other western liberal members of parliament.
The issue of provincehood was at the forefront of the 1902 North-West Territories general election, and historian Lingard noted that all candidates ran a campaign arguing for provincehood. The Territories were under growing financial stress from limited revenue generation authorities while there was wave of immigration and population growth and rising demands for improved government infrastructure and services. Haultain's government was reelected in the chaotic and partisan 1902 election. Despite the partisan divisions, members of the Territorial Assembly agreed that provincial autonomy was a pressing concern. During this time, Robert Borden, leader of the federal Conservative Party began to support provincehood for the Territories. Frustrated in negotiations with the federal Liberal government, Haultain identified with the Conservative Party and campaigned for it in the 1904 federal election.
Despite Haultain's influence, Laurier's Liberals were re-elected to power and even captured most of the vote in the North-West Territories. During the 1904 federal election, Laurier promised that his government would address the issue of provincial status. Despite efforts by Frank Oliver to downplay the benefits of autonomy in his newspaper, the Edmonton Bulletin, the Liberal government's Speech from the Throne to start the 10th Canadian Parliament committed the government to act on the question of autonomy. The government passed the Autonomy Act, which split the southern part of the North-West Territories along the 4th meridian of the Dominion Land Survey and created two provinces of roughly equal area of and 250,000 people each. The federal government under Laurier said one single province covering the western prairies would be too large to manage effectively, and the territory above the 60th parallel north was unfit for agriculture and therefore had little hope of "thick and permanent settlement" so was not needing provincehood.
Terms of provincehood
The federal government drafted a bill for consultation that established two new provinces, retained federal ownership of public lands and resources, and provided financial terms that historian Lewis Thomas described as "not ungenerous".
The greatest opposition to the bill came with clauses providing education rights to minority faiths through separate schools, with the right enshrined to establish schools and be provided public funds. The Laurier government had been embroiled in a similar controversial schools question in Manitoba a decade earlier, which resulted in the Laurier-Greenway compromise and the removal of minority school rights in Manitoba. The compromise was opposed by French-Canadians and the Catholic Church. The Haultain government had been engaged in a progressive reduction of the minority faith education privileges, with only eleven separate schools in operation by 1905. Minister of the Interior and the western Liberal representative in Cabinet Clifford Sifton, who had been travelling away from Ottawa during the drafting of the autonomy bill returned to Ottawa to resign his portfolio in protest. Finance Minister William Stevens Fielding also considered resigning, but remained in cabinet.
The education matter was controversial in English Canada, eliciting responses from Liberal newspapers and stoking fears for Liberal unity, however, in the Territories the issue was not seen as significant. Instead, the main issue with provincehood in the North-West Territories was the debate over the location of the new provincial capital and whether the federal government or the new provinces would have ownership of public lands and resources. The autonomy bill was amended to provide minority faiths with the right to separate schools that remained under provincial control. The bill retained federal control over public lands and natural resources, and the provinces were promised $375,000 annually each with a provision for population growth.
The selection of the new provincial capital became the primary public issue. The finalized Alberta Act identified Edmonton as the "provisional" capital, and provided the legislative assembly the authority to determine the final location of the capital. Calgary had a slightly larger population and was located in a more densely populated part of the province, giving it an advantage. However, Edmonton's position as the geographic center of the province and Frank Oliver's prominent voice in Laurier's cabinet were also factors in its favor. Additionally, Member of Parliament for Strathcona Peter Talbot promised to "fight to the finish" to ensure the provisional capital was either in Edmonton or the neighbouring Strathcona.