One of the very nicest houses in the city of Edmonton is empty almost all the time and has been for 80 years. In spite of this, it is not a ruin. Nothing of the kind; it receives periodic care and renovation in fantastic quantities that any property-flipper would envy.
I speak, of course, of Alberta’s Government House, which sits on the edge of the grounds of the old Royal Alberta Museum. It was built before the First World War as the official residence of the Alberta lieutenant-governor. Today, it is kept in pristine shape, but is not used as a residence by anybody; it is called into service during royal visits (and one papal one), for the swearings-in of ministries and on other occasions when the province is in need of the frontier’s answer to a palace.
It also has a secret function as a reminder of Alberta history. Almost every Albertan knows why Government House is empty. In 1937, its last occupant, a Baptist pastor and Liberal politician named John Campbell Bowen, chose to use his reserve powers to delay radical, aggressive legislation passed by the Social Credit-dominated assembly. Bowen’s use of his reserve powers passed muster with the courts and was approved by the federal government.
But this led, naturally, to bad feeling between the viceroy and the Socreds. In December 1937, Social Credit’s provincial convention, always much more radical than the parliamentary party, moved to stop all provincial funding for the maintenance of the lieutenant-governor. The assembly’s committee of supply enacted the measure in the spring. It turned out that the federal government was only paying the personal salary of the lieutenant-governor himself; the province had the ability to fire his staff, take away his car and shut off the utilities in Government House.
The lieutenant-governor played the game of chicken for a while; he insisted that the government’s attack on his expenses required an order-in-council that he would have to sign himself. When the lights finally dimmed, and the fine furnishings in the house began to grow cold, a bargain was reached. The order Bowen wanted was properly drafted and delivered, and Bowen duly signed it, packed his things and moved his base of operations to the Hotel Macdonald. The federally owned Government House did fall into relative desuetude — the wartime sale of the original furnishings was a particularly short-sighted tragedy — and was used as a home for veterans until its sale to the province in 1964, and its eventual restoration, fuelled by 1970s oil money.
The displaced Bowen remained on the job until 1950, playing an important part during the Second World War when Edmonton was colonized by American airmen and construction workers. In the usual version of the Alberta legend, Bowen is the hero. The Social Credit laws he blocked got rough treatment when they came before judges, and Bowen’s grand refusal is associated with the Alberta press’s courageous fight against out-of-control Social Credit populism.
Bowen (and Government House itself) received some genuine abuse for defying a very popular government — one he supposedly considered dismissing, before realizing that it would merely be returned again by the people in the ensuing election, and probably in a form more vicious than ever.
But the house is still empty. Bowen’s fight with the provincial government was a quiet recapitulation of our deep constitutional history. The abstract theory of our government is that the sovereign and her representatives really have unlimited authority, and are above, in a hierarchical sense, the organized rabble that is assembled to legislate. The divine right of kings became impractical in early modern Britain because Parliament had secured and kept control of the public purse. Monarchs who sought to rule as dictators soon found that they needed the help of that rabble to raise any revenue, or to reign, in any meaningful sense, at all. It’s the golden rule, according to the old joke: who has the gold makes the rules.
Bowen’s holdup of laws passed by the Alberta legislature was recognized as anomalous, though constitutional, at the time. There existed an understanding within the federal government that lieutenant-governors were “Dominion officers” who were to act on, essentially, ministerial advice from Ottawa. But Bowen neither sought nor received any such advice before acting.
The crisis had come upon him in the very early weeks of his tenure, and his intermittent political career in Alberta had probably not prepared him very well for the position of lieutenant-governor. The provincial attorney general, the lawyer John Hugill, was at odds with the Social Credit cabinet himself, and seems to have allowed this to influence his advice to the lieutenant-governor as his law officer. (This is exactly the same sort of tension that became manifest in our time in the struggle between the Prime Minister’s Office and Jody Wilson-Raybould.)
The result was that, because politicians couldn’t work things out with the viceroy behind the scenes, the power of the purse was brought into play. This seems ugly and cruel in the retrospective view (which may overlook the Depression then in progress, and the incredible sheer brokeness of the Alberta government of the day), but kicking the lieutenant-governor of Government House was a proper alternative to having the government attempt to rule illegitimately, without a viceroy, or to involve the Queen in the matter.
Once Bowen was slightly humiliated, and reminded of the ultimate source of a modern government’s power, the business of government could continue in a constitutional way. There may be a lesson in this for today’s federal government, and today’s Governor-General of Canada, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
National Post
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