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Tom Monto

What do Queen Alexandra and Elmer Roper have in common? A tale of district names

The naming of provincial electoral districts after individuals goes back to the early years of Alberta being a province.


Prior to our second provincial election in 1909, the district of Alexandra was created, to take in Lloydminster and surrounding countryside - only on the Alberta side of the town, of course. It is named after Queen Alexandra, queen of the British Empire from 1901 to 1901, wife of King Edward VII. At the time too a Strathcona school was named Queen Alexandra in her honour. It still stands today at 106 Street and University Avenue.


The Alexandra district naming appears to be only case of naming a district after an individual for many years.


Of course there are districts named after places that are named after individuals. From the start in Alberta there was Strathcona (now Edmonton-Strathcona). There have been occasional breaks when it was named Edmonton South. The old town and city of Strathcona was named after Lord Strathcona, HBC official and corporate kingpin of the Canadian Pacific Railway. His birth name of Donald Smith was not as glamorous as his taken name.


Also, the district of Victoria, northeast of Edmonton, was in existence in provincial elections from that first election to 1935.


It is sometimes thought that it was named after Queen Victoria who passed in 1901. But it is named after the historic settlement of Victoria Settlement, which is still a place northeast of Edmonton. The wide riverflat there was home to Natives even before George McDougall named it and operated a Methodist mission there in the 1860s/1870s. He soon moved to Edmonton and built the first McDougall Church downtown. Then shortly thereafter he moved to Morley and died in a blizzard, a classic death for a pioneer in the old North-West.


Like in Strathcona, the voters of Victoria elected Liberals, the party of immigrants, French and pioneer farmers in those days.


Other individuals so honoured include:

Calgary -Shaw named after Joseph Tweed Shaw, Labour MP representing west Calgary in 1921-1925. He was a Liberal MLA 1926-1930 representing Bow River.


At the time Shaw was Labour MP, there were only two other Labour MPs in Canada --William Irvine, also of Calgary, and J.S. Woodsworth, who would later be first leader of the CCF. (There was much more Labour vote than that but under our First Past The Post system, most of it was as good as thrown in the trash.)


The other Calgary Labour MP, Wiliam Irvine, was better known than Shaw. He was elected MP three times in Alberta and one time in BC and an active publicist for the left (farmers, workers, the poor, the old and young, the sick and injured) in newspaper and books. With Woodsworth he helped found the CCF in 1932 - in Calgary. Why a provincial district was named after Shaw instead of the better known Irvine is unknown but can be guessed...


A new slew of districts named after individuals appeared in 1993. These were Calgary-Lougheed, Edmonton-Manning, Edmonton-Rutherford, Edmonton-McClung and Edmonton-Roper. A.C. Rutherford, Ernest Manning and Peter Lougheed were premiers Liberal, Social Credit and Conservative respectively. Each was probably the best known of the three premiers of the time their parties were in power in Alberta.


Note that no districts have been named after the three UFA premiers who served during the time that party was in power. For some reason from 1905 to 2007, each of the four -- yes only four -- governments that governed Alberta had three premiers.


Nellie McClung was Liberal MLA 1921-1926 and one of the Famous Five who secured women's legal right to be appointed to Senate.


The district of Edmonton-Roper, unlike the other three, was soon re-named Edmonton-Castle Downs. And that memorial to long-time CCF MLA 1942-1955, leader of the Alberta CCF party, Edmonton businessman, active unionist, labour newspaperman and fondly-remembered Edmonton mayor 1959-1963 is now no more.


Workers and farmer representatives, like Roger Dangerfield, just don't get no respect!


As one-time Edmonton Liberal MLA Nellie McClung has a district named after her due mostly for her part in the Famous Five, perhaps the province should honour the other Famous Five members by naming a district after each of them.


In addition to McClung, two served in the Alberta Legislature, before their fight for Senate appointment - Louise McKinney 1917-1921 in the district of Claresholm, and lrene Parlby in the district of Lacombe.


Henrietta Muir Edwards lived with her husband in Macleod where he served as medical officer for the tribes there. So those three districts would be fitting to be re-named.


The last member of the Famous Five, Emily Murphy, lived in Edmonton. Her modest clapboard house where the Famous Five set off on their epic journey toward political equality for women still stands on the UofA grounds. She never served as elected representative, holding out apparently for appointment to the Senate - a plum forever unattained.


If Edmonton in some future date is converted into two multiple-member districts, one could be Edmonton-Murphy, the other Edmonton-McClung. (although Murphy's anti-Oriental sentiments and other outlandish notions are unsuited to today.)


There was also a UFA MLA who represented Edmonton longer than McClung - John Lymburn 1926-1935. And don't forget CCF MLA, Elmer Roper who served 1942-1955 and who was mayor of Edmonton. So these may be fitting names for Edmonton districts if and when it becomes just two districts.


While no UFA or CCF representatives are currently honoured with district names, one district has been named after a famous NDP leader and campaigner for the common good. In 2010 the Peace River farm district Dunvegan-Central Peace-Notley was renamed Central Peace-Notley. He had represented the area when MLA from 1971 to his tragic death in 1984.


His fight is carried forward by his daughter Rachel.


What do Elmer Roper and Queen Alexandra have in common? They are the only two individuals whose names are no longer used for a provincial district. The name Roper was it seems undesirable as he was a lefty. Queen Alexandra, a monarch, was a target in Social Credit Premier Wiliam Aberhart's early years in power when he was railing out at the Establishment, the Old Guard, the old money, the banks, the Eastern corporate interests. Aberhart even put forward the notion that Alberta citizens had sovereignty and rights that were being trampled by the powers that be. Having a district named after a queen did not appeal to the hard-bitten farming and labouring grassroots of his party.


The honour of a district name is likely to be mostly withheld from the campaigners of the left in the future as in the past.


The right mostly holds the money, the power and the prestige, and withholds as much as they can from those whose interests are diametrically opposed to theirs. The idea of a politician representing a whole artificially-drawn district despite the varying sentiments within it is obsolete, but the myth is carried on due to the right benefitting from such a construct.


What we need is a more egalitarian political plan where parties are given seats based on their due share of the vote, in other words, proportional representation. Under such a system a minority of the votes will not elect a majority of the seats, giving 100 percent of the power to a minority. Anything less than proportional representation is not democratic.


The giving of names to districts is an honour. But it is basically tokenism. And when it is withheld or pulled back (as in Roper's case and in the case of Queen Alexandra), it is just a revelation of the class warfare that lies under our present political situation, disguised and suppressed though it be by our FPTP system.


District naming, however you see it, will not address our broken democracy.

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