[Some work still to do on this blog, but publishing it anyway]
Strathcona was a town from 1899 to 1907, then a City from 1907 to 1912.
Who served on the Strathcona town council and on the Strathcona city council?
The mayors are well known. You can see Wikipedia "Strathcona (City)" for the list. But the names of the councillors are not as accessible.
When Strathcona was town 1899 to 1907, three were elected each year with three others continuing from previous year. This system of staggered elections ensured that there was constancy on council. As well, Douglas and other councillors were re-elected two or more times and usually a sitting councillor was elected mayor, so that was constancy as well.
1902 Town Council
Edmonton Bulletin Dec. 13, 1901 says "Mssrs Douglas, McKenzie and Carmichael" were elected to Strathcona Town council.
But who was this Douglas?
There were three Douglas brothers who were prominent in old Strathcona.
Could it have been one of them?
I have consulted a variety of sources and still don't know.
biographies of city councillors are given in Joseph Rek, Municipal Elections in Edmonton, 1882-1989
(book available at Edmonton Public Library)
It has some info on the Douglas brothers but does not say which was on council in 1902, if any.
There is also a small book History of City Council 1882-1977 (available at Edmonton Public Library)
It has some info on Strathcona elections as well as elections of the council of Edmonton.
Henry Ward Beecher Douglas seems not to be a possibility.
Rek says Henry Douglas (H.W.B. Douglas) came to Edmonton [area] in April 1902 so looks like he could not have been elected in 1901 election to serve in 1902.
Rek says Henry served on Edmonton school board 1916-1921
said to be "member of Masonic Lodge" [also Kiwanis Club and Edmonton Board of Trade].
James McCrie Douglas was "elected alderman on Strathcona City Council", but nothing on Strathcona town Council.
Edmonton aldermen listings on-line
Parliamentarians bio info says James McCrie Douglas served on Strathcona city council 1907-1908.
James Douglas was elected in a Strathcona federal by-election. This was conducted after the death of Strathcona MP Dr. McIntyre (for whom McIntyre Park is named).
Interestingly, sixteen different people put their names forward to run for the Liberal nomination to replace McIntyre. And the winner was decided through multi-rounds of voting. With the least-popular candidate being dropped after each round until just two remained and one or the other took a majority of votes.
This is not actually the first known instance of non-plurality voting used in Alberta. Despite an idea that many may have that the old days were un-sophisticated, we see that nomination of party candidates was done just as fairly then as now. A person needed to have majority support to win the nomination.
So we see in 1906 that when Peter Talbot, the sitting MP for Strathcona, resigned, that the nomination contest for the Liberal candidacy was decided through multi-round voting with the winner having to take a majority of the votes. In fact, Dr. Wilbert McIntyre did not lead in the first count. G.W. Smith, Red Deer school teacher and local leader (and later MLA), led in the first count. But through five rounds of voting, McIntyre achieved a lead over Smith and held it, eventually beating Smith by just one vote on the fifth round of voting. Until that final round, when only two nominees were in the running, no one nominee had secured a majority of the votes.
Although people may think that candidate(s) or member(s) were always elected through single-winner First Past The Post or multi-winner Block Voting, such was not the case.
Both systems allocate seats based on relative lead in votes, not the fairness produced by methods, like multi-round voting, where a majority of votes are used to elect the member(s).
When more than two candidates run, FPTP does not guarantee that the winner has a majority of the votes.
In Block Voting, it is common for a slate with less than half the votes to take all the seats.
But as early as the 1906 by-election Liberal nomination convention, the successful nominee had to take a majority of the votes, not just simple plurality in one round of voting.
The other main non-plurality system used in Canadian history was Single Transferable Voting (STV), first used in a city election in Alberta in 1917, provincially in 1926. Under STV, multiple winners are elected, with about 80 percent of vote used to actually elect the winners.
The kind of fairness seen in the 1906 and 1909 nomination convention was to become common. (And now the leaders of all the major parties are elected through that same multi-round voting system.)
As seen on Oct. 1, 1909, multi-round voting can involve an excessive number of rounds of voting. Five were needed in 1906; nine were needed to decide a winner in 1909.
Eventually Albertans found repeated casting of ballots to be inefficient, when a simple ranking of the candidates by voters (preferential ballots) would achieve the same thing with just one casting of votes.
The UFA adopted the use of ranked ballots and the use of multi-winner STV or single-winner Instant-Runoff Voting for election of its executive by the late 1910s or early 1920s. The use of such efficient and fair voting methods proved itself in such contexts, and in 1924 the UFA government brought in preferential ballots for Alberta's provincial elections, with most of Alberta's MLAs subsequently elected through IRV and the others elected through STV.
The Liberal Nomination Convention (1909)
Those who put their name forward included:
James Douglas (listed as J.M. Douglas)
N.D. Mills,
D.H. McKinnon,
Rice Sheppard (of the United Farmers of Alberta) and later to be Edmonton city councillor
Joshua Fletcher (of the United Farmers of Alberta)
A.L. Marks (who later married two of Rice Sheppard's daughters (in succession))
J.G. Anderson of Angus Ridge
Dr. Robertson of Wetaskiwin
A.S. Rosenroll, Wetaskiwin
Dennis Twomey, Camrose.
(others joined the fray before nominations closed.
The nomination was an elaborate and hard-fought battle, in part because whoever was nominated would likely be the next MP (the Liberals having held the seat since it was established in 1904.
The nomination convention was not open to all the party members but to representative delegates from different parts of the far-flung riding.
Not every party member attended the nomination vote but each part of the far-flung riding was allocated a delegate, one for each 20 votes that had been cast there in the last election for McIntyre and one for each ten who had voted for Anderson (who had run in the last election as an Independent) and now was competing in the Liberal nomination although at a dis-advantage.
As it happened, Anderson would not be in the running long - he was the first to be eliminated. and after nine rounds of voting, James Douglas was elected as the Liberal candidate at the Liberal nomination meeting held on Oct. 1.
He went on to win the seat by acclamation on Oct. 20.
In the 1908 election McIntyre had taken 3130 votes, Anderson 1034.
so delegate break-down was 157 for the former McIntyre voters and 103 for the former Anderson supporters.
The Edmonton Bulletin outlined this process and then said the delegate total was 253.
(I don't know why the math worked out that way)
But interesting that the Liberal party tried to be at least somewhat fair to Anderson, who had formerly run against the Liberal candidate.
Thus, the representative delegate spots were allocated in a fair and balanced way.
As well, the vote for the Liberal candidate was fair and balanced and in the end endorsed by a shout of unanimous support. (It is not stated whether strong-minded Rice Sheppard, who was defeated in the nomination battle, participated in this.)
The winner had to have majority of the vote, which was finally decided only in the eight vote when the field of candidate was thinned to just two.
Strathcona, at the time a separate city from Edmonton, was to have 24 delegates and these would be chosen at a meeting held by Strathcona Liberal Association, by Liberal members in good standing (with paid-up dues) at a meeting held in advance of the main nomination meeting. (Edmonton Bulletin, Sept. 22, 1909)
Nominees (nomination candidates) were:
James Douglas (listed as J.M. Douglas)
Dennis Twomey, Camrose
N.D. Mills, Strathcona
"E.H. Malcolm C. Kellam" (perhaps E.H. Malcolm of Killam?)
Rice Sheppard (of the United Farmers of Alberta and later to be Edmonton city councillor)
Joshua Fletcher, Ellerslie (of the United Farmers of Alberta)
A.L. Marks, Leduc (who later married two of Rice Sheppard's daughters (in succession))
J.G. Anderson, Angus Ridge
Dr. Robertson of Wetaskiwin
A.S. Rosenroll, Wetaskiwin.
W. Lang, Strathcona
Dr. Stevenson, Wetaskiwn
Charles Stuart, Sedgewick
Geo. P. Smith, Camrose
J.C. Wainwright, Strathcona
Turgeon
Lang, Stevenson, Stuart, Smith, Turgeon and Wainwright all withdrew from the contest leaving ten.
The Wetaskiwin delegation split when its chairman imposed a rule that only those delegates who had paid up their dues three days prior could vote. (a rule imposed on no other delegation)
A separate Wetaskiwin Liberal district association was formed in separate room and insisted on being the rightful possessor of Wetaskiwin's 13 delegate spots.
The old Wetaskiwin delegation though insisted on its right to the 13 spots.
Eventually it was decided that the old and the new association would each put forward six delegates and the thirteenth spot would be decided by chance.
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First count was performed. (The vote tallies are not recorded.)
Then Anderson (the former Independent candidate) was the first to be eliminated,
then Sheppard and Fletcher were dropped -- farmers not being a large part of Liberal delegates apparently.
Malcolm and Robertson were dropped next.
Mills and Rosenroll were dropped next.
Marks, whose vote tally was close to the leaders', was the last to be dropped.
Then the vote came down to just Douglas versus Twomey.
The first vote between these two candidates was disregarded as one person voted out of turn.
In the next count, Douglas took 86 votes to Twomey's 85. The election result was then made unanimous by a round of applause.
(more specific informaton on the voting can be found below.)
After that was settled, a resolution was passed that the members of the provincial government (MLAs) whose districts make up the federal riding of Strathcona should work to establish a monument or memorial for the late member.
The McIntyre fountain that today graces the McIntyre Park (83rd and 104th Street) is a later version of the memorial that was erected, it seems, by this joint effort of the MLAs. The first McIntyre fountain was demolished by an automobile in the 1950s.
Oct. 2, 1909 Saturday News, “the size of the late member’s majority [in the 1908 election] has led most people to the conclusion that it was in the Liberal [nomination] convention that the real fight for the riding would take place.”
Sheppard was described as having opposed Premier Rutherford in the past election and it was said that if he loses the nomination, he may run in any case.
It seems that in line with the general opinion, when Sheppard lost the nomination, he did not bother to run against the Liberal candidate. The winner of the Liberal nomination, James Douglas, was elected by acclamation.
Fletcher was put forward as something of a compromise candidate – Farmer-minded like Sheppard but without Sheppard’s baggage. (Saturday News, Oct. 2, 1909)
Localism played a role in the nomination
Marks was from Leduc. (Later he moved to Edmonton and became one of the city’s most politically-minded lawyers.)
Twomey was from Camrose
deRosenroll, a former MLA, and Robertson were from Wetaskiwin.
Douglas and Mills had the inside track being from “Strathcona City”, the largest population centre in the riding.
Sheppard had a farm on the outskirts of “Strathcona City”.
Nomination decided by multi-round voting to establish a majority winner.
Delegates cast votes nine times. Winner announced at 830
Voting began at 4 pm.
The four-hour voting process, likely repeated in other nomination conventions, led many to latch onto Instant-runoff Voting as a quicker method.
And only 15 years later, the Alberta government adopted IRV for the election of all MLAs outside the cities.
The vote count under IRV might have taken four hours in some districts, as it had taken to do the vote count for the 1909 Liberal nominaion, but each voter just had to vote once. So IRV was a more convenient method for voters.
Representative delegates
Out of possible 215 delegates, there were present or represented by proxy 174.
Final vote was 86 to 85, so it seems most of these 174 stayed right through all nine rounds of voting. (In some uses of the two-round vote, fewer voters vote in the second round than in the first round. In the 2017 French presidential election, 1.5M voters did not show up to vote in the second round of voting compared to the number who had voted in the first round. In Wetaskiwin that autumn day in 1909, almost all the delegates stayed through all the nine rounds of voting. One difference was that the voting was done in one day in 1909, while in 2017 in France the two rounds of voting were separated by two weeks of intense politicking.)
For the 1906 by-election not one delegate had come from the part of the riding east of Wetaskiwin, but since then a branch-line had been built east of Wetaskiwin and this time about a hundred delegates came from that part of the riding to attend the nomination convention.
Majority was 87. Never stated that a majority was the goal. As it happened, no candidate took a majority of the votes until the field was thinned to just two, when one or the other taking the majority was unavoidable.
Vote tallies
1st Round Twomey 34 Marks 32 Douglas 29 and seven others with fewer votes
2nd Round Twomey 37 Marks 33 Douglas 30 and six others with fewer votes
3rd Round Twomey 37 Marks 33 Douglas 29 and five others with fewer votes
4th Round Twomey 38 Marks 33 Douglas 32 and three others with fewer votes*
5th Round Twomey 41 Marks 40 Douglas 35 and two others with fewer votes
6th Round Twomey 51 Marks 43 Douglas 48 and one other with fewer votes
7th Round Twomey 70 Marks 51 Douglas 51 (thrown out due to irregularity)
8th Round Twomey 62 Marks 54 Douglas 57 total 173 votes
9th Round Twomey 85 Douglas 86 total 171 votes
*Malcolm and Robertson were tied with ten votes each so were both eliminated in the same round.
I would say Robertson should have been eliminated first as he had more first round votes than Malcolm.
What could have been
Three delegates did not stay around long enough for the ninth count. Interesting to think that if those three had not left, they might have tipped the balance in favour of Twomey. If Twomey was more leftist than Douglas and if he was elected in 1909 and the next general election as James Douglas was, then perhaps he would, like Edmonton MP Fank Oliver, have stayed out of the Conservative Robert Borden-led Unionist Government. James Douglas did win the 1909 by-election and the 1911 general election and did join Borden's Unionist government and then ran in 1921 under the Conservative label.
Such sell-out of his Liberal base was punished by Douglas losing his seat in 1921.
The Farmer movement had matured in the meantime, and it was a candidate running under the label of the United Farmers who won the seat. (Rice Sheppard who had been denied the nomination in 1909 ran for the Strathcona seat in 1921 under the Labour label - against James Douglas running under the Conservative label. But neither of those two won the seat. it was Daniel W. Warner, who farmed near Clover Bar, who won the seat for the UFA.)
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The coverage of Douglas's run for the 1909 nomination does not mention whether or not James Douglas was on Strathcona town council in 1902, so this mystery is still not cleared up.
Rek's book Municipal Elections in Edmonton says Robert Blyth Douglas, a brother of H.W.B. and James, served on the Strathcona School Board [but nothing is said about him being on town council]
Edmonton Bulletin (May 21, 1917) says Robert Blyth Douglas served on Str. Public School Board for seven years up to amalgamation [so 1905-1912]
Edmonton Bulletin does confirm part of that saying R.B. was elected to Str. School board on Dec. 10, 1907)
Edmonton Bulletin May 21, 1917 provides a thumbnail biography of Robert Blyth Douglas who was running for MLA in South Edmonton in the provincial election that year.
It says that he had previously served on the Strathcona Public School board. Likely if he had been on the town council, it would've been mentioned.
(In 1917, he lost to Conservative candidate H.H. Crawford, owner of the Crawford Block, just behind the Strathcona Hotel.)
So I still don't know which Douglas served on Town council in 1902.
could've been either Robert or James.
Likely it was James. He had such a full political life that perhaps it was not thought important to mention his election to a town council in his biographies. Strathcona was only a town then. Perhaps it was not thought important to include it in his biographies as he had served as member of a city council and than as an MP.
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1903 Town Council
1904 Town Council
1905 Town Council election Dec. 1904
Arthur Davies elected mayor.
Councillors: Richards re-elected
Cowles elected
James Douglas elected
Carmichael, Green and Pollard continuing members. (OSSER, p. 216)
Edmonton Bulletin Oct. 25, 1905 lists Douglas, Pollard, Richards, Cowles and Carmichael.
All of these were prominent businessmen in the community, which was just on the verge of becoming a city.
1906 town council election Dec. 1905
William Sheppard elected mayor.
Councillors: Elliot, McFarland, McKenzie elected this year
Richards, Cowles, James Douglas were continuing members
Edmonton Bulletin Feb. 3, 1906 many prominent Strathcona businessmen participated in an Alberta excursion to Winnipeg. Mayor J.J. McKenzie [perhaps this is mistake] and J.J. Pollard were among those who participated. (Saturday News, Feb. 3, 1906)
1907 Council election held Dec. 10, 1906
N.D. Mills elected mayor
Councillors: Crawford, Rankin and Hulbert (of Hulbert Bock fame) elected
Elliot, McFarland, McKenzie were continuing members (OSSER, p. 224)
Crawford later was elected MLA for the constituency of Edmonton-South (Strathcona) .
1907 Strathcona became City
1908 Council election held Dec. 10, 1907
(first election in the new city of Strathcona
Total ballots cast: about 600
Mayor: N.D. Mills (re-elected) won seat with 397, 159 more votes than his opponent Arthur Davies
Councillors:
two councillors elected in each ward, Block Voting
(Plural voting is shown by high vote counts. Only about 150 or 200 voters were voting in each ward but vote totals were much larger.)
Ward 1 W.F. Cameron (124) V.T. Richards (177) unsuccessful T.P. Malone (103)
Ward 2 J.G. Tipton (186) S.H. Somersall (156)
unsucc. Dr. Collison (137) R. McKernan (135)
Ward 3 G.H. Elliot (sitting alderman) (110), A.G. Baalim (105) unsuccessful John Carmichael (93)
Ward 4 O. Bush, W.H. Shepard [sic] (should be Sheppard) (elected by acclamation)
(from 1908 Henderson Directory (#362.3, p. 267); voting tallies from Edmonton Bulletin, Dec. 10, 1907)
1909
Mayor:
Councillors:
1910
Mayor:
Councillors:
1911
Mayor:
Councillors:
The Cities of Strathcona and Edmonton amalgamated in 1912.
(Although Strathcona became part of Edmonton, its history before amalgamation is not as well preserved as its history after amalgamation. In fact, Edmonton marked Strathcona's hundredth anniversary in 2012, which was really a hundred years after its actual end as a existing city, not its start.
1999 was the hundredth anniversary of Strathcona becoming a town, and 2007 was the hundredth anniversary of Strathcona becoming a city, but these milestones were not honoured at all, only the date when Strathcona joined Edmonton.)
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