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Tom Monto

William Wallace on electoral reform (1927)

Updated: May 22, 2021

William Wallace was a British scientist who came to Alberta in 1907 for health reasons - back when Alberta was a sort of health spa - who took up school teaching north of Edmonton.


He spent much time pondering social issues and scribbled his thoughts and sent them to government official in Edmonton. They are preserved at the Provincial Archives.


"To meet efficiently the political requirements of the day, the political system of a country demands a dual system of electoral organization - in Neighbourhood groups and Occupational groups, simultaneously.

Neighbourhood groups - to take care of the local and general interests of the people as consumers;

Occupational groups - to extend to all questions arising out of the occupational interests of the people as producers.


There should be two co-ordinate elective Houses of Representatives corresponding respectively to the two types of electoral organization, general and functional. It does not follow that locally autonomous subdivisions should also be organized in this dual fashion irrespective of local conditions.


In Alberta, the bulk of the population and almost all the territory covered, are devoted to a single occupation, farming. It would be sufficient to maintain a single House and uselessly extravagant to maintain two.


But the representation in the Alberta Legislature would have to be based on an occupational organization of the community, for whereas the composition of such a legislature would be sufficiently well distributed to take care of local questions with reasonable efficiency, a legislature returned on a local basis representing Neighbourhood groups would be entirely incompetent to take care of occupational interests. The reason why the Neighbourhood group has prevailed so long in politics is obvious. Until the Industrial Revolution gave birth to Big Business, men not only lived as individuals - they also worked as individuals, masters as well as men.


The only material that could have produced an occupational group was the agricultural community, but the farmers were so landlord-ridden that they dared not organize.


In these latter days (the 1920s), however, while people still live as individuals, they work in groups possessing greater or less solidarity, and serious problems have arisen out of the more complex relations of industrial life that only be solved through the intensive activity of organized occupational groups.


To continue to ignore the specific appeal of the occupational group, as being the expert exponent of vital interests, is surely a policy of confusion."

(William Wallace, of Campsie, April 10, 1927)


Thanks for reading.

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