Alberta and Great Waterways Railway scandal information
1910 political scandal in Alberta, Canada
Alexander Cameron Rutherford was a popular premier who enjoyed a sizeable majority before the scandal broke.
The Alberta and Great Waterways Railway Scandal was a political scandal in Alberta, Canada in 1910, which forced the resignation of Liberal premier Alexander Cameron Rutherford. Rutherford and his government were accused of giving loan guarantees to private interests for the construction of the Alberta and Great Waterways (A&GW) Railway that substantially exceeded the cost of construction, and which paid interest considerably above the market rate. They were also accused of exercising insufficient oversight over the railway's operations.
The scandal split the Liberal Party: Rutherford's Minister of Public Works, William Henry Cushing, resigned from the government and publicly attacked its railway policy, and a large portion of the Liberal caucus voted to defeat the government in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. The government survived all of these votes. Rutherford largely placated the legislature by appointing a royal commission to investigate the affair, but pressure from Lieutenant-Governor George Bulyea and unrest within his own caucus forced Rutherford's resignation and his replacement by Arthur Sifton.
The royal commission gave its report months after Rutherford resigned. The majority on the commission did not find Rutherford or his cabinet guilty of any wrongdoing, but criticized them for poor judgment, both in relation to the loan guarantees and in relation to the exemptions the A&GW received from provincial legislation. A minority report was more sympathetic, and declared the allegations against them "disproved".
James Cornwall, a Liberal backbencher who supported Rutherford, fared somewhat worse: his personal financial involvement in the railway gave rise to "suspicious circumstances", but he too was not proven guilty of any wrongdoing.
Besides provoking Rutherford's resignation, the scandal opened rifts in the Liberal Party that took years to heal. Sifton eventually smoothed over most of these divisions, but was frustrated in his railway policy by legal defeats. He ultimately adopted a similar policy to Rutherford's, and the A&GW was eventually built by private interests using the money raised from provincial loan guarantees. Sifton's Liberals went on to be re-elected in 1913 and 1917.
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