Remember that time Ontario, the most
British part of Canada, the home of the United Empire Loyalists and the centre of the Canadian chapter of the Orange Order, elected a worker-peasant government?
To be fair, it was 1919. World War I had made itself felt across Canada, as a generation of boys and men marched to war in the name of the British Empire and either died in Flanders fields or came home to find it had all been for very little. Ontario might not itself have felt the war's ravages, but the Ontarians had, and when the provincial assembly expired in October 1919, they were baying for blood.
The incumbent Conservative government was in its fourth term, and had not made itself popular as a wartime administration. Nonetheless, Premier William Hearst (yes, really) was reasonably confident in his chances of re-election. Having passed women's suffrage in 1917, Hearst's government now went to the polls on what had been the other major issue dividing the province - prohibition. A referendum on whether to prohibit alcoholic beverages was scheduled to take place alongside the election, and while the government's positive line carried the day, the voters clearly didn't translate this to backing the Conservatives.
The opposition Liberals made small gains, but the breakout winner of the election were the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO - yes, really), who had no organised province-wide campaign and only two incumbent members who'd won their seats in by-elections. Its General Secretary, James J. Morrison, hoped that the organisation would win enough seats to hold the balance of power, backing whichever side would give a better deal to farmers. He had absolutely no notion of forming a government, which was a bit awkward as the UFO swept rural Ontario and became the largest party in the new legislature.
The UFO did not, however, have a majority. For that, they needed the support of the (Independent) Labour Party, who had won eleven seats and now actually held the balance of power (for irony purposes one hopes this was after having hoped to form the government, but I somewhat doubt that). Morrison did not think the farmer and labour interests were compatible, and refused to entertain a coalition with Labour. Instead, the job went to Ernest C. Drury, a former minister in the Liberal government of the 1880s. Drury had jumped ship to the UFO when it was founded, but was not an MLA, so a by-election had to be held in Halton County to get him into the assembly.
Drury's government was a full Farmer-Labour coalition, supported by the "Soldier" MLA in Riverdale and a rogue Liberal in Grey North. It would create the earliest skeleton of Ontario's welfare state, creating provincial benefit systems for widows and orphans as well as UFO planks like a provincial savings bank and rural electrification. Drury was, however, adamant that it be seen as a government for all Ontarians, and it was perhaps to this end that he called on the opposition to provide a Speaker in the form of Liberal MLA Nelson Parliament (yes,
really).
Weirdly, the broad-based policies of the Drury government brought it into conflict with the UFO organisation and James J. Morrison, who publicly withdrew his support for the government in 1923. That year, Drury had the assembly dissolved after failing to get STV through it, and the resulting election saw the Tories returned to power.
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