page_title: Premiership of John Edward Brownlee
section_title: Sexual sterilization
hierarchical_section_title: Premiership of John Edward Brownlee / Road to prosperity (1925–29) / Sexual sterilization
caption_attribution_description: English: Long-time leader of the Alberta farmers movement, Henry Wise Wood.
context_page_description: John Edward Brownlee was Premier of Alberta, Canada, from 1925 to 1934 as leader of the United Farmers of Alberta caucus in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. After a number of early successes, his popularity and his government's suffered from the hardships of the Great Depression. In 1934, he was embroiled in a sex scandal when a family friend sued him for seduction. Though Brownlee denied the events she alleged, when the jury found in her favour he announced his resignation as premier.
  Brownlee became premier on November 23, 1925, when, at the request of the UFA caucus, he took over from the indecisive Herbert Greenfield, in whose cabinet he had served as attorney-general. After winning the 1926 election for the UFA, Brownlee achieved a number of successes. In 1929 he signed an agreement with the federal government that transferred control of Alberta's natural resources to its provincial government, which had been a priority of his three immediate predecessors as premier. In 1928 he divested the government of the money-losing railways it had acquired after the syndicates that founded them went out of business, by selling them to Canadian Pacific and Canadian National.
context_section_description: The 1920s Progressive movement of which the Brownlee government was a part advocated eugenics, including the sexual sterilization of so-called "mental defectives" to improve the genetic quality of the human race.  First-wave feminists such as Nellie McClung made public appeals to "save" mentally retarded girls from pregnancy.  The medical profession suggested that many inmates of insane asylums could be safely released but for the concern that they would procreate.  In 1928, the Brownlee government introduced the Sexual Sterilization Act, allowing a Board of Examination—jointly nominated by the University of Alberta Senate and the College of Physicians—to mandate the sterilization of any psychiatric patient if it was "unanimously of the opinion that the patient might be safely discharged if the danger of procreation with its attendant risk of multiplication of the evil by transmission of the disability to progeny were eliminated".  Permission of the patient was nominally required, but permission of the nearest relative could be substituted in cases where the board considered the patient not mentally competent.
  The Liberals and Conservatives opposed the bill, as did two of the five Labour members.  Nor were the UFA members unanimous in the legislation's support: Maurice Conner abstained, and thirteen others—including Archibald Matheson, who had made early attempts to have the bill die on the order paper—were absent for the final vote.  Even so, the bill passed by a vote of 31 to 11.  The next day, posters appeared along Jasper Avenue advocating the sterilization of George Hoadley, Brownlee's Minister of Health and the bill's sponsor.
caption: Henry Wise Wood was an important ally of Brownlee's in the UFA.
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