page_title: Premiership of John Edward Brownlee
section_title: Royal commission
hierarchical_section_title: Premiership of John Edward Brownlee / Depression and scandal (1930–34) / Royal commission
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Richard Bedford Bennett, 1st Viscount Bennett, the eleventh Prime Minister of Canada Français&#160;: Photo de Richard Bedford Bennett, 1er vicomte Bennett, le 11e premier ministre du Canada
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: While Brownlee was viewed as an orthodox conservative in his approach to economic matters  within Alberta, elsewhere in Canada he was still regarded as a leader of the country's radical farmer movement.  Accordingly, when Bennett struck a royal commission to examine the government's role in economic and monetary management, he asked Brownlee to serve on it as a representative of Western and unorthodox views.  Though he was concerned that the commission's other two Canadian members, Beaudry Leman and William Thomas White, were involved in the banking industry, Brownlee agreed to the appointment.  He was formally appointed with the rest of the members July 31, 1933, and the commission began its work in Ottawa on August 8.
  The royal commission conducted hearings across the country.  In Victoria, Brownlee questioned witnesses on how poverty among prairie farmers was hurting British Columbia's lumber and salmon packing industries.  In Calgary he drew testimony from farmers that farming conditions were excellent—in contrast with the wide belief in eastern Canada that western farmers' troubles were caused by drought and land unsuited for agriculture—and that the problem was "not due to Acts of God but to Acts of Man".
  The UFA's submission, presented in Calgary by Gardiner, emphasized these points and accused the banks of charging predatory interest rates.  It called on the commission to recommend a government-owned central bank and controls on interest, and concluded that "the monetary system has failed".  Brownlee himself wrote the Alberta government's submission, though it was presented at the commission's Edmonton hearings by Acting Premier George Hoadley.  It echoed the UFA's points about interest rates and the importance of a government-owned central bank, and accused the banks of treating the west unequally to the east.  The commission concluded its hearings in Ottawa in September, where representatives of the banks testified.  Brownlee criticized them for "discounting", a practice whereby banks charged higher de facto interest rates than the legal maximum by requiring loan recipients to consent to having a portion of their loan withheld.
  The commission's report, issued September 29, recommended the establishment of a central bank and an inquiry on the availability of credit to farmers.  Brownlee supported both recommendations, and attached a minority report calling for banks to end their disparate treatment of eastern and western debtors, urging that a statutory maximum interest rate be maintained and possibly lowered, and recommending that the proposed central bank be entirely government owned and controlled.  This last recommendation came to pass in 1938, when the Bank of Canada, originally controlled by a mix of public and private interests, was reorganized as a federal Crown corporation.
caption: Brownlee was appointed to the royal commission by his old principal R. B. Bennett.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "CPARCHIVEPHOTO PUBLIC  NO ARCHIVES Candian Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett is shown in an undated file photo. What started as a project for a county fair now has a home-schooled New Brunswick teen talking with MP's and the family of a former prime minister to erect a statue in honour of R.B. Bennett on Parliament Hill. THE CANADIAN PRESS/National Archives of Canada"}