page_title: Premiership of John Edward Brownlee
section_title: Collapse of agricultural prices
hierarchical_section_title: Premiership of John Edward Brownlee / Depression and scandal (1930–34) / Collapse of agricultural prices
caption_attribution_description: English: Dust storm at Harry Thomson's farm near Okotoks, Alberta, 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: In the 1920s and 1930s, Alberta's economy was heavily reliant on wheat, and in 1930 the price of wheat began to fall drastically.  From its peak of $1.78 per bushel in summer 1929, by February 1930 it had fallen to $1.07 because of world oversupply and dumping by the Soviet Union and Argentina.  By March it had reached $1.00, a level at which most Alberta wheat farmers could not profit.  By the fall, it had had fallen below $0.60 and by the end of the year to $0.45.  Other agricultural products, especially cattle, poultry, and eggs, saw similar or greater price decreases.
  In February 1930 Brownlee advocated a federally guaranteed minimum price to farmers of $0.70 per bushel of wheat.  In November he asked new Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, with whom he had practiced law in Calgary nearly twenty years previous, to stabilize wheat "at some reasonable price".  Bennett replied that price decreases were inevitable in the face of a global oversupply of 400 million bushels.  Brownlee also sought assistance from Bennett in dealing with banks' increasing reluctance to lend money to farmers, many of whom would not be able to purchase seed for the 1931 crop without loans.  Brownlee himself offered such farmers limited assistance, but only quietly and only in the last resort; he was concerned that a well-publicized and widespread program of loan guarantees would induce banks to lend money under predatory terms, knowing that if the farmers could not make the repayments the province would.  When he reluctantly agreed to guarantee banks' loans to farmers for binder twine, he insisted that these guarantees be kept secret to discourage farmers from shifting loans that they could pay off themselves to the provincial government.  To address the problem of farmers being forced to pledge one third of their crop as security on loans, he threatened to implement legislation capping such crop share guarantees at one quarter.  As he had hoped, this threat enhanced lenders' willingness to negotiate with his government for less radical solutions; these eventually included caps that applied only in low yield areas of the province and an agreement to give three to four weeks notice before initiating foreclosures and to initiate them only where farmers' payments did not even cover interest.  Despite these minor successes, Brownlee's strategy of negotiation and relying on the reasonableness of all parties rather than imposing strong legislation left his popularity among farmers diminished.  It was not enhanced when he supported unpopular federal legislation requiring farmers to plant less wheat, part of an international agreement aimed at addressing worldwide oversupply.
  A second consequence of collapsing wheat prices was the threat they posed to the Alberta Wheat Pool (AWP).  Falling prices and the attendant tightened credit conditions led the Pool, along with its counterparts in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to seek help from its provincial government in 1930.  Brownlee guaranteed loans to the Pool, but told the legislature that he did not expect this guarantee to prove necessary, since the large portions of the 1929 crop already sold at higher prices would provide sufficient cushioning unless wheat prices fell "to a level never reached on Canadian markets".  In October 1930, with the Pool receiving a price for its wheat well below the $1.00 per bushel that it guaranteed its farmers, the banks refused to lend more money unless the Pool appointed to its Central Selling Agency (CSA) a general manager acceptable to the banks.  Brownlee and Premiers John Bracken of Manitoba and James Thomas Milton Anderson of Saskatchewan met in Ottawa with acting Prime Minister Sir George Perley, seeking direct federal aid to the Pools.  The premiers' pleas rejected, CSA President Alexander James McPhail offered the banks the names of two possible general managers.  The first was John McFarland, former president of the Alberta Pacific Grain Company.  The second was Brownlee.  The banks chose McFarland.  Brownlee too imposed conditions on the AWP as a condition of provincial
caption: Conditions during the "Dirty Thirties" sometimes gave rise to dust storms, such as this July 1933 storm near Okotoks.
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