page_title: United Farmers of Ontario
section_title: End of the movement (1927-1940)
hierarchical_section_title: United Farmers of Ontario / History / End of the movement (1927-1940)
caption_attribution_description: Farquhar Oliver leaning on his desk
context_page_description: The United Farmers of Ontario was an agrarian and populist provincial political party in Ontario, Canada. It was the Ontario provincial branch of the United Farmers movement of the early part of the 20th century.
context_section_description: Raney resigned from the legislature the next year in order to accept an appointment to the Supreme Court of Ontario and 72-year-old John Giles Lethbridge was chosen as the new leader of the Progressives. In the 1929 election, only five Progressives, one Labour and one UFO MLA won re-election. Lethbridge, like Raney in the previous election, campaigned largely on the issue of prohibition. After Lethbridge lost his seat in the 1929 election Harry Nixon, who had served as Provincial Secretary in Drury's government, became the leader of the remaining Progressives. In the early 1930s, Nixon and the Progressives agreed to an alliance with former UFO activist Mitchell Hepburn who, in 1930, became leader of the Liberal Party. A group of four Liberal-Progressive MLAs, led by Nixon, were elected in the 1934 election, who joined Hepburn to form a government and were eventually absorbed into the Liberal Party. (see Liberal-Progressives (Ontario) for more information)
  In 1932, leading UFO member Agnes Macphail (originally elected to the Progressive Party) encouraged the UFO to affiliate with Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) when it was formed. It did so, and MacPhail became the first Chairman of the Ontario CCF in 1932, but the UFO disaffiliated from the CCF in 1934 due to allegations of communist influence in the party. The UFO nominated candidates, incumbent MLA Farquhar Oliver and former MLA Leslie Oke, accordingly ran as UFO candidates in the 1934 provincial election rather than as CCFers. The UFO, like United Farmers groups in the provinces of western Canada, decided to withdraw entirely from electoral politics though Oliver and Macphail continued to run under the UFO banner until 1940. Many United Farmers joined the CCF as individuals. The UFO's newspaper, The Farmer's Sun, was sold to Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt and became an organ for the League for Social Reconstruction and the Ontario CCF.
  In the 1935 federal election, the UFO's provincial executive voted to endorse the new Reconstruction Party of Canada formed by H.H. Stevens, however many local UFO groups backed the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and UFO MP Agnes MacPhail continued to work with the CCF on an informal basis. Other UFOers backed the Liberals. The Reconstruction Party won 11% of the vote in Ontario in the 1935 federal election, more than the CCF, but failed to win a seat in the province and only won one seat nationally.
  In 1936, the UFO, the United Farmers’ Co-operative Ltd., and various growers and other agricultural organizations formed the Ontario Chamber of Agriculture which, in 1940, became the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), a non-partisan lobbying and marketing organization for farmers. In 1943, the UFO ceased to exist as a formal organization and its remnants were absorbed by the OFA. In 1948 the United Farmers' Co-operative became the United Co-operatives of Ontario and remains one of the largest farmer-owned co-operatives in Canada.
  In 1940, Oliver, the last remaining UFO member of the Legislature and a supporter of the Hepburn government since 1934, joined the Hepburn cabinet and became a Liberal. MacPhail lost her seat as the last United Farmers MP in the House of Commons in the 1940 election. She turned to provincial politics and won election to the Ontario Legislature as a candidate of the CCF in the 1943 provincial election while Oliver became Liberal Party leader in 1945.
caption: Farquhar Oliver, last UFO MLA in the provincial legislature.
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