page_title: John Edward Brownlee
section_title: UGG President
hierarchical_section_title: John Edward Brownlee / Life after politics / UGG President
caption_attribution_description: English: Printing department employees, United Grain Growers (Western Division), Calgary, Alberta.
context_page_description: John Edward Brownlee, QC was the fifth Premier of Alberta, Canada, serving from 1925 until 1934. Born in Port Ryerse, Ontario, he studied history and political science at the University of Toronto's Victoria College before moving west to Calgary to become a lawyer. His clients included the United Farmers of Alberta; through his connection with that lobby group, he was involved in founding the United Grain Growers.
  After the UFA entered electoral politics and won the 1921 election, new premier Herbert Greenfield asked Brownlee to serve as his attorney-general. Brownlee agreed and was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta in a by-election in the riding of Ponoka. As attorney-general, he was an important member of Greenfield's government. He was closely involved in its most important activities, including efforts to better the lot of farmers living in Alberta's drought-ridden south, divest itself of money-losing railways, and win jurisdiction over natural resources from the federal government. When a group of UFA backbenchers grew frustrated with Greenfield's weak leadership, they asked Brownlee to replace him. Brownlee eventually agreed, and became premier in 1925.
context_section_description: In the mid-1940s, UGG President and General Manager R. S. Law fell ill, and in February 1947, Brownlee was named the UGG's Acting General Manager.  On January 1, 1948, he became full General Manager.  In spring 1948 Law stepped down completely, and on May 1 Brownlee succeeded him as President and General Manager.
  In this capacity, he had offices in Calgary and Winnipeg.  He worked constantly, often arriving at work on a Monday with a briefcase full of dictation machine recordings for secretaries to transcribe.  Foster says that Brownlee was known by his staff as "a man whose life was his work, who lived in his briefcase, and whose only recreation seemed to be changing from one job to another".
  He turned this work ethic to expanding the company, building new grain elevators and purchasing existing ones.  At the same time, he undertook a study of the operating costs and volume of each of the UGG's delivery points.  He found that roughly a dozen elevators were losing money, with climbing costs threatening to increase this number.  Brownlee tried to reach accommodations with the UGG's competitors to divide among them centres too small to support more than one elevator, and achieved some success, especially with the Alberta Wheat Pool.  At the same time, Brownlee increased the UGG's presence in larger centres, especially Regina, Brandon, and Winnipeg.
  Brownlee remained intimately involved in the grain industry even outside the UGG, in part through his position on the Canadian Federation of Agriculture executive.  In this capacity, he found himself in the middle of a controversy over the British Wheat Agreement (BWA).  The BWA was an agreement to sell wheat to British clients at a fixed price over a four-year period.  The price was to be adjusted during the following two years, "having regard to" world wheat prices.  During the first four years, world wheat prices were continually above the price stipulated in the agreement, breeding resentment towards the British, especially since they sold much of this fixed price wheat for a large profit in European markets.  This was exacerbated when the British refused to adjust the price upwards for the last two years, on the grounds that there was nothing in the agreement to compel them to do so.  The result was considerable ill will and a loss by grain farmers of an estimated $350 million.  The federal government, which had negotiated the agreement, offered to supplement the British payments by $65 million, a sum large enough to raise the ire of eastern Canadians but too small to placate western farmers.  Brownlee, who had opposed the agreement, authorized a purchase of advertising across the country pointing out that the government fixed the domestic price of wheat at $0.77 per bushel while the world price reached as high as $2.18.  In Brownlee's view, the $65 million payment by the government paled in comparison to the benefit to consumers of the federal policy.  Subsequent international agreements, for which Brownlee acted as an advisor to the Canadian delegation, resulted in more favourable terms for farmers.  Brownlee's continued status as one of the grain industry's leading figures was also exhibited by his involvement in government relations.  He appeared before the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture to oppose a system of allocating box cars to each grain elevator by formula, favouring instead a system whereby the Canadian Wheat Board retained the flexibility to assign them as it saw fit.  In his September 1960 submission to the Royal Commission on Transportation, In Defense of the Crow's Nest Pass Rates, he rejected the railways' calls to deregulate the rates they charged for the shipment of grain.
  Brownlee's presidency coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Grain Growers Grain Company, one of the UGG's founding organizations.  In celebration of the event, Brownlee travelled around the country speaking to UGG outlets.  He also oversaw the publication, and wrote much, of The First Fifty Years, a history of the UGG to that point.  In this capacity
caption: Calgary employees of the UGG's printing division, 1946
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