Peter Lougheed, ‘blue-eyed sheik,’ dies
Alberta premier from 1971 to 1985
He was the face of Alberta politics for a generation.
Peter Lougheed, who died Thursday at the age of 84, served as Alberta’s premier from 1971 to 1985, beginning a Conservative dynasty that continues to this day in the land of the oilsands.
Perhaps best known for his battles with Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau over the controversial National Energy Program, the late premier is credited with decisions that fundamentally changed both the outlook and prospects for the province. He was critical to developing the oilsands industry. He was also known for protecting individual freedoms with his initial piece of legislation, the Alberta Bill of Rights. He overhauled public education and strengthened rural Alberta.
“He moved us from being, in the early 1960s, a small, remote, average bunch of people, to a respected powerhouse in Confederation,” Lou Hyndman, who was elected to the legislature with Lougheed in 1967, once told the Calgary Herald.
“He did that in everything from human rights to the oilsands. He had an ability to get Albertans to believe in themselves that no one had ever shown before.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Lougheed “a truly great man.”
“Peter Lougheed was quite simply one of the most remarkable Canadians of his generation,” said Harper. “Today we mourn the loss of an exceptional leader, a true Canadian and a trail blazing Albertan. And yet his legacy will live on in the institutions that he pioneered which continue to generate benefits for the people of Alberta and the people of Canada.”
A provincial park and a Calgary hospital both bear his name. He was a companion of the Order of Canada.
His other legacies include: Fish Creek Park, Syncrude, and an enviable network of rural highways, hospitals and airports.
But he might best be remembered for his famous battle with Ottawa over energy and the constitution. The province’s modern oil wealth, it’s been argued, is a direct benefit of Lougheed’s struggles to keep resource ownership in provincial hands.
His stand also earned him the nickname the “blue-eyed sheik.”
Still, Lougheed once said his worst day in politics came in 1981 when his government decided to cut oil production in response to the National Energy Program, which is despised to this day in Alberta.
“As a Canadian, that was the hardest day policy-wise of my 14 years,” he said. “It really was confrontational. I didn’t enjoy that.”
Edgar Peter Lougheed was born in Calgary on July 26, 1928.
Peter’s grandfather was Sir James A. Lougheed, a lawyer who arrived in Calgary from Toronto in 1883. He later became Calgary’s first senator
“He moved us from being a small, remote average bunch of people.” LOU HYNDMAN, FORMER ALBERTA MLA
at age 35 while building a small real estate empire in Calgary.
On the heels of the senior Lougheed’s death came a decline in the family’s personal fortunes. His second son, Edgar, Peter’s father, lost the family home during the Depression and Peter witnessed the selling off of city-expropriated heirlooms for a fraction of their worth.
Family members have said that it was this experience that would later push him as premier to try to make the province as diverse and as strong as possible.
First elected in 1935, the Social Credit government at that time was beginning to look its age. Nationally, Alberta was viewed as insular, rural and a bit player on the federal stage.
Lougheed, however, saw Al- berta as a province with great potential in nearly every respect.
In 1965, Lougheed captured the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives, a party without a single seat in the legislature. Soon, he was the MLA for Calgary-West. And, in 1971, he changed the face of Alberta politics.
Using its famous campaign slogan — NOW — the PCs told Albertans it was time to consider a new alternative.
“The first major goal was to get Alberta out of being a provincial backwater and into the mainstream of Canadian life,” Lougheed said in 1996. “Not just in political terms, but that our citizens felt that was in everything they did — whether it was professions, in sports, in the arts — that we were players in what was going on in the country.”
Albertans embraced the message, electing 49 PCs out 75 seats. The party hasn’t relinquished power since.
His government created the Heritage Savings Trust Fund in 1976, a groundbreaking scheme to sock away some of the province’s energy wealth to the benefit of Albertans.
The fund was to be Alberta’s insurance against rainy days.
When the deluge came it lasted from the mid-1980s through the late-1990s.
The fund proved critical when Lougheed moved to shield Albertans from a portion of mortgage interest rates, which soared as high as 20 per cent.
In May, Lougheed received national recognition as Canada’s best premier of the past 40 years in a survey by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.