Former Alberta Premier Lougheed dies

[Phantasee]

Peter Lougheed, Mr. Alberta, dies, age 84

Peter Lougheed was Mr. Alberta.

Nobody was more successful as a politician, more tenacious in defence of the province or more visionary in industrializing and managing Alberta’s resources and potential. Canny, determined and cosmopolitan, he modernized an insular province and made it a player on the national political stage and in the global oil economy.

A Red Tory, he led a socially conservative electorate through boom and bust, and created a political and social legacy that transcended politics. Earlier this year, Policy Options magazine voted him the best Canadian premier of the past 40 years.
He died Thursday in Calgary. He was 84. Funeral arrangements are pending.

A year ago, he spoke with The Globe about his political legacy as Progressive Conservative premier from 1971 to 1985. He saw it in four parts. “First of all, putting a party from scratch together. We were facing Ernest Manning and Social Credit and putting a party together, finding candidates, getting support, selling memberships, raising money, developing constituency associations … that was all really hard, but challenging work between 1965 and 1971.”

The second achievement was the “positive” way he and the party governed the province during good times and bad. “Our sense was that the people of Alberta, from ’71 right through to ’85, wanted us to be an activist government,” he said. “That starts out with the fact that Alberta owns the resources. We’re not just the manager of the resources, we’re the owner.” That crucial fact brought Lougheed into conflict with prime minister Pierre Trudeau in the early 1980s over royalty rates under the stringent terms of the National Energy Policy.

“We were very fortunate that it [the development of the energy industry] was tied with the substantial increase in the price of oil, and that brought us into developing our revenues in terms of having surpluses,” he said. And that led to the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, which he created in 1976 as a way of putting money aside during boom times for the downturn that would inevitably follow. But therein also lay one of his disappointments.

The premiers who had followed him, Don Getty and especially Ralph Klein, decided not to keep investing in the Heritage Fund. “Mr. Klein thought it was Mr. Lougheed’s deal – the Heritage Fund – so he was going to develop a Sustainability Fund. He was the premier at the time, he made that decision. I was disappointed because we felt the public of Alberta were [and are] very supportive of the Heritage Savings Trust Fund and they feel it’s theirs. They sense and know it’s ... not just for the current generation, but for their children and their grandchildren. And that support has been amazingly strong over all these 40 years.”

Finally, Lougheed acknowledged his activist role in the federal-provincial battles in the 1970s and 1980s over repatriating the Constitution and negotiating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “Of all the things we did, I think the most important one was that we succeeded with regard to the Constitution in making sure that Trudeau’s efforts to make it into a unitary state, federally dominated, did not succeed. We ended up with a Constitution where Alberta played a leading role in bringing together eight provinces and ending up with a Constitution that balanced and maintained us as a federal state and maintained the position with regard to the ownership of resources by the provinces. In the matters that we accomplished, that to me was No. 1 in terms of what I look back on.”

Another huge part of his legacy is the mentoring of younger politicians, including Alison Redford, the current Premier of Alberta. She’s been learning from his example and following his advice since she was 16 and he was leader of the party. “I was privileged enough as the president of the youth executive to sit in meetings with him every two months,” she said in an interview during the provincial election campaign earlier this year. “I learned a lot from him and one of the things I learned was you set that course and you put the planning in place and then you build on that and manage it because that is what Albertans trust and what the voters trust.”

Edgar Peter Lougheed was born in Calgary on July 26, 1928, into a distinguished Alberta family that had fallen on straitened circumstances. His grandfather, Sir James Alexander Lougheed, was a lawyer and a federal politician. A successful businessman, a law partner of future prime minister R.B. Bennett, and a Conservative senator in the government of Sir Robert Borden, he made a sizable fortune before he died in 1925. Much of it vaporized during the Depression, so young Peter inherited an impressive political pedigree and a celebrated name, but grew up in poverty, moving with his parents, Edgar Donald Lougheed and his mother, Edna Alexandria Bauld, from one rented place to another.

He went to local schools in Calgary, finishing high school at Central Collegiate Institute. That’s where he whetted his political appetites, by proposing the formation of a students’ union and serving as its first president. Although slight of build and small of stature, Lougheed was quick of mind and movement and a natural athlete, especially on the football field. After Central Collegiate, he went to the University of Alberta, earning both an undergraduate and a law degree by 1952. At university, he played football for the Golden Bears and as a pro for the Edmonton Eskimos, as well as editing the sports section of the campus newspaper and serving as president of the student union from 1951-1952.

Even as a young man, Lougheed was a generalist who wanted to widen his business horizons and acquire a variety of experience before settling down in Alberta. First stop was acquiring a Harvard MBA. He and his bride, Jeanne Rogers, moved to Boston after their 1952 marriage. Before graduating in 1954, Lougheed spent one summer working with Gulf Oil in Tulsa Okla., learning first hand the boom and bust cycle that is so often a part of the oil patch – an experience that he remembered later in his political career.

Believing that a successful politician needed to get his feet wet in business and law first, he took a job as a junior lawyer with a Calgary construction firm, Mannix Corporation. Four years later, he was a vice-president. He left Mannix in 1962 to open a law practice as a launching pad for a political career. At the time, Alberta regularly sent Progressive Conservatives to Ottawa. But at home, the province voted solidly for the Social Credit Party, first under William (Bible Bill) Aberhart, and after Aberhart’s death in 1943, Ernest Manning. The party was so popular that it won 60 of the 63 seats in the legislature in the 1963 election.

Undeterred, Lougheed believed it was time for the parochial province to interact more forcibly with the rest of the country and that he was the man to make it happen. Milton (Milt) Harradence stepped down as leader in 1964, Lougheed won the leadership of the seatless party the following year and declared that before the party could provide an opposition, it had to be a credible alternative. “I want to do my homework before I start talking about issues and solutions,” he told supporters. “I plan to meet people throughout Alberta to listen to their problems and uncover their needs.” It was the same advice he gave Redford 47 years later when she was facing her first provincial election as leader of the party.

In the 1967 election, the party fielded candidates in every riding; six were elected, including Lougheed in Calgary West, a seat he held for the next 19 years. As leader of the official opposition, Lougheed was in a powerful position to put forward his own policies and ideas, in contrast to the largely spent political drive of the Socreds. Through by-elections and defections, the PC caucus slowly increased its numbers to 10 and began grooming itself for leadership: in the 1970 spring session, the party introduced more than 20 bills.

When Harry Strom, the man who had succeeded Manning as leader in 1968, called an election for August, 1971, Lougheed was ready. Using the snappy one word slogan NOW! combined with his own cosmopolitan image, he routed the Socreds, especially in urban ridings, by taking every seat in Edmonton and all but five in Calgary. The PC party, which had been shut out of the legislature only eight years earlier, formed the government with a majority of 49 seats to 25 for the Socreds and one for the NDP.

Lougheed became premier at the beginning of a decade long development boom, which netted him an even stronger mandate in the 1975 election, followed by two more landslide victories in 1979 and 1982, when his party was returned in 75 of 79 ridings. Having never forgotten the boom-bust cycle he observed in Oklahoma as an MBA student, he inaugurated Alberta’s rainy-day Heritage Savings Trust Fund in 1976, using royalties from the oil patch to make long-term investments in health care and medical research.

His tenure was punctuated with protracted constitutional battles and acrimonious clashes with Trudeau over Alberta’a gushing gas and oil resources. The introduction of the National Energy Policy in 1980, by then Liberal energy minister Marc Lalonde, placed stringent controls on domestic oil prices, and provoked animosity against Ottawa – especially toward the Liberal Party – that is still raw in some segments of the province today.

The Alberta premier who had made his mark by encouraging Albertans to think and act outside of their own backwater, now became the defiant and articulate defender of provincial rights, including control of its own resources. Two days after the NEP was unilaterally introduced on Oct. 28, 1980, Lougheed went on provincewide television to tell Albertans that he was implementing a series of oil production cuts in retaliation.

“We expected the worst from the Trudeau government and that’s what we got with the National Energy Program,” Lougheed said in an interview in 2000, recalling fierce fights waged against Ottawa that prompted some critics to call him “the blue-eyed sheik” because of his defence of Alberta’s natural resources.

In September, 1981, the Lougheed and Trudeau governments wrestled a new energy deal to the negotiating table that substantially increased the value of Alberta’s crude oil. But then the oil boom went bust in the 1981-82 recession, and many Albertans blamed Ottawa.

A year after Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney began dismantling the NEP – a promise he had made in the 1984 federal campaign that netted him a landslide victory – Lougheed retired and was succeeded as leader by Don Getty, a former football player and one of the original cadre that Lougheed had recruited back in 1967. He was 57 and had been premier for 14 years.

The workaholic habits of a lifetime continued. He went back to practising law, joining Bennett Jones LLP in Calgary in 1986, and began accepting appointments to corporate boards. At one time, he was a director of nearly 20 companies, including such blue-chip firms as Royal Bank of Canada, Bombardier, Canadian Pacific, Atco and Noranda. He was also chancellor of Queen’s University from 1996-2002.

Lougheed strode back into the public arena in 2005 as an elder statesman chagrined by the way the modern province he had helped create was going astray in a frenzy of development led by multinationals and foreign interests. Struck by the eagerness with which others were pursuing the province’s resources, he urged restraint and chided those who lost sight of the fact that the oil belonged to Albertans.

He publicly opposed plans to send unprocessed oil-sands crude to the United States for refining, which he said amounted to exporting Canadian jobs. He pushed for the province to stash away more money in its Heritage Savings Trust Fund, which had been allowed to languish under premier Ralph Klein. He urged Alberta to tweak the nose of the United States and seek market leverage by selling oil-sands crude to Asia.

Perhaps most notably, he lent his voice to those who saw danger in the breakneck pace of development in the oil sands, where multibillion-dollar projects were announced with remarkable frequency. Though he was largely ignored, he called for a slowed construction pace that would prevent the province from hyper-extending itself. “Orderly development,” as he termed it, would ease cost pressures, produce better environmental performance and deliver more revenues to the province.

“What do I as an Albertan gain by this mad rush up there?” he said in 2008, before the global market crash persuaded the province’s corporate chieftains that he may have been right.

In the past few years, he had been suffering from heart disease and was admitted to hospital late in 2011 with pneumonia. He emerged again from private life to endorse Ms. Redford in her tightly contested but successful provincial election campaign against Danielle Smith, Leader of the Wildrose Party.

Peter Lougheed leaves his wife, Jeanne, sons Stephen and Joseph, daughters Andrea and Pamela and his extended family.

One of the greatest Canadians, and in my opinion the greatest Albertan, has passed away. What you see above is an obituary that very few leaders in this country will ever get, or deserve.

[Phantasee]

Peter Lougheed's lessons in leadership

By Don Braid, Calgary Herald September 15, 2012 7:02 AM


Here's one of many stories that explain the late Peter Lougheed's genius for leadership, a quality so rare in Canada these days that we've almost forgotten what it looks like.

During the fraught constitutional talks in Ottawa in the early 1980s, the premier foresaw a change in Alberta's position.

"He actually called the caucus from Ottawa," one of his MLAs once told me. "We'd had all agreed that he would only go so far. But something changed, and he wanted agreement to alter Alberta's stance.

"So there we were in the caucus room at Government House, talking to the premier on the phone, arriving at a new position.

"I don't think another premier in Canada would have done that. Anybody else would have just changed the position and explained later."

That long-ago MLA still won't be identified. The principle of caucus confidentiality was so ingrained that it can't be entirely ignored, even today.

When Lougheed made that phone call, he handed some authority to his MLA and in so doing, he won even more respect and authority back from them.

It's a highly sophisticated leadership tactic that can only be applied at the right moment, by the right leader. Weak leaders are always afraid to try it, fearing rebellion if they loosen their grip.

Lougheed was probably born with many of these skills. His childhood friends in Calgary - people like the late Jim Seymour - noted he was always the leader of the pack in sports, school and social life. Usually the smallest boy in a highly competitive group, he set the tone for everyone.

But Lougheed didn't just have an innate gift; he also thought deeply about leadership. He constantly critiqued and refined his methods.

Personally, he often did admirable things that amplified his standing. There was nothing phoney about this; generosity came naturally to him. But he also knew how to make the quality count.

I love this story from Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who invited Lougheed to give advice after his party formed government.

"He said he would but wondered if we could afford his consultation fee," says Wall. "I asked him what the fee was. He said 'a steak sandwich.'

"His visit ... turned out to be the most important steak sandwich ever bought in our province."

Hearing that, who wouldn't admire Lougheed? In these days of runaway expense accounts, it's enough to make you weep with nostalgia.

In a Banff speech in 2008, Lougheed laid out his thinking about leadership. People who've seen him at work, or worked closely with him, will recognize every quality he describes.

"I'll put it to you as strongly as I can - in seeking leadership you have to strive for the extraordinary," he told the audience. "The ordinary won't cut it. You have to strive for the extraordinary.

"But you have to do it in a particular way, and that particular way is being part of a team.

"(And) you just have to have a vision. That word is over-used, but there isn't a better word that I can use to describe it.

"And you need, as part of that vision, goals that stretch the team.


"A leader has to be determined to reach these goals and leaders have to be the hardest workers.

"The leader has to be prepared to do the homework. That means many, many hours. It means sixandahalf days a week, if you really want to be a leader.

He added: "Can you be a good listener? I have never met a good leader who's not a good listener."

Lougheed also stressed personal links to colleagues. He knew about their family lives, their joys and pains. If they had trouble, he and his wife Jeanne were always ready to help.

"When my wife passed away, Peter and Jeanne came over to our house and cooked dinner for the family," says Lee Richardson, former Lougheed aide and now Premier Alison Redford's principal secretary.

"I've never forgotten that. I was enormously touched. I love Peter's family as I love my own."

Such deeds foster intense friendship and loyalty. Coworkers will move mountains for a leader like that.

In his attitude to the public, Lougheed felt both humility and a sense of service. This showed most clearly when he heard a word he loathed: power.

If asked how he came to power, or how happy he was to win power again, Lougheed always snapped something like: "Office. It's office! This government is not in power, it's in office."

To this day, it amazes me when I hear other premiers casually say they're "in power." After Lougheed, with his subtle understanding of how Canadians view good government, it sounds so arrogant.

From this leadership ethic sprang the most competent, focused, aggressive cabinet Team Canada has produced in the last 40 years. And it arrived, as many have noted, just as unfriendly federal policies put Alberta's very future at stake.

Modern governments are so much bigger, so overstaffed and overstuffed, that leaders are often overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the machine they're trying to steer.

But there isn't a serving premier - or prime minister - who couldn't do better by following Peter Lougheed's leadership lessons.


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