WARTIME PREMIER

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19847, 23 May 1927, Page 12

WARTIME PREMIER

A FURTHER TERM DERBYSHIRE DONKEY-BOY, The Hon. John Oliver, last surviving wartime Premier of the British Empire, has been acclaimed by the Liberal convention of British Columbia and given a further lease of control of the party’s destiny. He is approaching his 71st year. Born in Derbyshire, his education was restricted, and at 11 he was employed as donkey-boy in a lead and iron mine operated by his father on the property of the late Duke of Devonshire, also selling eggs at the country market and acting as farmers’ agent as a side-line. The closing of the mine was the occasion for his coming to Canada with his parents and their large family. In -a year in Ontario, Mr Oliver became an expert woodsman and quarry hand. Coming to the West in the seventies, overland through the United States, he took a job as axeman on the Canadian Pacific railway when it was being pushed over the Rockies to the Pacific terminal. He operated a threshing outfit later, and was one of the first licensed engineers in British Columbia. Then he became a farmer, and built his own dykes in the irrigation belt.

An extempore speech at a political meeting brought him into public notice, and in a year he was a member of the Cabinet. He refused to turn Conservative with the Mcßride Government, and in 1916 went into the Liberal Ministry, becoming Premier in the following year. A close observer of the Australian and New Zealand experiments in social legislation, he introduced measures, such as the minimum wage, woman suffrage, and old-age pensions, before any other province in Canada. At present he is engaged on the biggest task of his career, fighting the Dominion Government for better terms for British Columbia, which has gained least of all the provinces from Confederation.