Sir Oliver Mowat (July 22, 1820 – April 19, 1903) was a Canadian lawyer, politician, and Ontario Liberal Party leader. He served for nearly 24 years as the third premier of Ontario. He was the eighth lieutenant governor of Ontario and one of the Fathers of Confederation. He is best known for defending successfully the constitutional rights of the provinces in the face of the centralizing tendency of the national government as represented by his longtime Conservative adversary, John A. Macdonald. This longevity and power was due to his manoeuvring to build a political base around Liberals, Catholics, trade unions, and anti-French-Canadian sentiment.
Mowat was born in Kingston, Upper Canada (now Ontario), to John Mowat and Helen Levack, Scottish Presbyterians who both emigrated from Caithness, Scotland. As a youth, he had taken up arms with the loyalists during the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, which suggested a conservative inclination in politics. But he instead joined the Reformers.
Marriage, family, and legal success
Mowat was called to the bar of Upper Canada on November 5, 1841. In 1846, he married Jane Ewart, a daughter of John Ewart of Toronto. Mowat and his wife had three sons and four daughters. In 1856 Mowat was appointed Queen's Counsel.
He was known to be a tenacious legal practitioner, with two of his cases being upheld by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In the 1858 case Bowes v. City of Toronto, John George Bowes (previously mayor of Toronto) was successfully sued for recovery of the share of the profit he was suspected to have made in collaboration with co-premier Francis Hincks out of a speculation in city debentures. Afterwards, Mowat admitted, "I cannot speak with much force unless I have an opponent, and things are said by others which I do not altogether coincide with."
Political career before Confederation
Mowat first entered politics as an alderman of the City of Toronto in 1857. From there, he became a member of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada for South Ontario. As a member of the Assembly from 1858 to 1867, he was closely associated with George Brown. Mowat served as Provincial Secretary (1858) and Postmaster-General (1863–1864) in the pre-Confederation governments of George Brown and John Sandfield Macdonald for the Liberal Party of Canada.
Mowat was a member of the Great Coalition government of 1864 and was a representative at that year's Quebec Conference, where he helped work out the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments. On November 14, 1864, he was appointed to the judiciary as Vice-Chancellor of the Court of Chancery of Upper Canada, He held this position until he was appointed premier on October 25, 1872. One of the more notable cases during his time on the Court was Dickson v Burnham in 1868, whose underlying jurisprudence would be altered during his later time as Premier, with the passage of the Rivers and Streams Act, 1884.
Premier and Attorney-General of Ontario
Mowat served as provincial member for the riding of Oxford North, about 150 km west of Toronto, for his entire term as premier.
As premier in the 1880s a series of disputes with the Dominion arose over Provincial boundaries, jurisdiction over liquor licenses, trade and commerce, rivers and streams, timber, escheats, and other matters. In 1890, it was said:
The attacks made on Provincial Rights he has succeeded in repelling. Not a single case remains unfinished; not a single case did he lose.
These court battles resulted in a weakening of the power of the federal government in provincial matters. Although Macdonald had dismissed him as "Blake's jackal", Mowat's battles with the federal government greatly decentralized Canada, giving the provinces far more power than Macdonald had intended.
He also served as his own Attorney-General concurrently with his service as Premier, and introduced reforms such as the secret ballot in elections, and the extension of suffrage beyond property owners. He also extended laws regulating liquor and consolidated the laws relating to the municipal level of government. His policies, particularly regarding liquor regulation and separate schools, routinely drew criticism from political conservatives, including the Orange Lodge and its associated newspaper, The Sentinel.
The boundary between Ontario and Manitoba became a hotly contested matter, with the federal government attempting to extend Manitoba's jurisdiction eastward to the Great Lakes, into the areas that Ontario claimed. In 1882, Premier Mowat threatened to pull Ontario from Confederation over the issue. Mowat sent police into the disputed territory to assert Ontario's claims, while Manitoba (at the behest of the national government) did the same. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Britain, serving as Canada's highest appeal court, repeatedly issued rulings taking the side of provincial rights. These decisions would to some extent neutralize the power of the central government, creating a more decentralized federation. John Ibbitson writes that by 1914:
Confederation had evolved into a creation beyond John A. Macdonald's worst nightmare. Powerful, independent provinces, sovereign within their own spheres, manipulated the rights of property, levied their own taxes—even income taxes, in a few cases—exploited their natural resources, and managed schools, hospitals, and relief for the poor, while a weak and ineffectual central government presided over not much of anything in the drab little capital on the banks of the Ottawa.
George William Ross praised Mowat's ability to read the public mind, and John Stephen Willison remarked that his political genius rose from "the fact that for so long he had a generous support from the liquor interest and a still more generous support from Prohibitionists".
His government was moderate and attempted to cut across divisions in the province between Roman Catholics and Protestants as well as between country and city. He also oversaw the northward expansion of Ontario's boundaries and the development of its natural resources, as well as the emergence of the province into the economic powerhouse of Canada.