Don Getty, Alberta’s 11th Premier, passed away this past week. Like his predecessor and good friend Peter Lougheed, he came into the public eye as a star football player for the Edmonton Eskimos and led that team to a Grey Cup championship. Following that, he began a business career with Imperial Oil and later became Canada’s youngest independent oil company president when he formed Baldonnel Oil and Gas Ltd. His longtime friend Peter Lougheed convinced him to give back to the Province that had been so good to him, or so the story goes, and Getty subsequently got himself elected to the Provincial Legislature in the opposition Conservative Party during Canada’s Centennial year. Four years later his party formed the government, and not surprisingly his friend Peter Lougheed asked him to join his Cabinet as Alberta’s first minister of federal and intergovernmental affairs. When Premier Lougheed came to the Empire Club on May 7th, 1973, he brought along Minister Getty who sat in the front row and was recognized from the podium. While Lougheed’s time in office was by all accounts successful, there were already troubling signs on the horizon that would lead to Getty inheriting one of the worst economic crises in the Province’s history when he came to the Premier’s office 12 years later. Here is an extract from that speech that Premier Lougheed delivered to the Club in 1973:
“First, there is clearly a world energy crisis with major ramifications for Canada and for the energy province of Canada-Alberta-and particularly for the Athabasca tar sands within Alberta.
Secondly, we have, as all of you know, increased tensions and difficulties in world trade and monetary arrangement which have a particular significance for a leading nation such as Canada.
Thirdly, I think it is fair to say that the period of comfortable and special trade relations with the United States appears to be subsiding.
Another development has been over those six years that millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent by the Federal Government in an attempt to offset regional economic disparities.”
The warning signs that were communicated by Premier Lougheed were to be heeded, and by the time that Mr. Getty occupied the head office in the Province in 1985 he was into an economic slowdown and falling energy prices which hit Alberta’s oil economy really hard. Everywhere around him people were losing their jobs and mounting government deficits continued to plague the Province. By the time he left office in 1992, the Alberta government had sunk $11 billion into debt, making it one of the most difficult times in the history of the Province. No wonder that incumbent Premier Rachael Notley, commenting this past week on the passing of Mr. Getty, expressed a certain kinship with the former Premier as she faces many of the identical problems that he did three decades ago.
Don Getty will be remembered as strengthening Alberta’s place in Canada, contributing to some early efforts at Senate Reform, bringing important new programs to Alberta’s aboriginal peoples, and fighting for a new holiday for Canadians in the month of February which would become known as Family Day.
While he resigned as Premier and left the political arena in 1992 following a very difficult period that saw him lose his own home riding and face increasing leadership machinations from some of his own ministers, he will be remembered as a man who always had the best interests of his fellow Albertans at heart.
Former Alberta Premier Don Getty, dead at 82.
