Newton Wesley Rowell
| Newton Wesley Rowell | |
|---|---|
| N.W. Rowell | |
| Born | 1867-11-01 near St. John's (Arva), Ontario |
| Died | 1941-11-22 Toronto, Ontario |
| Occupation | Lawyer; politician; judge |
| Father | |
| Mother | |
| Partner | |
Newton Wesley Rowell (1 November 1867 – 22 November 1941 (aged 74)), also known as N.W. Rowell, was a Canadian lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as President of the Privy Council, Chief Justice of Ontario, and co-chair of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations.[1]
Early life
Rowell was born on 1 November 1867 on a farm near St. John's (Arva), Ontario, the son of Joseph Rowell, a farmer and Methodist lay preacher who had emigrated from Cumberland, England in 1842, and Nancy Green, daughter of Henry Coyne. He had a sister, Sarah Alice Rowell (later Wright). Rowell grew up in a household shaped by Methodist Wesleyanism and the moderate Reform political tradition associated with Robert Baldwin.[1]
After completing his high school matriculation in 1886, he joined the legal firm of Fraser and Fraser. He relocated to Toronto in 1891, passed the Law Society of Upper Canada examinations second in his class, and joined the firm of Isidore Frederick Hellmuth, where he concentrated initially on property and corporation law.[1]
Legal career
Rowell's practice grew steadily. By 1903 he was senior partner of Rowell, Reid, and Wood. He was appointed King's Counsel in 1902. He represented several large American-financed corporations operating in northern Ontario, including work connected with Francis Hector Clergue's Consolidated Lake Superior Corporation, and served as solicitor for the Algoma Central Railway and the Nipigon Pulp and Paper Company.[1]
His standing at the bar was recognized internationally. He argued before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London on multiple occasions, most notably in the "Persons Case," in which he represented Emily Gowan Murphy (Ferguson) and four other Alberta women in contending that women were "qualified persons" eligible for Senate appointment under section 24 of the British North America Act. The Supreme Court of Canada rejected that argument in 1928; a year later the Privy Council reversed the decision, with Lord Sankey holding that the constitution was "a living tree capable of growth."[1]
By 1925 Rowell had become president of the Toronto General Trusts Company, and in 1932 he was elected president of both the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the Canadian Bar Association. He was made an honorary bencher of Lincoln's Inn — an honour held at the time by only one other Canadian, Richard Bedford Bennett.[1]
Political life
Rowell ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in York East in 1900 as a Liberal, losing to William Findlay Maclean in a contest complicated by divisions over Canadian participation in the South African War. After the federal Liberals' defeat on reciprocity in 1911, he was recruited to lead the Ontario Liberal opposition. He won Oxford North on 11 December 1911, reorganized the provincial party with support from Alfred Ernest Ames, Joseph E. Atkinson of the Toronto Daily Star, and others, and campaigned on temperance and social reform. His 1914 slogan was "abolish the bar"; though the Liberals gained only four seats, the Ontario Temperance Act passed unanimously shortly afterward, and women's provincial voting rights followed in 1917.[1]
When the First World War began, Rowell travelled to Britain and France in 1916 to observe conditions at the front and report to Prime Minister Sir Robert Laird Borden. He concluded that effective prosecution of the war required all-party cooperation. When Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Ontario Liberals declined to join a coalition, Rowell accepted Borden's invitation to enter the Union government, announced 13 October 1917, on the condition that western and Maritime Liberals also participate. Key recruits included James Alexander Calder, Thomas Alexander Crerar, Arthur Lewis Watkins Sifton, and Frank Broadstreet Carvell.[1]
As President of the Privy Council and Vice-Chairman of the War Committee from 1917 to 1920, Rowell bore principal responsibility for organizing Canada's war effort, enforcing conscription, and managing veterans' pensions — securing what was regarded as the most generous pension scale among the Allied nations. He advocated a substantial profits tax on business, including an eleven percent levy on meat packers, bringing him into conflict with James Henry Gundy and Joseph Wesley Flavelle. He also championed expansion of the Civil Service Commission to some 35,000 federal employees and broader jurisdiction for the War Purchasing Commission.[1]
In the federal election of 17 December 1917 Rowell ran in Durham east of Toronto and won decisively. The campaign was deeply divisive; the War-time Elections Act had enfranchised female relatives of servicemembers while disenfranchising enemy aliens naturalized after 1902 — a provision Rowell personally opposed. The result left Unionists holding 153 seats to the Laurier Liberals' 82, almost all from Quebec.[1]
On 27 May 1918, Rowell sailed with Borden, Calder, and Meighen to attend Imperial War Cabinet meetings in London, visiting Canadian forces in France. After the armistice on 11 November 1918, he led the thanksgiving service on Parliament Hill, declaring: "To-day marks the close of the old order and dawn of the new." He pressed a progressive domestic agenda — subsidized housing, federal health promotion, educational improvements — that met resistance from most of his Conservative cabinet colleagues, including Finance Minister Sir William Thomas White.[1]
The Winnipeg General Strike of June 1919 placed Rowell in an uncomfortable position. Known as sympathetic to labour, he praised workers' democratic spirit while expressing concern about Bolshevik infiltration fears held by Winnipeg business interests. He defended the use of the Royal North-West Mounted Police to restore order when violence briefly erupted. That autumn he and Labour Minister Gideon Decker Robertson represented Canada at the founding conference of the International Labour Organization in Washington.[1]
As Health Minister from 1919, Rowell organized Canada's first Department of Health, a weaker body than the "Department of Social Welfare" he had envisioned, owing to parliamentary resistance to federal encroachment on provincial jurisdiction. When Borden retired on 1 July 1920 and Meighen succeeded him, Rowell could not join the renamed National Liberal and Conservative Party, believing Conservative policies would dominate and his reform positions would be considered radical. He resigned on 10 July 1920.[1]
International affairs
Days after his resignation, Rowell sailed for England. On Meighen's invitation, he joined Sir George Eulas Foster and Doherty as a Canadian representative at the first assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva in November 1920. He became a prominent figure at the assembly, consistently asserting Canadian autonomy and speaking in defense of smaller nations. His declaration that European policies had "drenched this world in blood" and that "fifty thousand Canadians under the soil of France and Flanders is what Canada has paid for European statesmanship" was widely reported in British and American newspapers.[1]
Returning to law practice in early 1921, he continued speaking and writing on international affairs. He organized the League of Nations Society in Canada, which grew from Halifax to Victoria, and in November 1921 delivered the Burwash Memorial Lectures at the University of Toronto, published as The British empire and world peace (1922), in which he argued that durable peace required recognition of transnational political organization and a particular responsibility on the part of Christian churches.[1][2]
He was a founding member of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, formally established in January 1928 and affiliated with the Institute of Pacific Relations and Royal Institute of International Affairs.[1]
Church and social causes
Rowell was a committed Methodist layman throughout his life. He was an active supporter of the Methodist minister George Jackson's appointment at Victoria University during the "Jackson case" controversy of 1909–1910, backing Jackson against the opposition of General Superintendent Albert Carman. Beginning in 1904 he served on the joint Methodist-Presbyterian-Congregational committee working toward church union, and in 1925 he was the leading layman in the legal and organizational work that created the United Church of Canada. He chaired the new church's peace and war committee, and at the third General Council in Winnipeg in the autumn of 1928 his committee's report affirmed Christian responsibility for promoting peace.[1]
Chief Justice and Rowell-Sirois Commission
In September 1936, after deliberation, Rowell accepted appointment as Chief Justice of Ontario. His tenure lasted less than a year, as King asked him to chair the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, whose mandate was to examine the balance of power and fiscal responsibility between the federal and provincial governments. Fellow commissioners included Rowell's friend John Wesley Dafoe and notary Joseph Sirois. Public hearings opened in Winnipeg on 29 November 1937 and moved through western Canada; Rowell's command of the subject and courtesy to witnesses drew widespread praise from journalists.[1]
On 7 May 1938, in Toronto, Rowell suffered a heart attack followed by a stroke that left him without speech. He resigned from both the commission and the chief justiceship in November 1938; Sirois took over as chairman. The completed commission report, published in 1940, paid warm tribute to Rowell's intellect and the preparation work he had accomplished. Its recommendations for minimum standards of education and social services for all Canadians anticipated the postwar welfare state that he would not live to see.[1]
Personal life
Rowell married Nellie Langford, daughter of the Reverend Alexander Langford, on 27 June 1901 in Owen Sound, Ontario. Their honeymoon included visits to religious sites in Britain, where Rowell addressed the third Ecumenical Methodist Conference. The couple settled in Toronto's Rosedale district in 1904. They had four children: William Langford Rowell, Mary Coyne Rowell, Frederick Newton Alexander Rowell, and Edward Newton Rowell, who died at seven months in 1908. The greatest personal sorrow of Rowell's life came in the spring of 1923, when his son Langford Rowell, a Victoria University arts student and athlete who had planned to study law, died of blood poisoning. In 1930 his daughter Mary married Conservative lawyer Henry Rutherford Jackman; their son Henry Newton Rowell Jackman, a future Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, was born three years later.[1]
Death
Rowell died on 22 November 1941 (aged 74) in Toronto. At his request there was no eulogy at the funeral service held at Metropolitan Church. His son Frederick Newton Alexander Rowell attended in Royal Canadian Air Force uniform — a pointed reminder that the disarmament efforts and League of Nations work to which Rowell had devoted so much energy had ultimately failed. Saturday Night editor Bernard Keble Sandwell summarized public sentiment in a piece headed "What Canada missed," questioning why Rowell had not been permitted a greater role in national affairs and writing that "a mature democracy does not reject great men."[1]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 Margaret E. Prang."Margaret E. Prang, "Rowell, Newton Wesley," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 17."[website].Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 17 (University of Toronto/Université Laval).2009.University of Toronto/Université Laval.Link.(Rights: copyrighted | Access: open)
- ↑ Newton Wesley Rowell."The British empire and world peace: being the Burwash Memorial Lectures, delivered in Convocation Hall, University of Toronto, November, 1921."[book].1922.University of Toronto Press, Toronto.(Rights: unknown | Access: open)