Duff Pattullo, 22nd Premier of British Columbia: what did he get right, and what did he get wrong?

1. At Lands he was an able administrator with a mixed record of policy. He professionalized the forest service and rescued the Okanagan irrigation districts; the soldier settlements of the board he conceived mostly failed, the timber companies largely set the terms of forest policy, Sumas Lake was drained at a cost the estimates never met, and he signed the order that made the reserve cut-offs final. Mixed: favourable as administration, unfavourable as land policy.
2. He rebuilt his party and won office on a program. “Work and wages” was a platform with specific planks, and it took 34 of 47 seats in 1933. Certain.
3. The Little New Deal was real, and among the most vigorous provincial answers to the Depression in Canada, but it cooled after 1937. Strong lean (Fisher, and the Liberal record of 1933-37).
4. His works and parks are his clearest legacy. The Pattullo Bridge, the forestry and youth camps, and five large provincial parks. Certain on the facts.
5. His northern plans ran ahead of the province’s means. The Alaska highway and the Yukon annexation failed in his time; the north he imagined was opened by others. Strong lean.
6. Bloody Sunday was the worst month of his premiership. He arranged the eviction with Ottawa and refused the men further relief; the hour and the clubs were the police’s. Certain on his part.
7. On Asian Canadians he held the exclusionist view of nearly all of white British Columbia’s politicians, and pressed it harder in private than in public. Certain on the record.
8. On Rowell-Sirois he had a case, lost the argument, and then lost office over the coalition. Open on the merits; certain on the cost.
9. His strengths and his failures came from the same temperament. Strong lean.

He was born at Woodstock, Ontario, in 1873, into a Liberal newspaper family: his father George was chief Liberal organizer for Ontario and his uncle Andrew ran the Sentinel-Review and sat for Oxford North. In 1897 the family’s connections sent him north with the Yukon’s new commissioner, and he spent ten years in the Klondike as a clerk, acting assistant gold commissioner, newspaper owner and alderman, quarrelling with his superiors and writing over their heads to Ottawa. Hal Guest finds there “the insensitivity of a federal government which did not appreciate the demands of an outlying region,” the start of a lifelong distrust of distant authority (Hal Guest, "The Political Apprenticeship of Thomas Dufferin Pattullo," BC Studies 58 (Summer 1983)); Fisher adds that the Klondike was a frontier where people “expected the government to deliver services but protested vociferously when it appeared to interfere with their economic objectives” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 80). In 1908 he went to Prince Rupert to bet on the Grand Trunk Pacific’s new terminus, and the boom did not come. He sat on its first council and was its mayor, and in 1916 it sent him to the legislature, which he did not leave until 1945. A family note belongs here: he was named for his uncle Thomas Robson Pattullo (Thomas Robson Pattullo), the Barkerville miner who in 1872 went round the Cariboo and raised $615 to send a consumptive miner home, and whom the elegy written after his death called “the poor man’s friend.” At Bennett in 1898, on the way to the Klondike, the elegy’s author told the nephew he looked just like his uncle (Bourdon, "Barkerville's Thomas Robson Pattullo in Life and Death," BC Studies 185 (Spring 2015), pp. 49-77).

He went straight into the cabinet of Harlan Brewster, and then John Oliver, as Minister of Lands, the department that held the province’s forests, unsold land and water. Twelve years there were the making of him, and the record has four parts.

Settlement. The Land Settlement and Development Act of 1917 set up a Land Settlement Board. It sat in the Department of Agriculture, but the idea was his: he “had originally conceived of the idea of the Land Settlement Board,” and later reminded its chairman, “with biting sarcasm,” that he had insisted on the name (James Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part)). The Soldiers’ Land Act of 1918 set returned men on land the board bought and cleared. At the Ottawa conference of 1918 he called British Columbia’s “the most progressive land legislation in the world” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 3 December 1918, p. 3: the Minister of Lands on the Ottawa conference). The results were poor. Paul Koroscil’s study of the settlements (Paul M. Koroscil, "Soldiers, Settlement and Development in British Columbia, 1915-1930," BC Studies 54 (Summer 1982), pp. 63-87) gives the figures: by 1920 Merville, near Courtenay, had cost about $507,000 for 13,660 acres; a fire on 5 July 1922 “destroyed fifty houses and the majority of the farm buildings,” a later committee found “one half of the Merville lands were worthless for cultivation,” and many settlers had left for the city by 1929. Camp Lister, near Creston, cost about $474,000; its $50,000 irrigation system was finished in 1929, too late, “as only twenty-one soldier settlers remained.” Koroscil blames the board’s “careless decisions” (land bought after a visit, without a soil survey; the Nechako chosen without markets) and does not name Pattullo. Fisher does: “Pattullo, along with Oliver, must bear much of the responsibility,” though “in some places he had more success.”

Irrigation. The South Okanagan Lands Project, begun in 1919, bought about 22,000 acres from Senator Lytton Shatford’s company and dug the canal that by 1927 reached the American border. Margaret Ormsby counts it among Oliver’s projects, costing “over $2,500,000” (Margaret A. Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958)); Pattullo, in 1945, said $3,500,000. The town that grew there was named for the premier, and Fisher writes that Pattullo was “particularly proud” of the work. The diversion dam was called the Pattullo Dam; the opposition said the settlers were more likely to say “damn Pattullo!”, and Pattullo proposed a brass plaque on it “so that everyone would know who was responsible” (James Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007)). The province also took over the failing private irrigation systems of the Okanagan, at prices the companies complained were too low, and Fisher calls the province’s Okanagan irrigation policy “a successful if relatively straightforward policy,” one Pattullo counted among his best. He was not soft about it. When a member said in 1925 that farmers could not pay $15 to $30 an acre for water, “Mr. Pattullo replied that they had better get off their farms if that was true” (Victoria Daily Times, 1 December 1925: the legislature on the Okanagan irrigation districts).

Sumas Lake. In 1917 he suggested that the Land Settlement Board take over as the Sumas dyking commissioners (James Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007)). The board drained the lake between 1920 and 1924: its 1919 report promised “30,000 acres of magnificent land at a cost of $4,250,000” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 20 March 1919: the Land Settlement Board's report), the engineer’s estimates “had proved badly out,” as the Attorney General admitted in 1928, and sales were slow. Pattullo held to it, telling the House in 1929 that Sumas “had been well worth reclaiming,” while refusing relief to landowners who stood to profit from land they had done nothing to create (Victoria Daily Times, 8 March 1929: the legislature on Sumas). The lake, which swelled to three times its size each spring, had fed the Semá:th with salmon, sturgeon and waterfowl; its draining, the Sumas First Nation says, “brought profound and lasting harm” (Sumas First Nation, "Our Territory" (website)). No record found ties Pattullo to any decision about them.

Forests and the north. Fisher credits him with more forest rangers, “appointed on the basis of expertise rather than political affiliation,” and better firefighting, and his own line, “You cannot have a tree and cut it at the same time,” heads Fisher’s chapter. Stephen Gray’s closer study of the department is cooler: the province “deferred to the perceived needs of the forest companies,” Pattullo dropped the royalty bill, and he defended a large pulp sale with an argument Gray calls “ludicrous, if convenient” (Stephen Gray, "The Government's Timber Business: Forest Policy and Administration in British Columbia, 1912-1928," BC Studies 81 (Spring 1989)). He pressed Ottawa from 1918 for the return of the Railway Belt and the Peace River Block (“The federal authorities did not appear in a receptive mood,” Prince Rupert Daily News, 3 December 1918, p. 3: the Minister of Lands on the Ottawa conference); they came back in 1930, after he had left office. He courted settlers for the north, Estonians at Stuart Lake in 1924 and Hebridean crofters the same year, and neither scheme lasted (Prince Rupert Daily News, February-December 1924: Pattullo's plan to settle Hebridean crofter-fishermen in British Columbia). On 25 July 1923 he signed the minister’s recommendation that made the McKenna-McBride settlement of the Indian reserves, cut-offs included, final for British Columbia; asked by Ottawa for more land for the bands, he promised only to have the list “carefully examined” (British Columbia Order in Council 911/1923: the McKenna-McBride report, as amended by Ditchburn and Clark, approved as the final settlement of the Indian reserves, Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons appointed to inquire into the Claims of the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia: Proceedings, Reports and the Evidence (Ottawa, 1927)).

A reviewer of Fisher’s book, Neil Sutherland, sums up the biographer’s view: “We see Pattullo as an extremely able Minister of Lands” (Neil Sutherland, review of Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia, BC Studies 94 (Summer 1992), pp. 92-95). As a manager of a department the description holds. As a chooser of land, and as an owner who could have asked more of the companies, he did less well, and the settlers at Merville and the Semá:th at Sumas paid for it.

The Liberals lost in 1928 and he barely held Prince Rupert. He was confirmed as leader at Kamloops in May 1930 and rebuilt the party through the worst of the Depression, which Sutherland calls a “masterly effort.” He twice refused Premier Tolmie’s offers of a union government (1932 and 1933), and when the Kidd Report of 1932, a businessmen’s plan for “ruthless cutting of government services” (Fisher), was kept from him, he told the cabinet to stop “the present blithering kite-flying” and go to the Lieutenant-Governor and resign (Margaret A. Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958)). The platform he took into the 1933 election began with work: “Profitable and permanent Employment is the most important question facing our people,” to be met by “wage-distributing public enterprise.” It also promised an Economic Council, national unemployment insurance, “a measure of State Health Insurance,” a public utilities commission and a central bank (Prince Rupert Daily News, 10 October 1933, p. 4: the Liberal platform). He put it in four words and a promise: “Work and wages. Work at the prevailing rate of wages. It can be done and it will be” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 7 October 1933: "Work and wages"). On 2 November 1933 the Liberals took 34 of 47 seats; Tolmie lost his own, and the Conservative party, Ormsby writes, “was annihilated” (Margaret A. Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), Canadian Elections Database: British Columbia general elections of 1933, 1937, 1941 and 1945). The new CCF, with seven seats, became the opposition.

He called his program “socialized capitalism” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 24 Feb 1934): capital “used to the benefit and not to the detriment of the people,” in Fisher’s paraphrase of it. The point was to steady the system, not to replace it. Fisher, who admires him, puts it plainly: “Pattullo was patently not motivated by ideology, and his ultimate objective was the preservation of capitalism,” yet his government was “less the client of big business and more vigorous in its response to the depression than most” (Robin Fisher, "Regulating Fuels in the Depression: The Coal and Petroleum Control Board of British Columbia," BC Studies 66 (Summer 1985)). In the biography he goes further: “arguably the most active in Canada during the 1930s” (p. 248; Neil Sutherland, review of Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia, BC Studies 94 (Summer 1992), pp. 92-95).

The money was the problem from the first month. In January 1934 he told Toronto that British Columbia paid more into the Dominion treasury than Ottawa spent there: “We are not mendicants,” and “We have the wealth and resources to make good any borrowing we may do in these times” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 24 January 1934, p. 1: "We are not mendicants"). Bennett’s government would not finance his public works, would not take the bankrupt Pacific Great Eastern railway off the province’s hands, and, with King’s after 1935, wanted provincial borrowing supervised by a national loan council, which he opposed. His minister of labour told the Dominion-provincial conference of December 1935 that it was “Pattullo policy that every able man should be given remunerative work,” and that about $5 million a year would employ nearly all the province’s jobless (Prince Rupert Daily News, 14 December 1935: editorial on the Dominion-provincial conference). King’s diary called his requests “the most absurd ideas about the extent to which public monies should be spent at this time” (Fisher, p. 286); Sutherland, reviewing the book, calls them sensible.

What the government did, beyond the works below, included the Health Insurance Act of 1936, prepared on the advice of the expert Harry Cassidy and shelved in February 1937 when the doctors and business opposed it (Allan Irving, "The Doctors versus the Expert: Harry Morris Cassidy and the British Columbia Health Insurance Dispute of the 1930s," BC Studies 78 (Summer 1988)); the Coal and Petroleum Products Control Board of 1937, which set fuel prices and led to his fight with the oil companies, the “insolent companies,” in 1940 (Robin Fisher, "Regulating Fuels in the Depression: The Coal and Petroleum Control Board of British Columbia," BC Studies 66 (Summer 1985)); and the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1937, which gave workers conciliation but kept “outside” unions from bargaining, and which the Trades and Labour Council’s leader said could not have been better drafted by “the most rabid opponents of trades unionism” (Andrew Parnaby, "What's Law Got To Do With It? The IWA and the Politics of State Power in British Columbia, 1935-1939," Labour/Le Travail 44 (Fall 1999)). The detail of the 1934-36 legislation (wages, hours, marketing, the Economic Council) is still to be read in Ormsby’s study and Fisher’s chapters. The voters approved in 1937: 31 seats. After that, Fisher writes, “much of the reformist heat had gone out” (p. 299), and of health insurance, the pattern of “bringing in experts to formulate and administer a sound policy but failing to maintain a steady course when the political storms blew against the plan” (p. 309).

The Pattullo Bridge. The old New Westminster bridge of 1904 carried road and rail on two decks and could not take the traffic. Ottawa would not help, so the contract went in 1935 to the Dominion Bridge Company, which undertook to sell $2 million of the province’s bonds (Prince Rupert Daily News, 18 June 1935, p. 1: the Fraser bridge contract). On the radio in April 1937 he explained that the legislature had voted $4,000,000, that the Act required tolls, and that if Ottawa paid half, as it should for a link in the national highway, “the bridge will be a free bridge” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 3 May 1937, p. 4: the Premier's radio address of 23 April 1937). Ottawa did not, and the toll was 25 cents. He opened it on 15 November 1937 (Prince Rupert Daily News, 15 November 1937, p. 1: the Pattullo Bridge opened). New Westminster campaigned against the tolls, which lasted until 1952; the bridge served until 6 February 2026, and in time opened Surrey to the suburbs. On his card in 1945: “Built Pattullo Bridge at New Westminster in face of heavy opposition for which many have since apologized” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 27 September 1945, p. 2: Pattullo's election card).

Roads. A federal committee’s figures for the five years to March 1938 show Ottawa spending $3.8 million on British Columbia’s roads and the province $15.5 million (Grant, Daniel John Grant, "T. D. Pattullo's Northern Empire: The Alaska Highway and the Proposed Annexation of the Yukon Territory, 1933-1941" (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 1980)). His roads were his own: he refused to set up a highway commission, and the opposition’s R. L. Maitland said in 1937, “There’s a parallel between Julius Caesar and Pattullo, but Julius Caesar had a good road policy.” The Big Bend Highway round the Columbia, begun in 1929 and paid for by Ottawa from 1933, he opened on 29 June 1940; a travel writer called it “positively the loneliest road in North America,” and the Kinbasket reservoir later drowned much of it (Ben Bradley, "'A Questionable Basis for Establishing a Major Park': Politics, Roads, and the Failure of a National Park in British Columbia's Big Bend Country," in Claire Elizabeth Campbell, ed., A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011)).

The camps. The forestry camps were the most praised of his relief schemes. The Young Men’s Forestry Training Plan of 1935 put about 500 young men in the woods at $1.75 a day, less board, and cut 382 miles of trail; the forest historian Richard Rajala calls it “a master-stroke of public policy” (Richard A. Rajala, "A Political Football: Federal-Provincial Cooperation in British Columbia Forests, 1930-1995," Forest History Today (Spring/Fall 2003), pp. 29-40). The Forest Development Projects that followed, from the winter of 1936-37, employed 2,809 men that winter and 4,005 the next by the Forest Branch’s count (Rajala gives 3,800 and “roughly 5,000”), at 30 cents an hour, cutting fire lines and clearing the sites of what became Little Qualicum Falls, Englishman River, Mount Seymour and other parks. Over five years some 3,100 young men had forestry training. The camps closed in September 1939. The development camps were winter camps, and the men they let go in the spring of 1938 were the men of Bloody Sunday, below.

The parks. His government set aside Mount Seymour (31 January 1936), Tweedsmuir (21 May 1938), Wells Gray (28 November 1939, named for his Minister of Lands), Manning (17 June 1941) and Hamber (16 September 1941, some 2.4 million acres). Tweedsmuir carries his personal mark: the Pattullo Range was named in 1938 to commemorate the Governor General’s visit to the park in August 1937, “upon Mr. Pattullo’s invitation” (BC Geographical Names: the records of Mount Seymour, Tweedsmuir, Wells Gray, Manning and Hamber parks, and the Pattullo Range). Hamber, which he hoped Ottawa would take over as a national park, was issued “abruptly and with little consultation,” and park-making in those years, Bradley writes, “remained a cavalier process”; Hamber was cut down in 1961 for the Columbia hydro projects. Tweedsmuir lost about a fifth of its area to the Alcan dam of the 1950s. Wells Gray, Manning and Mount Seymour remain.

His largest plans were northern. In 1937 he proposed that British Columbia annex the Yukon, and with it a road from Vancouver to Fairbanks: “Simply put, the plan Pattullo devised was gargantuan,” Daniel Grant writes in his thesis on it (p. 4). King’s cabinet discussed it, and Ottawa offered a subsidy; then the Yukoners, who said they were being “sold as chattel slaves,” the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation and its lobbyists, and the question of the territory’s Catholic school stopped it, and in October 1937 it was left “in abeyance.” In 1938 he went to Washington to find American money for an Alaska highway, which King’s diary greeted with “Pattullo like a fool, has been telling the Americans what to do”; in 1940 King wrote that Pattullo “believes in spending millions instead of thousands because the people do not know the difference.” A federal committee found the road “would not be justified.” The Americans built a highway to Alaska in 1942, for war, on another route. Grant’s verdict is the best summary of this side of him: “In the midst of the depression he refused to allow British Columbia to be depressed,” and “later premiers, in times of prosperity, built where he laid the plans.” He also wrote: “A man of politics, he would have made a better king.”

He then refused the men “any more immediate relief,” believing that able-bodied single men could look after themselves over the summer, while admitting to King that the public did not care for “the bald advice that they should get out and rustle” (Fisher, pp. 306-307), and he pressed King, that same June, for the Alaska highway as work for them. “We have got to have a showdown,” he said; “British Columbia cannot take care of unemployed from all over Canada” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 21 June 1938, p. 1: "Cannot Take Care of Canada's Unemployed, Pattullo Points Out"). The line he is best remembered for, “there comes a time when too much sympathy can be shown the men,” rests on a single account, Dorothy Steeves’s of 1960 (Dorothy G. Steeves, The Compassionate Rebel: Ernest E. Winch and His Times (1960), pp. 117-118 (excerpt)), and is not in Fisher’s account of the meeting. That autumn he refused an inquiry into the provincial police at the Blubber Bay strike, citing “some very subversive elements at work” ("No Inquiry on Labor Rioting: Premier Says Subversive Elements Working at Blubber Bay," Victoria Daily Times, 21 September 1938, p. 1). By July Ottawa had agreed to pay relief to registered transients until they could be sent home, so as a bargain with Ottawa it partly worked; King’s government, his biographer notes, was lucky that the unemployed blamed Pattullo (H. Blair Neatby, William Lyon Mackenzie King, vol. III, 1932-1939: The Prism of Unity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 265). It was the moment the premier of “work and wages” met men who wanted exactly that, on terms he had not set, and chose the province’s quarrel with Ottawa over them.

His idea of the people he governed for had a border, as it did for nearly all of white British Columbia’s politicians of his time, his opponents included. Besides the reserve settlement of 1923 (above), his Lands department kept, and defended in the courts, an older clause in Crown timber licences against “the employment of Chinese or Japanese.” In public he was measured: “No one can blame the Oriental for trying to make a living. The mistake has been their admission into the country.” He rebuked the Vancouver alderman Halford Wilson in 1940 for slurring “as a body those of foreign birth,” and worked with King quietly, keeping the subject out of the House (Patricia E. Roy, "Educating the 'East': British Columbia and the Oriental Question in the Interwar Years," BC Studies 18 (Summer 1973)).

In private he went further. He told the Rowell-Sirois Commission in 1938 that “as many Orientals as possible should be returned to the land from which they came,” wrote to King in 1939 that British Columbia would like to see the day “when all the Japanese are repatriated,” and on 23 September 1940 urged King to keep Japanese and Chinese Canadians in British Columbia out of the call-up for military training, chiefly because “there will be a demand that they be given the franchise, which we in this Province can never tolerate.” Within days King replied that they would be left out of the first call, and the exclusion was extended in October (Pattullo Papers and Premier's Papers, BC Archives: letters to and from Mackenzie King, and other papers, on Japanese and Chinese Canadians, 1938-1940). He was out of office before the removal of Japanese Canadians from the coast in 1942, and no word of his on it has been found. Of all his acts on the question, the call-up letter had the clearest effect.

The Rowell-Sirois Commission on Dominion-provincial relations, appointed in 1937, heard British Columbia’s case at Victoria in March 1938. Its report of 1940 proposed that Ottawa take over provincial debts and the relief of the employable jobless, while the provinces gave up income tax, corporation taxes and succession duties in return for grants, of which British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario would get none (James A. Maxwell, "The Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations," in Recent Developments in Dominion-Provincial Fiscal Relations in Canada (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1948), pp. 4-6). On 7 November 1940 Pattullo told the legislature his government was “not prepared to accept the recommendations of this report in toto,” since “Undue centralization of any kind would be harmful” (Journals of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, 1940, pp. 21-22: the Premier's statement on the Rowell-Sirois report, 7 November 1940). At the Dominion-provincial conference in Ottawa on 14 January 1941 he read a printed statement: the plan meant “immediate and ever increasing centralization of authority in the Dominion,” British Columbia did not want “to turn the treadmill of mediocrity in perpetuity,” and the Dominion already had all the power it needed to win the war, so “this is no time to make so radical a change” (Statement by Hon. T. D. Pattullo, Premier of British Columbia, at the Dominion-Provincial Conference, Ottawa, 14 January 1941 (printed, 1941)). He, Mitchell Hepburn of Ontario and William Aberhart of Alberta refused to take the report as the basis of discussion, and the conference broke up after two days.

King’s diary was scornful (“They all think Pattullo particularly stupid, having had his speech printed before leaving BC”) and satisfied: Ottawa had the provinces’ pledge to let it take their revenues if needed, “a tremendous achievement.” The Vancouver Sun and Province called Pattullo “chief of the wrecking crew.” George Abbott’s study of the episode (George M. Abbott, "Pattullo, the Press, and the Dominion-Provincial Conference of 1941," BC Studies 111 (Autumn 1996), pp. 37-59) finds, against King’s diary, that the cabinet backed him: John Hart wrote the province’s critique of the plan, and the education minister, George Weir, said it would set social services back twenty-five years; Ottawa’s own figures showed British Columbia losing $3.6 million under it. Whether he was right divides historians. Margaret Ormsby saw parochialism, and Martin Robin “a petty obstructionist”; Fisher calls him “absolutely correct” about undue centralization, and Abbott agrees. In the long run the commission’s approach won, and equalization is in the constitution of 1982.

The election of 21 October 1941 gave the Liberals 21 seats and 32.9% of the vote, the CCF 14 seats and 33.4%, the Conservatives 12 seats and 30.9% (Canadian Elections Database: British Columbia general elections of 1933, 1937, 1941 and 1945). His party wanted a coalition with the Conservatives; he would not have one, convinced it would destroy the Liberals and hand the province to the CCF. Abbott’s study of the crisis (George M. Abbott, "Duff Pattullo and the Coalition Controversy of 1941," BC Studies 102 (Summer 1994)) finds “remarkably clear vision in assessing the consequences of coalition” and “remarkably poor judgement in his handling of the issue”: he saw “a plot… a constant underground agitation against myself personally,” and cast his loyal finance minister, Hart, as Judas. At the party’s convention on 2 December he warned, “I predict 66 percent of the Liberal party will go over to the C.C.F. if you have a coalition,” and walked out; he resigned on 9 December, and Hart formed the coalition. He kept his seat, the dean of the House, until Prince Rupert defeated him in 1945, when he ran as an independent and his home paper wrote that “It is in the nature of Duff Pattullo that he should go down fighting” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 26 October 1945: Pattullo defeated in Prince Rupert). The coalition broke up in 1952, and W. A. C. Bennett’s Social Credit, not the CCF, took the province for twenty years.

The witnesses agree. Bruce Hutchison in 1933: “His power in the Liberal Party is not the power of the glad hand, but of sheer force of character… he has always been boss without question.” King’s diary in 1934: “shockingly egotistical, conceited beyond words.” Pattullo himself in 1939: “Even if it sounds egotistical, I tell you this: what I say goes in this province,” and to the legislature, “We do not apologise, we simply give reasons for our actions” (Daniel John Grant, "T. D. Pattullo's Northern Empire: The Alaska Highway and the Proposed Annexation of the Yukon Territory, 1933-1941" (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 1980), Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 303). Grant: “Pattullo not only governed, he ruled.” He bought his clothes in New York and wrote to the King in the first person.

Three habits run through the record. He believed in expertise, from the forest rangers of the 1920s to Cassidy’s health insurance, and in development, the work done and the country opened, more than in the people doing it. He distrusted Ottawa, with cause, and fought it all his career in letters, conferences and, when he could, on the radio. And he took organized defiance personally. He regulated the oil companies when they defied his price board, backed the police against the Blubber Bay strikers, fought the jobless when they took a public building, and in 1941 fought his own caucus; the words in 1938 (“a showdown”) and 1941 (“a plot”) are the same. He yielded to the organized power he needed, the doctors in 1937, and faced down the power he did not. The force that rebuilt a party, carried a program through the Depression and stood up to Ottawa is the same force that would not bargain in 1938 or in 1941.

He was also good company. In 1937 Cudge Ellingwood, Ruth’s husband, travelling west to find work, “went over to get acquainted with Ruth’s cousin, Duff Pattullo, who was premier of British Columbia in Victoria. He gave me some good advice as well as a fine time” (Cudge: Being his story as he recalls it, memoir of Richard Everett Ellingwood Sr., p. G37).

• On the map: the Pattullo Bridge (1937-2026); Tweedsmuir, Wells Gray, Manning and Mount Seymour parks, and what is left of Hamber; the small parks and trails the forestry crews built. The Big Bend Highway is gone, and the Alaska Highway went elsewhere.
• In the Okanagan and the Fraser Valley: the irrigated orchards of the South Okanagan and the farmland where Sumas Lake was, with what that cost the Semá:th.
• In government: the example of a province that borrowed to build and to employ, a fuel-price board, a health insurance act passed and then shelved, and a habit of looking north. Neil Sutherland, citing Bill Asselstine, a minister in both Pattullo’s and Hart’s cabinets, saw in Pattullo and W. A. C. Bennett “a similar imaginative vision”; Bennett, with postwar money, built the northern railway, the dams and the highways, and in 1968 floated the annexation of the Yukon again.
• In federalism: a provincial case against centralization that lost in 1941 and has been argued since.
• In politics: a warning about coalition that came true in part: the coalition did end the old two-party province, though Social Credit, not the CCF, inherited it.

He was a capable and ambitious public man whose achievements were real and whose failures were of a piece with them. At Lands he ran a department well and chose land badly, and he left the forests to the companies’ terms. In opposition he rebuilt a party and gave it a program. As premier he did more with a provincial government in a depression than most of his contemporaries in Canada, and the bridge, the camps and the parks are the proof of it. He had a vision of the north that the province could not pay for and that later governments carried out.

What he got wrong came mostly from the same place. Reform cooled once the money and the politics got hard, and he gave way to the doctors on health insurance. In 1938 he treated men asking for his own program of work as an organized defiance to be ended, and claimed the ending. On Asian Canadians he shared the exclusionist view of nearly all his contemporaries in British Columbia’s politics and, guarded in public, used his influence with King to act on it, most effectively in the call-up letter of 1940. In 1941 he was right about more than he was given credit for, on centralization and on coalition, and handled both in a way that cost him the premiership.

Whether he was the most significant premier of the century, as Fisher holds, or “a respectable second” to Bennett, as Sutherland would have it, the case for him rests on the first four years of his premiership and the works that came of them, and the case against him on 1938 and on the border he drew around “the people.” Both are true of him.

• The legislation of 1934-36 in detail (wages, hours, marketing, the Economic Council): Ormsby, “T. Dufferin Pattullo and the Little New Deal” (Canadian Historical Review, 1962), and Fisher’s chapters on 1933-37.
• Fisher’s pages for the Lands, opposition and New Deal years, now known only through the Internet Archive’s search of the text, so without page numbers.
• Relief and works employment, year by year, in the Public Works and Labour reports of the Sessional Papers.
• The forest camps’ numbers: the Forest Branch’s 2,809 and 4,005 against Rajala’s 3,800 and 5,000.
• The Pattullo Bridge: when the contract was let (June or October 1935), and its length (7,800 feet in the Canadian Press of 1937, 6,200 in later accounts).
• Tweedsmuir: reserved in 1936 or established in 1938 (the BC Geographical Names record gives both).
• The Semá:th and Sumas, and the Osoyoos people and the South Okanagan project: any record of his part.
• Bloody Sunday: how and when he arranged the eviction with Ottawa, and who chose the hour; his telegrams and letters of June 1938 in the Pattullo Papers.
• British Columbia’s submission to Rowell-Sirois (1938), in full.
• His death: 29 March 1956 (the Prince Rupert Daily News of 31 March, “died Thursday”) or 30 March (Find a Grave and the Canadian Encyclopedia).