United Farmers of Ontario
The United Farmers of Ontario were part of the nation-wide United Farmers movement that arose in early part of the 20th century. The UFO was founded in 1914 by the merger of various farmers organizations that had arisen in the previous fifteen years. The UFO entered politics by contesting the 1919 provincial election and shocked everyone, including itself, by becoming the largest party in the legislature, with 45 seats, despite the fact that the party had no leader.The UFO joined with one Independent and eleven Independent Labour Party MPPs to form a coalition government from 1919-1923 with Ernest C. Drury as Premier of Ontario. The Drury government lost the election of 1923 returning 17 UFO members, and 4 Labour compared to 75 Conservatives Drury lost his own seat and the United Farmers were in disarray. Eighteen months following the general election, William Raney became leader of what was now referred to as the Progressive bloc of MPs.
The 1926 election was a further setback for the group with only 13 Progressive MPPs re-elected, 3 UFO MPPs and a sole Labour member. In December, 1926, the UFO convention voted to formally cease running its own candidates (though some local UFO clubs continued to do so for some years), however, the UFO considered the Progressives as their party and, for all intents and purposes, the UFO and the Progessive Party were the same organization in Ontario.
Raney resigned from the legislature the next year and in the 1929 election only 5 Progressives, 1 Labour and 1 UFO MPP won re-election with former UFO cabinet minster Harry Nixon emerging as their leader. Nixon and the Progressives agreed to an alliance with Mitchell Hepburn and his Liberals and elected a group of 4 Liberal-Progressive MPPs in the 1934 election who joined Hepburn to form a government. In 1940, Farquhar Oliver, the last remaining UFO MPP, joined the Hepburn cabinet and formally became a Liberal member though he had, in practice, supported the Hepburn government since 1934.
The United Farmers of Ontario itself, however, encouraged by leading UFO member Agnes MacPhail (a Member of Parliament originally elected with the Progressive Party), affiliated with Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) when it was formed in 1932. The UFO disaffiliated from the CCF in 1934 and like United Farmers groups in the west, decided to withdraw entirely from electoral politics to become a lobby group. In 1944 the UFO joined with other farm groups to form the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
Many United Farmers, however, joined the CCF as individuals including MacPhail who became the first President of the Ontario CCF in 1932 and won election to the Ontario legislature as a CCF MPP in 1943.
See also:
- Ontario Liberal Party
- Ontario New Democratic Party
- Progressive Party
- Cooperative Commonwealth Federation
- Labour Party
- List of political parties in Canada