Jim Prentice

Prentice was born to a large, blue-collar family in South Porcupine, near Timmins, Ontario. The family then moved to Alberta in 1969.[6] He was the son of Wilma Lyle Marea (Mawhiney) and Eric Prentice, a professional hockey player who played five games in the National Hockey League (NHL) in the 1940s.[7][8] His uncle Dean Prentice played in the NHL for more than 20 years. Prentice was educated at the University of Alberta (where he became a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity[9]) and Dalhousie University. He paid for his tuition by working as a coal miner in the summer months for seven years.[10]

As a lawyer, he served as a Law Commissioner of the Indian Claims Commission of Canada.[11]

In his personal life, Prentice served for seven years on the Board of Directors at the Calgary Winter Club, including stints as president and Chairman. He was an active member and volunteer leader in the Grace Presbyterian Church. Prentice and his wife Karen have three daughters and two grandchildren.[12]

He was also a member of the Trilateral Commission, a non-partisan organization that aims to increase cooperation within the developed world. In this capacity, Prentice was one of 20 Canadian members.[13]

Prentice joined the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, and was active in Tory circles ever since. In the 1986 provincial election, Prentice ran for the Progressive Conservatives in Calgary Mountain View, being defeated by NDP candidate Bob Hawkesworth.[14]

During the early 1990s, Prentice served as the governing federal PC party's chief financial officer and treasurer (1990–93). Prentice first ran for Parliament as the nominated Progressive Conservative candidate in a spring 2002 by-election in the riding of Calgary Southwest that followed the retirement of Preston Manning as the riding's Member of Parliament (MP). When newly elected Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper replaced nominated CA candidate Ezra Levant in the by-election, Prentice withdrew from the race, following common practice to allow a party leader to win a seat uncontested so they may lead their party within Parliament.[15]

He ran in the 2003 Progressive Conservative leadership election to support the "United Alternative" proposal to merge the PC party with the Canadian Alliance. He was seen by many as an alternative to the "status quo" candidate and front runner Peter MacKay. A basic platform of Prentice's campaign was that "no one has ever defeated the Liberals with a divided conservative family." Prentice entered the 2003 convention day with some momentum, after delivering a passionate speech to the assembled delegates that encouraged Tories to be proud of their accomplishments, despite recent setbacks, and that recalled the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers who fought in the Battle of Passchendaele. He also unexpectedly received the support of fellow leadership challenger Craig Chandler, who withdrew early. Prentice ultimately emerged in second-place on the fourth ballot to the eventual winner MacKay.[16] Consistent with his positions during the leadership race, Prentice was a supporter of the merger endorsed by both the CA and PC parties in December 2003 that formed the new Conservative Party of Canada.[17]

Prentice was the first declared candidate for the leadership of the new Conservative Party,[18] announcing his run on December 7, 2003, the day after the new party was ratified by members of the PC Party. Prentice began his campaign in Calgary and toured parts of Ontario, specifically visiting Kingston, Ontario, the hometown of the first Canadian Conservative Leader Sir John A. Macdonald and also the city where one of his daughters attends Queen's University. However, he withdrew from the race on January 12, 2004, citing difficulty in raising new funds less than a year after his unsuccessful first leadership bid.[19] The leadership election was won by Stephen Harper, who later became Prime Minister of Canada after the 2006 Canadian federal election.

Prentice ran in the riding of Calgary Centre-North in the 2004 election for the new Conservative Party, and won the seat with 54% of the popular vote.[20]

After being sworn in as the MP for Calgary Centre North on July 16, Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper named Prentice to the Shadow Cabinet as the Official Opposition Critic for Indian and Northern Affairs. In that role Prentice opposed the Tli Cho land claim agreement, which he said would make Canadian law secondary to Tlicho local law.[21] Prentice was also a strong supporter of the proposed and controversial Mackenzie Valley pipeline.[22][23] He criticized the Liberal government for its treatment of aboriginal women, and its alleged costs of administering the Residential School Claims program for aboriginal victims of abuse.[24]

Prentice described himself as a Red Tory in the Conservative Party[25] and surprised many observers when he voted in favour of Bill C-38 supporting same-sex marriage.[26]

Prentice had been assigned the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development in the Conservative government, and was sworn into this role on February 6, 2006 until August 13, 2007. One of his main challenges as Minister was to implement "The Nunavut Project," a 2006 report authored by Thomas Berger, to show tangible, measurable results to increase Inuit representation in the Nunavut public services.[27]

In a cabinet shuffle on August 14, 2007, Prentice became Minister of Industry, succeeding Maxime Bernier.[30]

Copyright legislation and controversy

Bringing "Canada into WIPO treaty compliance" had been stated as one of Prentice's goals in future copyright legislation.[31] It has been pointed out repeatedly, however, that at the time of Prentice's statement of his rationale for introducing amendments to the Copyright Act, there was no international legal obligation to implement any provision of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty (WCT) or the WIPO Performances & Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) since neither had been ratified by Canada.[32] Prentice has promised to "put consumers first." claiming in an editorial that "(C-61) allows the recording of webcasts and TV and radio programs to be enjoyed at different times" while ignoring the fact that if the files are protected by digital rights management (DRM) it is illegal to break the DRM to make the recording.[33] Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has suggested that the core desire of the draft legislation is "to satisfy U.S. pressure by enacting something very close to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act".[34]

An opponent of the proposed Bill C-61 holds up a protest sign at a public breakfast event held during the Calgary Stampede by Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice.

Prentice did not immediately provide a rationale for not discussing the issue with CBC Radio Canada despite the hundreds of questions that flooded in from concerned Canadians.[35] He also refused to talk to a group of protesters who went to his office to express their concern, stating "When Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner and I have reached a consensus and we're satisfied, we will introduce a bill."[36] Prentice has also implied that he will not follow the Government's policy to table the WCT & WPPT 21 days prior to introducing copyright amendments designed to implement parts of these treaties contrary to the Government's policy on treaty implementation.[32] Industry Canada announced on June 11, 2008, that Prentice "will deliver brief statements and answer media inquiries shortly after the tabling of a bill to amend the Copyright Act ... [on] Thursday, June 12, 2008".[37] After less than two hours, hundreds of Canadians and critics panned the new Bill C-61[38] as nothing more than pandering to US interests at the expense of Canadians.[39]

On a 10-minute interview with the CBC's Search Engine radio program he dismissed any question related to digital rights management as "extremely technical" and claimed that the market will take care of copy protected CD's. Prentice then hung up mid question and refused to continue the interview at a later time. Most notably, Jim Prentice hung up before answering Jesse Brown's final question about who, under this bill, would have the power to investigate potential copyright violations.[40]

On October 30, 2008, Prentice was sworn in as Minister of the Environment in the Conservative Government.[49] During his tenure, funding for the CFCAS (Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences) was not renewed, which some argued lead to a brain drain in the climate scientific community.[50]

Prentice and Danielle Smith announcing that Smith and eight other Wildrose MLAs would be crossing the floor to join the Progressive Conservatives

Though previously rumoured to have been interested in succeeding Stephen Harper as federal Conservative leader,[55] Prentice entered the 2014 Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership election on May 15, 2014.[56][57] At the time the Alberta PC party was lagging badly in polls behind the opposition Wildrose due to personal expense controversies with Allison Redford, who resigned as premier and party leader after facing a revolt from the caucus and riding associations, with Dave Hancock serving in these roles for the interim. On September 6, 2014 Prentice won the leadership race with more than 76% of the vote on the first ballot.[58]

Prentice was formally sworn in as premier on September 15, 2014.[59] He immediately named a 20-member Executive Council of Alberta, smaller than the cabinet had been under recent premiers. His recommendations for cabinet appointments included two people, former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel and former Calgary Board of Education trustee Gordon Dirks, who were not members of the Legislative Assembly.[59] Prentice was elected to the legislature in a by-election in Calgary-Foothills, the seat formerly held by MLA Len Webber.[60] The PCs won all four of the provincial by-elections held on October 27, 2014 in what was seen at the time as a major electoral success for Prentice.[61]

On November 24, 2014, Wildrose Party MLAs Kerry Towle, (Innisfail-Sylvan Lake), and Ian Donovan, (Little Bow) crossed the floor to join the ruling PC Party's caucus giving the turmoil within the Wildrose Party, uncertainty about the leadership of Danielle Smith and confidence in Prentice as reasons for their move.[62] On December 17, 2014, Smith confirmed she and eight other Wildrose members – Rob Anderson, Gary Bikman, Rod Fox, Jason Hale, Bruce McAllister, Blake Pedersen, Bruce Rowe and Jeff Wilson – would cross the floor to the Progressive Conservative caucus.[63] At a press conference, Smith said that her conversations with Prentice revealed that they shared so much common ground that it made little sense for her to continue in opposition. "If you’re going to be the official Opposition leader," she said, "you have to really want to take down the government and really take down the premier. I don't want to take down this premier. I want this premier to succeed."[64] The defections were termed by a journalist as "an unprecedented move in Canadian political history", although they did not change the overall make-up of the government – the Conservatives still held a vast majority of the seats and the Wildrose Party was still the Official Opposition with a smaller caucus in the Legislature.[65]

Prentice at a campaign stop at the Whitemud Creek Community Centre in Edmonton during the 2015 election

Prentice's March 2015 budget "raised a plethora of taxes and fees to help pay the province’s way out of its hole, but he refuses to touch corporate taxes, because he is spooked by the prospect of investors skipping over Alberta for their next billion-dollar energy project, in favour of some more clement petro-state somewhere else. This array of taxes on you and your friends, but not on the C-Suite in Calgary’s office-tower jungle, has provoked populists on the left and right".[66][67]

On April 7, 2015, Prentice advised the Lieutenant Governor to call an early election for May 5 claiming that he needed to seek a new mandate in order to pass his budget, a full year before he was mandated to by the provincial fixed-election law of an election every four years (by the constitution, the incumbent government could run for up to five years before the writ had to be dropped in 2017).[68][69] The Progressive Conservatives were already lagging in polls behind the resurgent Wildrose Party led by Brian Jean, as Prentice's pre-election budget was deeply unpopular with both the left and right in the political spectrum while only "business leaders thought it was tough but fair". Several gaffes by Prentice hurt him and his party in the campaign, including a comment before the election call in which Prentince appeared to be blaming Albertans, telling them that they had to "look in the mirror" to understand the root cause of Alberta's "serious budget shortfall"; Alberta Party leader Greg Clark dubbed this “Mr. Prentice’s Alice in Wonderland moment because it’s only in some alternate reality that the blame for decades of PC mismanagement can be placed squarely on Albertans".[70] There was an "embarrassing miscalculation in the proposed NDP budget" released two days before the debate that Prentice planned to capitalize upon; during the televised leaders' debate Prentice said "I know math is difficult" to Alberta New Democratic Party leader Rachel Notley in criticizing the "multibillion-dollar hole in [her] proposed budget", however Prentice's remark came under fire for as being deeply patronizing as well as potentially sexist.[70][71][72] While Prentice otherwise performed respectably ahead of Wildrose leader Brian Jean and interim Liberal leader David Swann, the NDP gained momentum as a result of the debate and overtook Wildrose for the lead in polls.[73][74][75][76]

The provincial election ended the Progressive Conservatives' 44-year run in government, with the Alberta New Democratic Party winning a majority government, the first time the party had been elected to government in the province's history. The Progressive Conservatives fell to third place in the legislature, with 10 seats, behind both the NDP and the Wildrose Party. While the PCs placed second in terms of the popular vote, their caucus was decimated due to being completely shut out in Edmonton and losing all but eight seats in Calgary. Thirteen members of Prentice's cabinet were defeated, though Prentice himself was re-elected in Calgary-Foothills. However, with the overall result beyond doubt, he resigned as PC leader, disclaimed his seat (thus voiding the election result in his riding)[77] and retired from politics.[78]

During the transition of power, Prentice advised Premier-designate Notley to continue settlement talks with the Lubicon Lake Band. The band had been seeking an agreement for 80 years, and Prentice had reopened negotiations in the fall of 2014. Notley recalled "He saw a path forward and he advised me how to travel that path, for which I, and many, many others, are very grateful", and the land claim deal was reached in late 2018.[79][80]

Prentice served as a visiting global fellow at the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. for a four-month term that begun in February 2016.[81] At the Wilson Center, he wrote the book Triple Crown: Winning Canada’s Energy Future with Jean-Sebastien Rioux that was published posthumously by HarperCollins on February 21, 2017.[82][83]

Prentice was appointed as a senior advisor to private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC in June 2016, specializing in the energy industry.[84][85]

Wikinews has related news: Former Alberta premier Jim Prentice killed in plane crash

Prentice was among the four people killed in a small-plane crash in British Columbia on October 13, 2016. He was aboard a twin-engine Cessna Citation that disappeared from radar and crashed in nearby Lake Country shortly after takeoff from Kelowna International Airport, en route to the Springbank Airport, just outside of Calgary. He had spent the day golfing in the Kelowna area and had been returning home to Calgary.[86] In April 2018, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada reported that while no conclusive reason for the crash could be determined, it was likely that the pilot had become spatially disoriented shortly after takeoff, having had little experience flying at night.[6][87][88][89][90]

A state funeral was held for Prentice on October 28, 2016. Numerous dignitaries were in attendance, including former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, interim federal Conservative leader Rona Ambrose, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, former prime minister Joe Clark and former opposition leader Preston Manning.[91][92][93]

Prentice's official portrait as Premier of Alberta was unveiled on February 4, 2019. Painted by David Goatley, it depicts Prentice "standing on the third floor of the Alberta legislature, hands resting on the marble railing, eyes looking off in the distance. The expression and gaze shows Jim's sense of vision. He's thinking of the future and not the past." At the ceremony of the portrait unveiling, his widow Karen recalled that Prentice was "one who couldn't resist meeting with school tours when they passed by his office. He would invite them in, show them around, and give each of them the opportunity to sit in the premier's chair. I honestly believe his hope was that the experience would inspire more than one of these children to become involved in politics one day, and perhaps even become premier".[79][80]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jim Prentice.

• Jim Prentice – Parliament of Canada biography