Alberta Premier Don Getty, the inventor of Family Day, in office.
Alberta Premier Don Getty, the inventor of Family Day, in office. Credit: Government of Alberta Credit: Government of Alberta

Happy Family Day!

The winters around here are long. T.S. Eliot may have reckoned April was the cruellest month, but anyone from Alberta knows it’s February, season of the original fake news: “Spring is coming!”

Given what the Internet had turned into even before Elon Musk bought Twitter and made fake news great again, we need a February long weekend even more than we did in the cold, dark ages before the present rapidly warming epoch.

So thank God (and Don Getty) for small favours!

As favours go, the 11th premier of Alberta’s gift to us was a fairly small one, and it didn’t come without an unfortunate quid pro quo. 

Just the same, given the crowd now running the government of Alberta, it would be fair to say Mr. Getty gets a worse rap than he deserved – at least with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. 

At any rate, 35 years ago, thanks to Getty and the troubles his family was experiencing, Albertans celebrated their first Family Day statutory holiday.

The year before, during the run-up to a provincial election, Getty’s Progressive Conservative Government had announced in its pre-vote Throne Speech that henceforth and forevermore Alberta would mark Family Day on the third Monday of every February.

The initial reviews were not stellar. Indeed, a great howl of indignation rose up from all the usual suspects – the restaurant industry in particular – about how a February holiday would wreck productivity, cost untold bazillions that could never be recovered, and generally persuade the lazy slackers who were their employees to grow even lazier and slacker. Nothing of the sort happened, of course.

Ever since, though, killjoys of both right and left have been darkly carping that the former star professional football quarterback who became Alberta’s premier in 1985 only cooked up the idea to distract voters from the fact his son was in trouble with the law, accused at the time of trying to sell an ounce* of cocaine to an undercover narc in an Edmonton motel room.

Yeah, well, whatever.

Judging from the debate in the Alberta Legislature back in 1990, New Democrats and Alberta Liberals were not supportive. They were wrong about that.

There was some irony when the Opposition NDP caucus objected – or maybe just a case of turnabout is fair play. As Dave Cournoyer pointed out on his Daveberta Substack, a year before the Getty Government took up the idea, the NDP had proposed a February holiday. When that private member’s bill was debated in the Legislature, Tory MLAs catcalled the idea as “Karl Marx Day.” It was allowed to die on the order paper.

When the Tories brought it back a year later, Bob Hawkesworth, the NDP MLA for Calgary-Mountain View, complained in the Legislature that one Family Day in February wasn’t much of a consolation for the loss of a day off every week when working people could spent time with their families.

Hawkesworth, a churchgoer, was referring to Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, for those of you not old enough to remember when commercial establishments had to be closed on that day and you couldn’t get an alcoholic beverage other than sacramental wine to save your soul.

But by 1989, when Hawkesworth was carrying on, that train had already left the station and a statutory holiday in February is still better than no statutory holiday in February!

Laurence Decore, leader of the third-party Liberals in the Legislature, complained that the February holiday wouldn’t “excite and energize and stimulate Albertans.”

In 1990, as the first Family Day neared, Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid, by then a crotchety old man, was still carping about the idea, blaming it on “couch potatoes in the Legislature who want another holiday.”

Like Decore and Hawkesworth, he was wrong too, which just goes to show that some things never change. 

Unfortunately, Getty’s greatest achievement off the gridiron, unless you count not letting the premier of Newfoundland leave the room when he wanted to, was marred by a failure of nerve. Mr. Getty responded to the incessant whinging of the fast-food bosses about how their costs were bound to increase by downgrading another stat holiday, Heritage Day on the first Monday of August, which had been an official holiday in this province since 1974.

Heritage Day was busted back to a mere civic holiday to avoid the complaints about overtime costs. That was the quid pro quo. 

If Rachel Notley’s Alberta NDP government had wanted a project that would have ensured the eternal gratitude of most Albertans, come what may, it should have returned the August holiday to statutory status. On this, they ignored your blogger’s advice.

When mean-spirited Jason Kenney was at the helm taking direction from Restaurants Canada and pursuing his wage-reduction strategy, there was no hope of that happening. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if Kenney could have figured out how to get rid of both of them, he would’ve. 

Getty was inveigled into politics by Peter Lougheed, his former teammate on the Canadian Football League’s Edmonton Elks, then known by another name which I’m not going to mention here just to annoy the crybaby snowflakes of the anti-woke right. He was premier until the end of 1992. 

The patrician Lougheed may not have been much of an athlete compared to Getty, playing two years as an undistinguished defensive back starting in 1950, but he was a far bigger star in politics.

Getty passed the football more than 8,000 yards in his career and led Edmonton to two Grey Cups.

Getty served Lougheed as intergovernmental affairs minister and energy minister, then prudently stepped out of politics in 1979. Not long after that, in the summer of 1981, a recession accompanied by plummeting oil prices hit Alberta. (That’s the one that Alberta Conservatives have been tendentiously blaming on Pierre Trudeau ever since.) 

Lougheed stepped down in 1985. Getty was tempted once more unto the breach that same year. It was a fateful decision, because whatever timing magic he possessed on the gridiron deserted him, creating the opportunity for the neoliberal takeover of the Conservative Party that haunts Alberta and Canada to this day.

Alberta was the first Canadian province with a February long weekend. However, it must be acknowledged that Yukon created one in 1976, before any province. However, not being a province and at the time still having its territorial name preceded by the only definite article in the English Language, not to mention self-referentially calling the occasion Yukon Heritage Day, it gets no credit and no respect. Sorry about that, Yukon!

Saskatchewan finally climbed aboard the Family Day train 17 years after Alberta. A year after that Ontario joined the parade. Liberals in New Brunswick eventually followed suit, marking the occasion as a stat holiday for the first time in 2018.

“Liberals” in British Columbia, who in those days were really conservatives, created a February holiday with the same name starting in 2013, but decided to hold it on the second Monday, perhaps as a sop to the usual whiners at the Chamber of Commerce, seeing as the third Monday is also President’s Day south of the Medicine Line and thus was supposedly a big day for tourism in the fleshpots of Vancouver Island and the Kootenays.

In 2018, Family Day harmonization came to B.C., and the holiday was moved by a week, so we’re all one happy Canadian Family again. Or mostly, anyway.

By the way, the Presidents Day national statutory holiday, pegged approximately to George Washington’s February 22 birthday, has been officially enjoyed by Americans on the third Monday of February since 1968, but was marked in U.S. federal offices as Washington’s Birthday at least since 1885. Until the current incumbent came along, Gen. Washington was revered by our American cousins as their greatest president. 

Getty died in February 2016 at the age of 82, entitled to our qualified gratitude.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...