Charles Stuart (Canadian politician)

Charles Allan Stuart (August 3, 1864 – March 5, 1926) was a Canadian politician and jurist in the province of Alberta.

He resigned before the end of his term in the latter body to accept a judgeship on the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories.

[1] He attended Middlesex County College and then the University of Toronto, graduating from the latter in 1891 with a gold medal in classics;[2] he subsequently lectured there in constitutional history.

[2] During the lead-up to Alberta's 1905 creation as a province, Stuart was initially critical of the terms imposed by the Liberal federal government of Wilfrid Laurier; these terms kept control of natural resources, which was held by the provincial governments of the older provinces, under federal control.

[5] He was less sanguine about Alberta's new electoral boundaries, which disproportionately favoured the province's north, and about the Liberals' policy of fixing Calgary's rival Edmonton as the interim provincial capital, with the first legislature to make the final decision—he felt that the issue should be put to a vote in the first provincial election.

[1] As Supreme Court judge, Stuart found in favour of the Alberta government in a 1912 suit against the Royal Bank of Canada.

Stuart found that the government was entitled to the money, but his ruling was overturned by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1913.