His father, Charles Alfred Drury, continued the family farm and was a forward-looking farmer, who used new techniques and technologies.

Drury was a co-founder of the UFO in 1913 but did not run in the 1919 election, which returned farmer candidates as the largest bloc in the provincial legislature.

Drury was elected to the Legislative Assembly in Halton in 1920, after John Featherstone Ford, the sitting UFO MLA, had stepped aside.

The newly-elected Labour MLA George Grant Halcrow was immediately convicted of violating the Ontario Temperance Act, which prevented him from receiving an expected appointment to the Cabinet.

[19] He became House Leader for the Labour Party but found himself at odds with Attorney-General William Raney over temperance by admitting, "I was an out-and-out wet in the Legislature.

[19] Another Act was passed which effectively prevented any movement of liquor within the Province,[20] but it was later held not to prohibit exports to the United States.

Dougall Carmichael, appointed as Minister without Portfolio, was given the responsibility of being the government representative on the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, and specifically with keeping its chairman Adam Beck in line.

[23] In 1920, responding to a campaign to have Hydro's rates made uniform,[24] a Legislature committee headed by John G. Lethbridge proposed a levy of $2 per 1 horsepower (0.75 kW) on all electricity generated in the province in order to subsidize up to 80% of construction costs on rural transmission lines (whenever there was an average of three customers per mile of line).

[26] An Act that favoured Beck's view, through subsidizing up to 50% of construction costs in the rural power zone, was passed in 1921,[11] which effectively tightened Hydro's control over public distributors and denied payments to private electricity producers.

[30] A particular issue with Ferguson's previous actions was that he had sold timber limits to the Shevlin-Clarke Lumber Company (headed by fellow Conservative James Arthur Mathieu) for less than half the price they would have normally fetched,[31] and the company later paid a fine of $1.5 million for breaching the Crown Timber Act.

[37] Many labour leaders distrusted a government dominated by farmers, feeling that they could not understand the problems of urban workers.

[41] The government was defeated when it ran for re-election in the 1923 provincial election, in part, due to false claims that Drury had used $100 to purchase a new coal scuttle for his personal use.