Born in Ontario, he migrated west as a young adult where he started a successful lumber company and later became Alberta's first Minister of Public Works and the 11th mayor of Calgary.

[7] He was also active in the local Methodist church and the Bowness golf club,[8] and served eight years as a school trustee with the Calgary Board of Education.

[6] In keeping with custom for cabinet ministers in Westminster parliamentary systems, Cushing ran for the first Legislative Assembly of Alberta in the district of Calgary in the 1905 election.

The campaign was acrimonious; at one meeting, Bennett accused Cushing of giving his fellow Liberal candidates road-building money with which they could bribe their districts.

[14] Though it was not to be at his preferred location, as Public Works Minister, Cushing chose the design for the new Alberta Legislature Building, which was based on the Minnesota State Capitol.

[15] As Calgary's representative, Cushing was further dismayed when Rutherford elected to locate the University of Alberta in his own hometown of Strathcona, immediately across the North Saskatchewan River from Edmonton.

[16] As Public Works Minister, Cushing was a primary advocate of government intervention in the labour disputes plaguing Alberta's coal industry in 1907; Rutherford eventually appointed a commission to examine the problem.

Bell controlled all telephone service in Calgary, and refused to extend its operations into less densely populated, and therefore less profitable, regions of the province.

This new company later purchased Bell's lines and financed the venture by issuing debentures, in contrast to the government's usual policy of "pay as you go".

Cushing felt that guaranteeing $20,000 per mile, regardless of actual construction costs, was unwise, and further believed that the government's reliance on the A&GW's engineer could let the company get away with building a sub-standard railway.

[27] Bulyea instead invited provincial Chief Justice Arthur Sifton to form a government, though Cushing was reputed to have been "sitting in his hotel room, his ear glued to the telephone, waiting for the summons from the Lieutenant-Governor to assume the robes of Rutherford".

In assessing his role in that episode, Thomas has suggested that his actions were motivated by something other than "revulsion against what appeared to be an unwise contract with a railway company".

[33] In evaluating his legacy, Roome also considers his role in establishing the government telephone system, which in her opinion "produced serious financial difficulties" for the province in the years ahead.