He was a collegiate football star, a Harvard graduate, a visionary, a statesman and Canada’s Blue-eyed Sheik. He was Peter Lougheed. And for more than a generation of Albertans, he was the greatest premier in the province’s history. Lougheed passed away Thursday. He was 84 years old. Lougheed, who served from 1971 to 1985 as Alberta’s first Progressive Conservative premier, is credited with decisions that fundamentally changed both the outlook and prospects for the province. He was critical to developing the oilsands industry and started the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. He protected individual freedoms with his initial piece of legislation, the Alberta Bill of Rights. He overhauled public education and strengthened rural Alberta. “He moved us from being, in the early 1960s, a small, remote, average bunch of people, to a respected powerhouse in Confederation,” Lou Hyndman, who was elected to the legislature with Lougheed in 1967, once told the Herald. “He did that in everything from human rights to the oilsands. He had an ability to get Albertans to believe in themselves that no one had ever shown before.” A provincial park and a Calgary hospital both bear his name. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada. His other legacies include: Fish Creek Park, Syncrude, and an enviable network of rural highways, hospitals and airports. But he may best be remembered for his famous battle with Ottawa over energy anfd the constitution. The province’s modern oil wealth, it’s been argued, is a direct benefit of Lougheed’s struggles to keep resource ownership in provincial hands. His stand also earned him the nickname the “Blue-eyed Sheik.” Still, Lougheed once revealed to the Herald that his worst day in politics came in 1981 when his government decided to cut oil production in response to the National Energy Program. “It was dramatic to do that,” he said in a 1996 interview. “We were confident of the legal grounds we were on. We were fighting a federal budget, for heaven’s sake, and it required extreme action. “But as a Canadian, that was the hardest day policy-wise of my 14 years. It really was confrontational. I didn’t enjoy that.” Edgar Peter Lougheed was born in Calgary on July 26, 1928. And one would have to consider it a noble birth by Alberta standards, with grandparents that were true members of the frontier aristocracy. Peter’s grandfather was Sir James A. Lougheed, a lawyer who arrived in Calgary from Toronto in 1883. He later became Calgary’s first senator at age 35, all while building a small empire of real estate in Calgary. He was also knighted — the only Albertan to receive the honour — for his work as acting minister of the militia during the war. His wife was Isabella Clark Hardisty, who moved to Calgary to live with her uncle, Richard Charles Hardisty, the richest man in the Northwest Territories. The senior Lougheed was a reflection of Calgary’s own growth and determination. But on the heels of his death came a decline in the family’s personal fortunes.

His second son, Edgar, Peter’s father, lost the family home during the Depression and Peter witnessed the selling off of city-expropriated heirlooms for a fraction of their worth. Family members have said that it was this experience that would later push him as premier to try to make the province as diverse and as strong as possible so that Alberta could better navigate future economic hardship. As a teenager, Lougheed attended Central High School and founded a Students’ Union. Naturally, he was its first president. Although smaller than most of his pals, he was always the leader and distinguished himself in athletics. Friends remembered him as someone who played fair and worked harder than anyone else. He then went on to study at the University of Alberta, ultimately graduating with a law degree in 1952. He was a standout football player at U of A and is honoured on the university’s sports wall of fame. Lougheed was also Students’ Union president. During his late university years, he played football with the Edmonton Eskimos, assigned the bone-clattering task of running back kicks. But rather than pursue a career on the gridiron, Lougheed went off to Harvard Business School and received an M.B.A. in 1954. The next year, he was called to the Alberta Bar. Sharing in those early achievements was his wife, Jeanne E. Rogers, whom he married in 1952. The pair would go on to have four children: Stephen, Andrea, Pamela and Joseph. As a young man, Lougheed enjoyed success in law and in business, but he had ambitions beyond personal achievement that led him to choose a political life. The 1960s was a tumultuous decade that brought upheaval worldwide. It was a time of new music, politics and ambitions, from the Beatles to JFK to the space race. Lougheed was a conservative at heart, but he also saw the need for change in Alberta. First elected in 1935, the Social Credit government at that time was beginning to look its age. Nationally, Alberta was viewed as insular, rural and a bit player on the federal stage. Lougheed, however, saw Alberta as a province with great potential in nearly every respect. In 1965, Lougheed, a virtual unknown, captured the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives, a party without a single seat in the legislature. Soon, he was the MLA for Calgary-West. And, in 1971, he changed the face of Alberta politics. Using its famous campaign slogan — NOW — the PCs told Albertans it was time to consider a new alternative. Rather than focus criticism on the Socreds, Lougheed challenged Albertans to think big. “The first major goal was to get Alberta out of being a provincial backwater and into the mainstream of Canadian life,” Lougheed said in 1996. “Not just in political terms, but that our citizens felt that was in everything they did — whether it was professions, in sports, in the arts — that we were players in what was going on in the country.” Albertans embraced the message, electing 49 PCs out 75 seats. The party hasn’t relinquished power since.

As premier, he became known as the “little general.” He always had a goal in mind and was always thinking five steps ahead to achieve it. And he reached most goals. He improved health, recreational and arts facilities. His government created the Heritage Savings Trust Fund in 1976, a groundbreaking scheme to sock away some of the province’s energy wealth to the benefit of Albertans. The fund was to be Alberta’s insurance against rainy days. When the deluge came it lasted from the mid-1980s through the late-1990s. The fund proved critical when Lougheed moved to shield Albertans from a portion of mortgage interest rates, which soared as high as 20 per cent. Using money from the fund, he created the Mortgage Interest Reduction Plan, which provided interest rate relief for low- and middle-income homeowners. But the Heritage Fund was also used to reach out to other regions of the country, lending money to have-not provinces. And Lougheed was not afraid to have government step in if he felt it was best for the province. During the 1970s, he raised oil and gas royalties, ensuring the province benefited as a whole from the energy boom. Lougheed’s government set up the Alberta Energy Company, which became a major energy player in the province. Many years later — as a publicly traded company — AEC was part of the mega-merger that created Encana Corp., a leading North American natural gas producer. Lougheed also created numerous other government agencies including the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority, invested taxpayer money in an oilsands company, Syncrude, built hospitals and schools and museums and other facilities. In 1974, his government even bought Pacific Western Airlines to serve northern towns that eastern-based Air Canada ignored, helping spark a development boom. But for many Albertans, it was Lougheed’s battles with Ottawa for which he is best remembered. In the wake of the 1973 energy crisis, Alberta’s energy sector boomed but the rest of Canada felt the pinch of higher oil prices. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government responded by freezing oil prices and taxing oil exports. When prices spiked again in the late 1970s, Trudeau introduced the notorious National Energy Program in 1980, which imposed new taxes on energy producers. Lougheed fired back by turning down the taps on energy exports and delaying development of the Syncrude oilsands project. The move eventually got Trudeau to the bargaining table, and in 1981, the pair inked an energy accord. Among other things, it reaffirmed Alberta’s ownership of its resources. The NEP, meanwhile, faded as plunging oil prices rendered it unnecessary. On the national stage, Lougheed also fought for the other western provinces and was highly involved in the development of the constitutional amending formula in 1982. The late Allan Blakeney, who was premier of Saskatchewan when Lougheed held the reins in Alberta, once recalled for the Herald how Lougheed had a clear idea of the place of the provinces in Confederation.