Newton Rowell
Newton Wesley Rowell, PC (
November 1,
1867-
November 22,
1941) was a
Canadian lawyer and politician and leading lay figure in the
Methodist church. Rowell led the
Ontario Liberal Party from 1911 to 1917 and put forward a platform advocating
temperance. Rowell's Liberals failed to oppose the
Whitney government's passage of
Regulation 17 which restricted the teaching of the French language in schools alienating the province's
French-Canadian minority.
In 1917 Rowell, a supporter of
conscription during
World War I left the Ontario
legislature to join the national
Unionist government of Sir
Robert Borden serving as President of the
Privy Council of Canada and, later, as Canada's first Minister of Health. Rowell did not run for re-election in 1921. After the war Rowell served as a Canadian delegate to the
League of Nations and became involved in international affairs. He also helped lead the Methodists into a merger with
Presbyterians to form the
United Church of Canada. In 1936 he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Ontario.
He is also noted for being the first chair of the 1937
Rowell-Sirois Commission into Dominion-Provincial economic relations and for being a founding leader of the
United Church of Canada.
Asked how to say his name, he told
The Literary Digest it had
ow as in
now: row-ELL. (Charles Earle Funk,
What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)
Rowell was the maternal grandfather of former
Lieutenant Governor of Ontario Hal Jackman and current
Senator Nancy Ruth. His daughter Mary wed
Harry Jackman in
1930.
