Fonds edm-1846 - George Van Allen fonds

George Van Allen was born in Morrisburg Ontario in 1890. Initially educated as a teacher, he moved west to Alberta in 1912 to become the principal of a school in Lethbridge. Soon after arriving in the province, however, Van Allen decided to relocate to Edmonton to study law at the University of Alberta. He quickly developed a passion for the law; he was admitted to the bar in 1915, he went on to establish his own practice in 1919, and then became King's Council in 1929. Van Allen was also active in municipal and provincial affairs, first serving on the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, becoming chamber president in 1928, then as a MLA for Edmonton. In politics, Van Allen was a staunch liberal. Though he worked with the party for many years, he was reluctant to run; however, in 1935 the party convinced him to be a candidate in Edmonton, where he won one of the five Liberal seats during the Social Credit landslide. Because of his roots in farming in Ontario and Alberta, Van Allen focused his attention on the state of the agricultural industry in Alberta during the depression, but he was also quite concerned by the Social Credit's radical economic policies. During his first legislative term, in the autumn of 1936, Van Allen came down with a flu that quickly developed into full-blown pneumonia. The pneumonia was very aggressive; it resisted treatment in California and Minnesota until Van Allen's death in June 1937. There was a real sense of loss following his death among his colleagues; many MLAs believed that Van Allen had real parliamentary potential, and that he was "aggressiveness personified" during debates. Married in 1926, Van Allen had three sons and a daughter.