Member of the North-West Council Oliver was elected to the North-West Council in 1883. He was the second elected member to the
1st Council of the Northwest Territories, winning the May 29, 1883, election for the newly formed
Edmonton district. In 1885, his newspaper pointed out that the NWT council did not have as many elected members as its population, 100,000, would warrant. Under the headline "Responsible Government", he called for a change in the way that members were elected. The following month, he pointed out that out-migration to the U.S. was stunting Canada's own population growth, and the NWT was in large measure to account for that, due to conditions created by the Conservative government in Ottawa. He blamed the out-migration on "the unwise and ever changing land regulations, the enormous reserves [(land held by the HBC and the Crown and not open to local settlement)], the ill treatment of squatters [(pioneers who had settled in the NW prior to government survey)], the discriminating tariff, the railway monopoly, and the lack of political rights (the one statement that has been made and repeated on platform after platform), and on how North-West lands and NW settlers must ultimately pay the whole cost of the CPR." Some of the stands he took in the NWT Council at Regina were not popular with all Edmontonians, least of all with local Conservatives. He organized a meeting in early January to refute charges that he was "an irreconcilable oppositionist with socialist tendencies", saying what he did had been in accordance "with the interests and wishes of the majority of his constituents". In 1885, following the suppression of the
Metis Rebellion, his newspaper said that the blame for the outbreak was shared "between Riel and the Ottawa government", singling out the late minister of the interior. His newspaper blamed the Conservative government's "deception, mismanagement and injustice" for having caused the rebellion. Oliver lost his seat in the
1885 Northwest Territories election to a local physician, 25-year-old
Herbert Charles Wilson. Oliver contested and won one of two seats in the Edmonton district in
1888. He retained the seat by acclamation in the
1891 and
1894 elections. During his time as a territorial representative, he contributed to the creation of the North-West Territories' first public school system. Oliver resigned from the council in 1896 to run for a seat in the
House of Commons of Canada for the
Liberal Party of Canada.
MP in the House of Commons Running as a Liberal Party candidate in the
1896 federal election, Oliver was a champion of small farmers and business people pioneering in Alberta at the time. He was elected to represent the entire
provisional district of Alberta and re-elected in
1900. The large Alberta riding was broken up in 1904, and Edmonton acquired an MP. Oliver was elected to the newly formed
Edmonton district in the
1904 Canadian federal election. Following his appointment to the federal cabinet, he retained the seat in a 1905
ministerial by-election. As leading federal politician of the western Prairies, Oliver was assigned by
Wilfrid Laurier to draw up electoral boundaries used in the
1905 Alberta general election. The boundaries were said to favour Edmonton, where the
Alberta Liberal Party enjoyed the most support, although overall, the Liberal Party got the majority of the votes cast and more votes than any other party in the election, including its main competitor, the Conservative party. Seven districts were drawn to touch Edmonton,
Federal minister From 1905 to 1911, Oliver served as the
Minister of the Interior and
Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs in the federal cabinet.
Jasper National Park was established during his time as minister responsible for national parks. Later, under the
Dominion Forest Reserves and Parks Act of 1911, he drastically reduced the size of
Rocky Mountains Park (later Banff National Park) from in 1902, to ;
Kootenay Lakes Forest Reserve (later Waterton Lakes National Park) from in 1895 to ; and
Jasper National Park from in 1907 to . Oliver's successor for Minister of the Interior,
William James Roche, later expanded the three Alberta national parks closer to their earlier sizes: in 1914, Waterton Lakes National Park to and in 1917, Banff National Park to and Jasper National Park to . In 1907, Oliver established a commission to investigate
Doukhobor settlement in Saskatchewan. The group had settled there on
Clifford Sifton's promise that they could hold and work the land communally. The commission led to the reversal of Sifton's policy and the Doukhobors being dispossessed of the land they had immigrated from Russia to settle. By 1911, Oliver had imposed tighter controls on immigration. He was staunchly British, and his policies favoured nationality over occupation. He asserted that his immigration policy was more "restrictive, exclusive and selective" than those of his predecessors. Like his predecessor, Clifford Sifton, Oliver encouraged European immigration, particularly of experienced farmers from Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe. Oliver wrote
Order-in-Council P.C. 1911–1324, which was approved by the
Laurier Cabinet on August 12, 1911, under the authority of the Immigration Act, 1906. It was intended to keep out
black Americans escaping segregation in the
American South by stating that "the Negro race...is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada." The order was never called upon, as efforts by immigration officials had already reduced the number of blacks immigrating to Canada. Cabinet cancelled the order on October 5, 1911, the day before Laurier's government was replaced by the new Conservative government. The cancellation claimed that the Minister of the Interior was not present at the time of approval. Oliver also used his newspaper to lobby for having the
Papaschase Cree removed from their
Treaty 6 reserve territory, south of Edmonton, in the 1880s. ==Later career and life==