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Peter Lougheed Politician

Edgar Peter Lougheed, PC CC AOE QC, (/ˈlɔːhiːd/ LAW-heed; July 26, 1928 – September 13, 2012) was a Canadian lawyer and politician. He served as the tenth Premier of Alberta from 1971 to 1985 as a Progressive Conservative.Lougheed was the grandson of Sir James Alexander Lougheed, an early senator and prominent Alberta businessman. After a short football career he entered business and practised law in Calgary. In 1965, he was elected leader of the Progressive Conservatives, a party that at the time had no seats in the legislature. He led the party back into the legislature in the 1967 provincial election. Four years later, the Tories won power with 49 of the 75 seats in the legislature, defeating the Social Credit Party which had governed the province since the 1935 election. Lougheed established a Tory dynasty in the province that has continued uninterrupted since then, the longest unbroken run in government for a provincial party in Canadian history to date. Lougheed was reelected in 1975, 1979 and 1982 provincial elections, winning landslide majorities each time.As premier, Lougheed furthered the development of the oil and gas resources, and started the Alberta Heritage Fund as a way of ensuring that the exploitation of non-renewable resources would be of long-term benefit to Alberta. He also introduced the Alberta Bill of Rights. Lougheed quarrelled with Pierre Trudeau's federal Liberal government over its 1980 introduction of the National Energy Program. But Lougheed and Trudeau eventually reached an agreement for energy revenue sharing in 1982, after hard bargaining. The successful Calgary bid to host the 1988 Winter Olympics was developed during Lougheed's terms.From 1996 to 2002, Lougheed served as Chancellor of Queen's University.Lougheed sat on the boards of a variety of organizations and corporations. In a 2012 edition, the Institute for Research on Public Policy's magazine, Policy Options, named Lougheed the best Canadian premier of the last forty years.