Hazen, Sir John Douglas

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Barry Cahill, “HAZEN, SIR JOHN DOUGLAS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/hazen_john_douglas_16E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer, university administrator, politician, and judge; b. 5 June 1860 in Oromocto, N.B., son of James King Hazen and Elizabeth Marian Beckwith; grandson of John Adolphus Beckwith; m. 22 Sept. 1884 Ada Caroline Tibbits in Fredericton, and they had two sons and three daughters; d. 27 Dec. 1937 in Saint John.
    • Douglas Hazen – he never used his first name – was a scion of the Sunbury Hazens, a cadet branch of one of New Brunswick’s most prominent patrician families. Young Hazen was educated at Fredericton Collegiate School and the University of New Brunswick, graduating from the latter with a ba in 1879. Shortly afterwards he commenced the study of law in the elite Fredericton firm of Premier John James Fraser, Edward Ludlow Wetmore, and Edward Byron Winslow. He was admitted as an attorney in 1882 and called to the bar the following year. From 1882 to 1890 he was employed principally as the University of New Brunswick’s registrar and treasurer, and he practised law in a desultory manner. His real interest was Conservative politics, into which he was initiated when he campaigned for Fraser throughout the riding of York during the federal election of 1882. 
    • In the federal election of 5 March 1891 Hazen, running chiefly on his family name, was elected for Saint John City and County and joined Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservative government in Ottawa. At 30 years of age Hazen was possibly the youngest anglophone mp up to that time, yet when parliament convened in April he was given the honour of moving the address in reply to the speech from the throne. His mature and polished eloquence made an impression, and throughout the next five years Hazen was a busy and well-informed backbencher who spoke frequently to matters of local and regional interest.
    • In the federal election of 23 June 1896 Hazen lost by 191 votes to Joseph John Tucker, a Liberal newcomer to politics whose “chief political asset,” in the words of historian John Irvine Little, “seems to have been his wealth.” Hazen’s defeat is difficult to explain. If any local issue affected the outcome, it was the failure of successive Conservative governments to sustain Saint John’s claim to be Canada’s winter port and terminus of the fast line of North Atlantic mail steamers. Years later, as federal minister of marine and fisheries, Hazen would be in a position to divert both steamship lines and individual vessels from Halifax to Saint John, and he would not hesitate to do so.
    • The rivalry between Borden and Hazen epitomized and mirrored the historic tension between Halifax and Saint John, the cities where they respectively built their careers. They had little in common except their profession and political allegiance. Borden was an elite counsel who headed a gilt-edged firm and was at best a reluctant politician; Hazen, on the other hand, was an indifferent lawyer whose real love was public life but who never achieved the level of political success that Borden did. Hazen was no less aggressive, ruthlessly ambitious, and determined than Borden, but, certain that he was indispensable, Hazen was perhaps more trusting of Borden than the prime minister was of him.
    • Sir John Douglas Hazen’s historical significance as a regional figure is secure, but his place on the national stage was fatally undermined by the sudden and premature end of his career in federal politics. As a minister, he was far more experienced and distinguished than Carvell, and Borden’s decision to sacrifice him to political expediency was unwise and unnecessary. The Union government could have managed quite well without a token Unionist Liberal from New Brunswick. Hazen’s exclusion weakened the cabinet, especially because Ballantyne, his successor at the Department of Marine and Fisheries, was parachuted into a portfolio of supreme importance to the war effort despite being a political novice. From 1911 to 1917 Hazen was a strong figure in the cabinet, and two years after dropping him Borden needed and wanted him back, seeming finally to have recognized how short-sighted and imprudent his sacking of Hazen had been. It is interesting to speculate about what might have happened had Hazen accepted Borden’s offer to return to the cabinet. If he had become the next leader of the Conservative Party, then the course of the country’s politics would have been changed. Hazen’s career, then, represents one of the great what-might-have-beens of Canadian political history.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=3718
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8663968/john-douglas-hazen