| Jean Léon Côté: a pioneering force in Alberta’s francophone community. | | |  | Ernest Côté poses with a picture of himself while serving with the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War. | | | | | Ernest Côté, ’38 LLB, continues to keep alive the legacy of a francophone pioneer with the Jean Léon Côté Scholarship Jean Léon Côté was born in Les Éboulement, on the St. Lawrence River east of Quebec City, the same year the country came into being — 1867. The eldest son of seven children, he grew up with close ties to the land so, as an adult, when he heard that the Department of the Interior was hiring young men to conduct land surveys in Canada’s Northwest Territories, he began a campaign in Ottawa to get himself hired on. He got his wish in the spring of 1886 when he was hired as an axeman/chainman for the survey party heading west. Soon after the strapping 185-centimetre-tall Côté — a recent graduate of l’Academie Commerciale at Montmagny, Quebec — climbed aboard the CPR transcontinental train bound for Calgary, he made the acquaintance of the other survey party members, predominantly Scotsmen from Glengarry County, Ontario. It was amongst them that he had his first total English immersion that would eventually see him become known as the francophone who spoke English with a Scottish burr. That summer, Côté and his coterie of Scotsmen surveyed the land along what was then called the Edmonton Trail, mapping out homesteads and townships. Returning to Ottawa in the fall, he studied for and passed the federal government exam to become a Dominion Land Surveyor in 1890. Côté plied his trade in the East for almost a decade, and might have stayed there forever were it not for George Carmack and Skookum Jim Mason staking a claim to some mineral rights in the Yukon in 1896, setting in motion the feverish Klondike Gold Rush. Three years after the stampede north had begun, Côté was sent to Dawson City. He arrived to the chaos and anarchy caused by over 40,000 people in the region (Dawson City now has about 2,000 residents) intent on only one thing — finding their own pot of gold. Shortly after arriving in the Yukon, Côté gave up his federal employ and threw his hat in with brothers Richard and Reginald Cautley in a surveying partnership that was to last for several years. But as the gold rush played itself out business dwindled to the point where the partners decided to pick up stakes and move shop to the newly appointed capital of the new province of Alberta — Edmonton. In 1907, Côté returned to his hometown where he married Cécile Gagnon and brought her west to Edmonton where the fluently bilingual surveyor began to parlay his many personal friendships and connections as a surveyor into a political career. Well known in such communities as Athabasca, Lesser Slave Lake, Peace River and Fort McMurray, Côté was elected as a Liberal in the new Grouard riding in 1913 and re-elected by acclamation in 1918 and 1921. During his time in office he also served as minister of mines, railways and telephones, and was instrumental in the establishment of the Alberta Research Council. In 1923, Prime Minister Mackenzie King appointed Côté to the Senate but, sadly, he wasn’t to serve for long as he died of peritonitis the following year at the age of 57. A small community in Peace country and a mountain in the Canadian Rockies are named after Côté, whom well-known Alberta archivist Ted Hart described as a man who not only made his mark on the province’s surveying history, but also one who recognized the importance that French language and culture played in the province’s early history. One of Côté’s sons, Ernest, was 11 when his father died. He later went east to earn a Bachelor of Science degree at Laval University and then returned to Edmonton to follow that up with a law degree from the University of Alberta. When war broke out, Ernest Côté enlisted in the army, first in the Royal 22nd Regiment as a platoon commander. In 1943, he was attached to the headquarters of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division where he was promoted to colonel. He participated in the D-Day invasion at Normandy and would later be inducted as a Member in the prestigious Order of the British Empire. After the war, Côté remained in the Canadian Armed Forces, rising to the rank of general at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa. Over the next several decades, he served various roles, including 2nd and 1st secretary for the Department of External Affairs, assistant deputy minister and deputy minister of northern affairs, deputy minister of veterans’ affairs, deputy solicitor general and as Canada’s ambassador to Finland. Although he spent many years living in Ottawa, Ernest Côté never forgot his Alberta roots and his father’s role as a francophone pioneer in Western Canada. In memory of their patriarch, in 1995 the Côté family established the Jean Léon Côté Scholarship at the U of A. Ernest Côté is now 93 years old and continues to support this scholarship awarded annually to students who successfully complete Grade 12 in a francophone high school in Alberta and who enter the first year of a degree program at the U of A, preferably at Campus Saint-Jean. As well as his annual contribution to the scholarship, Ernest Côté has also included in his will a bequest to enhance the scholarship endowment as his way of giving something back to a community that was very supportive of his family. “My family has always believed in supporting young people financially to assist with their studies,” he says. “Students who have a profound understanding of their maternal language will be more competitive in whatever field they choose.” —Michael Robb, ’89 BA |
