George William Ross
| George William Ross | |
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The Hon. Sir George William Ross
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| 5th Premier of Ontario | |
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In office October 21, 1899 – February 8, 1905 |
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| Monarch | |
| Lieutenant Governor | |
| Preceded by | Arthur Sturgis Hardy |
| Succeeded by | James Whitney |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
September 18, 1841 Nairn, Upper Canada |
| Died | March 7, 1914 (aged 72) Toronto, Ontario |
| Resting place | Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto |
| Political party | Liberal |
| Spouse(s) |
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| Religion | Presbyterian |
Sir George William Ross (September 18, 1841 – March 7, 1914) was an educator and politician in the Canadian province of Ontario. He was the fifth Premier of Ontario from 1899 to 1905.
Born near Nairn, in Middlesex County, Upper Canada, he worked as a school teacher, a school inspector and a newspaper publisher before he got into politics.
Ross's parents had emigrated from Tain in the Highlands of Scotland in 1831 and the language of his youth was Scottish Gaelic. He held a lifelong love for the language and his fellow Canadian Gaels and a short biographical account of Ross was printed in Gaelic in Ontario in the year following his death.
He was first elected to the Canadian House of Commons as a Liberal in the 1872 election, and was re-elected in the 1874 and 1878 elections. During his time as an MP, he actively defended the Canada Temperance Act, which favoured the "local option" approach for implementing prohibition.
He was initially declared re-elected again in the 1882 election, but his victory was challenged, and the next year the vote was declared void.
Rather than run again, Ross moved to provincial politics when he was offered the position of Minister of Education for Ontario in the Liberal government of Sir Oliver Mowat in 1883. He oversaw the transformation of former mechanics' institutes into more than 300 public libraries, the expansion of the kindergarten system, and the creation of a provincial School of Pedagogy for the training of school inspectors and masters. Ross increased grants to the education system, expanded the authority of the provincial Department of Education, and oversaw the expansion of the university system and the federation of a number of smaller colleges with the University of Toronto. He also, controversially, established an oligopoly for the supply of textbooks to Ontario schools that was in effect from 1885 to 1907.
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