A Belated Second Look

• Author: C. Ian Kyer
• Pages: 163-176

163

eight

A Belated Second Look

F   after his trial, Jarvis and his many allies had

pushed to obtain a re-examination of the evidence against

him. But so long as the Conservatives remained in power in

Ontario, that had proved impossible. Neither Premier Ferguson nor

his successor, Premier Henry, had wanted anything to do with such

a re-examination. But that hurdle was removed on 19 June 1934 when

the Ontario voters elected Mitch Hepburn’s Liberals.

Jarvis took the opportunity to petition Arthur Roebuck, Hepburn’s

new attorney general.1 There were good reasons to believe that f‌ifty-

six-year-old Roebuck would take a dif‌ferent attitude toward the UFO

Party and how Ferguson and Price had treated them. He had grown

up on a farm in Wellington County, near Guelph. After working as a

reporter for Joe Atkinson’s Toronto Star, he had joined Ontario’s silver

rush, becoming the editor of the Cobalt Citizen. In his spare time, he

had studied law and become a lawyer, working with Hartley Dewart,

Peter Smith’s f‌irst choice as legal counsel.2 After two unsuccessful

attempts to win a seat in the provincial legislature as a Liberal-Labour

candidate, he had joined Drury’s UFO Party. In the 1923 election that

brought Ferguson’s Conservatives to power, Roebuck had run and lost

as a UFO candidate. In 1926, at a banquet given in honour of Drury

in Barrie by the party (then known as the Progressives), Roebuck had