Clarence Decatur Howe

Clarence Decatur Howe , 1886-1960, Canadian civil engineer and cabinet minister, b. Waltham, Mass. He went to Canada in 1908 as professor of civil engineering at Dalhousie Univ. He founded (1916) an engineering firm that became internationally famous for its design and construction of grain elevators. He entered the Canadian House of Commons as a Liberal in 1935 and was at once invited by Mackenzie King to join the cabinet as minister of railways and canals and minister of marine. He merged the two agencies into the ministry of transport in 1936 and thereafter devoted himself to the development of air transportation, founding and organizing the Trans-Canada Air Lines. Soon after the outbreak of World War II, he was appointed (1940) minister of munitions and supply and in 1944 accepted concurrent appointment as minister of reconstruction. He became minister of trade and commerce in 1948. In 1957 he resigned the post when the Liberal party was defeated. From 1957 until his death he was chancellor of Dalhousie Univ.

Howe, Clarence Decatur (b. 15 Jan. 1886, d. 31 Dec. 1960). Canadian politician Born at Waltham (Massachusetts), he obtained an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before arriving in Canada in 1908. His successful business in grain elevators was destroyed by the Great Depression. He entered Parliament for the Liberal Party in 1935, and became Minister of Transport under Mackenzie King in 1936, becoming partially responsible for the creation of the Trans-Canada-Airlines (later Air Canada). As Minister of Munitions and Supply he successfully directed Canada's wartime economy. From 1944 he organized its transition to a peacetime economy and, as Minister for Trade and Commerce (1948–57), he continued to oversee the prosperity of the Canadian economy. In 1956 he supported the trans-Canada pipeline, with public money to be given to a private company; the necessary bill caused a parliamentary storm, and Howe's short-tempered responses to criticism of the pipeline led in part to the defeat of the St Laurent government in 1957.

Howe, Clarence D. (1886–1960),US-born Canadian businessman who, after entering parliament as a Liberal in 1935, became minister of transport in 1936 (where he helped create what eventually became Air Canada) and then minister of munitions and supply in April 1940 with almost dictatorial control of Canadian industry. He ran the country's war production programme brilliantly and in 1941 alone got it to produce more armaments than had been manufactured during the whole of the First World War. He also chaired the Canadian Mutual Aid Board and in 1944 headed the new department of reconstruction, overseeing the freeing of the economy from government control.