particular his convincing the legislature to set a minimum teachers' salary of $840 per year. Another of Boyle's tactics to alleviate the teacher shortage was to make it easier for teachers qualified in Quebec to teach in Alberta. However, this liberalization was subject to applicants' English proficiency: Boyle insisted that all instruction in Alberta schools be delivered in English. A Québécois teacher who passed an English language proficiency exam would be granted a temporary teaching license, which could be upgraded to a full Alberta Teaching Certificate with five months' study at a normal school. Boyle's insistence that Alberta was English offended not only the province's French Canadian minority, but also its Ukrainian-speaking population; an editorial in a Ukrainian newspaper maintained angrily that "the minister of education lies when he says that Alberta is an English province. Alberta is a Canadian province, where everyone has equal rights, including the Ukrainians." During a by-election in Whitford Boyle accused the Conservatives of promising Ukrainian language schools to court the immigrant vote. In 1918, new premier Charles Stewart, who had succeeded Sifton when the latter entered federal politics in 1917, fired Cross and appointed Boyle Attorney-General. The following year Boyle introduced legislation formally making English Alberta's only official language. At the time, he boasted that in the past election "my majority came from English electors" in contrast to a Conservative who supported "Russian schools for Russian people". As Attorney-General, he also supported unsuccessful legislation to allow Imperial Oil to construct a pipeline in Alberta; in response to bipartisan opposition calling for pipelines to be common carriers, he said that to adopt such a course would be to tell oil companies that they "were free to spend vast sums in exploration work but if oil were found, they were not to pipe it out." One of Boyle's chief responsibilities as Attorney-General was to enforce Alberta's recently enacted prohibition. This proved difficult, as the law was widely disparaged—not least by judges, who reputedly presided over liquor trials while hungover. In 1921, Boyle estimated that bootleggers were profiting from prohibition to the tune of Can$7 million. He was denounced by supporters of prohibition for his ineffectiveness at enforcing it, and by its opponents for "arrogating to himself the powers of a czar." In the 1921 election, Boyle both sought re-election in Sturgeon and election in the new multi-member constituency of Edmonton. He was defeated in the former