 It was the longstanding view of a segment of the UFA that the Alberta government should enter the banking business directly by obtaining a bank charter from the federal government ( which has responsibility for banking under the Canadian constitution ) . In fact , UFA President William John Tregillus had included the idea in a speech he gave on his goals for the organization in 1913 . At the UFA convention in 1923 , a proponent of a provincial banking , George Bevington , made a passionate speech in favour of this idea , bringing most of the membership around to his side . The convention passed a resolution in favour of the idea ( along with one calling on the provincial treasury to establish a loan department , an idea that came to fruition fifteen years later with the creation of Alberta Treasury Branches ) , against the stiff opposition of Attorney @-@ General Brownlee . Brownlee 's opposition stemmed in part from investigations that Greenfield 's government had already undertaken into the subject : information was gathered from similar experiments in New Zealand and New South Wales , leading to the conclusion that , while there would be some benefit to a provincially owned bank , Alberta " had neither the economic nor constitutional base to consider such a scheme " . This conclusion was affirmed by University of Alberta professor D. A. MacGibbon in a government @-@ commissioned study . 
