Richard Gavin Reid

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Hon. Richard Gavin Reid
7th Premier of Alberta
In office July 10, 1934 – September 3, 1935
Preceded by	John E. Brownlee
Succeeded by	William Aberhart
Member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for Vermilion
In office July 18, 1921 – August 22, 1935
Preceded by	Arthur Ebbett
Succeeded by	William Fallow
Alberta Treasury Board President
In office July 10, 1934 – September 3, 1935
Preceded by	New position
Succeeded by	Position abolished (Position was merged with that of Provincial Treasurer until 2004, when Shirley McClellan filled it)
Alberta Provincial Secretary
In office July 10, 1934 – September 3, 1935
Preceded by	John E. Brownlee
Succeeded by	Ernest Manning
Alberta Minister of Public Works
In office July 10, 1934 – July 14, 1934
Preceded by	Oran McPherson
Succeeded by	John James MacLellan
Alberta Minister of Health
In office August 13, 1921 – July 10, 1934
Preceded by	Charles R. Mitchell
Succeeded by	George Hoadley
Alberta Provincial Treasurer
In office 1923 – July 10, 1934
Preceded by	Herbert Greenfield
Succeeded by	John Russell Love
Alberta Minister of Municipal Affairs
In office November 23, 1925 – July 10, 1934
Preceded by	Herbert Greenfield
Succeeded by	Hugh Allen
In office August 31, 1921 – 1923
Preceded by	Charles R. Mitchell
Succeeded by	Herbert Greenfield
Alberta Minister of Lands and Mines
In office October 10, 1930 – July 10, 1934
Preceded by	New position
Succeeded by	Hugh Allen
Born	January 17, 1879(1879-01-17) Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Died	October 17, 1980 (aged 101) Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Political party	United Farmers of Alberta
Spouse	Marion Stuart
Children	Three sons, two daughters
Profession	Dentist
Religion	Presbyterian

Richard Gavin Reid (January 17, 1879 – October 17, 1980) was a Canadian politician who served as Premier of the province of Alberta from 1934 to 1935. He was the last member of the United Farmers of Alberta to hold the office, and that party's defeat at the hands of the upstart Social Credit League in the 1935 election made Reid the shortest-serving Premier in Alberta history.

Born near Glasgow, Reid worked a number of jobs as a young adult, including wholesaler, army medic (during the Second Boer War), farmhand, lumberjack, and dentist, and emigrated to Canada in 1903. He involved himself in local politics and joined the recently-formed UFA; he was nominated to run for provincial office in the 1921 election in Vermilion. After winning election, he found himself a member of the UFA government caucus, and served in several capacities in the cabinets of Premiers Herbert Greenfield and John E. Brownlee, where he established a reputation for competence and fiscal conservatism. When a sex scandal forced Brownlee from office in 1934, Reid was the caucus' unanimous choice to succeed him as Premier.

When Reid took office, Alberta was in the throes of the Great Depression. Reid took measures to attempt to ease the suffering of Albertans, but asserted that inducing economic recovery was beyond the capability of the provincial government. In this climate, the monetary theories of evangelical preacher William Aberhart, who preached a version social credit, began to look very attractive to Alberta voters. Despite Reid's claims that Aberhart's proposals were economically and constitutionally unfeasible, Social Credit routed the United Farmers in the 1935 election; Reid's party did not retain a single seat.

Reid would live forty-five years after his defeat, but these years were spent in obscurity; he never returned to political life.

[edit] Early life

Reid was born January 17, 1879 near Glasgow, Scotland to George Reid and Margaret Ogston.^[1] He attended school in Glasgow and worked for several years in the wholesale provisions business before enlisting in the Royal Army Medical Corps.^[2] He served in South Africa as a Lance-Sergeant from 1900 to 1902 during the Second Boer War, doing hospital duty, before returning to Scotland.^[2] There he began to map his future, considering returning to South Africa to live before deciding on Canada instead.^[2]

He arrived in Killarney, Manitoba in 1903, where he worked as a farmhand during the harvest.^[2] When winter came, he went to Fort William to work as a lumberjack.^[2] He emerged from the experience with $160.^[2] A voyage west followed, and he set up a homestead in east-central Alberta.^[2] He also began to work as a dentist, drawing on his experience in the war.^[2]

On September 9, 1919, he married Marion Stuart.^[1] They would have three sons and two daughters.^[2]

[edit] Early political career

[edit] Local politics

Reid's political career began with four years on the municipal council of Buffalo Coulee, around present-day Vermilion.^[2] Two of these were spent as Reeve.^[2] He was also instrumental in founding the Vermilion municipal hospital district, on which he served for many years.^[2] On the federal scene, he was active with the United Farmers of Alberta Battle River Federal Political Association.^[2] To his surprise, he was elected its president.^[2] This led to a degree of profile around the district and, eventually, a nomination for provincial office.^[3]

[edit] Entry into provincial politics

Reid was nominated as the United Farmers of Alberta candidate in Vermilion during the 1921 provincial election.^[4] The UFA had only one seat—Alexander Moore's Cochrane seat, won in a 1919 by-election resulting from the death of Charles W. Fisher—in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, which was dominated by the Alberta Liberal Party, which had governed Alberta since it became a province. To Reid's great surprise, he defeated his only opponent (a Liberal) and was elected to the legislature, along with thirty-seven of his fellow UFA candidates—enough for a majority government.^[4]

The first meeting of the UFA caucus following the 1921 election, at which it selected Herbert Greenfield as its Premier. Reid, who chaired the meeting, sits at the extreme right.

Reid was elected chair of the first meeting of the UFA caucus following the election, at which it selected Herbert Greenfield, who had not run in the election, as Premier.^[4] Once so-elected, Greenfield made Reid his Minister of Health and his Minister of Municipal Affairs.^[4] Reid was re-elected in the 1926 and 1930 elections.^[5][6]

[edit] Cabinet career

Richard Reid enjoyed an illustrious career as minister in the cabinets of Greenfield and his successor, John E. Brownlee. He served as Minister of Health throughout both of their tenures, and also served as Minister of Municipal Affairs (1921–23, 1925-34), Provincial Treasurer (1923–34), and Minister of Lands and Mines (1930–34).^[4] As Health Minister, he called on his past experience to guide the establishment of new municipal health boards.^[4] He initiated a program of eugenics through the sterilization of the mentally handicapped;^[4] the program took effect in 1928 and lasted until 1972.^[7] He also vigorously supported Greenfield's deficit-cutting measures, laying off all school inspection nurses and many public health nurses.^[8]

This zeal also manifested itself in his performance as Provincial Treasurer. He was able to run surpluses from 1925 until 1930, except for 1927, and predicted in 1929 that a Alberta was on the cusp of a period of economic expansion.^[8] When he was confronted instead by the Great Depression, he drastically cut provincial spending and raised taxes, including a new income tax.^[8] When these measures were insufficient to prevent further deficits, he reluctantly accepted that the budget would not be balanced as long as the depression persisted, though his reasons for this were less the result of any Keynesian desire to stimulate the economy through government spending and more a belief that there simply wasn't any further spending to be cut or any further taxes that could be raised.^[8]

Reid, fourth from the left, stands among members of the Alberta and Saskatchewan cabinets, circa 1930.

As Treasurer, Reid favoured private over public ownership. He opposed calls from his own party to have the provincial government take the lead in developing hydroelectricity in Alberta, and viewed the provincially-owned railways as a burden to the government, even once they finally turned a profit in 1927.^[9] He was a leading advocate of selling them to private interests, a course that was eventually followed in 1929.^[9]

Reid's fiscal conservatism was also in evidence in his performance as Municipal Affairs Minister. In this capacity, he resisted a 1926 call from several municipalities to transfer a greater proportion of the responsibility for caring for indigents to the province.^[9] In 1929, he locked horns with the cities again when he insisted that they be responsible for 10% of the old age pensions paid to their residents.^[9]

[edit] Premier

When Brownlee was forced to resign in 1934 over his involvement in a sex scandal, Reid was the most prominent minister in his cabinet and among the most popular.^[9] Accordingly, he was the UFA caucus' unanimous choice to take over as Premier.^[9] It was not a good time for the government; besides Brownlee's resignation, longtime minister Oran McPherson was in the midst of a messy divorce and had also left cabinet, and UFA MLAs Peter Miskiw and Omer St. Germain had crossed the floor to the Liberals.^[9] Additionally, the province was in dire economic straits, as the Great Depression was still very much in effect.^[9] Liberal leader William R. Howson tried to take advantage of this state to undermine the government and position himself as the province's next Premier; he attacked Reid relentlessly for what he alleged were spendthrift habits, and suggested the province's tax rates were causing the confiscation of family homes.^[10] Reid resisted the attacks, asserted that Alberta's taxes had decreased since 1921, and criticized Howson for simultaneously attacking government spending as lavish and demanding new infrastructure projects.^[10]

Reid, right, giving a speech in Edmonton on the occasion of George V's silver jubilee

A more dangerous opponent than Howson was William Aberhart, the Calgary preacher who was proposing a form of social credit to cure the province's ills.^[11] Reid pronounced himself in favour of the principles of social credit, as did most of the province's politicians of the day,^[12] but ridiculed Aberhart's proposal to send every Alberta $25 per month as unfeasible without a tenfold increase in taxes.^[13] Moreover, Reid argued, since Aberhart's proposals would amount to a shift in monetary policy, they could not be implemented without the support of the federal government which, under the British North America Act, had full authority over such changes.^[13] In these criticisms, Reid had the support of both his party and social credit advocates who were loyal to the movement's intellectual godfather, C. H. Douglas, and who considered the Aberhart plan a perversion of proper social credit principles.^[13] Aberhart had not yet established a political party of his own, and attended the UFA's annual convention in January 1935 to propose a resolution that would have seen the UFA campaign on social credit in the next election; it was supported by fewer than ten percent of delegates, and Aberhart began to organize the Social Credit league as an electoral alternative to the UFA and the old-line parties.^[14]

In the meantime, Reid's government had taken a number of policy initiatives. It passed legislation authorizing it to buy the cattle of farmers who could no longer afford feed, and worked out a cost-sharing agreement with the federal government and the railways to relocate farmers fleeing the province's dust belt.^[10] Reid also called for the creation of a federal wheat marketing board,^[11] and proposed legislation—the Agricultural Industry Stabilization Act—that protected from creditors any portion of a farmer's revenue that was used on operating costs for his farm or living expenses for his family.^[15] Despite these measures, Reid found himself at odds with his party's membership, which was reacting to the depression by following an increasingly socialist path.^[11] Reid found UFA President Robert Gardiner to be of the "far left", and considered the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation to be an "unholy amalgamation".^[11] Even so, Reid's government experimented with a form of health insurance, to be jointly funded by government, employers, and employees, that would provide all Albertans with free medical, dental, and hospital care; the project was to be launched as a pilot project in Camrose, but never got off the ground due to the intervention of the 1935 election.^[11] More controversially, Reid's government reacted to McPherson's divorce and its attendant coverage by proposing legislation that would ban the coverage of divorce proceedings by the province's newspapers.^[15] In response, Liberal MLA Joseph Miville Dechene compared Reid to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.^[15]

When the election came, in August 1935, Aberhart offered economic recovery and Reid offered criticisms.^[16] Highlighting the UFA's record of clean government, low taxes, and fiscal responsibility, Reid committed himself and his government to bringing a sense of security.^[17] More tangibly, he committed to build a government oil refinery (predicting that "the near future will witness the greatest explorations for oil which this province has ever known").^[17] Even with the UFA's defense of its record and promises for the future, most of the campaign was conducted around Social Credit's promise to pull the province out of the depression with its monetary theories.^[16] Reid alleged that Aberhart's policies would destroy the province's credit and leave it unable to borrow the money it needed to carry on, but voters—even those skeptical of Social Credit's promises—saw no alternative hopes offered by the UFA, and deserted it in droves.^[16] On August 11, election day, every UFA MLA was defeated; Reid himself finished third in his riding, barely ahead of the Communist candidate, and resigned as Premier effective August 22.^[18] At 408 days, Reid's time as Premier was the shortest in the province's history.^[2]

[edit] Life after politics

After his defeat in the 1935 election, Reid withdrew from politics all together.^[19] He became a commission agent, and later the librarian for Canadian Utilities Limited.^[19] For this latter role, he was made an honorary member of the Edmonton Library Association.^[19] During World War II, he served on the Canadian government's mobilization board.^[19]

Richard Reid died in Edmonton October 17, 1980 at the age of 101.^[19] He was cremated, and his ashes buried in Edmonton.^[1]

[edit] Electoral record

[edit] As party leader

[edit] As MLA

[edit] References

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