Richard Gavin Reid
Richard Gavin "Dick" Reid was a Canadian politician who served as the sixth premier 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 him the shortest serving premier to that point in Alberta's history.
Born near Glasgow, Scotland, Reid worked a number of jobs as a young adult—including wholesaler, army medic, farmhand, lumberjack and dentist—and immigrated to Canada in 1903. He involved himself in local politics and joined the recently formed UFA, which nominated him to run in the 1921 provincial election as its candidate in Vermilion. The UFA won the election, and Reid served in several capacities in the cabinets of premiers Herbert Greenfield and John Edward 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 experiencing the Great Depression. Reid took measures to ease Albertans' suffering, but believed that inducing a full economic recovery was beyond the capacity of the provincial government. In this climate, Alberta voters were attracted to the economic theories of evangelical preacher William Aberhart, who advocated a version of social credit. Despite Reid's claims that Aberhart's proposals were economically and constitutionally unfeasible, Social Credit routed the UFA in the 1935 election; Reid's party did not retain a single seat. Reid lived forty-five years after his defeat, but these years were spent in obscurity; he never returned to political life.
Early life
Reid was born 17 January 1879 near Glasgow, Scotland, to George and Margaret Reid. He attended school in Glasgow and worked for several years in the wholesale provisions business before enlisting in the Royal Army Medical Corps. 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. There he began to plan his future, considering returning to South Africa to live before deciding on Canada.He arrived in Killarney, Manitoba, in 1903, where he worked as a farmhand during the harvest. When winter came, he found work as a lumberjack in Fort William, Ontario. A voyage west followed, and he set up a homestead in east-central Alberta. Once there, he began to practice dentistry, drawing on his army experience. On 9 September 1919, he married Marion Stuart. They had three sons and two daughters.
Early political career
Entry into politics
Reid's political career began with four years on the municipal council of Buffalo Coulee, around present-day Vermilion. He spent two of these as Reeve. He was instrumental in founding the Vermilion municipal hospital district, on whose board he served for many years. Federally, he was active with the United Farmers of Alberta Battle River Political Association, of which he became president.Image:UFA caucus.jpg|thumb|left|alt=Photo of a caucus meeting showing thirty-five men and a woman, sitting around several long tables with documents laid out before them. As space is cramped and there is not room for everyone at the table, they are seated in two rows.|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 nominated as the UFA candidate in Vermilion during the 1921 provincial election, the first in which the UFA ran candidates. The Legislative Assembly of Alberta was dominated by the Liberals, who had governed Alberta since its creation in 1905. To Reid's great surprise, he defeated his Liberal opponent and was elected to the legislature, along with 37 of his fellow UFA candidates—enough to form a majority government. He chaired the first meeting of the new UFA caucus, at which it selected Herbert Greenfield as Premier. Reid was re-elected in the 1926 and 1930 elections.
Cabinet career
Reid occupied high-ranking cabinet positions in Greenfield's government and that of his successor, John Edward Brownlee. Greenfield appointed him Minister of Health and Minister of Municipal Affairs in 1921. In the former capacity, he drew on his past experience with the Vermilion board in establishing new municipal health boards. He also proposed a program of eugenics through the sterilisation of the mentally handicapped, which in 1928 led to the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta. As an advocate of government-wide economy, he laid off all school inspection nurses and many public health nurses. This inclination towards thrift was also evident in his performance as Minister of Municipal Affairs, in which he resisted a 1926 call from several municipalities to transfer a greater proportion of the responsibility for caring for indigents to the province. In 1929, he disagreed with them again when he insisted that they be responsible for 10% of the old-age pensions paid to their residents.In 1923 Greenfield moved Reid out of both of his portfolios and made him Provincial Treasurer, where he perpetuated his fiscal conservatism across the government. Early in his tenure, he presented a brief to cabinet recommending that ministers reduce their budgets and that the government create a purchasing department tasked with coordinating spending on supplies. In these proposals he found a close ally in Brownlee, Greenfield's Attorney-General, and when Brownlee succeeded Greenfield as Premier in 1925 he kept Reid as Provincial Treasurer and re-appointed him as Minister of Municipal Affairs. Brownlee and Reid had a history of working closely not only on fiscal issues, but also on agricultural ones: in July 1923, they had travelled together to investigate the creation of a wheat pool in Alberta. This trip included a meeting with cooperative pioneer Aaron Sapiro in San Francisco and a visit to Chicago's commodity market. Both Reid and Brownlee concluded that a pool ought to be proceeded with cautiously, if at all, though this view was overruled when a later visit by Sapiro to Alberta generated sufficient enthusiasm that the government had little choice but to go along with the creation of the Alberta Wheat Pool.
Image:Alberta and Saskatchewan.jpg|thumb|left|alt=Photo of ten cabinet members standing in a row.|Reid, fourth from the left, among members of the Alberta and Saskatchewan cabinets, c. 1930.With Brownlee as premier and Reid as Provincial Treasurer, government deficits ceased: the budget showed a surplus in every year from 1925 until 1930, except for 1927. In 1929, Reid predicted that Alberta was on the cusp of a period of economic expansion; instead, he was soon confronted with the Great Depression. He drastically cut provincial spending and raised taxes, in part by creating a new income tax. He reluctantly accepted that these measures could not prevent a return to deficit spending. His willingness to outspend revenues was due less to any Keynesian desire to stimulate the economy than to a belief that there was no further spending to be cut or further taxes that could reasonably be raised. Conversely, he rejected calls from the opposition Liberals to cut taxes as a stimulus measure.
Though Brownlee was no more enthusiastic than Reid about deficits, his continued confidence in his Provincial Treasurer was evidenced by his decision to give him yet another ministerial portfolio. In 1930 Brownlee secured Alberta's long-sought control over its natural resources from the federal government, and he appointed Reid Alberta's first Minister of Lands and Mines on 10 October 1930. In this capacity, Reid favoured private over public ownership. He opposed calls from his own party to promote government-developed hydroelectricity projects, and viewed the provincially owned railways as a burden to the government, though they finally turned a profit in 1927. He was a leading advocate of selling them to private interests, a course that was eventually followed in 1929.
Premier
In 1934, Brownlee was implicated in a sex scandal, as a young family friend and her father sued him for seduction. By Reid's account, he had to convince his premier not to quit "hundreds of times". When the jury found in favour of the plaintiffs, however, Brownlee had no choice, and resigned effective 10 July 1934. Reid was the most prominent minister in the cabinet and among the most popular, and was the UFA caucus' unanimous choice to take over. He also replaced Brownlee as Provincial Secretary and installed himself in the newly created position of Treasury Board President.The UFA was in an uncertain position when Reid became Premier; besides Brownlee's resignation, longtime Minister of Public Works Oran McPherson was in the midst of a scandalous divorce and had also left cabinet, and UFA MLAs Peter Miskew and Omer St. Germain had crossed the floor to the Liberals. Additionally, the province's economic condition remained poor. Liberal leader William R. Howson tried to take advantage of this 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. Reid asserted in response that Alberta's taxes had decreased since 1921, and criticised Howson for simultaneously attacking government spending and demanding new infrastructure projects.
In the meantime, Reid's government took a number of policy initiatives. It passed legislation authorizing the government purchase of cattle from 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. Reid also called for the creation of a federal wheat marketing board, and proposed legislation—the Agricultural Industry Stabilisation 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. Despite these measures, Reid found himself at odds with his party's membership, which was reacting to the Great Depression by following an increasingly socialist path. He found UFA President Robert Gardiner to be of the "far left", and considered the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, in whose founding many UFA members had participated, to be an "unholy amalgamation". Even so, his government experimented with a form of universal health insurance, to be jointly funded by government, employers, and employees, that would provide Albertans with free medical, dental, and hospital care; the project was to be launched as a pilot project in Camrose, but was never begun because of the intervention of the 1935 election. More controversially, Reid's government reacted to McPherson's divorce and its attendant coverage by proposing to ban newspapers from covering divorce proceedings, a proposal that prompted Liberal MLA Joseph Miville Dechene to compare Reid to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.