Richard Gavin Reid

Reid was born 17 January 1879 near Glasgow, Scotland, to George and Margaret (Ogston) 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. 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 these proposals he found a close ally in Brownlee, Greenfield's Attorney-General, 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. ==Premier==

. He sits at left.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. 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. 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. 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. Social credit, the brainchild of British engineer C. H. Douglas, purported to bridge the gap between a society's production and its purchasing power; Aberhart maintained that this gap was the source of Alberta's economic hardships. Reid was leery of Aberhart though he, like most politicians of the era, pronounced himself in favour of Douglas's philosophy. T. C. Byrne suggests that this expressed support was dishonest, that Reid considered social credit in all of its forms to be "complete nonsense", and paid it lip service only because of its popularity among voters. Though he was gaining adherents, Aberhart insisted that his aim was not to enter politics, but to persuade existing parties to adopt social credit in their platforms. To this end, he appeared at the UFA convention of 15 January 1935. The night before, he organised a reception for delegates. Besides Aberhart, it featured actors portraying two characters of whom Aberhart had been making considerable use in presentations around the province: the Man from Mars, who expressed bewilderment that poverty could exist in the midst of plenty and that governments were doing nothing about it, and Kant B. Dunn, who brought up straw man arguments against social credit for Aberhart to dismantle. Another of Aberhart's characters, the bumbling socialist C. C. Heifer, did not make an appearance; Aberhart biographers David Elliott and Iris Miller suggest that this was to avoid alienating the many UFA members who supported socialism. The next day, the UFA began debate on a resolution that read Resolved that a system of social credit as outlined by William Aberhart, Calgary, be put in as a plank in the UFA provincial platform to be brought before the electorate at the next provincial election. Debate was vigorous. One delegate said that UFA members wanted social credit, and if they could not get it through the UFA they would find other means. After three hours, UFA Vice President Norman Priestly noted in frustration that delegates were debating the merits of "a system of social credit as outlined by" Aberhart without ever having heard Aberhart outline his proposed system. It was agreed to invite Aberhart to appear. He closed by expressing pessimism that the delegates would choose to support social credit, and this pessimism proved well-founded: though sources are inconsistent on the precise outcome—journalist John Barr reports that the exact vote was not recorded, while historian Bradford Rennie states there were 30 affirmative votes out of 400 delegates present—there is agreement that the resolution was handily defeated. While the vote appeared to be a decisive victory for Reid and his fellow traditionalists, Byrne suggests that many members abstained. Reid's defence took two forms. The first was an overt attack on Aberhart and his policies. He insisted that Aberhart's proposed "monthly credit dividends" of Can$25 could not be issued unless taxes increased tenfold. He argued that Aberhart's proposed means of raising revenue—"unearned increments" and "production levies"—were actually disguised taxes, which would be paid primarily by farmers, and that his claims that the necessary credit could be created "at the stroke of a fountain pen" on an accounting ledger were absurd. He further pointed out that elements of Aberhart's plan, including the provincial government's entry into banking and the creation of a provincial tariff, were ultra vires the province under the Canadian constitution. The second element of Reid's approach was to call into question Aberhart's understanding of social credit by exposing inconsistencies between his statements and the theories advanced by Douglas. Douglas and Aberhart did not like each other, and Douglas did not believe that Aberhart fully understood his theories; though he declined to comment publicly, one of his deputies once called one of Aberhart's pamphlets "fallacious from start to finish". Hoping to capitalize on this rift, Reid invited Douglas to come to Alberta and serve as "Economic Reconstruction Advisor" at an annual fee of $2,500 plus a $2,000 expense allowance for each of his annual three-week trips to the province. Douglas accepted. Angered that the government had incurred this sizable expense without consulting the legislature, Conservative leader David Duggan introduced a motion calling on Aberhart to be hired in a similar capacity. This suited Reid, who hoped that by inducing both men to submit detailed plans he would at last have something concrete from Aberhart to attack, and something equally concrete from Douglas with which to contrast it. Aberhart confounded Reid's plan by declining his offer. On the other hand, shortly after his arrival he sent Aberhart a letter, gleefully released by Aberhart, asserting that there was no conflict between the "Douglas" and "Aberhart" versions of social credit. Moreover, his interim report to the government concerned itself primarily with political and legal, rather than economic, realities: he recommended setting up a provincially controlled media outlet to counter the anti-social credit propaganda he anticipated from the privately owned press, organizing a provincial government credit institution, and accumulating a stockpile of currency, stocks, and bonds. He also suggested that the UFA might need to form a coalition government to implement social credit. The report was of little use to Reid's government, so he had his Attorney-General, John Lymburn, ask Douglas to critique one of Aberhart's radio broadcasts. Douglas demurred, and made only vague comments about minor technical errors in the transcript. Reid's approach to combating Aberhart's influence had failed. The first element, attacking the validity of Aberhart's ideas directly, had failed because much of the Alberta public, in abject poverty, was not interested in hearing economic and legal arguments against social credit. This state of mind was illustrated by a voter's comments to Brownlee on Aberhart's proposals: Mr. Brownlee, we have listened to you with a great deal of attention and the answers you have given seem pretty hard to meet. But I have one more question ... I'm selling my wheat at 25 cents a bushel. If I tried to sell a steer tomorrow I'd probably hardly get enough to pay the freight. I get three cents a dozen for eggs. I'm lucky to get a dollar for a can of cream. Will you tell me what I've got to lose? The second part of the strategy, contrasting Aberhart's proposals with Douglas's, failed largely because both men were too evasive in their statements to make any kind of direct comparison of their views. Electoral defeat When the election came in August 1935, Aberhart offered economic recovery while Reid offered criticisms of Aberhart. 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. More tangibly, he promised to build a government oil refinery (predicting that "the near future will witness the greatest explorations for oil which this province has ever known"). Most of the campaign was conducted around Social Credit's promise to pull the province out of depression with its monetary theories. 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 sceptical of Social Credit's promises—saw no alternative hopes offered by the UFA. Time would prove Reid correct in most of his criticisms of Aberhart: he did lack a specific economic agenda, much of his legislation was struck down by the courts, and the depression did continue for several more years in Alberta. This was of cold comfort to Reid, whose defeat was total: at 408 days, his time as Premier was the shortest in the province's history to that point. ==Life after politics==

After the election, Reid orchestrated a quick transfer of power. The Social Credit victory had provoked a bank run, and he wanted to re-establish stability as quickly as possible. Moreover, the province needed to borrow a large sum of money to meet even its short-term obligations, and the UFA, as a lame duck government, was unable to make promises to would-be creditors. Once in office, confronted with a dire financial situation, Aberhart accused the UFA government of mismanagement. Reid responded in January 1936 that there had been no such mismanagement, that the province's financial problems were due to Social Credit's policies, both real and promised, and that had the UFA won re-election in 1935 it could have continued governing without serious difficulty. He also resisted insinuations that it had been too restrained in helping impoverished farmers: as late as 1969 he was offering the view that shrinking sources of provincial revenue made further assistance impossible. Apart from these occasional forays defending his record, Reid withdrew from politics. He became a commission agent, and later the librarian for Canadian Utilities Limited. For this latter role, he was made an honorary member of the Edmonton Library Association. During World War II, he served on the Canadian government's mobilisation board. Richard Reid died in Edmonton 17 October 1980 at the age of 101. He was cremated, and his ashes buried in Edmonton. As Rennie closes, "In 1935 Albertans wanted a saviour. Richard Gavin Reid was a mere mortal." ==Electoral record==

As party leader As MLA ==Notes==