THIS DAY IN HISTORY: JULY 12, 1935
In 1935, federal Conservative cabinet minister H. H. Stevens left Prime Minister R. B. Bennett’s government after a falling- out. But the prominent British Columbia politician didn’t leave politics: he started up a new party. Stevens’ Reconstruction Party platform was designed to lift Canada out of the Great Depression. It was released 78 years ago today, and was summed up in a Sun headline as “Work for Youth, Tax the Rich, ( and) Lower Interest.” Stevens had begun political life as a free enterprise Conservative, but the ravages of the Depression convinced him the government should intervene in the economy. “It is now as much the duty of the state to ensure for its people the elementary needs of food, clothing and shelter on a civilized scale as to protect them and their property from molestation,” Stevens stated in the party manifesto. “Social justice and economic security are recognized as being the only firm foundation upon which national security can be built.” The Reconstruction platform called for increased taxes on “large incomes and corporations,” agricultural marketing boards to protect farmers, and “strict enforcement of fair- wage provisions in all government contracts, with the aim of securing such fairwage rates in industry generally.” It also urged the completion of a Trans- Canada Highway, a countrywide reforestation program and a national housing program. The party received almost nine per cent of the votes in the 1935 federal election, but Stevens was the only member to actually win a seat. Liberal Mackenzie King won the election in a landslide, partly because Stevens split the Conservative vote. Stevens wound up rejoining the Conservatives and folding the Reconstruction party after his nemesis Bennett retired and moved to England. Henry Herbert Stevens was born in England himself, and moved to Peterborough, Ont., with his family as a child. The family moved to Vernon in 1894. In 1899, he joined the U. S. army, spending time in China during the Boxer Rebellion, when the Chinese rebelled against foreign control of the country. Stevens returned to Canada in 1901 and became active in reform campaigns to close down “Chinese gambling dens, the redlight district and rough saloons.” In 1911, he was elected an MP. Opposed to Asian immigration, in 1914 he played a key role in the notorious Komagata Maru incident, where the federal government refused to let a ship carrying hundreds of would- be immigrants from India land in Canada. Stevens later became an advocate of more aid for China. His proudest accomplishment may have been getting federal money to start construction of the Stanley Park seawall in 1921; for many years, he walked the seven- mile seawall on his birthday. He died on June 14, 1973 at 94.