Richard Gavin Reid - Premier

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.