STEVENS, Henry Herbert

Henry Herbert Stevens spent twenty-five years as one of British Columbia’s most durable federal Conservatives, chaired a royal commission whose findings his own prime minister wanted buried, walked out of the Bennett cabinet when those findings were suppressed, and founded the Reconstruction Party of Canada, which in the 1935 election drew over four hundred thousand votes and elected one member: himself.

Early life

Stevens was born in Bristol, England, on 8 December 1878, and emigrated with his family to Peterborough, Ontario, as a boy. The family later moved on to Vancouver, which would be his political base for the rest of his life. Before entering politics he worked as a grocer, a real-estate and insurance broker, and saw brief volunteer service with a Canadian contingent that went to China in 1900.

Federal politics, 1911–1930

Stevens was elected to the House of Commons for Vancouver in the 1911 Borden sweep and represented Vancouver-area ridings almost continuously into 1940. In the Meighen Conservative governments of 1921 and 1926 he served briefly as Minister of Customs and Inland Revenue, a portfolio that gave him his first experience of interventionist regulation.

The Bennett cabinet and the Price Spreads Commission

When R. B. Bennett won the 1930 general election, Stevens became Minister of Trade and Commerce. The Depression steadily radicalised him. By 1934 he was publicly criticising retail chains and large manufacturers for using their buying power to squeeze suppliers and wages. Bennett appointed a Royal Commission on Price Spreads with Stevens as chair. Its report, tabled in April 1935, named the meat packers, bakeries, cotton mills, and department stores whose practices Stevens had called out, and it proposed federal intervention on a scale Bennett was unwilling to endorse.

The Reconstruction Party

Stevens resigned from the Bennett cabinet in the autumn of 1934 and from the Conservative caucus the following July. With a group of reform-minded Conservatives and independents he founded the Reconstruction Party of Canada, running on a platform of unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, a shorter work week, and federal regulation of trusts and chain retailers.

The 1935 general election gave the Reconstruction Party 8.7 per cent of the national vote — roughly 400,000 ballots — and one seat: Stevens’s own, Kootenay East. By drawing Conservative voters in about thirty ridings the new party materially contributed to the scale of Bennett’s defeat. One of the handful of Conservatives who survived in the Prairies was a young Saskatchewan lawyer, John G. Diefenbaker, who would spend the next three decades rebuilding the party.

Return to the Conservative Party

Stevens returned to the Conservative fold in 1938 and considered standing for the party leadership at the 1938 Winnipeg convention but did not put his name forward. He lost Kootenay East in the 1940 election and left Parliament after twenty-nine years in the House. He remained a political commentator and occasional candidate through the 1940s and into the early 1950s.

Later life and death

Stevens retired to Vancouver and died there on 14 June 1973, at the age of ninety-four. The Globe and Mail’s obituary credited him as “the leader of Canada’s only successful third-party revolt against a governing party from inside its own ranks” — a characterisation that is contestable on the details but captures the shape of the 1935 breakaway.