Henry Herbert Stevens - Parliamentary Career

Parliamentary Career

Stevens was first elected to the House of Commons in the 1911 general election as a Conservative. He served in the short-lived Cabinets of Prime Minister Arthur Meighen in 1921 as Minister of Trade and Commerce until the government was defeated by William Lyon Mackenzie King's Liberals. In 1926, Stevens led an investigation into the King government's handling of customs which uncovered evidence of corruption that forced the resignation of King's minority government and Governor General Byng's controversial decision to ask the Conservatives under Meighen to form a government rather than call an election. Stevens was appointed Minister of Customs and Excise in Meighen's short-lived ministry.

Stevens was an opponent of Asian immigration saying, in 1914, "We cannot hope to preserve the national type if we allow Asiatics to enter Canada in any numbers." He was actively involved in the Komagata Maru incident, working with the head immigration officer, Malcolm R. J. Reid, to stop the ship's Indian passengers from coming to shore. It was Reid's intransigence, supported by Stevens, that led to mistreatment of the passengers on the ship and to prolonging its departure date, which wasn't resolved until the intervention of the federal Minister of Agriculture, Martin Burrell, MP for Yale—Cariboo.

When R.B. Bennett led the Tories to victory in the 1930 general election, he made Stevens his Minister of Trade and Commerce. In 1934, Stevens was responsible for the striking of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying in which he exposed abuses by big business and attacked corporate interests accusing them of price fixing and called for radical reform. Bennett agreed to set up a parliamentary committee in February 1934 to examine price fixing and corporate manipulation of the market. Stevens resigned from Cabinet a year later when many of the committee's recommendations were ignored. Three cabinet ministers urged Stevens to challenge Bennett for the leadership of the party within the Conservative caucus and a total of 72 of the 137 Conservative MPs pledged to support Stevens, but he declined to challenge Bennett for the party leadership without a leadership convention and, instead, quit the Conservatives to form the Reconstruction Party of Canada to run in the 1935 Canadian election. While the party won nearly 400,000 votes in the 1935 federal election and shattered the Tories, reducing them to a rump of only 30 seats, Stevens was the only Reconstructionist candidate to win a seat. He subsequently crossed the floor to rejoin the Conservative Party in 1938, and ran in Kamloops in 1940 but was defeated.

He ran as a candidate in the 1942 Conservative leadership convention. He was eliminated on the first ballot, losing to John Bracken.

Stevens did not run in the 1945 general elections, but ran again in Vancouver Centre in 1949 and again in 1953, losing both times. He was elected Chairman of the Vancouver Board of Trade in 1952.

In 1932, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of British Columbia.

Stevens was the last surviving member of Bennett's cabinet when he died in 1973 at the age of 94.