Robert Weir: Forgotten Farmer-Minister in R.B. Bennett's Depression-Era Cabinet

摘要

A successful mixed farmer from north-central Saskatchewan, Robert Weir was federal minister of Agriculture in R.B. Bennett's Conservative government during the worst years of the Great Depression and the prolonged drought that devastated grain farmersin the Palliser Triangle. Weir's original policies for agricultural recovery in Canada were of very limited assistance to wheat growers in the relatively arid south of the Prairie Provinces. Faced with worsening economic, social and political conditionson the prairies, Weir eventually introduced a major program of soil and water conservation and drought land reclamation through the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, an initiative that was soon claimed by Jimmy Gardiner and the federal Liberal governmentunder William Lyon Mackenzie King.