Background
Needham was born in Bromhall, Cheshire, England and emigrated to Canada where he settled in Saskatchewan.
Needham was born in Bromhall, Cheshire, England and emigrated to Canada where he settled in Saskatchewan.
Ordained as a Methodist minister, Needham entered commercial life in 1919 in Unity, Saskatchewan near the Alberta border working as an agent and secretary and eventually becoming a hospital superintendent. Needham was one of only two of the 17 Social Cr MPs to have been elected from outside of Alberta having been returned from the Saskatchewan riding of The Battlefords. He was re-elected to the position of provincial president in 1939.
In 1938, Needham suggested that there was a strong sentiment in Saskatchewan for secession from Canada earning him a rebuke from Saskatchewan"s Minister of Public Works who said "such talk is nonsense!" Later that year, while speaking in favour of a state run health care plan he criticized the Ontario government of Mitchell Hepburn for its treatment of the Dionne Quintuplets saying "I"ve often wondered why the province of Ontario bothered so much about the quintuplets.
Needham also called for the diversion of money from the military to the poor. In 1938, he proposed a resolution in the House of Commons calling for a world conference of economists, educators and peace workers to examine removing the causes of war and "diverting defence expenditures from implements of destruction into the creation and distribution of their equivalent in gifts of goods to needy people, including so-called enemy peoples." He also called for the government to make farm implements free to farmers or give farmers compensation for their purchase.
Needham also served as president and de facto leader of the Social Cr Party of Saskatchewan from the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s but did not personally contest a seat in provincial elections. He died in an accident on April 8, 1953.
He served a single term and was defeated in the 1940 federal election when he stood for re-election as a New Democracy candidate, which was the banner under which many Social Cr candidates ran that year. The 1940 election returned only 10 Social Cr/New Democracy MPs, all of whom represented Alberta.
He was elected to the House of Commons in the 1935 federal election as a member of the first federal parliamentary caucus Social Cr MPs in Ottawa.