Pritchard later was elected reeve (mayor) of Burnaby, British Columbia during the Great Depression and played an instrumental role in founding the BC Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.

D.C. Masters, in his book on the Winnipeg General Strike, wrote:Pritchard was distinctly a man of parts: a fine athlete, a musician of ability who organized juvenile orchestras and male voice choirs, an omnivorous reader who, at the age of eleven, had read Josephus and Gibbon.

Although Pritchard did not stay in the city long, he nonetheless was targeted by state authorities and, with six other strike leaders, was put on trial and convicted on trumped-up charges of seditious conspiracy in 1920.

[10][11] Pritchard's wife, Eleanor (Hanson), an SPC activist whom he had married in 1913, ran for office in the 1920 Manitoba election while he was serving his one-year sentence at Stony Mountain Federal Penitentiary.

[13] In 1926, he ran as an Independent Labour candidate in the federal constituency of New Westminster, promising workers and farmers a war on poverty in contrast to the personal partisanship of Arthur Meighen and Mackenzie King.

[15] Pritchard soon emerged as a champion of local relief issues vis-à-vis senior governments, and was rewarded by a landslide majority (66 per cent) in his last municipal race (January 1932).

[15] He also took steps to encourage local self-sufficiency, notably by supporting the Army of the Common Good, a self-help organization that was a harbinger of the credit union movement in British Columbia.

[17] Finally, in the autumn of 1932, the Burnaby council, after lengthy debate, symbolically repudiated its municipal debt (through defaulting on a $25 bond payment) to protest the inaction of the provincial and federal governments.

[18] While reeve, Pritchard also held executive positions in municipal bodies at the provincial and national levels, and made efforts to resolve the 1931 Barnet Millworkers' strike.