That time Alberta tried to invade Saskatchewan
86 years ago, Premier William Aberhart staged an invasion of Saskatchewan politics
It’s Election Day in Saskatchewan and it looks like a close race between the 17-year long governing Saskatchewan Party led by Premier Scott Moe and a revived Sask NDP led by Carla Beck. While I’ll leave the political analysis of tonight’s results and the past four weeks of campaigning to people more familiar with the Land of the Living Skies, I do know a little bit about one particular election in Saskatchewan’s history.
Eighty-six years ago, in 1938, Alberta Premier William Aberhart staged an invasion of Saskatchewan politics by using the Alberta Social Credit Party’s organization and the levers of the Alberta government to try to get the Social Credit Party of Saskatchewan elected as government.
The political invasion came three years after Aberhart’s Social Credit Party had swept the August 22, 1935 Alberta election, going from zero to 56 seats and forming a majority government during the height of the Great Depression. It was a shock to the country’s political system. Nowhere in the world had the radical Social Credit movement, founded by Major C.H. Douglas, seen this level of electoral success.
The Boston Herald ran the headline "Alberta Goes Crazy!" and, upon learning of the election victory in Alberta, the Social Credit Green Shirts in London marched around the Bank of England Building holding torches and blowing their trumpets (no doubt inspired by the Battle of Jericho).
During its first decade in government, Aberhart’s radical administration tried to print its own currency and legislate control over the media, attempted to nationalize the banking system and ban alcohol sales, and terrorized the political establishment.
Spreading the Social Credit gospel to Saskatchewan
Eager to spread the gospel of Social Credit theory and expand his own political power beyond Alberta’s provincial boundaries, Aberhart’s party propped up a Socred Party in Saskatchewan to contest the June 8, 1938 provincial election. The Alberta Premier viewed Saskatchewan as a beachhead for his party’s expansion across Canada and, eventually, to Ottawa.
Member of Parliament Joseph Needham, who was elected in The Battlefords when the Social Credit Party swept 17 prairie seats in the October 13, 1935 federal election, was party leader by default, but the Saskatchewan Social Credit Party organization was manufactured by Albertans. The Saskatchewan Socred campaign was run by Alberta’s Provincial Secretary Ernest Manning, who would later become Premier after Aberhart’s death in 1943.
Nearly all of Alberta’s Social Credit MLAs and cabinet ministers hit the hustings in Saskatchewan during this election, spending weeks campaigning for local candidates. Aberhart himself spent two weeks on the campaign trail, speaking to rallies across Saskatchewan along with a band of experts in Social Credit theory.
“The outlook in Saskatchewan is very encouraging,” Aberhart was reported to have said upon a brief return to Alberta in May 1938.
“It would appear from the definite interest manifested by the people who gathered in such large numbers that they realize a change is absolutely necessary,” Aberhart boasted.
Troupe from Alberta invading Saskatchewan
The “troupe from Alberta invading Saskatchewan,” as one Saskatchewan newspaper described them, did not go unnoticed and faced fierce opposition from the local political establishment and opponents on both sides of the provincial boundary.
The intentions of Social Credit candidates on the ballot were called into question by Liberal-leaning The Leader-Post, whose editors asked in a June 6 editorial who they would be loyal to if elected. “Will their loyalty be given to the Alberta Premier or to the people of Saskatchewan?,” the editorial asked.
Saskatchewan’s Liberal Minister of Natural Resources, William Kerr, called Social Credit a disease and claimed that if its candidates were elected those MLAs would represent the Premier of Alberta in the Saskatchewan Legislature.
Former Social Credit Attorney General John Hugill, who had become an outspoken critic of Aberhart, said in May 1938 that the Alberta Premier “visualizes being the dominant force in the political life of Western Canada as a stepping stone to becoming the Hitler of Canada.”
Hugill had been removed as Attorney General and left the Social Credit caucus to sit as an Independent MLA in 1937 after he told Lieutenant Governor John Bowen he believed three of the Aberhart government’s most controversial pieces of legislation were unconstitutional.
On the eve of the election, Aberhart is reported to have spoken to a rally of 5,000 people in the Town of Melville. The rally was policed by party activists wearing official Social Credit armbands who reportedly tossed out protesters from the event. According to a report from the Canadian Press, six men from Alberta were removed by the party’s security force after they started heckling and asking questions of Aberhart about the line ups at soup kitchens in Calgary and school children protesting against the government’s relief programs in Medicine Hat.
“Mr. Aberhart and his government are a peril to the people of Alberta. Not only is he a threat to Alberta, but his actions coming into Saskatchewan and disrupting the affairs of neighbouring province has been a menace to Canadian unity,” J.T. Shaw told The Leader-Post in June 1938. Shaw was former Labour Party MP and Liberal MLA from Alberta who traveled from Calgary to campaign against the spread of the Social Credit menace in Saskatchewan.
On June 6, the Kerrobert League for Democracy, based in the town of Kerrobert, sent a telegram to the chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking him to stop Aberhart’s radio broadcasts into Saskatchewan:
“The law prohibits radio broadcasting of political propaganda for certain periods before election days,” the League wrote. “…Premier Aberhart of Alberta took unsportsmanlike advantage of situation by broadcasting his propaganda against Saskatchewan opponents from Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute Sunday…”
Aberhart had earned his nickname, “Bible Bill,” from his popular weekly evangelical Christian and Social Credit sermons broadcast on the radio from the Prophetic Bible Institute in downtown Calgary.
Aberhart repelled
Despite the best efforts of the Alberta government, Aberhart’s Social Credit invasion of Saskatchewan was repelled. The Social Credit Party earned only 15.9 percent of the vote and elected two MLAs - William Roseland in Cut Knife and John Herman in Melville.
The Liberal Party led by Premier William Patterson was re-elected with a reduced majority of 38 seats and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation formed official opposition with 10 seats (the CCF led by Tommy Douglas would go on to win the next election in 1944, marking the first time a socialist party was elected into government in Canada). The Conservative Party led by future Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was shut out.
“The Alberta-run Social Credit election effort in Saskatchewan provided only two Social Credit seats in a fifty-five-seat house… The Social Credit revolution had been stopped at the Alberta-Saskatchewan border,” wrote historian Alvin Finkel in his excellent 1989 book The Social Credit Phenomenon.
The Leader-Post editorial on the day following the 1938 election read:
“The result is also satisfactory because it means the repulse of an outside government that threw itself into the domestic affairs of a neighboring province and attempted to lure Saskatchewan into adopting a plan of government and economics that has failed signally in Alberta. Mr. Aberhart and his men can now go home and attend to the business of running the province of Alberta, where they will find plenty of work to do. Mr. Aberhart may now cease from his extravagant claims that the people of the west are clamouring for Social Credit.”
The Socred’s toe-hold in the Saskatchewan Legislature was erased in 1944 when neither of the party’s two MLAs ran for re-election and the party virtually disappeared after nominating only one candidate in that year’s election.
The Socreds regained a presence in the Saskatchewan Legislature when it elected 3 MLAs in the 1956 election, but the party was once again shut out in the following election in 1960.
Despite the Social Credit Party’s wild electoral success in Alberta, and later success in British Columbia in 1952 (also with significant help from their Alberta cousins), the Socred Party never had much lasting success in the province known as “The Breadbasket of Canada.”
Aberhart’s hopes of spreading the Social Credit gospel and his own political power eastward failed. The Alberta invasion of Saskatchewan was repelled.
(This is an updated version of a story I first published back on November 1, 2016)
Thank you for reading
Thank you for reading! Today’s Daveberta newsletter delved into one of my favourite periods of Alberta’s political history, and I’m glad to be able to share these stories here from time to time.
With the Alberta Legislature returning today, the United Conservative Party annual general meeting fast approaching, a by-election in Lethbridge-West expected to be called any day, and labour unrest on the horizon, I’ll be back to writing about today’s Alberta politics soon.
If you enjoyed today’s Daveberta newsletter, please feel free to share it with a friend or colleague.
Thanks again,
Dave
