Political Alberta

Hello, I'm Frits Pannekoek. Welcome back to Episode 4 of Alberta's Past: A New Lens. In our last episode, we shifted attention to Indigenous communities and heard stories of innovation from elders and scholars. In this episode, we stay with the theme of innovation, but turned to Alberta's formal politics, i.e. Parties, premiers, movements, and the institutions they built. To do this, we'll hear from three people. Historian David Elliott examines William Aberhart in social credit. Former ministers in the Lougheed and Getty governments, David King and Fred Bradley, speak from their experience as Albertans, as cabinet ministers, and as MLAs. We'll ask them what it meant for Alberta to be innovative in politics, and how those experiments have shaped the province. Alberta's political culture has been called maverick, populist, and one party, and each label captures only part of the picture. Beneath the changes of party and leader, two patterns stand out. One is community: churches, ethnic society, cooperatives, unions. The other is disruption: economic crises, constitutional limits, and local disasters that push those communities and their governments to try new political solutions. We begin in the mining communities of the Crow's Nest Pass, where disruptions took its most devastating form during the first decades of the province.

There were so many people from different ethnic backgrounds, and initially, you know, things were structured differently. There were community societies: the Italian society, the Finnish society, the Polish society, the Ukrainian society. And they were basically benevolent societies because this was before you had all the social legislation, and they took care of people. And it didn't matter where you were, were you from Poland or Scotland or Wales or Ukraine or Slovakia or wherever. And sometimes there were language barriers, but certainly everyone depended on each other, that they worked together underground. And I think that translated into what the other things that happened in the communities, whether the building sports clubs or arenas or community halls, brought that community focus together. Those rich ethnic roots and the intermix of people, of culture, the cultural coming together. The habit of

Solving problems collectively in those settings becomes one of the underlying conditions for later political innovation in the province. The United Farmers of Alberta, the Social Credit Party and the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Loughey drew on those ideas in different ways. These collaborative communities were shaped by a mix of religious and social influences. Churches and associations and others linked southward into American evangelical and populist networks, alongside a European immigrant grouping. I think

Alberta was probably the most American of all of the provinces. You have the Mormons moving up from Utah and settling in southern Alberta around Cardston and building a temple there. I think that was probably the first foreign temple that they had created. You have other people who came to Alberta for various reasons for ranching. The entertainment industry, whether it's the Stampede and other things, a lot of American input there. And the populist movement in the U.S. With Henry Wisewood as being part of that and other American populists like William Jennings Bryan were also getting heard in Alberta. Most of Aberhart's sort of intellectual ideas were either connected with these fundamentalist schools in Chicago or Los Angeles. You know, he's not drawing stuff from central Canada. He's pulling it up from the U.S. And he goes to the U.S. And goes on a lecture tour in California. And so I can see that kind of frontier attitude influencing the way voting was going in Alberta. And then you have an awful lot of people who are immigrants from Europe who settle here and they're either religious or are cultural groupings. And they don't have the loyalty to central Canada.

For many American and European immigrants with weak ties to central Canada, it reinforced a limited trust that Ottawa would put local needs first. And during times of disruption, this question becomes even more central.

The resilience for those three disasters, the Frank Slide, the Bellevue Mine Disaster, the Hillcrest Mine Disaster, three worst loss of life in Alberta history all occurred in the coast was passed. And that was another disruption to a community. And what followed? Was it innovative? There were some innovative things that followed that I believe. Workers' compensation, all that safety came because of some of those disasters and the consequences of them and the approaches, the safety committees, all the things that you had to do to make sure you had a safe underground mind. Absolutely.

When people in the past came together after each disaster, they were drawing on more than local habit. Across Alberta, congregations, lodges, farm and labour organisations and mutual aid societies knew that communities had responsibilities to the injured, the widowed and the poor. And those responsibilities in religious terms. Historian David Elliott places this intersection of obligation, religion and politics within a wider social gospel movement.

There was an intersection in Alberta with the United Farmers Movement because Henry Wisewood, who set up that movement, came from the US, was part of the American social gospel movement believed that the churches should implement the social teachings of Jesus into everyday and political life so that the hungry would be fed, the naked would be clothed, that people would get medical treatment, that the workers' rights should be protected. And those very much were part of the background to the United Farmers of Alberta.

Regardless of whether the practice of community obligation came through Ontarian Protestantism, currents of American evangelicalism or European heritage, the effect over time was a dense culture, volunteerism and community.

I remember the 1984 Winter, Alberta Winter Games, the first time the Winter Games were awarded to a rural, smaller centre. Usually larger cities, Red Deer, Lethbridge or other places would be hosting these games. But the Crozeness Pass was selected for that and a large community volunteer component. I think there were 1,500 volunteers for a population of about just over 7,000. A huge volunteer component to it. But the Crozeness Pass has a rich cultural history from its ethnic settlement there in the early development of the Crozeness Pass with over 41 or 43 different nationalities sitting there. You look at Alberta and you will have ethnic groups settle in certain areas, the Ukrainians in certain areas or the early French settlers in certain areas or different ethnic groups. The Icelandic, Steffensen House, etc. But the Crozeness Pass was a vast number from different parts of the world other than the white Anglo-Saxon British. But all that mixture, vibrant musical tradition and cultural aspect to it and the mixing of those cultures. So in the 84 Winter Games, the Crozeness Pass not only wanted to invite other Albertans to come in and participate in the games, but they wanted to have this showcase the cultural side and had cultural events showcasing the local communities. And that became a model for when the 88 Winter Olympics came into Calgary. That cultural component was so successful in the past and of course the Alberta Sports Council, the people look at it and say, "Yes, that was really something new and became part of what the 88 Winter Olympics had." All that cultural activity associated not only in sports, but showcasing Alberta talent in other ways. So that came out of that rich, grossness, past ethno-cultural traditions from its settlement patterns.

Throughout this series, we've been circling that idea of the story of Alberta. Several figures who treated that narrative as a central task of governing included United Farmers of Alberta Premier Greenfield, Alberta Premier Aberhart, and within our memory Premier Peter Lougheed. Peter believed that

We all live inside a story, that there was a story about the province. It was a story of agency, it was a story of imagination and energy, and of being creative going forward. This

Crafting of a narrative is something Alberta's major parties have all tried to do: define a single, coherent account of what Alberta is and who it is for. That perhaps explains the long runs of uninterrupted rule that historians often describe as one-partyism. The question though, is how much of that stability belongs to the party label, and how much to the people shaping it at a given moment. Leadership

And innovation, they're hand in hand. If you don't have the right leadership, sometimes innovation is stifled. Sometimes innovation will occur regardless of leadership at the political level. But if you have a culture at the leadership level that is open to that and looking at new ways of doing things, and taking ideas from citizens, and working with citizens to move those ideas forward. Even the United Farm Workers government were elected without a leader, as a matter of fact. But the Social Credit government came in and obviously there was a lot of concerns about how you finance things. They introduced prosperity certificates, basically what people may have called funny money, but a different financial instrument from what the Bank of Canada was issuing. Setting up the Treasury branches as a provincial financial institution, which was separate from the regulated banks, was a new approach to financing. They established the Energy Resources Conservation Board in 1938, which is a model across North America and other jurisdictions of how you regulate energy. In 1948, the first universal publicly funded health insurance program, long in advance of Medicare, and that became controversial when Medicare came in. Whether Alberta would continue with their already universal program or subscribe to the national program, but that was certainly a very innovative approach. These social

Credit initiatives point to the moment when those earlier religious and populist currents in Alberta politics crystallized into a single government movement. It was carried into public life by William Aberhart, a school principal who had already become a promised white figure through his Bible teachings and his Back to the Bible Hour radio broadcasts. Under Aberhart, transnational evangelical influences, including American dispensationalist teachings, became highly visible in provincial politics. There

Have been radio broadcasters producing their sermons like Fulton Sheen for the Catholic Church in the United States, and Amy Semple McPherson had a broadcast going on in Los Angeles. But none of them were sort of overtly political, but Aberhart sort of mixed all of his wild prophetic ideas with the economic ideas of social credit and tried to meld the two and did create a very, very unusual political movement that was launched very, very quickly. The other area that I think was significant in creating a cohort of voters was this Radio Sunday School that he set up in 1926, because at its height, he had over 9,000 children enrolled. And Aberhart wrote these lessons. Every week, they'd be mailed out to children who had signed up, and it didn't matter whether you had one or 20 kids in the family, each child got a personal letter from Aberhart's organization. And he would talk about the best students for that last week when they marked their exam papers. And so he built a rapport with these kids, and he had a segment in his radio show for these kids. And I have interviewed a lot of people that I've just sort of met, and they said, you're working on Aberhart? I used to attend his Radio Sunday School. And that really creates a group of kids that have a personal attachment to Aberhart. And once they get to voting age, they are a potential good block of voters.

Aberhart's social credit experiment made leadership itself visible, a single charismatic figure using radio, pulpit, and party to push an economic and spiritual program into government. But when we talk about innovation, are we really talking about exceptional leaders or about a political culture that lets those leaders take risks and keep power long enough to see them through?

I think Peter Lougheed was a great leader, and I think Aberhart was blessed with his leadership. But I also think that that kind of person moved forward, came forward in other provinces and in other parties, perhaps in part because the political culture was different in that day than it is now. I

Remember early in the Lougheed era as a newly elected MLA, when people come to you and have an idea, you don't say no. You say, well, maybe how can we work with this person to bring their idea forward? Because it came from the top. If you have a culture that says new ideas from people, shut them down and don't listen to them, you stifle innovation.

Lougheed clearly attracted very good people around him. Not only to serve in the Legislative Assembly, but he attracted very good people to serve in the public service. And he encouraged that kind of imagination and sense of agency in other fields in which the government was not directly involved. You look at the growth of the Banff School of Fine Arts, Banff School of Management at that time when Peter was premier. You look at the growth of cultural organizations and activities and projects when he was premier. I think one of his great strengths was that he could attract remarkable people and not just give them permission, but prod them to be the best they could be. As part of that, he insisted on quite a few caucus meetings. I think we had more caucus meetings than any other government anywhere in Canada, and certainly more than is the case now. And he insisted that every MLA had to be at every caucus meeting for the duration, unless you went out for a cup of coffee or went out to go to the bathroom. And he would say, when we're talking about money for rapid transit in Edmonton or Calgary, I want rural MLAs there listening, because they're going to have to explain to rural constituents why Edmonton or Calgary are getting money for mass transit. And similarly, when we're talking about crop insurance, I want urban MLAs there, because they are going to have to explain why rural Alberta is getting money for crop insurance. And he insisted on what I would call the consistency of the story, the integrity of the story across the province. You might use different words or illustrations or metaphors in Edmonton Highlands than you would use in Wainwright. But the story had better be consistent from one place to another. There had better be integrity in the story from one place to another. And you could only accomplish that if the rural MLAs continued to sit beside the urban MLAs and vice versa, no matter what was the issue being talked about. I think that was a very significant innovation. In

Practice, that combination of tight public discipline and internal encouragement to go and do things helped push innovation across several fronts at once, from saving and investing resource revenues to building new research and cultural institutions to experimenting with educational reforms. This agenda grew out of a leadership style that assumed new ideas would surface if people were trusted to act. When

We were in opposition, his identifying that as opposition MLAs, the six of them could introduce private members' bills in the Legislative Assembly, he went to Premier Manning right after the 1967 election and said, We need resources. We need office space, which no backbench MLA or opposition had at that time. And we need research assistance, which it turned out was me. So to say to Mr. Manning, the opposition has a vital role and needs to be resourced. And for Mr. Manning's part to say, I acknowledge that and will provide the resources. There was an innovation. The private members' bill was an innovation. Peter would often say to the other five MLAs when we were in the opposition, We're not the official opposition. We are Her Majesty's loyal alternative. He didn't want to present himself as the leader of the opposition. And whenever the media came to those six MLAs, eventually ten, to say the Minister of Transportation has just said or done something, what do you think? Peter's consistent position was, we don't spend our time criticizing what the government has done. If they ask us for a comment about something the Minister of Transportation has done, our response is to say, you have to talk to the Minister of Transportation about that. If we were the government, this is what we would do. So the mindset of being not the opposition, but the official alternative was, I think, important. When we formed the government, at least once a year, he would meet with all of the deputy ministers. And he would say to them what was the government's agenda in that timeframe. And he also told them time and time again that he expected a lean and productive public service that was a careful steward of resources and that he expected integrity. While deputies were responsible, Peter had an interest in how they performed and they knew that he was watching. In

Alberta, that willingness to re-engineer the way decisions were made became as distinctive as any single policy. It helped set expectations that government should not only announce new programs, but also open clearer channels through which citizens and legislators could shape them. There

Were a lot of innovations there that had impact setting up the Alberta Heritage Sydney Trust Fund. And some of the things that were set up under that through the Capital Projects Division would have been the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, which had a dramatic impact on innovation in medical research. And one might say that the first island cell transfer came out of that approach. But there were other things. For example, you look at Kananaska's country and from a recreational perspective, a first major provincial investment of that scale anywhere in the country through the Alberta Heritage Sydney Trust

Fund. Look at the Western Economic Opportunities Conference or look at the establishment of the Alberta Heritage Foundation, a sovereign wealth fund for the province. Or look at the purchase of a thousand grain cars that had the Heritage Fund logo on them. Or in 1980, when we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the province, to fund the Canadian Encyclopedia and gift it all across the country.

So far in this episode, much of the focus has been on two figures, Aberhart and Lougheed. But the question of innovation doesn't end there. Later premiers inherit those early structures and confront different pressures: constitutional change, Indigenous rights and debates over how national institutions like the Senate should work. The

1982 constitution in Alberta was very much involved in ensuring that our natural resources were recognised. But following that, the Meech Lake Accordance, the approach that was taken there in terms of constitutional reform and the Getty government. And Premier Getty was very instrumental to reform the institutions at the federal level to have an elected Senate. And we introduced legislation whereby Albertans would elect a nominee, which Alberta would then put forward under the Meech Lake Accord to be appointed by the Prime Minister. An elected senator in Alberta still has the Senate elections and has people who have been actually voted on by the people and present that to the federal government. But sometimes they accept that, depending on who's in office, but that's an innovative approach.

The push to entrench provincial control over natural resources and to experiment with elected Senate nominees sit inside a much longer history of Alberta's fights for control from Ottawa. That concern runs back to the first days of provincehood. A 1905 cartoon about Alberta's resources captures an early version of what later gets called alienation. Questions about resources, representation, and Ottawa never fully disappear. They are reworked from era to era. But in this series, innovation has never been an uncomplicated virtue. Aberhart may be the clearest case. Well,

Almost every political idea that he put forward failed, but they were very innovative in Canadian history. And his regime was probably the most interesting and bizarre of any experiment in Canadian history, because he's bringing in all kinds of authoritarian rules and regulations. He ends up taking direction from this Major Douglas in England, who is, through his representatives, dictating policy in Alberta. And most of this legislation, which attacked the press, which attacked the civil rights of banking employees, and tried to get rid of the Mounties. And even before that, this funny money scheme. I mean, this was wild stuff. Not all

Political missteps are so wild. In fact, some of the most significant failures are embedded in small technical decisions that were intended to make the system fairer or more orderly. In the

Mid 70s, we brought in election finances and contribution disclosure legislation. And I believe it was good legislation and certainly well meant. But there was a problem with it that appeared to be nothing more than mechanical, instrumental. How do you know that a candidate merits a financial remission from the chief electoral officer after an election? We included a provision that a candidate was a candidate when a party leader signed the nomination paper. None of us thought about the possibility that over time that would lead to increasingly centralized control of the entire party apparatus in the person of the party leader. And I really believe that parties everywhere have suffered from the 40 year results of what we thought was an entirely innocent, merely instrumental inclusion in the legislation. If

Authority is now concentrated inside party leadership, what legacies remain from earlier periods with more populist leaders like Aberhart? There is

Still a distrust of the central government. That was very much part of Aberhart's agenda to distance people from the major institutions. You know, his radio plays were making fun of academics like Professor Orthodox Anonymous and talking about the 50 big shots who ran the country and attacks on the politicians in Ottawa. And that has deep roots in Alberta. Aberhart's thing wasn't really democratic. It was authoritarian and maybe it was the last frontier that didn't really produce that kind of positive aspect of innovation in the West.

Aberhart's mixture of authoritarian measures and anti-Ottawa rhetoric is one expression of a longer thread in Alberta politics. Innovative tools and experiments are repeatedly deployed against structural constraints set elsewhere. And the emotional legacy of those conflicts continues to shape how many Albertans respond to new institutions and policies today. In this episode, we've looked at Alberta's political history through the lens of innovation and its limits. Through David Elliott, we've seen how religious movements, American influences and social credit experiments shaped a distinct style of populist politics and a long running distrust of central authority. Through David King, we've examined how leadership style, caucus practice and institutional design affected what kind of change were possible and how unintended consequences can narrow democratic space over time. Through Fred Bradley, we followed community experience in the Crows Nest Pass into the legislature, seeing how local disasters, voluntary organizations and later infrastructure projects, projects informed provincial policy. Taken together, their accounts suggest that Alberta politics have been innovative at key moments, often in response to external constraints, but also marked by recurring tensions between independence and central control, between community judgment and party discipline. In our next episode, we turn from formal politics to arts and culture. We will ask how artists and cultural institutions have picked up these political and economic stories, how they have reinforced or challenged them, and how cultural innovation has shaped the way we think about Alberta. All the

Forces of social status will be purely voluntary. But when it comes to the point of extortation and exploitation and strata greed and lust, there must be some power that will stop the man that won't listen to reason. And I think it may be necessary for us to use the whip of constitutional authority. I believe that every serious thinking man should realize that suppressed oppression, exploitation, extortion must be removed. We can never continue to live unless lived. Modern society will never continue to stand the streets unless something is done. We have no intention of taking away anybody's whip. Remember that. But we must have no extortion of your neighbors. They must be allowed to live and to be able to secure the necessities of life with the aid and cooperation of the state. And nobody must interfere with that right to live.