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Political Organization in the Rimbey District, 1930-35
by
Robin Hunter
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Socialism, the most profound of the social critiques of capitalism willed by
the last century, still whispered its unnerving insinuations to the victims of a
wildly fluctuating and unpredictable world market in agricultural products. In
addition, schemes and proposals to change the financial and credit system in
some way, to eliminate the bumps and shudders of an unstable business economy,
had been hotly debated since well before the turn of the century. Such schemes
exercised a strange fascination over entire cohorts of North American society
early in this century. Social Credit was one of these theories. The individual
most associated with Social Credit in Alberta was William Aberhart, who led the
movement to its electoral victory in 1935, and served as provincial premier for
seven years. Ironically, Aberhart played far less of a role in bringing the
basic idea of Social Credit to Alberta than did the party and movement he
defeated — United Farmers.
The UFA, in its role as a farm-based cultural organization, had long had an
interest in Social Credit ideas. Those ideas — the reform theories of Major C.
H. Douglas, a Scottish engineer and social critic — were first presented to
Albertans in a series of articles published in Western Farmer and Weekly
Albertan in March 1921. They took root in Alberta's fertile and reform-oriented
soil with ease. One Alberta MP, Calgary Labour member William Irvine, was so
impressed with "the Douglas system" that he elaborated on it as a possible
solution for Canada in his maiden speech in the Commons in 1922. A leading light
in the radical knot of labour and farmer MPs known as the "Ginger Group," Irvine
was a socialist, who perceived Douglas' ideas as an auxiliary reform to lessen
the hardships of a faltering capitalism. For him they were a useful supplement
to his socialist program, rather than a complete solution to what he saw as the
basic problem. Irvine lost his Calgary seat in the 1925 election. In 1926 he won
the Wetaskiwin federal riding, in which Rimbey was situated, for the UFA. He
retained and continued to state his socialist beliefs, which in the ferment of
Alberta politics did not isolate him.
In 1923, while still a Labour MP, Irvine had been instrumental in persuading
a parliamentary committee, set up to revise the Bank Act, to conduct a
full-scale enquiry into the working of the credit system in Canada. The
committee received testimony from leading economists and critics of the banking
system, including Major Douglas, whom Irvine was instrumental in persuading to
visit Canada. The testimony before the committee helped disseminate Social
Credit ideas. Douglas' testimony probably persuaded several other Progressive
MPs that action along Social Credit lines would help combat the Depression and
the disadvantaged economic circumstances facing farmers, but no changes in the
Bank Act, which Irvine had hoped for, came out of it. It is likely that "Douglas
Social Credit," as the ideas became known, received a modest boost from Douglas'
visit, particularly in the West, through the medium of the Progressive MPs who
listened to him, and relayed the ideas to their constituents.
Gradually, "the Douglas system" became one of the causes fostered within the
farming communities of Western Canada, and also one of those favoured within the
UFA. It became the subject of discussion groups and presentations within the
sporadic education programs of the locals, motivated and handled by a steadily
growing grass roots. Traditionally, farmers as a class had been open to easier
credit and money policies. "Free silver" and the demand for bimetallism had had
a free rein in circles of farmers looking for a way to make the economic system
repay their labour equitably, which the existing system certainly did not.
People in small towns, dependent on the revival of trade, put no stock in
maintenance of the old system either, particularly as the economic situation
worsened in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In the meantime, in Southern Alberta, things were on the move. The
fundamentalist radio preacher William Aberhart, broadcasting from Calgary, had
discovered Social Credit ideas, and saw no reason why they would not work. He
began espousing them on his Prophetic Bible Institute radio show. Aberhart, an
unparallelled radio publicist, soon had a mass movement of Albertans eager for
the implementation of Social Credit ideas on his hands. This was a critical new
element for the UFA, many of whose members were drawn to Douglas/Aberhart ideas.
Strong pressure was brought to bear on the provincial government to adopt the
programs which Aberhart was proclaiming as the salvation of civil society from
the ravages of the Depression.
The pressure continued to build. In the years 1931-34, almost all the UFA
locals around Rimbey organized discussions of various credit reform schemes. In
early 1931, George Bevington, the leading credit reform advocate in the
provincial UFA organization, was guest speaker for the organizing meeting of the
Rimbey town UFA. The Bentley UFA received papers on the general question of
banking and credit, and the ensuing discussion "took up the whole evening,"
according to the local report. The Chapel UFA sponsored a debate on the effects
of the credit system on Western Canada, which drew an audience double the usual
size of its monthly meetings.
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