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 Alberta’s seventh premier, William “Bible Bill” Aberhart, was a former
teacher and radio evangelist who embraced the economic reforms of Major
C.H. Douglas’s Social Credit movement and chiefly through the economic doctrine
left his mark in Alberta.
Born on December 30, 1878, on a farm near Kippen in Hibbert
Township, Perth County, Ontario, William Aberhart completed teacher-training
programs at the Mitchell Model School and the Ontario Normal School in Hamilton,
Ontario. He served as a teacher, school principal and lay-preacher in Ontario,
during which time he undertook an extramural Bachelor of Arts degree
from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario.
 Moving
in 1910 to Calgary, Aberhart became a school principal, continued his religious
teaching, all of which led to his 1925 appointment as Dean of a bible institute,
later called the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute. The same year, Aberhart
began broadcasting Sunday afternoon lectures on the radio. These broadcasts
eventually had a large and widespread listening audience in Alberta, Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, British Columbia and the United States.
As a consequence of the hardships wrought by the Great
Depression, in the early 1930s, Aberhart became interested in the monetary
theories of Major C.H. Douglas. Collectively, these theories were known
as "Social Credit" and were concerned with the discrepancy between the costs
of production and the purchasing power of individuals. Among its tenets,
the theory advocated the distribution of money, or “social credit” that
would allow people to buy the goods and services that the capitalist system
offered.
Between the years 1932 and 1935, William Aberhart and
the Social Credit League tried to persuade the existing United Farmers of
Alberta government to adopt some Social Credit policy. When these attempts
failed, William Aberhart organized Alberta’s Social Credit Party, and its
representatives contested the 1935 provincial election. Aberhart’s party
won in a landslide, and became the world’s first Social Credit government,
taking 56 of 63 seats in the legislature.
 Premier
Aberhart was unable to fulfill many of his pre-election promises, however,
and his concept of Social Credit was never realized. Additionally, his government’s
monetary legislation was quickly disallowed by the federal government and
his ill treatment at the hands of the province’s newspapers prompted him
in 1937 to bring into being the Accurate News and Information Act, which
would be ruled unconstitutional and open up Alberta’s challenge to the British
North America Act in the Supreme Court of Canada.
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William Aberhart
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 John Campbell Bowen was Alberta’s sixth Alberta lieutenant-governor,
serving from 1937-50. During William Aberhart’s term as premier, Bowen withheld
his assent to three bills—The Alberta Credit Regulation Act, The Tax of
Banks Act, and The Accurate News and Information Act—an uncharacteristic
practice.
As stated in an editorial in the October 6, 1937 Edmonton Bulletin,
“The duty of a Lieutenant-Governor—as of a Governor General—to accept the
advice of his Premier so long as the Premier can command a majority in the
legislature has been well established.”1
Bowen’s action prevented the bills from coming into force. He referred the
cases to Ottawa for consideration, with royal assent to come from the governor
general, and set the province on the road to constructing a test case in
the Supreme Court of Canada.
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