Hon. James Gardiner and the Liberal Party of Alberta, 1935–40

Abstract

clude, as have some less casual, that no other political party of significance existed from the day Social Credit captured the province in I935 until the Progressive Conservatives formed their first government in 197 i. Legislative statistics uggest a similar one-party dominance for the period when the United Farmers of Alberta [UFA] formed the government, from i92i to 1935, and before that it was the Liberals who, with healthy majorities though diminishing shares of the popular vote, were in power from the province's creation in • 905 until • 9• i. Since 19• i the Liberal party has only twice held more than a quarter of the seats in the provincial legislature (and barely then), and has often held none; in the federal field in the same period its share of House of Commons seats, once six out of an available seven, has varied from none to seven out of seventeen. On the face of it, the Liberal Party in Alberta has been remarkably ineffective for half a century. Unless one assumes that the sole function of a party is to win seats in elections, that conclusion is unfounded. The party's share of the popular vote provincially has since I92I on occasion actually been zero, but it has on other occasions ranged from •o to 3 o per cent, generally in elections where its share of victories, thanks to the electoral system, was considerably less; the same is true of federal elections, where its share of the vote, from a low of 16 per cent in 19• i, has also been nearly 4 o. But apart from elections, the Alberta party has sometimes been extremely busy in all the rest of the representative and other governmental apparatus, as this article is intended to demonstrate. Such a period of activity was that following the Social Credit triumph in 1935, when that party's new and challenging theories, particularly as interpreted by the eloquent William Aberhart, kept all other parties unsettled and