CANADA: God & Government

“This world will at last come into a time of peace,” the Premier of Alberta said last week. “The earth will be as full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

As he does every Sunday, Premier Ernest Charles Manning had stepped out of his role as boss of oil-booming Alberta, and assumed his other position as head of the Prophetic Bible Institute in downtown Calgary. To some 250 people, who had braved 12°-below-zero weather to hear him, the pale, slender politician preached in a twangy, compelling voice. Calgary’s radio station CFCN carried his weekly Back to the Bible Hour to the rest of Alberta.

Pupil & Master. Ernest Manning’s blending of religion and politics had its beginning one Sunday afternoon 23 years ago. He was a Saskatchewan farm boy when he first heard a broadcast from Calgary by William (“Bible Bill”) Aberhart, radio evangelist. Two years later, after listening to Aberhart every Sunday, he set out for Calgary to enroll as a student at Aberhart’s Prophetic Bible Institute.

Night after night, big, hardy Bill Aberhart and the frail farm youth studied together, first the Scriptures, then more worldly books. When the depression was at its height they read Maurice Colbourne’s Unemployment or War, expounding the theory of Social Credit for the redistribution of wealth, as originated by England’s Major Clifford Douglas. Aberhart and Manning decided it was the answer to Alberta’s problems.

In 1934 the two converts naively tried to sell the Social Credit theory to the Alberta government. When they were laughed off, they resolved to form their own party, campaigned up & down the province at political rallies that opened with prayers and hymns. Depression-hit Alberta voted the Social Crediters into office with 51 of the 57 House seats. Ernest Manning, at 27, became Minister of Trade and Industry under Premier Aberhart.

Soon after they took office, the Social Crediters tried to get started on their currency reform plans, which were to pay off $25-a-month government “dividends” to all adults. In 1937 the Dominion government stepped in, ruled that a province had no right to tamper with the banking system, and the Social Credit payoff never got out of the dream stage. When Bill Aberhart died in 1943, Social Credit’s House membership had dropped to 35.

Crops & Oil. But both Alberta and Social Credit began to undergo amazing changes soon after Manning became Premier. Record wartime crops put agriculture back on its feet. New wartime industries provided a market for Alberta coal. Premier Manning was scarcely responsible for all Alberta’s good fortune, but Albertans gave him credit for making the most of it. In the 1944 election, they returned Manning’s party to its alltime high of 51 legislative seats. Just when the war boom began to peter out, the great new oilfields at Leduc and Redwater surged in. Manning smothered the opposition with another landslide in 1948.

With prosperity, the Social Credit philosophy did an about-face from starry-eyed radicalism to steady-eyed business. After ten years of defaulting on Alberta bonds, Manning recalled $113 million of the province’s debts, issued new bonds and began backing his word with payments.

One of Manning’s most popular moves was his handling of Alberta’s oil resources, based on his theory that the province as a whole should get the benefit of such a gift of nature. Few private fortunes were made on oil leases; the Alberta government owns most oil rights. Last year $13 million poured into Alberta’s treasury from oil lease sales and royalties, and Manning earmarked it for such capital expenditures as roads, schools and libraries. Said the Premier: “When the day comes that our oil runs out, these benefits will remain.”

Besides the whopping income from oil, Alberta’s revenues in the last fiscal year (ended March 31, 1949) reached a record $57.5 million, and the government was able to finish off the year with a $7.5 million surplus. Manning now estimates that Alberta will be debt-free in 30 years.

Of the double vocations he follows, Manning makes no secret of his preference. “I abhor the word politician,” he said last week. “I am not here by choice. I would much rather concentrate on my Bible work.”