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Alberta Elections: 1944 Aberhart Dies and Ernest Manning Leads Social Credit to Fourth Term in Office

When Albertans went to the polls on August 8th, 1944, the voting age had been lowered to nineteen. The ruling Social Credit Party had a new leader. And as historian David Leonard relates, his youthful image fit well with the excitement of the times:

William Aberhart died in 1943. Much maligned towards the end of his life, he did not achieve Social Credit ideologically like he had wanted to. But he was replaced by his young lieutenant, thirty-four-year-old Ernest Manning. And whereas the press had denigrated William Aberhart considerably over the years, Ernest Manning seemed young, bright, clear-headed, level-headed, a good thinker and dedicated to fiscal restraint and running a straightforward, middle-of-the-road government, which is what most people now wanted at the time.

When the results were in, the Social Credit Party had made a comeback. With Ernest Manning as leader, the Social Credit Party took fifty-one of fifty-seven ridings, with fifty-two percent of the popular vote.

The CCF, the Commonwealth Cooperative Federation, under Elmer Roper, secured two ridings. And all the rest were disgruntled Social Creditors who had run as Independent Social Creditors. So in 1944, Alberta is very solidly Social Credit. They?re looking forward to the end of the war. And in the backs of people?s minds, as well as the end of the war, is what we?re going to do with all of the returned veterans. Will we have jobs for these people?

By the time of the election, the government was already working on the problem of reintegrating the war veterans into Alberta society.

A Post-War Reconstruction Committee was struck by the government, which tabled a report in 1944 which recommended vast tracts of rural Alberta that is forested be made over to farmland, and that the coal industry be beefed up with government help, and that a Veterans Land Act be passed that would facilitate and accommodate veterans financially to go on to the land and to give interest-free loans for other businesses they might enter into, and also to provide free tuition for veterans who wanted to enter university or the technical college at Calgary.

After the election, many of these recommendations were introduced as legislation.

On the Heritage Trail, I?m Cheryl Croucher.

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