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Alberta Elections: 1963 Grain Sales to China and Fear of Pollution Predictable Manning Wins Eighth Term for Socreds

By the time the election came around in June of1963, the Social Credit Party had been in power twenty-eight years in Alberta. Royalties from an expanding oil and gas industry filled provincial coffers. Alberta was debt-free. And according to historian David Leonard, Albertans were quite content to give Premier Ernest Manning yet another term in office:

Everything was so predictable. The mood of radicalism of the mid and late sixties had not come upon the scene yet. The university was still devoted mostly to the sciences and to the professions. And people seemed to be quite content by that. The baby-boomers were not voting yet. They were to come along a little bit later. So the feeling of most people was this is a pretty good life we?ve got here. Thank gosh we don?t live in eastern Europe or in Communist China or places like that.

In 1963, the Social Credit Party won sixty of sixty-three ridings, with fifty-five percent of the popular vote.

Ernest Manning was seen as a force of stability, a force of progress and a feeling of comfort. And knowing what kind of government you had, I think, prevailed with most people in Alberta in 1963.

The Social Credit majority overwhelmed what tiny opposition was represented in the Legislature after the election in 1963.

Only two Liberals led the opposition. Dave Hunter of Calgary was the head of the Liberal Party at that time. The CCF, the Commonwealth Cooperative Federation, is gone as a provincial party now, replaced by the NDP, which had only one representative in the Alberta Legislature. Neil Reimer was its leader.

The nature of the opposition from the Liberal side was more on procedures and on a feeling of let?s get ahead and try something different. They didn?t disagree with them on policies at all. The Manning government was very, very favourable to the farmers, and the massive wheat sales to China and the Soviet Union at the time certainly helped the grain prices and helped people in the rural areas. The development of the gas industry now was supplementing the massive oil industry. So the province was debt-free. There was no sales tax. It was economically beneficial to invest in Alberta. The feeling was good in the business community.

But over the next four years, the mood changed in Alberta. By 1967, baby-boomers were hitting the polls, putting the established order on notice.

On the Heritage Trail, I?m Cheryl Croucher.

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