Alberta general election, 1959

← 1955

June 18, 1959 (1959-06-18)

1963 →

65 seats in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta
33 seats were needed for a majority

	Majority party	Minority party

Leader	Ernest Manning	Cam Kirby
Party	Social Credit	Progressive Conservative
Leader since	May 31, 1943	1958
Leader's seat	Strathcona East	Red Deer (lost re-election)
Last election	37 seats, 46.4%	3 seats, 9.2%
Seats before	37	3
Seats won	61	1
Seat change	24	2
Popular vote	230,283	98,730
Percentage	55.7%	23.9%
Swing	9,3%	14.7%

	Third party	Fourth party

Leader	Grant MacEwan	Floyd Albin Johnson
Party	Liberal	Co-operative Commonwealth
Leader since	November 1, 1958	1957
Leader's seat	Calgary-North (lost re-election)	ran in Denvegan (lost)
Last election	4 seats, 31.1%	2 seats, 8.2%
Seats before	15	2
Seats won	1	0
Seat change	14	2
Popular vote	57,408	17,899
Percentage	13.9%	4.3%
Swing	17.2%	3.9%

Premier before election

Ernest Manning
Social Credit

Premier-designate

Ernest Manning
Social Credit

The Alberta general election of 1959 was the fourteenth general election for the Province of Alberta, Canada. It was held on June 18, 1959 to elect members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta.

Ernest C. Manning, in his fifth election as party leader and provincial premier, led the Social Credit Party to its seventh consecutive term in government, with 55% of the popular vote, and all but four of the sixty five seats in the legislature.

Social Credit was also helped by a split in the opposition vote: whereas in the 1955 election, opponents were largely united behind the Liberal Party, in this election the vote was divided between the Liberals and the resurgent Progressive Conservative Party under the leadership of Cam Kirby, won almost 15% of the popular vote, placing ahead of the Liberals whose leader, Grant MacEwan lost his Calgary seat. The Tories and Liberals each won only one seat in the legislature while the Alberta CCF was shut out of the legislature for the first time in seventeen years.

The Social Credit government did away with the Instant-runoff voting system, that had been in place in the rural constituencies, and the Single Transferable Vote system in Edmonton and Calgary, both of which had been in place since 1924. The move was made to standardize and simplify voting results across the province. Under single transferable vote and instant-runoff voting, results would take up to five days to count all the possible vote transfers, before anyone was declared elected. This was especially problematic, in Edmonton that elected seven members. As well, the government in 1955 had lost a few members in rural constituencies due to IRV, when they had received the largest portion of the vote in the constituency but were not elected to the seat after re-distribution of the ballots in the second round. The cancellation of IRV system was meant to prevent this in the future.

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Wikipedia