Canadian social credit movement

The Canadian social credit movement is a Canadian political movement originally based on the Social Credit theory of Major C. H. Douglas. Its supporters were colloquially known as Socreds in English and créditistes in French. It gained popularity and its own political party in the 1930s, as a result of the Great Depression.

The Western Social Credit League, an outgrowth of Alberta Social Credit, ran candidates in the 1935 federal election taking many votes from the Progressive Party of Canada and the United Farmers movement. In the 1940 federal election, Socreds ran with supporters of William Duncan Herridge as New Democracy, but reverted to the Social Credit name in subsequent elections with the Social Credit Association of Canada being officially formed in 1944. The party was generally fairly small, and gradually declined.

In the 1960s, the Québécois wing of the party split off to form the Ralliement créditiste. The two wings reunited in 1971. The party was left without any parliamentary seats following the 1980 federal election, and thereafter declined into irrelevance, though it nominally continued to exist until 1993.

The ideology was embraced by the Reverend "Bible Bill" William Aberhart, who formed the Alberta Social Credit League based on Douglas' ideology and conservative Christian social values. He was elected Premier of Alberta in the 1935 provincial election. His government was probably the only one in the world that adhered to the social credit ideology. In fact, following the 1937 Social Credit backbenchers' revolt in which Aberhardt's government was pressured to implement its fiscal program, he once tried to implement social credit by issuing "Prosperity Certificates" to Albertans, although this measure was disallowed by the Supreme Court of Canada on the basis that only the federal government of Canada was authorized to issue currency. Aberhart died in office, and was replaced by Ernest Manning, who largely discredited the theory and attempted to purge the party of anti-Semites, but kept the Social Credit name.

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