By Mark Wegierski
web posted April 5, 2021
There have been throughout Western Canada’s history a number of regionalist or outrightly separatist parties that are usually considered as being on the fringe. These have included, among others, the Western Canada Concept, West-Fed, and so forth. The Social Credit Party (based loosely on the ideas of C. H. Douglas) was a right-wing populist party that arose in response to the Great Depression. It held the governments of Alberta and British Columbia at various times. Preston Manning’s father, Ernest C. Manning, was the long-time Social Credit Premier of Alberta. The term “retread Socreds” was one of the labels circulated about Preston Manning’s Reform Party. Nevertheless, Manning was in some ways more of a successor to the Progressive Party of the 1920s to 1940s. The remarkable electoral insurgency of the Progressive Party was able at one point to win the second-largest number of seats in the federal Parliament, but they more-or-less squandered their opportunity, and were never able to establish themselves as a permanent presence on the Canadian political scene. What could be seen as an achievement of sorts was the adoption of their name as an adjective to the official name of the erstwhile Conservative Party in 1942.