top of page
Tom Monto

Alberta versus Ontario - their histories compared

Updated: Jun 25, 2020

For curiosity sake, it is interesting to compare the political history of Ontario and Alberta.


Ontario has only had two governments elected other than Conservatives and Liberals: the United Farmers in 1919 and the NDP in 1990, each only serving one term.


Alberta was from 1921 to 1971 -- a full 50 years -- ruled by parties other than Liberals and Conservatives:

United Farmers of Alberta from 1921 to 1935 and

Social Credit from 1935 to 1971.


(During much of this period many of the MPs sent to Ottawa were of the same party as the provincial government, that is, not either Liberals not Conservatives. There they sat with a small smattering of non-Liberal non-Conservative MPs elected outside Alberta. In 1921 Calgary sent two Labour MPS to the House of Commons. Only one other city sent as many as one. That was Winnipeg. No Labour MPs were elected in Ontario.)


The United Farmers of Ontario was the first farmer government elected in Canada.

The United Farmers of Alberta was the longest-lasting farmer government in Canada.


Ontario still has the FPTP system that it has used for most of the 150 years since Confederation in 1867. (It used Limited Voting in Toronto in the late 1800s.)


Alberta has used different systems to elect Edmonton MLAs: First past the post, Block Voting, Single Transferable Voting. STV was brought in by the grassroots-based UFA, shortly after its election in 1921.


STV was the so-called English form of proportional representation because it is based on individual candidates not party totals. Under its fairer process (compared to FPTP), STV fostered fair labour representation - a Labour MLA was elected in Edmonton in 1926 alongside Conservative and Liberal MLAs. The Labour man was the first Labour candidate to be elected in that city at the provincial level, exemplifying STV's effectiveness at electing representation that reflects the mixed sentiment of a district's voters. (Many Labour candidates had previously been elected at the city level, some during the city's brief stint of municipal STV, but none were successful at the provincial level until 1926.)


Alberta's Social Credit government was the first SC government elected in the world. Led by the forceful (but not thoughtful) William Aberhart, it started out radical with many pieces of legislation overturned by the federal Liberal government and the courts. (In 1940, it was opposed by candidates belonging to a coalition of the Liberal and Conservative parties. Apparently they thought vote-splitting had allowed the 1935 SC victory, when actually under STV vote-splitting has little effect -- if the SC government side, or the anti-SC side, have enough numbers it will tell, even with multiple parties in the fight. And thus in 1940 with overall numbers on its side the SC government was re-elected.)


Eventually under Ernest Manning, it became a small-c conservative government, tightly reining in consumption of alcohol, labour unions and government welfare programs, while giving free rein to foreign-owned (U.S.) oil companies. (But still opposed by Liberal and Conservative candidates in each election.)


Under conservative Manning, the Social Credit government abolished Edmonton's STV system and returned Edmonton to FPTP election system. The SC government had been elected to two or three Edmonton seats at a time under STV (1935-1955), its due share. Under FPTP in 1959 the Social Credit party took all the Edmonton seats, far more than its due share based on the vote count. (A CCF candidate (Elmer Roper) was elected under STV in 1948 and 1952. After the end of STV, no Labour, CCF or NDP would be elected again in Edmonton until 1982, a period of 26 years. This despite, for example, the NDP getting 13 percent of Edmonton votes in 1971, thus being due two Edmonton seats in that election alone.)


The Alberta in the Twentieth Century history book series barely mentions the change of electoral system. Instead the books, being published by arch-Conservative Link Byfield, say that the 1959 windfall of seats was due to Manning's popularity, as if that was measured in some way other than the vote count.


Thanks for reading.

======================================================================


2 views

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page