“Join This Great Movement for the Release of Humanity from Oppression and Deceit”: Social Credit and Conspiratorial Thinking, 1945-1958

ABSTRACT

Social Credit was a constant presence in Canadian politics at the federal level from the mid-1930s until the late 1970s. Yet, the federal Social Credit Party has often been dismissed as the “lunatic fringe.” This article will contextualize the federal Social Credit Party as part of the political right in the early Cold War. By analyzing the statements of several Social Credit MPs, as well as text from the Canadian Social Crediter, this article seeks to better understand the nature of conspiratorial thinking within Social Credit and how it was interwoven into broader, more “mainstream,” postwar concerns, such as international Communism, the perceived decline of Britishness and Christianity, and the growing welfare state. The federal Social Credit Party pushed against the permeable barriers between “fringe” and “mainstream” by pairing conspiratorial thought with widespread concerns and operating within the center of political respectability in Canada.

KEYWORDS:

• Social credit
• conservativism
• conspiracy theory
• antisemitism
• fringe

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my graduate research assistants Andrew Goodwin, Victoria Sotvedt, and Devon Vadnai from the University of Calgary for their invaluable help. I also want to thank the reviewers and editors for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2024.2313919

Notes

1. “What is Social Credit?” Canadian Social Crediter, April 7, 1954.

2. Social Credit formed the provincial government in Alberta from 1935–1971 (all of which were majority governments), in British Columbia from 1952–1972, 1975–1991 (all of which, except the brief 1952 government, were majority governments) and elected at least six MPs to the House (apart from the years 1958–1962) in each federal election between 1935–1980.

3. Before this time, Social Credit did not have a formal leader or national organization, although Blackmore served as the leader in the House between 1935–1945.

4. Several documents in DA 02, File 4, Box 3, ADCJA.

5. After consulting with the Canadian Jewish Congress, there was a Zionist Organization of Canada and a Labour Zionist Movement in this period, but no Canadian Zionist League. Personal communication with Janice Rosen, March 13, 2023.

6. Chisholm was the inaugural director general of the World Health Organization, a psychiatrist, a secular humanist, and civil servant for the Liberal government. He made several controversial public statements about the negative impact of religious dogmatism throughout human history and the need for birth control to stem overpopulation (John Farley 2008, 40–47, 173–174, 183–184).

7. “Lower East Side of New York” is crossed out in the script for Blackmore’s January 24, 1954, radio broadcast, replaced by “a city in [the] eastern United States”

8. See the National Film Board’s report (Biggs 1954) on the racially segregated town of Dresden, Ontario, where several locals referred to the Communist Party as stirring up trouble where no real issue of racism existed.

Additional information

Funding

Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada). “Us and Them: The Federal Social Credit Party and Conspiratorial Thinking in Canada.” Project number 10033037. Grant number [430-2021-00153].