Populism in Alberta

Now that Pierre Poilievre leads the only party able to unseat the Liberals in the next federal election, and Danielle Smith is the UCP premier, it’s a good time to reconsider populism in Alberta. Understanding early Alberta populism helps us to appreciate that Poilievre’s and Smith’s brand of populism has serious democratic shortcomings.

Populism isn’t a fully developed ideology or a type of political movement. Rather, it’s a way of framing political and social life in terms of a basic antagonism between “the people” and some set of “elites.” Populists claim that elites exercise unjust power over the people, and they promise to hold such elites accountable on the people’s behalf.

This approach has a long history in Alberta. The origins of populism lay in the grain growers’ movement and their co-operatives. The United Farmers of Alberta formed in 1909 to defend farmers’ interests against big business—railways, grain companies, farm supply companies and banks. In 1919 its members decided to “go political,” that is, to present locally selected UFA candidates in the 1921 provincial election. They surprised themselves by winning. The UFA governed Alberta until 1935. UFA leaders saw big business as “elites” arrayed against “the people.” They convinced voters that established political parties had failed to represent them. Party leader Henry Wise Wood never tired of reminding UFA members that their movement was about collectively designing their own futures through new forms of democratic citizenship and self-government. If members did this well, they could confront powerful parties and economic elites that shared an interest in denying “the people” their rightful power and freedom from exploitation.

The UFA was attractive to people of many political hues, who broadly accepted Wood’s argument that the current party system should be replaced by “group government.” In this system, representatives of major economic interests (e.g., farmers) would play a role in democratic policy-making. In place of top-down party decision-making informed by business lobbies, Wood and the UFA proposed “delegate democracy,” local democratic decision-making that would oblige legislative representatives to follow their locals’ policy choices.

UFA populism challenged existing political representation by insisting on substantial democratic agency for citizens. Populists always anchor the case for their approach in an argument about leaders’ failure to truly represent the interests of the people. The UFA, however, went far beyond most current populist politics by offering a surprisingly detailed alternative to representation by “elites.” When Wood told UFA members that their political and economic salvation would come about only if they developed informed, critical and locally based citizenship, he meant it—and UFA members did precisely that. This is why UFA views on policy and desirable social outcomes were so diverse: its members were not given simplistic solutions by their leaders. Instead, they introduced and debated policy in local organizations, whose representatives brought a rich range of alternatives to their annual convention.

The UFA government was laid low by the Depression. Evangelical radio preacher William Aberhart offered the winning message through his Social Credit League of Alberta. Reaching a huge radio audience across the Prairies, Aberhart promised to create a new provincial bank to monetize the credit inherent in the provincial economy, borrow on that basis and give all adult citizens $25 per month. In 1935, when many Alberta farmers had no cash income, this was a tremendous offer.

Aberhart explained that flaws in the financial system and the greediness of central Canadian bankers were responsible for farmers’ poverty during the Depression. In this scenario, “the people” were all citizens suffering because of flaws in the financial system, while “the elite” was composed of bankers and their agents in other parties who refused to monetize the credit of society. Other parties, he claimed, could not represent the public’s will for social credit. His hand-picked candidates signed official pledges to represent this will, and Social Credit won a landslide victory in the 1935 provincial election.

Unsurprisingly, Social Credit “funny money” economic doctrine wasn’t implemented during Aberhart’s eight years in power. By the late 1930s Aberhart was blaming the federal government and old-line parties for this failure, substituting fed-bashing and dire warnings about deep-state socialism for his previous magical thinking about the curative powers of social credit economic policy. When he died in 1943, he was replaced by his second-in-command, Ernest Manning.

Manning prudently abandoned strict social credit economic doctrine and stepped up his attack on a federally coordinated welfare state and what he perceived to be the tyranny of socialism. In this later Social Credit version of populist conservatism, “the people” were God-fearing, hard-working and refused to be reliant on an intrusive state. “Elites” in this version were welfare state designers and administrators who were likely to be urban and overeducated, and who sided with the federal government against Alberta. The premier’s regular Sunday radio broadcast, the “Back to the Bible Hour,” spoke to a devout and seriously overrepresented rural audience that kept Social Credit in power through to 1971.

Populist politics take both left- and right-wing forms. The prairies incubated the left-populist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which was established in Calgary at a convention in 1932 and produced a full manifesto at its 1933 convention in Regina. Populist appeals on behalf of the people against the corporate elite have played an important role in attracting support for federal and provincial New Democratic parties since the 1960s.

Successful populist politicians “perform populism” by making convincing claims about the unjust and unnecessary power exercised by elites over the people while promising to hold such elites accountable on the people’s behalf. This is true for both right-wing and left-wing populisms. The essential social antagonism between the people and elites must be effectively dramatized—performed—for the audience to accept the specific ideological explanation of this antagonism. However, rhetorical performance often hides the policy agenda. Populist talking points are intended to gain an appreciative audience and do not necessarily indicate what the speaker intends to do.

Fifteen years after Social Credit was crushed by Peter Lougheed’s modernizing, urban-oriented Progressive Conservative party in 1971, the son of Ernest Manning and godson of William Aberhart became the inaugural leader of the federal Reform Party. Preston Manning’s regional protest party went on to absorb the federal Progressive Conservative party in less than two decades. The Reform Party transformed the Canadian party system, not by presenting Albertans and Canadians with many new ideas—most were derived from US Republican and conservative sources—but by innovatively combining ideas with a performative populist appeal. Manning had a keen understanding of the dynamics of western alienation, and had paid close attention to the success of populist messaging by conservative forces in the US. He saw that the economic agenda he’d grown fond of as a Social Crediter, and admired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for pursuing, could be made more palatable if presented in tandem with a call for political reform and an attack on politicians.

Manning presented a “Triple E Senate” (equal, elected and effective) and various forms of direct democracy as crucial instruments for redressing both the West’s domination by central Canada and the major parties’ lack of accountability to the people. His critique of established parties convinced most journalists that he was a populist. He and his party’s performance of populism was treated as newsworthy.

Manning also inveighed against “special interests,” the functional equivalent of “elites” in previous North American populist speech. The rhetorical twist here, which retrofitted populist performance nicely for Manning’s right-wing economic agenda, was that special interests were no longer big business or parties friendly to big business. Instead, special interests were groups that either promoted or benefited from a redistributive, regulatory welfare state. By this logic feminists, Québécois  nationalists, Indigenous peoples, unions, social welfare advocates, federal equalization programs and the Canadian Wheat Board were “special interests” preventing “the people” from benefiting from their own hard work.

Manning’s various instruments of direct democracy—the citizens initiative, the referendum, the recall—had initially been promoted in the US during the late 19th century to counteract corporate control of legislatures. Manning innovatively flipped this on its head, following the lead of right-wing Americans who had used citizen initiatives to cut state-level taxes and instituted recall procedures to stoke anti-politician sentiment. Direct democracy solutions were alleged to give “the people” some relief from unscrupulous politicians by offering voters unmediated power to accept or reject (but not modify) selected policy options. Manning knew that direct democracy would never be adopted by established parties; by offering it to his supporters he heightened their sense that traditional parties couldn’t be trusted.

The clear implication was that voting for the Reform Party was the next best thing to exercising direct democratic control over policy. By the time of Reform’s rebranding as the Canadian Alliance Party in 2000, however, direct democracy had been pushed to the margin of the party’s appeal. Once Stephen Harper engineered the creation of the Conservative Party of Canada, no commitment to direct democracy remained in the party platform. The Manning Centre’s mission statement had dropped all references to direct democracy and western alienation by the time Harper became prime minister in 2006.

Harper, by contrast, had always been suspicious of populist flirtations with popular democracy, however rhetorical and strategic they might be. In this regard, and in his approach to economic and social policy, he is a faithful devotee of Friedrich Hayek, the most influential conservative thinker in our lifetime. Hayek argued for a minimalist state that made no attempt to reduce inequality in the name of social justice. He had a deep distrust not only of popular democracy but also of conventional liberal representative democracy.

Like Hayek, Harper seemed convinced that individuals and society could be free only if economic life were framed by minimal regulations. From this vantage point, interventionist modern governments inevitably were seen as restricting that freedom. Politics, in this construction, is a necessary evil for those wishing to practise or enable real freedom. For Harper this meant making policy decisions out of public view, treating an inquiring press with contempt, treating Parliament as a strategic game of obstruction, and treating members of his own caucus as children whose public statements must all be vetted by the Prime Minister’s Office.

Among those in whom prime minister Harper displayed some small level of trust was Pierre Poilievre, a combative young alumnus of the same “Calgary School” that mentored Harper. Far from being offended when receiving marching orders from the PMO, Poilievre was pleased to be in on the game, because he understood its long-term Hayekian logic. With his anti-statism stoked by a reverence for Ayn Rand’s libertarian writings, Poilievre was keen to defend Harper’s policies. As Harper’s minister of democratic reform, Poilievre championed a disingenuous rationalization of the Conservative government’s 2014 “Fair Elections Act.” Anything but fair, the act’s restriction of the franchise was widely condemned outside of Conservative party circles. Poilievre also enthusiastically defended his government’s transparently anti-Islamic “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Practices Act” in 2015.

Pierre Poilievre is executing a strategic and scripted populist performance calculated to appeal to Canada’s anti-vax constituency.

This brings us to the current federal iteration of “populist conservatism.” Poilievre grabbed public and media attention in early 2022 by celebrating the actions of the “freedom convoy” in Ottawa. His pandering to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists led most Canadian media to label him a populist. Is he? Well, yes, since he fits the performative formula: he tells whoever will listen that “the people” want real freedom and this can only be achieved if state “elites” and their party sponsors get off their backs. For Poilievre, COVID prevention measures are just the most recent example of state interference in individual choice. By this account, the elites are not only those that enforce vaccine or mask mandates but also those that endorse any intrusion into the zone of sovereign individual choice. His solution is to represent the people’s will to be free, by making Canada “the freest nation on Earth.”

We’ve not heard much about how this will happen except through ending all pandemic mitigation measures, replacing the Bank of Canada’s governor, lowering taxes (surprise!) and adopting bitcoin as a parallel currency. Nor are we likely to hear about innovative ways for citizens to reclaim democratic agency, unless we count the standard contemporary conservative claim that such agency flows automatically from cuts to taxes, regulations, social programs and environmental protections. This explanation, or lack thereof, appears to be good enough for many members of his Conservative party.

Poilievre’s pitch sounds like a distorted echo of the Social Credit promise to set things right through “funny money.” But much more is going on here than conspiracy theorizing about banks and currency, or libertarian hankering for an unregulated market economy, or even opening space for authoritarian leadership and governance. The performative character of Poilievre’s populism might appear almost manic—except that our experience with the Reform and the Conservative parties suggests that he’s executing a carefully strategic and highly scripted populist performance. Poilievre calculated that appealing to Canada’s anti-vax constituency would provide him with instant media stardom, leadership campaign momentum and enough votes to win his party’s leadership.

We might reasonably expect that association with conspiracy theorizers would be the kiss of death for a credible politician. But in Donald Trump’s disturbing shadow, Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith have shown that they understand this not to be so.

Poilievre and his advisers have calculated that becoming party leader requires support from four groups. One is loyal Conservative members who hate the idea of another Trudeau Liberal victory more than almost anything. The second is anti-vaxxers who support a leader that gives the middle finger to medical, scientific and political “elites.” The third group sees Poilievre as the only credible bearer of the Harper torch, the only winning Conservative leader since the Reform Party was created. Finally, to become prime minister, Poilievre needs the support of social conservatives. Even if his deep libertarian beliefs prevent him from being a devoted social conservative, we must expect some socially conservative policy concessions from a future Prime Minister Poilievre.

Danielle Smith’s “Sovereignty Act” rage against the Ottawa machine is best understood as a Trojan horse for radical free-market governance.

At the provincial level, Danielle Smith has followed a similar strategy ever since it seemed possible that UCP members could force Jason Kenney to resign. Ironically, Kenney entered the first Reform Party caucus as one of Ottawa’s most partisan, stridently conservative and virulently anti-government MPs. Smith has performed as a champion for the conspiracy-theory-fuelled UCP faction that found all COVID restrictions offensive, articulating mostly rural antipathy towards scientific, medical and bureaucratic elites. And because she claims to represent a virtuous people—rural folk and anti-vax “freedom fighters”—who are resisting urban and Ontario elites, she too qualifies as a populist. Seen from this perspective, the constitutional extremism of Smith’s populist performance, with its “Sovereignty Act” rage against the Ottawa machine, is best understood as a Trojan horse for radical free-market governance.

One can reasonably predict that as an alumna of the same “Calgary School” that mentored Stephen Harper and Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith will pursue the same tax-cutting, deregulating, healthcare-disabling, public-education-degrading, social-program-starving policies that Harper did, that Kenney has and that a Prime Minister Poilievre would. This will be so even though we know that hardcore conservative agendas, unlike centrist conservative agendas, have little public support and can’t, by themselves, attract enough votes to win elections in Canada. Such agendas can only enter the halls of power through the back door, when opened by populist performance. Like Harper, Kenney and Poilievre, Danielle Smith uses “power to the people” rhetoric to take power away from the people and govern in support of free-market conservatism.

A defining feature of populism is its ability to shape-shift. Populisms in Alberta, as elsewhere, are ideologically highly variable. Populist politics can be effectively deployed by parties, movements and leaders from far left to far right. Populisms succeed most when they effectively tap into widespread grievances with a narrative about a besieged and alienated people contending against a set of powerful and exploitative elites. Often, populist conservatives take this a step further, demonizing their partisan opponents. Poilievre’s blaming Justin Trudeau for everything from COVID tyranny to high energy and housing prices to rampant inflation is a reminder of how populist conservatives, currently taking their cue from Donald Trump, “perform” the dynamics of people vs. elite antagonisms.

The UFA’s creation of opportunities for democratic agency at the local level shows how Alberta’s current populist conservatism has come up dramatically short. UFA local organizations’ policy dialogues and their annual convention debates contrasted strikingly with William Aberhart’s iron control over Social Credit activity and policy selection. The UFA experience also contrasts dramatically with the one-way flow of policy choices from Manning and Harper’s offices to Reform and Conservative MPs and members, and with the constrained policy dialogue at Reform and Conservative conventions. These conventions seldom addressed proposals not vetted by party insiders loyal to the leader.

Parties model their understanding of acceptable relations between governments and citizens in their processes of internal party decision-making. Social Credit, Reform and Conservative party populisms have treated citizens as passive consumers receiving a simplistic and fixed policy menu rather than as engaged and competent democratic citizens. Pierre Poilievre seems bent on mimicking his former boss, with his treatment of all serious opponents in the Conservative leadership campaign as sellouts and enemies with whom he has no obligation to respectfully debate policy.

Poilievre’s and Smith’s populism shouldn’t be mistaken for either principled ideology or as a reliable guide to legislative agendas. These politicians know that strategic populist performances work at the ballot box—in ways that would lead most early North American populists to turn over in their graves.

David Laycock is a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and author of Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910–1945.