Introduction

Larry Hannant

For thirty-five years after its creation as a province in 1905, Alberta held pride of place among the provinces for its political innovation and radicalism. Some of the notable steps in its line dance on the political edge are well known, others unjustly overlooked. Among the former is its 1921 rejection of the pattern of two-party control of provincial politics that prevailed in many other provinces—a dramatic dismissal of convention that came with the election of the upstart United Farmers of Alberta.¹ (Only later would that leap into the arms of a third party be revealed as a descent into a pattern of one-party rule.) Also recounted frequently in Alberta’s history is the fact that the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation got its start in 1932 in the Depression-racked city of Calgary. Another sign of political radicalism was the left-wing muscle evident in the coal-mining communities of the Crowsnest Pass district, which, as Tom Langford and Chris Frazer show, kept a “socialist workers’ movement” in control of the region for the quarter century from World War I to the end of World War II.² Up to the late 1930s, the province also saw abundant radical activism among farmers, women, and Indigenous peoples.³ And an innovative aspect of Alberta’s political history that is not commonly remembered is its “remarkable period of electoral experimentation” from 1926 to 1956, when it used a proportional representation system rather than the “winner takes all” first-past-the-post method of electing members to the legislature.⁴

The election of Social Credit in August 1935 was another departure from the norm, even though it, too, would descend into stolid conformity. For evidence of how potentially destabilizing it was seen to be, it is worth casting an eye back to the well-nigh universal shock at news that a pack of political neophytes with an alarmingly disruptive economic agenda had taken power. Worse still, the havoc was the work of a political outsider, whose popular appeal was based partly on a masterful use of a new social medium, inflammatory radio broadcasts, and partly on his vitriolic contempt for political and economic insiders and their lackeys, who were determined to thwart the people’s bid to overturn the failed status quo. The New York Times was aghast when the zealots around William Aberhart ridiculed newspaper “propaganda,” which was said by Social Credit to be “poisoning” the minds of Albertans.⁵ The Washington Post scoffed that his elected supporters would face a crisis when it came time to “legislate their constituents into the Garden of Eden.”⁶ The Toronto Globe wrote about the baffling stream of “contradictions” issuing from his mouth. Another Toronto journalist dismissed the new leader as a demagogue parading as “De Lawd of Alberta Green Pastures.”⁷

Although the derisive references to Aberhart would persist, the Social Credit economic experiment quickly withered in the brutal Depression heat, and the provincial government descended into business-as-usual, cost-cutting orthodoxy.⁸ Aberhart’s protégé and successor, the ever-so-earnest Manning, took up Aberhart’s pragmatic conservatism and forged it into principle. Manning’s regular denunciations of federal government initiatives such as social housing and medicare had by 1967 made him “Canada’s most identifiable enemy of the political left,” in Max Foran’s assessment.⁹ His political intransigence was made possible by his supervision of rising prosperity in the province, owing initially to wartime demand for the province’s agricultural output and, after 1947, to the addition of oil revenues to existing royalties from traditional energy sources such as coal and natural gas. Already by 1951, Albertans were showing themselves fully prepared to bask in the new wealth. In that year, over 250,000 of them registered cars—double the number on the road in 1945.¹⁰ Albertans’ worship of asphalt on and below ground was just beginning. By 1967, they enjoyed a disposable income more than double the Canadian average, thanks to low personal taxation and good salaries.¹¹

James H. Marsh has designated the political shift of 1971, which replaced Social Credit with Progressive Conservatives, as the launch of “Alberta’s Quiet Revolution,” evoking the transformation in Québec of the previous decade.¹² But confined as it was to a reconfiguration in the makeup of the legislature, and lacking the wide-ranging social upheaval that dramatically remade Québec, developments in Alberta might be better described as a “Palace Revolution.” Over the course of the next decade, writes Alvin Finkel, “there was no indication of any revival” of Social Credit.¹³ Partly because of that, the Conservatives went from strength to strength, extending their rule to a forty-four-year reign. Marsh lays it out bluntly in saying that aside from the Conservatives, “there was nowhere for formal political dissent to go.”¹⁴

That lack of formal political options, already present by the 1940s, has devolved into a stereotype of Alberta being unvaryingly conservative. This label was given an academic stamp of approval in 1953 when the University of Toronto political philosopher C. B. Macpherson published Democracy in Alberta, a thought-provoking, if too rigid, assessment of fifty years of the province’s political life.¹⁵ Subtitled The Theory and Practice of a Quasi-Party System, the book adopted a quasi-Marxist methodology that offered what appeared to be an irrefutable explanation for why the province had charted its apparently-fixed political path.¹⁶ Macpherson argued that Alberta was politically homogeneous because it was homogenous in its class composition. Independent commodity producers—primarily farmers—were the most numerous and politically influential class. Through economically good times (from the province’s founding in 1905 to 1930, then again after 1940) and bad ones (between 1930 and 1940), that class sought to avoid dramatic political extremes, preferring reformism to revolution. Even what appeared to be striking shifts from one political administration to another yielded in fact only nominal change. Once in power, the political parties conceived in that cautious womb persisted on a conservative track because their class supporters had numerical ascendancy and resisted political change.

The merit of Macpherson’s argument lay in its economic explanation for Alberta’s tendency to elect governments of a single party for long periods. Only in the 1970s did there begin to emerge a challenge to the notion that Alberta was a quasi-democracy because the province lacked the multi-class social spectrum that sustained political diversity. As political economists John Richards and Larry Pratt put it in their groundbreaking 1979 study, Prairie Capitalism, “Alberta was not a classless society, but through Macpherson’s eyes it approximated a one-class society.”¹⁷ Perceiving the election of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1971 as a sign of the coming to power of a new capitalist class, Richards and Pratt’s work constituted one of the early efforts to rethink the prevailing view that small-scale capitalists ruled Alberta and to identify the driving force of its conservatism as large-scale petroleum-based capitalists. Other authors would challenge the Macpherson thesis by examining Social Credit history, observing that homogeneity did not in fact prevail in the province, neither in class terms nor in voting patterns. Macpherson’s single-class depiction of Alberta was demographically and politically simplistic.¹⁸ But the undermining of Macpherson’s thesis about Alberta’s lack of alternative voices came too late to prevent the notion from becoming rote, both in Canada and in the province itself.

Alberta’s political leanings were long the object of derision by politicians and pundits in central Canada. The verdict about the 1935 election of “the funny money boys out West” became standard.¹⁹ In 1969, the unthinking conservativism that allegedly permeated the province provoked Globe and Mail columnist George Bain to sneer that “Canada has its own deep South. . . . Alberta is our approximate Mississippi. Just as the folks in the land of cotton (where dear old hatreds ain’t soon forgotten), the folks in the oil-rig and moo-cow country don’t put a whole lot of stock in legislatin’ things. No, sir. Keep government out of it.”²⁰

Under such caustic criticism, Albertans began to accept and even cherish a conviction that the province was of one conservative mind. So persuasive was the notion that an early twenty-first-century history promoting the idea of Albertans being mavericks locked itself into that ramshackle corral. Ironically, the prevailing storyline in Aritha van Herk’s Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta is conformism.²¹ Her mavericks are distressingly conventional. Reading it, you would never know, for instance, that Blairmore in the 1930s taunted the Conservative government in Ottawa by renaming its main street Tim Buck Boulevard, after the jailed leader of the Communist Party of Canada. That at the same time, Métis activists in northern Alberta would join the Communist Party as part of their campaign for justice and economic security. In particular, her account of the period taken up in Bucking Conservatism—the 1960s and 1970s—is shocking in how completely it ignores real troublemakers. In van Herk’s hands, that moment of vibrant political, cultural, environmental, Aboriginal, and youthful experimentation and rebellion is so staid it’s laughable. In a chapter titled “Crazy Politicians,” she trots out the tired story of the replacement of the Socreds by the Conservatives. Harry Strom and Peter Lougheed as “crazy politicians.” She does offer us a fleeting reference to Indian Association of Alberta president Harold Cardinal (although mistaken for the architect Douglas Cardinal), but there’s nothing of Andy Russell’s environmental advocacy, no Students for a Democratic University protests, no students at all.

The “Klein Revolution” of the 1990s, which saw Premier Ralph Klein impose deep cuts in public spending and massive job losses in the public sector, lit a fire under many Albertans. Yet the resulting eruption of popular, journalistic, and academic criticism of the government tended to focus specifically on an especially reactionary, foul-mouthed, and ill-tempered premier. One of those commentators, at least, did take on the broader misconception that Alberta was a province without unconventional thinkers or actors. Edmonton Journal writer Linda Goyette’s 1998 collection of her columns, Second Opinion, confronts “the myth that Alberta, unlike Canada’s other provinces, is homogenous in its outlook, uniformly behind the ruling party, and intolerant of anyone who challenges the right-wing orthodoxies of the provincial government.”²² Valuable as it was in dispelling the common notions of the 1990s, however, Goyette’s work did not look beyond that painful historical moment.

Early in the twenty-first century, more profound challenges to the Macpherson thesis that Alberta is marked by single-minded adherence to conservatism began to appear. In 2006, Doreen Barrie, in The Other Alberta, set out to dismantle some of the most persistent political truisms about the province, casting a skeptical eye on, for instance, voting patterns. As she points out, since 1905, the average percentage of the vote received by the winning political party has been 50 percent, “not exactly a stampede towards a single party.”²³ However, her work focuses almost exclusively on politics, so the vibrant alternative social and cultural threads woven into the Alberta fabric are not in evidence.

Perhaps Lois Harder is the author who most closely agrees with the argument of this book that resistance in Alberta has never ceased to flicker. Her book State of Struggle: Feminism and Politics in Alberta affirms that “feminist efforts to secure resources and recognition for women, as well as for racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, and the disabled, demonstrate that things are not entirely what they seem. Opposition [to the conservative paradigm] did and does exist.” Where her project deviates from this one is evident in the book’s opening phrase: “Since the 1970s.” Her work, in other words, takes up where we leave off.²⁴

In addition to Harder, other historians have delved into women’s undermining of conservatism in the province, and we have benefited from them. Much has been written, for example, about progressive Alberta at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mainly focusing on the Famous Five, the United Farmers of Alberta and the United Farm Women, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and labour movements, this literature provides early examples of progressive tendencies in Alberta.²⁵

Curiously, it is a journalistic work that seems to come closest to appreciating the rich diversity of ideas and initiatives in the province during the period we examine. That book is volume ten of a twelve-part survey, Alberta in the 20th Century: A Journalistic History of the Province. The volume, titled The Sixties Revolution and the Fall of Social Credit, swings through the depths of Manning’s reign into the election of 1971 that brought the curtain down on Social Credit. Using little-seen photographs and sprightly journalistic prose, the book ranges widely over the province’s cultural, social, gender, and racial landscape. It keeps a keen eye out for acts of resistance such as the protest by Lillian Piché Shirt, who, in 1969, set up a tipi in Sir Winston Churchill Square, across from Edmonton City Hall, after she and her four children were evicted from their apartment and prevented by racial bias from finding new rental accommodation.²⁶ The surprise is that the book is part of a multi-volume project launched by Ted Byfield, whose Alberta Report (and its predecessor) was for thirty years the Bible of the cantankerous right in western Canada. Given the book’s origins, it is refreshing to see that unexpected attention to protest and countercultural trends in The Sixties Revolution and the Fall of Social Credit. A journalistic assessment of the sixties simply could not ignore the anti-conservative upsurge in the province.

In short, grassroots opposition to conservatism in the province does and has consistently existed. What is lacking is any deep awareness of it, both among the people of Alberta and Canada and among writers and historians. Our purpose is to begin to redress that narrow reading of the province’s history. We look particularly at the undercurrents of opposition that welled up in the era from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, a period described by some historians as the Long Sixties.²⁷ Worldwide, it was a moment when dissident voices—which had always been present but which in the twenty years after World War II had been hushed—again began to shout, sing, and clamour. It was an era when revolutions were on the agenda in countless ways and locations, stimulated in part by the coming to adulthood of the baby-boom generation. Despite the determined repression of them, revolutions succeeded here and there, in sometimes unexpected forms. In Alberta, the men in power regarded those bids for dramatic change as something like the rats that infested the rest of the world but that had been successfully purged from Wild Rose Country. Yet they would learn that popular upheaval could not be halted at the province’s boundaries. Albertans proved themselves equal to the inspired actions of their international counterparts. Indigenous dissenters, cultural mavericks, women challenging the status quo, pioneering environmentalists, leftist students, revolutionary artists, and determined gay liberation activists—all stood up to contradict what was claimed to be a province-wide conservative homogeneity.

Although Alberta was the setting, and social attitudes or political forces specific to the province often the targets of resistance, many of the initiatives documented here are part of a much wider pattern of rebellion that can be characterized—despite its pop-cultural description as the Age of Aquarius—as the Age of Activism. Although not yet widely used, the phrase “think globally, act locally” was on the minds of more than a few of the Albertans featured here. Local irritants there were, but broader national and world causes also animated opposition, and Albertans used methods they saw applied elsewhere. Conflicts in the neighbouring United States were particularly influential within the oppositional movement in Canada. Indeed, so noticeable was the friction in the US that Canadian left nationalists such as Robin Matthews and Jim Laxer worried about what they considered to be the colonization of not just Canada in general but even the emerging New Left.²⁸ They thought Canadian dissidents were too ready to emulate their American counterparts. Looking beyond their southern neighbor Albertans turned their critical attention to injustice further afield, which can be seen in the 1976 arrest in Edmonton of sixty-one people opposed to Canadian collaboration with South Africa’s system of racial segregation, apartheid.²⁹

Study of the 1960s and 1970s is growing, leading to a spate of new books about that time in Canada. Although most tend to overlook Alberta, a few works embrace the province. Kathryn Magee and Laurie Meijer Drees have been prominent in elaborating on Indigenous activism in Alberta.³⁰ Articles by Beth Palmer and Erika Dyck reveal the strategic and passionate engagement of Albertan women in the fight for reproductive rights.³¹ Valerie Korinek’s Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930–1985 illuminates the history of gay and lesbian communities and their activism on the Prairies, including in Calgary and Edmonton.³² Although they address different eras and areas than this work, new books have successfully inserted into the picture some intriguing historical actors and issues, all of it complicating the standard perceptions of the Canadian West and western identity. Among them are The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Past and Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West Through Women’s History.³³

The chapters in Bucking Conservatism are organized into four sections, corresponding to themes that share common features—Indigenous people, gender and sexuality, politics, and counterculture and environment. (In creating these categories we acknowledge that they do not have sealed boundaries.³⁴ Indeed, it is difficult to find a “single-issue activist” within this collection or in Alberta during these decades.) Opening each section is a photograph that we see as representative of the issue and time. We also provide a brief primary source, a teaser that captures the conservatism of the day. Just as it was no small task to winnow down these expressions of conservatism, it was also difficult to limit the number of accounts of “bucking conservatism.” So many buckers, so little space! Indeed, we are confident that, comprehensive as this volume is, ours is just a preliminary sketch in the process of redrawing the conceptual map of this diverse province.

Several articles within this collection rethink the way activism is discussed and defined. Erin Gallagher-Cohoon’s “‘Ultra Activists’ in a ‘Very Closeted Place’: The Early Years of Edmonton’s Gay Alliance Toward Equality, 1972–77” and Tom Langford’s “Fed Up with the Status Quo: Alberta Women’s Groups Challenge Maternalist Ideology and Secure Provincial Funding for Daycare, 1964–71” query who and what are considered activists. Is activism only present at confrontations and marches? What about the on-the-ground work done to address oppressive circumstances? By broadening the definition of activism, each of these chapters reveals important moments and forms of resistance.

Other chapters in this collection bring to light activism in unsuspecting places, as seen in Baldwin Reichwein and PearlAnn Reichwein’s “Drop In, Hang Out, and Crash: Outreach Programs for Transient Youth and War Resisters in Edmonton.” Their discussion of humanitarian programs in Edmonton uncovers a coming together of the Garneau United Church congregation and transient “hippies” and war resisters from the US, the latter of whom were perceived to be lazy and foolish youth running away from responsibility. The chapter shows the importance of looking for activism beyond the confines of demonstrations and disruptions.

Jennifer Salahub’s essay on Calgary abstract artist Marion Nicoll illuminates two important considerations about the history of activism. First, age is not a limit to activism. Indeed, during a time when the phrase “don’t trust anyone over 30” was common among youthful dissidents, Nicoll was in her fifties and bucking conservatism just as energetically as young people. Second, even conservative places can spawn resistance. Salahub observes that while Calgary is often seen as a conservative stronghold within the province (especially compared with its rival sibling, Redmonton) Nicoll prevailed against both conservatism in the city and patriarchy within her workplace. Beyond the account of Nicoll, the chapters in Bucking Conservatism demonstrate an essential fact about resistance in Alberta: although it looked to the world beyond for inspiration, it was not carried into the province by outsiders. In that regard, Van Herk, for all her obedience to stereotype, gets one thing right about Alberta: “we grow our own dissent.”³⁵

To supplement a diverse array of chapters by both young and established academics that casts new light on some of the many forms that resistance took, we have reached out to non-academics with a depth of experience in dissent. Still a student in 1971, Tom Radford took his activism in defence of Indigenous peoples and their land rights into what was then a new endeavour for him—filmmaking. “Death of a Delta” documents the people and landscape he came to embrace in producing a pioneering documentary film. Louise Swift embarked on her long engagement with grassroots organizing as a young mother in the early 1960s in Edmonton and found there a community that has sustained her throughout her life. Ken Novakowski grew up in one of the cradles of dissent in the province, the left-wing Ukrainian community of central Alberta. Once in university, he moved to the forefront of leftist student provincial politics, then graduated to become a long-time teacher and labour union leader in British Columbia. The loss to Alberta’s left wing was BC’s gain.

What did it mean to buck conservatism in a province known for the deep blue hue of both its sky and its politics? Bucking begins with rejection but takes the matter further. To buck is to resist, to shake off, to kick. As seen in these cases, bucking conservatism means both refusing to conform to and actively challenging the prevailing political, social, and cultural order. This does not mean that Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s saw mass uprisings like what shook elites and their governments in Paris, Prague, Mexico City, and Chicago in 1968. The most surprising shock to Alberta’s status quo was the replacement in 1971 of one conservative government with a pro-business agenda by another with a slightly different pro-business agenda. What is indisputable about Alberta is that its electoral history—although nowhere nearly so homogenous as suggested by its string of nine consecutive Social Credit Party governments followed by twelve consecutive Progressive Conservative governments—is a story of uniformity. This volume takes no issue with that.

Little surprise, then, that with one exception, these chapters do not venture into the study of Albertans trying to effect change within formal politics.³⁶ Given the narrow range of political possibility in the province, activists at the time mostly avoided wasting energy on trying to effect change in that way. In any case, scorn for what was often called “big-people’s politics” was commonplace among the New Left, which concentrated instead on extra-parliamentary political, social, and cultural initiatives. Even the one outlier in this collection, Novakowski’s recollection of organizing the New Democratic Youth in Edmonton, includes elements of New Left–style activism such as the campaign to end the US war on Vietnam. So, almost without exception the stories in this collection are initiatives beyond the realm of formal politics. Their focus instead is social, cultural, environmental, and oppositional politics.

Yet, marginal as they might appear to be, these acts of resistance were not insignificant. For example, in unsanctioned demonstrations in the heart of the city in 1968 and 1970, students at the University of Calgary reasserted a right to public assembly in the streets that had not just been neglected for more than two decades but that Alberta Supreme Court Chief Justice J. V. H. Milvain told Albertans they had a duty to avoid.³⁷ Acts of defiance also included First Nations communities in the area of Saddle Lake occupying Blue Quills residential school; gay activists taking their challenge to Anita Bryant’s anti-gay vitriol right inside an arena full of her devotees; and women and children facing down a Caterpillar D8 bulldozer at the Mill Creek Ravine in Edmonton. These initiatives often passed with little attention at the time, and they have largely been overlooked by historians since. Yet they constitute indelible threads in a web of determination to make change that would improve life for those folk and others like them.

Bucking Conservatism features people who insisted on both conceiving and realizing alternatives to the status quo. They are the human equivalent of the Okotoks Erratic on an Alberta field. Given the uniform political landscape of the province, these outcroppings of resistance were monuments to the considerable courage of the nonconformists. In the absence of a sizable community of fellow rebels, challenging conventions demanded real pluck. In their joie de guerre, many of the mavericks featured here acted consistently with the memorable words of US journalist I. F. Stone, who advised that country’s subversives not to take on the air of martyrs but to fight “for the sheer fun and joy of it,” even knowing that they would lose.³⁸ Probably without ever having heard of Stone, Métis trapper Frank Ladouceur—spinning tall tales on his boat on Lake Mamawi, which, as Radford explains in his chapter, was even then rapidly draining away because of a megaproject 700 kilometres distant—exhibited that indomitable spirit.

Did the cases of bucking conservatism we highlight here fundamentally refashion the conservative wardrobe of Alberta? Despite the best efforts of the stalwarts at the heart of this book, Alberta did not in fact see a profound change in the 1960s. Nor in the 1970s. Come to think of it, not in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s, either. In any case, expecting that a few dozen activists in the 1960s and 1970s would revolutionize the province is farfetched. Neither they nor the editors of this volume can change Alberta’s past. We acknowledge that conservatism dominated Alberta through even this tumultuous moment, holding sway from the high-rise executive suites to the province’s farms and grasslands. But the province was also home to defiant radicals, rabble-rousers, and heretics who dared to assert a contrary trend. Like many activists worldwide at that time, the Albertans who bucked conservatism understood that they were not the majority. But neither were they intimidated by the majority, and they courageously insisted that their experience be recognized as an integral part of the Alberta story. Bucking Conservatism salutes these nonconformists and, for the first time in a single volume, gives their voices an opportunity to be heard. More than just amplifying the shouts of these progressive Albertans, it presents them as historically relevant actors. By weaving a brilliant thread through Alberta’s fabric, they have stitched themselves indelibly into the warp and woof of the province’s history.

Larry Hannant