Book Reviews : The Social Credit Movement in Alberta. By JOHN A. IRVING. (Toronto: Univer sity of Toronto Press, 1959. Pp. xi, 369. $6.00.)

• DOI: 10.1177/106591296101400331
• Author: Heath Macquarrie
• Date: 01 September 1961
• Published date: 01 September 1961
• Subject Matter: Articles

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state of Mississippi does not, in any serious manner, diminish the value of these
essays for those interested in constitutional reform at the state level.
S. SIDNEY ULMER
Michigan State University
The Social Credit Movement in Alberta. By JOHN A. IRVING. (Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1959. Pp. xi, 369. $6.00.)
This book concludes the series of studies on the background and develop-
ment of Social Credit in Alberta sponsored by the Canadian Social Science
Research Council under the editorship of Professor S. D. Clark.
The ten volumes by eminent Canadian scholars provide a most thorough
and valuable study of an interesting and unique political movement in the
western region of the Dominion. Social Credit, so completely unsuccessful in
its electoral appeals elsewhere, has remained triumphant in Alberta for over a
quarter of a century. But despite its continuing success in that province it has
never been able to make a successful appeal to the Dominion electorate and
only in British Columbia has it been able to extend itself provincially. Yet the
party which sprang to sudden and startling prominence in 1935 still dominates
the political scene in Alberta so completely as to make the legislature scarcely
distinguishable from a Social Credit caucus. Its rise to power at a time when the
Liberal party was triumphant everywhere else in Canada was a phenomenon the
explanation and examination of which the Irving study concerns itself.
Social Credit is much more than a party. Owing its origin to a Scottish
engineer, Major Clifford Douglas, who was impressed by the fact that many
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