William Aberhart

William Aberhart (born Dec. 30, 1878, Kippen, Ont., Can.—died May 23, 1943, Vancouver, B.C.) was the first Social Credit Party premier of Alberta, during and after the Great Depression.

Trained as a teacher, Aberhart was a high-school principal and Protestant lay preacher in Calgary, Alta. (1910–35). Beginning in the mid-1920s he became widely known as a radio evangelist, earning the sobriquet “Bible Bill.” In 1927 he founded the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute and in 1932 employed his evangelical rhetoric in promoting the unorthodox Social Credit monetary-reform and political theories of the British economist C.H. Douglas.

In order to solve economic problems and to build a new society, Aberhart proposed to issue dividends (social credit) to each person, based on the real wealth of the province. After the 1935 provincial election in which the Social Credit Party candidates won 56 of the 63 assembly seats, he became premier and minister of education, and he determined to make Alberta an example of the Social Credit system. The necessary enabling legislation, however, was declared unconstitutional and was disallowed by the federal government. Aberhart nonetheless continued in office, directing Alberta’s economy along orthodox financial lines, until his death.