British Columbia
In the 1930s and 1940s, the social credit movement in British Columbia was largely fractious, and made up of various small groups, the largest of which being the Social Credit League. The British Columbian movement was largely at odds with the Albertan wing and sought to distance itself from William Aberhart's religious preaching.
The effective death of the movement came when W. A. C. Bennett was elected leader of the League in 1951. Bennett joined in order to use the party as a political vehicle, and was quick to dump the original ideology, and reorganize into the conservative populist British Columbia Social Credit Party.
Social Credit's first government in British Columbia was a very small minority, but they were elected to a majority a year later. After the minority, and 20 years of majority government, the party was defeated by the New Democratic Party of British Columbia. The NDP served only one term in Government, before the Social Credit Party was returned to office for four more terms of majority government under W.A.C. Bennett's son, Bill Bennett. Bennett was succeeded by Bill Vander Zalm in 1986, but Vander Zalm was forced to resign in 1991 in favour of Rita Johnston.
The Social Credit government was defeated by the NDP in the 1991 election, and was knocked down to third place. The party collapsed in the 1996 election when it failed to win a single seat in the legislature, and received only 0.4% of votes cast. Many of the party's mainstream members left to join the British Columbia Liberal Party, which emerged in the early 1990s as the new "free enterprise" coalition opposing the NDP.
Although the party still nominally exists, it is generally reckoned as a fringe party. It ran only two candidates in the 2001 election. The strongest candidate of the two, Grant Mitton, a former radio talk show host who received 17% of the vote in his riding, later left the party to form the British Columbia Party. It only ran two candidates in 2005 and none in 2009.
Read more about this topic: Canadian Social Credit Movement
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—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)