Social Credit Party of Ontario - 1940s and 1950s

1940s and 1950s

Social Credit appears to have been inactive in Ontario until 1945 when eight candidates stood in the province for the federal party in the 1945 federal election. The Ontario Social Credit Party ran three candidates in the 1945 provincial election.

In 1946, the Ontario Social Credit movement split as a result of Ernest Manning's growing hostility to Douglasites and anti-Semites in the movement.

The official Ontario Social Credit League was headed by John J. Fitzgerald and William Ovens. Ron Gostick, a far right propagandist, established the Union of Electors as a rival organization inspired by the more radical Quebec social credit organization, Union des electeurs led by Louis Even.

Like Even's group, the Union rejected the party system and ran not as a partisan political party but as a citizen's organization compelling their elected representatives to represent the will of the people. Like the Quebec-based Union, it also believed in a more orthodox application of social credit economic theory and was more openly anti-Semitic. In October 1947, the Ontario Social Credit League held an emergency convention which repudiated Gostick and the Union for infringing the League's rights.

In the 1948 provincial election the official Social Credit League ran no candidates but the Union of Electors ran fifteen candidates. The Ontario Union of Electors was accused by the Toronto Labour Council of "disseminating racial hatred in its crudest form."

Both parties then went dormant running no candidates in the 1951 or 1955 provincial elections, although the federal party continued to run candidates in Ontario during federal elections throughout the 1950s. In the 1959 provincial election the Social Credit party ran five candidates under the leadership of Edgar Shipley Birrell. Birrell, a Toronto furrier, Social Credit member since 1944, and Leaside town councillor from 1955 to 1960 had been elected party leader in February 1959, and stood as the party's candidate in York East Birrell remained party leader until March 1962.