There we were, standing in an ice cream shop in San Francisco many years ago, only thinking of our taste buds and calories. I don’t know what had gotten into us, we aren’t much for travelling, but there we were, she and I (you know who she is), in a most unlikely place learning things we had never learned in school. Things that weren’t important enough to be taught in school, but which I can remember twenty-five or thirty years later, when I can’t remember your name and I maybe see you every day.
It was printed on a piece of paper, framed behind glass, hanging on the wall, and it said this: ‘There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey.’
It was written by a guy named John Ruskin, who isn’t usually written about for his intelligence, but he had a good bunch of it. I don’t know how he made his living but if nothing else, he is a thinker.
There’s another guy who lives in the country just south of us who is also a thinker. He is not John Ruskin and he doesn’t sell ice cream. He is currently that country’s president and his goal is not to get his thoughts put on a wall in an ice cream shop, it is instead to run the country. Except to run the country he has to continue to be the president and continue to have a congress that passes laws that he needs in order to implement his stuff. He is a little worried right now that with the American mid-term elections coming up that his side could lose and that he would be severely constrained in getting his things done.
So, like Ruskin, he’s been thinking.
One of his thoughts is that if he could give the voters money, he could get them to vote for his side, his party. And he further thought that if he could give the voters their own money, it wouldn’t cost him anything. And their own money is government money. Money that the government got from any source possible, income tax, sales tax, tariff tax.
So he, just last Wednesday night, offered the American people $5,000 per adult in the U.S., all 270 million of them, if his party wins the mid-term elections in November. It might add over a trillion dollars to the U.S. national debt, but even that may still be a good deal for the country. Better to add a trillion than to have the Democrats take over and add ten trillion.
But could it work?
Of course.
How can we know that?
Well, there are some things that we Canadians know that the rest of the world doesn’t know. And we know the answer to that because we have done that very thing before, in the real world, in a real election.
I know you want to know the story, but before I tell you I want to ask you a question and it’s this: If a provincial political party formed itself in one year, with no seats in the legislature that year, and no party leader, do you think it would have any chance of winning an election the next year?
Now since I’m at my house writing this on Sunday and you are at your house reading it probably on Thursday or Friday, I can’t hear what you might think is a good answer to that question. But I don’t think you would bet the farm on the answer being ‘yes.’ You would say that party wouldn’t have a chance in the world. And everyone would agree with you.
So here’s the story.
It happened in Alberta, right next door.
In 1935. When you and I were young!
And yes, someone could say that that was before history started. Well it was a while ago, but Canada was already sixty-eight years old at the time, the steamships that used to go through Golden were a distant memory and the railway had gone through western Canada fifty years before. So by the time this happened in 1935 there was already a good amount of history in the books.
So it happened in Alberta in ’35 and the party that was formed was the Alberta Social Credit Party, the one that would go on to govern Alberta for thirty-six years and B.C. for over thirty. Not just some dust in the wind. And when I was a kid in Alberta in the ’50’s, people were still talking about it, sometimes with a laugh about the Social Credit ‘funny money,’ but they still remembered it.
In early ’35 Alberta Social Credit had no leader and no seats.
But in the 1935 election it won a whopping 56 seats out of 63. A landslide by any definition. The new MLAs didn’t even know where the Legislature was let alone where the washrooms were!
How could they have won with there being so many things that they didn’t have.
Well there were all those things that they didn’t have, but there was one thing they did have.
They had an idea.
An idea that turned out to be a political king maker. It was the only major difference between Social Credit and all the other parties in that election, and it won it for them.
The idea was to give every adult $25 a month. Kids were to get a lesser amount.
Now remember, it was the middle of the depression, so that made the idea perhaps even more attractive than it might be now. But if we really want to compare it to now, there is another thing to consider and it’s this: people don’t change very much from year to year, even from different eras.
Give people money in 1935, they’ll love you.
Give people money in 2026, they’ll love you.
Trump reads the public very well. He won in 2016 and 2024 because he understood the American voters.
This idea, however, which he may have stolen from Alberta, may be the best one of all.
I’m not saying it’s the wisest idea for the country, it’s the most blatant form of vote buying you can imagine. But it’s a political silver bullet. Better than ice cream. And you can be sure that if the Democrats had thought of it, the ink would already be dry on their papers.
It worked in Alberta.
It will most likely work for Trump too.
Ninety-one years later.
