SOCIAL CREDIT PARTY

French Parti Du Crdit Social, minor Canadian political party founded in 1935 by William Aberhart in Alberta and based on the Social Credit theory of Clifford Douglas, a British economist. Douglas' theory, first promoted in 1919 in the British socialist publication The New Age, sought to remedy the chronic deficiency of purchasing power by issuing additional money to consumers and rendering subsidies to producers in order to liberate production from the price system, without altering private enterprise and profit. The Social Credit movement had a short-lived following in Britain in the 1920s and reached western Canada in the '30s. In 1935 Aberhart's newly established party won 56 of 63 contested seats in the Alberta Assembly, thus forming the world's first Social Credit government, which remained in power for 36 years (until 1971). The movement later spread to other provinces; it governed British Columbia from 1952, except for the years 197275; and it held seats in the Parliament at Ottawa from 1935 to 1980, when it lost all six of its seats. By the late 1930s the party had virtually abandoned Douglas' theories, and it now advocates such policies as employee participation in profits and in shareholding.