1952: William Bennett elected Premier of B.C.
Broadcast Date: Feb. 23, 1979
The 1952 election that made W.A.C. Bennett the British Columbia premier was like nothing the province had ever seen before. A new voting system delayed the results for weeks. It also helped Bennett's fledgling B.C. Social Credit party beat the established Liberals and Conservatives. In this television clip looking back at the historic vote, reporter Jack Wasserman calls it "one unholy mess." Bennett himself recalls how Social Credit was elected without a leader.Three days after they found out they'd won the election, Social Credit members gathered at a Vancouver hotel to vote for a leader. But they decided on Bennett so quickly, he was afraid it would look bad to reporters waiting outside. So Bennett stalled, asking each party member to talk about the new minority government before he finally broke up the meeting.
1952: William Bennett elected Premier of B.C.
• Seat totals in the June 12, 1952, British Columbia election:- British Columbia Social Credit League: 19
- Co-operative Commonwealth Federation: 18
- Liberal: 6
- Progressive Conservative: 4
- Labour: 1
• Five other parties failed to win a seat.
• The 1952 campaign was "surely one of the strangest political campaigns in Canada's history," according to David Mitchell, the author in 1983 of W.A.C. Bennett and the Rise of British Columbia. A party with no leader, that had never had an elected MLA, formed the government. The complex new voting system delayed results of the June 12 election until early July. It was July 15 before Social Credit chose Bennett as leader and Aug. 1 before he became premier.
• According to a Globe and Mail story published on the eve of the election, Social Credit was largely ignored by other parties at the campaign's outset. It came under increasing attack, however, as the fledgling party's popularity became apparent.
• Conservative leader Herbert Anscomb called Social Credit "the headless brigade from over the mountain," referring to Alberta's Social Credit government. Rev. E.G. Hansell, an Alberta Social Credit MP, went to B.C. to direct the provincial Social Credit campaign.
• What made Social Credit's upset possible was an alternative ballot system that debuted in 1952. Rather than choose a single candidate, voters ranked candidates in order of preference. If no candidate received a majority of votes as No. 1, the candidate with the least votes was dropped. The second-choice votes were then tallied, and so on until a winner emerged with more than 50 per cent of the vote. That's why it took about three weeks to figure out who won.
• The alternative ballot system was established by the Liberal-Conservative governing coalition that fell apart before the 1952 election. The aim, historians say today, was to prevent the increasingly popular socialist CCF from forming a government. The Liberals and Conservatives believed most voters would choose their parties as No. 1 and No. 2. Social Credit, it turned out, was most voters' second choice — and went on to win power.
• Under the previous electoral system, the CCF would have won a majority government in 1952.
• William Andrew Cecil Bennett was born Sept. 6, 1900, in Hastings, N.B. He moved west, bought a Kelowna hardware store in 1930 and was elected Conservative MLA for Okanagan in 1941. After losing two bids for the provincial Tory leadership, Bennett left the party in 1951 and ran for Social Credit in 1952.
• Bennett, nicknamed "Wacky" after his W.A.C. initials and sometimes oddball political stunts, ruled B.C. for the next 20 years — a period of remarkable prosperity and modernization in the province. As his own finance minister, Bennett ran a tight-fisted government with a "pay-as-you-go" philosophy. His most famous stunt was shooting a flaming arrow at a barge full of bond notes on Okanagan Lake to symbolize the province being debt-free. (When the arrow missed, a Mountie discreetly used a lighter to get the notes burning.)
• Bennett also oversaw major construction projects including expansions of the road system and the Great Eastern Pacific Railway. His government also built hydroelectric projects on the Peace and Columbia rivers.
• A devout Christian teetotaler, Bennett allowed only tea, coffee and Ovaltine at the 1952 election celebration with his new cabinet.
• Six successful elections later, a Toronto Star reporter asked Bennett about his formula for winning. The veteran premier compared himself to his television set. "That's why I'm successful in politics," he said in the 1969 interview. "I'm plugged in with God. If I pulled the plug out, I'd be no good either."
1952: William Bennett elected Premier of B.C.
Medium: Television
Program: CBC Television News Special
Broadcast Date: Feb. 23, 1979
Guest(s): W.A.C. Bennett
Reporter: Jack Wasserman
Duration: 3:04
Last updated:
July 14, 2009
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I just noticed that the day that this interview was broadcast was the day Cecil Bennett died. He was the man for the times and accomplished the infrastructure that BC needed at that time - highways, dams for hydroelectricity that was lacking in many smaller cities and towns across the province.
Submitted by: Marilyn Crosbie