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ernment adhered to conservative public policy and rejected any radical innovations, such as expansion of government-sponsored preventive public health measures. Palmer attributes the conservatism of the provincial UFA to inexperience of new members, the underlying conservatism of founding leader Henry Wise Wood and subsequent leader Premier Brownlee, concern about fiscal solvency, and the declining radicalism of Alberta farmers in the late 1920s. Fiscal solvency preoccupied the UFA government from 1930 to 1935, when the interest from Alberta’s massive public debt absorbed anywhere from one-third to more than half of the UFA government’s annual revenue.54 Similarly, Aberhart’s Social Credit party came to power at a time of economic crisis, in the depths of the Great Depression, when low grain prices, coupled with drought and soil drifting in southern and east-central Alberta, brought many farmers to the brink of disaster. During the depression of the 1930s, average per capita income of Albertans fell well below the national average . Having promised sweeping economic and social reform, but lacking practical experience in governing, Aberhart stumbled through the late 1930s and early 1940s, attempting to balance the provincial budget while laying the framework for a social welfare state and initiating major educational reforms that reflected his own background and the strong contingent of teachers in the government. Under Aberhart, Alberta politics were highly volatile, due in large part to eccentricities such as government -issued script to augment legal currency, putting the banks under provincial control (with legislation that was subsequently disallowed by the federal government) and attempting to legislatively limit freedom of the press (also disallowed by the federal government). Had it not been for the Second World War lifting Alberta out of its economic doldrums , the Social Credit government might very well have been turned out of office by the early 1940s. Third, the North American public health reform movement of the early twentieth century was adopted with varying speed and commitment by Canadian municipal and provincial governments. Not all citizens welcomed public health initiatives intended to “spread the social gospel of healthful living.” This “social gospel” was intended to link proposed reform through the political system with the religious heritage of the nation for the “salvation of society.”55 For example, some parents perceived physical examination of school children by doctors and nurses as interference with parental rights and invasion of family privacy. Others opposed preventive measures such as immunization for communicable diseases as infringement of religious rights and unwarranted strategies to prevent illness.56 The perceived role of children and their families, and elected governments’ responsibility to ensure a minimum standard of living, was equivocal under both the UFA and early Social Credit gov500 SHARON L. RICHARDSON ernments. Although both the UFA and Social Credit parties had a Christian base that supported the notion of helping others less fortunate than oneself, they also stressed the rights of the individual. Consequently, the home was perceived as sacrosanct and family matters only to be interfered with in cases of extreme poverty or demonstrated immorality. The strong rural base of both parties reinforced their conservative values on children and family life, thereby limiting public policy that might be perceived as intrusive to the sanctity of the home. Consequently, health and social service policy under both the UFA and early Social Credit governments focused on those children perceived as in great need, and not children whose families could reasonably be expected to care for them adequately. Further, since Alberta public health nurses were primarily white, middleclass , and Anglo-Saxon, and their health teaching was coloured both by moral reform and enthusiasm for technological solutions administered by experts, they were often viewed with suspicion by other ethnic groups, including French Canadians from Quebec, German-speaking and communal Mennonites and Hutterites, and the large population of Ukrainians who homesteaded north-central Alberta. The UFA government’s wariness about government interference in the life of the individual not only reduced preventive public health services , but also limited adoption of a fully funded system of state medicine.57 Under the UFA, in 1928 the concept of “state medicine” was initially declared impractical by Minister George Hoadley. Following repeated lobbying by the provincial Labour party and support by UFA party members M. McKeen and Irene Parlby, in March 1932, the UFA government finally agreed to re-examine ways in which adequate medical and health services could be made equally available to all Albertans. In its final report in 1934, a legislative committee defined state...

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