alt Hacker NewsI went down that rabbit hole. Apparently, he was a member of the Saskatchewan Social Credit Party. It looks like the party never made inroads in Saskatchewan, but the party controlled Alberta for decades. Then I ran into the following comment in the article:
> If mental illness is on the rise, then the obvious solution is on-demand therapists through an app
That is not the only "solution". Alberta had a Eugenics Board for the entire run of the Social Credit Party. One of the roles of this board was to sterilize people with mental illness. (The board predates the party by about a decade, but was only abolished about a year after they lost power.) While this a couple of leaps from the Technocracy movement, the mere association is rather scary.
Controlled Alberta for decades and BC as well though in BC it transformed into more of a big tent "everyone but the NDP" conservative party. Still run by lunatics though.
In Saskatchewan prairie populism took a left wing form instead.
In Alberta the taint of these people never went away. Lougheed's progressive conservatives pulled Alberta governance a bit more mainstream for a couple decades, but Smith's UCP has dragged it right back. Magazines like Alberta Report and hangers-on kept far right prairie right wing populism alive for decades, Preston Manning (Social Credit premier Earnest Manning's son) "mainstream"ized it in the Reform Party ... which essentially took over the federal conservative party... there's a well-spring of this stuff in rural Alberta.. and its full of all sorts of paranoid persecution complex politics, undertones of anti-Semitism (sometimes outright explicit as in the whole James Keegstra afair), with everything to the left of them considered "communism" and these days with bags of money being dumped on them from the US they have no managed to get themselves enough signatures to force a referendum on "independence" (aka annexation by the US).
As a person from Alberta originally and with all my family still there, I find it all a bit terrifying. Very much not a relic of the past, and with COVID and now Trump the lunatic fringe has outsized influence there like it never did before.
I suspect if you probe the right people from the UCP in the right church basements where they're off-mic you'd still find them defending things like eugenics etc.