Ernest George Hansell (14 May 1895 in

Norwich, England Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...

– 9 December 1965) was an ordained minister as well as a Canadian federal and provincial politician.

Federal politics

Hansell ran as a

Social Credit Social credit is a distributive philosophy of political economy developed by C. H. Douglas. Douglas attributed economic downturns to discrepancies between the cost of goods and the compensation of the workers who made them. To combat what he ...

candidate in the 1935 federal election. He defeated incumbent Member of Parliament George Gibson Coote to win his first term in office. Hansell was handpicked by

Ernest Manning Ernest Charles Manning, (September 20, 1908 – February 19, 1996), a Canadian politician, was the eighth Premier of Alberta between 1943 and 1968 for the Social Credit Party of Alberta. He served longer than any other premier in Alberta's histor ...

to serve as leader of the

British Columbia Social Credit League The British Columbia Social Credit Party, whose members are known as Socreds, was the governing provincial political party of British Columbia, Canada, for all but three years between the 1952 provincial election and the 1991 election. For fou ...

during the 1952 British Columbia provincial election, despite the fact that Hansell was an Albertan. Social Credit unexpectedly won the election, but Hansell remained in Ottawa and the British Columbia party chose William Andrew Bennett as its new leader and Premier. After helping Social Credit win the British Columbia provincial elections, Hansell would run for his 5th term in office in the 1953 federal election. He would defeat four other candidates, with the largest popular vote of his career. Hansell would run again for his sixth term in office in the 1957 federal election He would defeat Progressive Conservative Lawrence Kindt by a comfortable margin. Parliament would be dissolved a year later, and Hansell and Kindt would face each other again. This time, Hansell would be defeated in the 1958 federal election amid that year's massive PC landslide. The entire Socred caucus was unseated at this election. After his defeat, Hansell continued to work with the Social Credit party on the provincial level in Alberta.

Provincial politics

After his defeat from the

House of Commons of Canada The House of Commons of Canada (french: Chambre des communes du Canada) is the lower house of the Parliament of Canada. Together with the Crown and the Senate of Canada, they comprise the bicameral legislature of Canada. The House of Common ...

, Hansell ran for the Alberta Legislature in the

1959 Alberta general election Events January * January 1 - Cuba: Fulgencio Batista flees Havana when the forces of Fidel Castro advance. * January 2 - Lunar probe Luna 1 was the first man-made object to attain escape velocity from Earth. It reached the vicinity of E ...

. He defeated the incumbent Ross Ellis. Hansell served for one term as a backbencher in the

government before retiring from provincial politics in 1963.

External links

*
Legislative Assembly of Alberta Members Listing
1895 births 1965 deaths Alberta Social Credit Party MLAs British Columbia Social Credit Party leaders Canadian Baptists Social Credit Party of Canada MPs Members of the House of Commons of Canada from Alberta 20th-century Baptists {{alberta-politician-stub