Accurate News and Information Act
It would have required newspapers to print "clarifications" of stories that a committee of Social Credit legislators deemed inaccurate, and to reveal their sources on demand.
[1] Aberhart initially laid out his economic agenda in only vague terms, and by early 1935 his opponents, including Premier Richard Gavin Reid of the United Farmers of Alberta, were trying to force him to commit to a specific plan.
He has invoked a most dangerous precedent and has given the people of this province a foretaste of the Hitlerism which will prevail if he ever secures control of the provincial administration.
"[5] Though the Herald was the most strident in its opposition to Aberhart and Social Credit, the Bulletin, the Edmonton Journal, the Medicine Hat News, the Lethbridge Herald, and many smaller papers all, in the words of Athabasca University historian Alvin Finkel, "attacked Social Credit viciously as a chimera which, if placed in power, would wreck Alberta's chances for economic recovery.
[8] The Chronicle, in addition to acting as Aberhart's mouthpiece, carried guest editorials by such figures as British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and antisemitic priest Charles Coughlin.
"[11] Reaction across Canada was also negative; the St. Catharines Standard called the results "a nightmare that passeth all understanding" and the Montreal Star accused Albertans of voting for "an untried man and a policy whose workings he ostentatiously refused to explain before polling day.
In January 1935, H. Napier Moore wrote two articles for Maclean's casting doubt on Aberhart's honesty and his ability to follow through on his election promises.
The American Collier's Weekly ran a profile that mocked Aberhart's appearance, taking note of his "vast colorless face" and his "narrow, left slanted mouth with soft, extra-heavy, bloodless lips which don't quite meet and through which he breathes wetly.
"[13] Finkel, finding fault with both sides of the Aberhart-press feud, states The major newspapers of the province opposed virtually everything the government did.
[15] Though Social Credit staffer turned journalistic historian John Barr argues that the media's unswerving hostility to Aberhart may have benefited him politically by allowing him to "depict the press as a mere tool of Eastern financial and commercial interests", by January 1936 Aberhart was telling the listeners of his weekly gospel radio show that he was "glad there will be no newspapers in heaven.
"[19] Four days later, a special session of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta opened, with the Accurate News and Information Act figuring prominently on its order paper.
[26] Lieutenant-Governor John C. Bowen, mindful of the federal government's disallowance of the Social Credit Board's earlier legislation, reserved royal assent of the act and its companions until their legality could be tested at the Supreme Court of Canada.
[27][28] Bowen put a stop to the Accurate News and Information Act, at least temporarily, but Aberhart's fight against the press continued: on March 25, 1938, a resolution of the Social Credit-dominated legislature ordered that Don Brown, a reporter for the Edmonton Journal, be jailed "during the pleasure of the assembly" for allegedly misquoting Social Credit backbencher John Lyle Robinson on the inclusion of chiropractors in the Workman's Compensation Act.
[30] In the case of the Accurate News and Information Act, the court found that the Canadian constitution included an "implied bill of rights" that protected freedom of speech as being critical to a parliamentary democracy.
[31] For its leadership in the fight against the act, the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded the Edmonton Journal a bronze plaque, the first time it honoured a non-American newspaper.
