I have to confess that when I heard Calgary author Brian Brennan was writing a biography about former premier Ernest Manning, it didn’t exactly get my pulse racing.

What, I wondered, was interesting about a premier who resigned just in time to let his hapless successor fight and lose an election that triggered the eventual obliteration of their party?

Other than a Calgary high school and a road in Edmonton that were named after him, surely there was little left to remind us of this grey, uncontroversial politician. I was wrong.

Brennan’s book, The Good Steward, persuasively shows that this former Saskatchewan farm boy, and the Social Credit party he devoted his life to, shaped his adopted province in profound ways. If you want to thoroughly understand the Alberta of the 21st century, you need to know about Social Credit, its founder William Aberhart and the right-wing party’s long-serving leader, Ernest Manning. Their influence is all around us.

Brennan, appropriately, devotes a fair amount of ink to Aberhart in the early chapters. Manning was his protege and successor. Together they built Social Credit into a movement that, in its day, infused this politically isolated province with just the tonic it needed to challenge the eastern power structure and survive the Depression.

Born in 1908, in Carnduff, Saskatchewan to English immigrant parents, Ernest Charles Manning enrolled in the Calgary-based Prophetic Bible Institute run by “Bible Bill” Aberhart in 1927. Aberhart’s firebrand Sunday sermons were broadcast for many years on CFCN Radio (now Classic Country AM 1060).

Early in the Depression, Aberhart decided to enter politics and promote the cause of “social credit” monetary reform, founded on the theories of British engineer and author Clifford Douglas. Aberhart and his party’s candidates, including bible-school graduate Manning, won the 1935 provincial election largely on a promise of issuing $25-a-month payments to Albertans as a means of sharing the wealth with everyone. There was little wealth to share, however. When Manning became premier after Aberhart’s death in 1943, he made two attempts to fulfil the promise and the scheme flopped politically, as did premier Ralph Klein’s $400 payments to Albertans decades later.

During the Depression, the Social Credit government established the Alberta Treasury Branches (now ATB Financial, North America’s only state-run retail financial institution), cleverly skirting federal bank regulations. Alberta also brought in legal protections that limited homeowners’ exposure to real-estate debt obligations when an economy sours.

Manning was premier when the Leduc oil strike occurred in 1947, launching Alberta’s oil-and-gas economy — still regulated and taxed via Social Credit-created legislation. He saw the massive potential of the oilsands as well as the formidable costs of producing crude from it, so he supported a scheme (never tested) to set off nuclear explosions to heat and liquefy the encased resource.

Manning announced his retirement in 1968, as the Conservatives under Peter Lougheed were emerging as the first strong challengers to Social Credit in decades. Lougheed’s party swept to power in 1971, relegating new Socred leader Harry Strom to political trivia status.

Manning’s reputation fared better. The Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation, for example, was created in 1980 to give money and recognition to Canadian inventors.

Another legacy of the retired premier is his son Preston Manning, whom Brennan interviewed for the book. The young Manning founded and led the Reform Party, later the Alliance Party. Its philosophies and right-wing supporters are now part of the federal Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Ernest Manning, who served as a senator for 13 years, died of lung cancer in 1996 at the age of 88. Although never a smoker, he had spent too many years in the smoke-filled back rooms of power.

The Good Steward is a fascinating chronicle of those years, exploring all aspects of Manning’s life, positive and negative (such as his support of forced sterilization of people judged to be mentally deficient). The book deserves a place in every school library, as well as on the shelves of anyone interested in what, besides oil and gas, has made Alberta so different from the other nine provinces.