Ernest Manning

During the tenure of Ernest Manning (1908-1996) as the province’s eighth and longest-serving premier (1943-1968), Alberta’s petroleum industry entered a new phase. The oil discoveries at Leduc (1947) and Redwater (1948) catapulted Alberta to the top of Canada’s oil-producing provinces. It was Manning who made sure that these discoveries did not derail development of the province’s other oil resource, the oil sands.

Ernest Charles Manning was born into a farming family in Saskatchewan but was lured to Alberta by the voice of William Aberhart, founder and head of the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute. Aberhart made weekly evangelistic broadcasts on the radio: the Back to the

Bible Hour. When Manning became a student at the Institute in 1927, it was the beginning of a long association with Aberhart. He became secretary of the Institute in 1930, when he also began assisting with the radio broadcasts. Aberhart founded the Social Credit movement in Alberta and became Alberta’s seventh premier and leader of the Social Credit government in 1935. Manning also ran for office and was elected that same year.

When Aberhart died in 1943, during his second term in office, Ernest Manning was the clear choice to succeed him as premier. Manning was premier for twenty-five years. He held various cabinet positions as well, including Minister of Mines and Minerals from 1952 to 1962.

Upon assuming leadership of the provincial government, Manning faced a chaotic situation in respect to development of the province’s oil sands. Commercial attempts to develop the sands at Bitumount and Abasand could not seem to get off the ground. The International Bitumen Company Ltd. project at Bitumount was under-capitalized and haphazard. The plant at Abasand had burned down in 1941, been rebuilt and then taken over by the federal government as a possible source of petroleum products during wartime.

Even so, Manning supported oil sands development. In 1944, when it appeared that the federal government was not moving ahead with the Abasand project, he announced the financing of an experimental oil sands separation project at Bitumount, using Karl Clark’s hot water process. He told the Edmonton Journal:

It has been established beyond question that a successful and efficient simple process exists for the separation of the oil from the sands and for its refinement into commercial products. Members of the Government have inspected [the Bitumount plant] while in actual operations and producing a sufficient volume of clear sand free oil to prove the practicality of the process. The Government had come to this conclusion after careful investigation of all known factors and of scientific analysis at the University of Alberta, which prove that the process completely removes the sand.

The Abasand plant burned down again in 1945 and was not rebuilt. The huge discoveries of conventional oil at Leduc and Redwater cast even more doubt upon the need to pursue development of the oil sands given the difficulty of accessing and processing the bitumen. Simply put, there was no commercial interest in this stubborn resource.

Nevertheless, the entire Alberta legislature visited the Bitumount plant in 1949 to witness its success in separating the oil sands. Manning’s government commissioned petroleum engineer Sidney Blair to prepare a report on the economic viability of the process, and supported the Athabasca Oil Sands Conference in 1951. All these actions served to direct significant attention toward Alberta’s oil sands.

More than many others during his era, Manning recognized the potential of Alberta’s oil sands, and he supported steps to spur interest in what became an important sector of Alberta’s petroleum industry. He was on hand to officially open the Great Canadian Oil Sands plant—the first full-scale oil sands separation facility—in 1967.