I can’t say I knew much about Canadian political movements before reading Walter Isaacson’s description of Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather’s background (in his biography of Elon):
The loss of his farm [in the Great Depression] instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its first leader in Canada decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s national council.
He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy, which believed that government should be run by technocrats rather than politicians. It was temporarily outlawed in Canada because of its opposition to the country’s entry into World War II. Haldeman defied the ban by taking out a newspaper ad supporting the movement.
Incidentally, Canada’s banking system weathered the Great Depression rather well:
The McFadden Act of 1927 specifically prohibited interstate branch banking in the U.S., and only allowed banks to open branches within the single state in which it was chartered. Therefore, U.S. banks were forced to be small and local, with an undiversified loan portfolio tied to the local economy of a single state, or a specific region of a single state. The strict regulatory framework of the McFadden Act created a delicate and fragile banking system that could not easily withstand the shock of the Great Depression. Exhibit A: 9,000 banks failed in the U.S. in the early 1930s.
[…]
In Canada, where not a single bank failed, branching was the rule; in fact, Canada had only ten large banks during the 1930s. The Canadian economy fared much better than did the United States economy, in large part because of its better diversified and integrated banking system.
I didn’t know anyone moved to South Africa in the 1950s:
So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.
[…]
Haldeman decided he wanted to live inland, so they took off toward Johannesburg, where most of the white citizens spoke English rather than Afrikaans. But as they flew over nearby Pretoria, the lavender jacaranda flowers were in bloom, and Haldeman announced, “This is where we’ll stay.”
[…]
When Joshua and Winnifred were young, a charlatan named William Hunt, known (at least to himself) as “the Great Farini,” came to Moose Jaw and told tales of an ancient “lost city” he had seen when crossing the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. “This fabulist showed my grandfather pictures that were obviously fake, but he became a believer and decided it was his mission to rediscover it,” Musk says.
The Social Credit and Technocracy movements are especially interesting to me because of my reading of Heinlein. There were a lot of technocrats in the science fiction fandom of the 20s and 30s, and he wasn’t one of them, but in his first novel-length work, Beyond This Horizon, the economy is organized on Social Credit lines, and it’s technocratically run. (This is the “armed society is a polite society” book, by the way.)
I haven’t read Beyond This Horizon, but it’s apparently the source of “the door dilated,” too.
I recently revisited his 1940 short story “The Roads Must Roll,” in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964, which features a fictional social movement he calls Functionalism, in which one’s status and level of material reward in a society must and should depend on the functions one performs for that society.