Calgary & Southern Alberta

Anglican Bishop George Exton Lloyd, an English immigrant who helped found the Barr colony at Lloydminster in 1903, established the National Association of Canada as a public vehicle for co-ordinating efforts to halt immigration from continental Europe. Vigorously opposed to all non-British immigration, Lloyd claimed that the influx of European Catholics was turning Canada into a "mongrel" nation, introducing poverty and crime into the country, and threatening the nation's status as part of the British Empire. The arrival in Canada of the American-based Ku Klux Klan, which espoused an even more racially and religiously bigoted agenda, undermined Lloyd's efforts to attract support for his organisation.

Active in Montreal by 1921, the secret United States fraternity dedicated to Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy had established branches throughout Canada by 1925. The Klan's Canadian agenda resembled that of the American parent fraternity, but included some peculiarly Canadian elements such as an emphasis on loyalty to the British Crown, on anti-French propaganda, and on vitriolic opposition to Roman Catholicism.

According to historian Howard Palmer, much of the Klan's appeal in Alberta stemmed not just from its stand on moral issues in a time of rapidly changing moral standards, but also from the character of the provincial Klan leader, J. J. Maloney. Maloney was an Irish Catholic from Ontario. He had a somewhat chequered personal history, but was blessed with boyish good looks and charismatic charm. As a young man, Maloney briefly trained for the priesthood at a seminary in Montreal. He soon withdrew, however, complaining about the seminary's strict rules and the vow of celibacy. Fired from a lay job he subsequently acquired with the Roman Catholic Church, Maloney sued the Church for libel. When the Catholic Church counter-sued, Maloney affiliated himself with the Presbyterian Church, and mounted a vigorous anti-Catholic campaign from the pulpit. Joining the Ku Klux Klan in 1929, he moved to Edmonton, which he denounced as "The Rome of the West" because of its large French-speaking and European immigrant Catholic population.

Despite Maloney's magnetic personality, the Ku Klux Klan never attracted as much support in Alberta as it did in neighbouring Saskatchewan. In Palmer's view, the popularity of Alberta's religious fundamentalists, who expressed some concerns similar to those of the Klan, accounts in part for the contrast. While the Klan briefly achieved a modest level of acceptance in rural Alberta, its membership began to decline as businessmen and farmers alike began to realise that the organisation was not a straight-forward secret fraternity in the accepted Canadian tradition. Given the Klan's emphasis on moral virtue, Maloney undoubtedly eroded Klan support when he was jailed for embezzling Klan funds.