In 1946, Haldeman found himself in the midst of a national scandal, after the Quebec wing of Social Credit published the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A Saskatoon Star Phoenix editorial said Social Credit was cooking up “home-baked fascism” by promoting a fraudulent document that “purports to reveal a plot [by Jews] to dominate the world.”
This reinforced Social Credit’s reputation as an antisemitic organization — which can be traced back to its founder, Clifford Hugh Douglas, also known as “Major Douglas.”
“The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without responsibility. He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in which he has attained power,” Douglas wrote in a 1939 edition of the party’s magazine.
Haldeman, as the chairman of the National Social Credit Association, responded in a letter to the editor of the Star Phoenix. He said “Social Credit is absolutely opposed to antisemitism,” adding, “the great mass of the Jewish people in Germany suffered greatly and our full sympathy goes out to them.”
But he also defended the publishing of the Protocols. He said whether the document was fraudulent “is not the point.”
“The point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation,” Haldeman wrote, noting the conspiracy this book supposedly revealed was executed “by international financiers, many but not all of them, Jewish.”
In a 1947 letter to the editor of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Rabbi Irwin Gordon expressed skepticism about Haldeman’s disavowal of antisemitism.
“Doctor Haldeman must have a short memory as well if he does not remember his own speeches shot through with antisemitic talk,” Gordon wrote. “Doctor Haldeman’s over-interest in clearing the party and himself from the charge of antisemitism and anti-Canadianism will not fool the people.”
Even Alberta’s Social Credit premier thought the party had an antisemitism problem. In a letter to a national leader after the Protocols incident, Premier Ernest Manning (father of Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party of Canada) took aim at the organization’s magazine, the Canadian Social Crediter.
“No one who values their name or their influence is going to get behind a publication which contains little but negative and destructive criticism flavoured with ‘Jew-baiting,’” Manning wrote, demanding that Haldeman, as party chairman, clean things up.