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By Glynn Brothen

Family Ties

Maverick politics and technological pursuits: The Prince Albert connection to Elon Musk

Mar 26, 2025 | 12:00 PM

When the roads to Prince Albert were made of gravel and dirt, a recreational pilot parachuted into the community to be its Social Credit Party candidate.

Joshua Haldeman, a Regina-based chiropractor and maternal grandfather of Elon Musk, placed fourth in that 1945 election, losing to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s Edward LeRoy Bowerman who also beat out future Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King by 129 votes.

Undeterred, Haldeman ran provincially against Tommy Douglas in 1948. And when he lost that election, he ran in a constituency won by another future prime minister, John Diefenbaker. That was another loss.

“I have a feeling that Haldeman was kind of interested in going up against the best. He ran against three fairly strong politicians but he didn’t win in any of the elections,” Fred Payton from the Prince Albert Historical Museum said.

During his 1945 campaign, Haldeman made his case in a short advertisement titled ‘A Man Well Qualified to Serve Prince Albert”

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“Dr. Joshua Haldeman, Social Credit Candidate for the Federal Constituency of Prince Albert, has had a wide and varied experience in Western Canadian life that is hard to equal. He had lived under the most arduous Canadian conditions which were a down-right disgrace to a great country; and also lived on the best, as a national figure, in other endeavours.”

A photo of Joshua Haldeman’s campaign photo. (Joshua N. Haldeman, D.C., the Canadian years: 1926-1950)

Haldeman was born in Minnesota, and moved to Saskatchewan with his parents when he was around five years old in 1907.

His political drive was buoyed by beliefs of low taxes, minimal government regulation and free economic markets. He was a higher up in Canada’s Technocracy movement which eschewed partisanship and advocated elite scientists and technology leaders were better suited to hold government positions. Its ultimate goal was for North America and Central America to become one ‘Technate’, an independent geographical unit extending from Panama to the North Pole that was self-reliant on its own natural resources.

Haldeman’s romance with the movement died off after a certain view, Payton said. “He left the party because they wanted to take over Greenland. Which is exactly the opposite of what his grandson is involved in.”

Musk, for his part, has recently echoed President Donald Trump’s desire for Greenland to join the United States.

“I see them both as being mavericks and being willing and able to think outside the box. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is questionable,” Payton said.

“But they certainly both are mavericks.”

The comparisons between the two men are unique.

The ambition for both to challenge the status quo and take on the bigger players as outsiders can be seen in Haldeman challenging wellknown political players. Musk took on NASA with his own SpaceX company for space exploration.

Haldeman regularly proselytized his belief that machines were the answer to a better work/life balance, a view similar to Musk’s investments in Tesla’s self-driving cars and Neuralink, a clinical trial brain implant to telepathically control computers.

Cost-cutting and ridding debt was a component of Haldeman’s political campaigns in which he criticized the Liberal Party’s family allowance payments. In turn, Musk recently assembled a group of employees to work under the umbrella of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) a newly developed unit tasked with advancing technology and cost cutting.

Former Member of Parliament Ray Funk says he remembers a neighbour telling him about Haldeman’s presence, that he was someone who dominated a room and a “dynamic kind of a guy.”

A copy of Technocracy Digest, the group’s magazine, which Haldeman wrote for on occasion. (University of Alberta Archives)

The Technocracy group, Funk said, had its height during the Depression era with many of its believers thinking engineering advancements would reduce manual labour to the point where many could retire early.

Funk, known by other former politicians as a history buff, said the group was cult-like and remembers Canwood, Sask. holding local chapter meetings. But by the 1970s when Funk landed on the political scene, he said the group was reduced province-wide to about “three or four guys having coffee.”

Haldeman went on to live in Pretoria, South Africa with his family. It was there he authored articles for Saskatchewan newspapers where he shared stories about flying his family around in his personal plane, expressed support for apartheid, and underscored his own racist views of Black South Africans with personal anecdotes.

Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971. He emigrated to Canada as a student and spent a brief amount of time connecting with his relatives near Swift Current.

Now the wealthiest man in the world, he was appointed as a special adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump.

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glynn.brothen@pattisonmedia.com