Esterhazy, New Sweden, Thingvalla, and Harmony were a few such communities located in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, mainly founded and populated by groups of Scandinavian settlers. Alberta and British Columbia also had their share of communal utopias, which assumed a distinctly Western tone because of their agrarian mindset and Protestant religious and moral social codes. What Allen calls the "social gospel" was one of the hallmarks of the Reform movement in Western Canada.1 An occasional sense of "moral superiority" bolstered and reinforced a preexisting sense of isolation and alienation, especially during the political crises that came about as the result of Canada's participation in World War I.2 .

             Such a sense of moral superiority was not limited to members of utopian communities in Western Canada. Rather, many more mainstream members of society cultivated a sense of moral hygiene, based mainly on Protestant Christian ideology. The religious-based utopian communities occasionally preached austerity and abstinence, while the Christian temperance movement transformed moral righteousness into a political lobby. The essence of both the temperance movement and the utopian agrarian community was in fact, reform. Both sought to reform existing social structures and institutions and to define life in Western Canada.

             Western Canada, although peopled eventually with a substantial number of non-Protestant immigrants, retained a distinctively Protestant character. New waves of immigrants poured into Western Canada toward the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century changed demographics more than they changed the impetus for reform. In fact, immigration and its concurrent problems fueled the desire for reform in Western Canada, especially because many new immigrants arrived from the United States, from Great Britain, and from other regions in which leftist political movements had already gained ground.