Doctor Strange

The Canadian origin story of Elon Musk begins in 1907, three generations before his birth, in the tiny, whistle-stop settlement of Herbert, Saskatchewan. Even now, Herbert consists mostly of a grain elevator, a level crossing and a tight cross-hatch of streets just north of the Trans-Canada Highway, its 700-odd residents surrounded by wheat fields that extend endlessly out toward the horizon. But, at the time, John Elon Haldeman; his wife, Almeda; and their five-year-old son, Joshua (Elon’s grandfather), were at the vanguard of a massive migration. More than 320,000 Americans were heading north to the Prairies, lured by offers of land from the Canadian government. They all shared a dream of settling and cultivating the vast swath of terrain that had been tended for millennia by the Plains Cree.

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Despite the government’s promises of prosperity, money was tight for the Haldemans. Almeda set up a little diner behind a lumberyard on Herbert’s main drag to help bolster the family’s finances. Then, when Joshua was just seven, his father died from complications related to diabetes, and Almeda signed on to teach at the town’s new school for extra cash. In 1915, she married a British-born man named Heseltine Wilson, who owned a large farm and was active in municipal politics. Joshua grew up on his stepfather’s property, becoming an athletic kid who boxed, wrestled and took part in bronco-riding competitions. Life in rural ­Saskatchewan wasn’t for the faint of heart, but the unforgiving prairie steppes provided the perfect outlet for Joshua’s physical prowess and competitive spirit.

He struggled in more rigid environments. After high school, he attended nine colleges and universities in Western Canada without graduating from any of them. Eventually, he completed chiropractic college, at that time a fringe discipline, in Iowa. In 1926, he moved back to Herbert to establish a practice and manage the homestead. Within a few years, drought turned the once-fertile prairie lands into a dust bowl. Haldeman, by then a robust 24-year-old with high cheekbones and an intense gaze, leveraged every skill he had, breaking in horses and trading chiropractic treatments for food and lodging, but he couldn’t stop the banks from foreclosing on his family’s farm. For a time, he abandoned Herbert altogether. In a biography of Elon Musk, journalist Walter Isaacson describes Joshua Haldeman’s peripatetic life: “[He] worked as a cowboy, a rodeo performer, and a construction hand. His one constant was a love for adventure. He married and divorced, travelled as a hobo on freight trains and was a stowaway on an ocean-going ship.”

Haldeman eventually returned to Western Canada, where the Great Depression was in full force. Bankrupt and dispossessed farmers were directing their ire at the indifferent capitalist system, which no longer seemed to value what they produced. Haldeman got caught up in the populist fervour that blew in like a prairie storm. It was those headwinds that would spur him to become a leader in a radical US-based movement called Technocracy Inc. Its hundreds of thousands of followers would advocate for the abolition of democracy, the creation of a single state that would consume every country from Greenland to the Caribbean, and the right to put all political, economic and social decision-making into the hands of a few all-powerful technocrats.

The roots of Haldeman’s interest in fringe politics were most likely related to his occupation. In the early 20th century, chiropractic medicine operated firmly outside the bounds of accepted health care. The profession’s founder, a Port Perry man named D. D. Palmer, was a healer who proselytized about the rejuvenating power of magnets. One day, so the story goes, Palmer was joking with a hearing-impaired custodian and casually slapped him on the back with a book. The man’s hearing suddenly improved. Palmer continued treating him by pressing on a protrusion in his spine, eventually thwacking it hard enough to dislodge the bump. After that, the custodian’s hearing recovered fully.

Palmer began administering spinal adjustments to his patients. He and his son, B. J., went on to found the Iowa-based college of chiropractic medicine that Haldeman would later attend. The Palmers cultivated a profession that, at the time, was defiant in its resistance to biomedical science and steeped in the huckster culture of midwestern preachers. The malady they sought to cure was genuine—they were hardly the first to observe that distinctly miserable condition known as chronic back pain. Many doctors had tried to diagnose it, attributing it to bad posture, excessive masturbation (“self-abuse,” per one medical journal of the time), poor diet, improper hygiene, and too much drinking and smoking. Palmer and his disciples recognized that back pain is both fed by and feeds into psychological conditions such as unrelieved stress or depression. Their treatments involved the usual—massage, vertebrae popping, neck ­adjustments—combined with efforts to get to the bottom of their patients’ psychic distress and attempts to transfer their own physical strength to the ailing through the power of touch.

The early chiropractors were mavericks, suspicious of conventional health care with its painful surgical procedures and dubious pharmaceuticals. They spread the gospel of chiropractic medicine as a panacea. Some practitioners claimed that athletes were dying prematurely due to stresses on their spinal columns, others that chiropractic adjustment could completely cure 70 per cent of childhood polio cases.

Haldeman treated the men and women toiling in the fields of Saskatchewan, doing the thankless, back-breaking work of keeping the rest of the nation fed. Like them, chiropractors felt snubbed by the mainstream, a sentiment that was the focus of a conference Haldeman would attend in Toronto in 1938. Over three hot days in late July, some 1,200 chiropractors from across North America converged on the Royal York Hotel for the annual confab of the National Chiropractic Association. It included a pilgrimage to Port Perry to see D. D. Palmer’s birthplace. In the evening, after a dinner in the Royal York’s banquet hall, a Toronto practitioner reminded attendees of chiropractic’s persistent outlaw status. It was banned in Ontario and subject to criminal prosecution in New York state. “Today we cannot visit even the smallest and meanest of the hospitals [in Ontario] to carry on our work,” he lamented. “Our fellow practitioners are brow-beaten and humiliated wherever they go.”

Haldeman made it his personal mission to fight the exclusion of chiropractors from the medical community. He joined various professional committees and pushed for laws to protect chiropractors, osteopaths and naturopaths from prosecution. He started his own radio show out of Regina to promote his “drugless” profession and helped launch a Canadian council of chiropractors. Haldeman’s relentless drive to gain legitimacy for his brand of health care was likely what brought him into the political arena.

The Great Depression fuelled Western Canada’s feelings of alienation from the federal government and gave rise to new political movements. Populism offered the promise of healing to a ravaged region. The charismatic figures who rose to the surface of this quintessentially grassroots movement proposed various solutions to the West’s economic collapse. Some started farm co-ops or advocated for socialized health care; others suggested societies built around something other than money. One of the most alluring was the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation—the CCF—led by Tommy Douglas, a preacher who would go on to champion medicare and found the NDP. For a while, Haldeman joined their ranks. In 1934, he served as the chairman of the Assiniboia constituency association for the party’s federal wing. But his involvement in Canada’s nascent progressive politics didn’t last long. Within two years, he left the party to join Technocracy Inc., a loose-knit group whose agenda went far beyond what the CCF was offering.

Technocracy Inc. was the brainchild of Howard Scott, a Virginia-born man who had moved to Greenwich Village in 1918. Scott described himself as an engineer, although he had no actual training beyond a few years spent working for chemical companies in Alabama. In New York in the 1920s, he fell in with a circle of intellectuals that included Thorstein Veblen, the economist who coined the concept of conspicuous consumption. It was there that Scott developed what he deemed the ultimate solution to America’s problems: handing power over to technocrats and engineers.

Scott established Technocracy Inc. as a “research” group in 1933 and set out its tenets in a series of manifestos. He argued that science and technology were already changing life in North America and that only engineers and other technological experts could lead the masses into a new age. Scott proposed a society without capitalism, where production was instead organized according to scientific techniques. The logistics were wobbly, but Technocracy Inc. planned to calculate the amount of energy required to produce all the goods and services on the continent. They would then convert that energy value into currency, in the form of what they called energy certificates, and divide it equally among all citizens over the age of 25. Scott claimed that this system would give rise to dramatically shorter workweeks, longer vacations and widespread early retirement.

The ultimate goal was to create a massive new techno-utopia called Technate, erasing all national borders and democratic systems in North America and the Caribbean. In place of democracy, which Scott believed put too many incompetent people in positions of power, a committee of “experts”—largely engineers and technocrats along with some leaders in fields like medicine and education—would make up a cabinet, with a single “continental director” overseeing them. Scott claimed that, in Technate, everyone would be housed, fed and cared for. “Under the Technate, we will be responsible for the health and well-being of every human being,” he said. “That is more than any political government ever did.”

Despite the many logistical holes in his vision, Scott was a persuasive evangelist. A tall figure often dressed in tailored grey suits, leather overcoats and wide-brimmed fedoras, he was a gifted orator whose infectious non-conformity attracted growing audiences, first in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses and then farther afield. “Whatever may be one’s beliefs about the soundness of the concrete proposals which have been advanced by Howard Scott,” one pundit wrote in a 1933 essay in a journal called The World Tomorrow, “one can only warmly welcome the extraordinary interest which they have aroused.” It was, in the writer’s view, a sign that most people had “seen through the essential vacuity of the stuffed shirts of the bull market era and are in a mood to consider basic proposals for the reconstruction of society.”

As Technocracy spread, it formalized its operations. Adherents set up local chapters across the US, and members started wearing grey military-style suits and driving cars painted to match. Scott took on the mantle of “Chief Engineer,” and his followers saluted him whenever he entered the room. In an effort to expand Technocracy’s membership westward, into cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and eventually Vancouver, Scott held large rallies that he called “symbolizations.” Technocracy officials took over large venues like the Hollywood Bowl or the Vancouver Forum, once arriving in a motorcade with hundreds of cars. Then Scott would take the stage, flanked by his uniformed lieutenants, and address crowds of up to 5,000 people.

Technocracy gained a following in Canada partly because mass unemployment made its vision especially appealing. A cover story in the Technocrats Magazine posed the following question: “Thirty million out of work in 1933 or $20,000 a year income for every family. Which?” In 1936, Haldeman became one of Scott’s disciples. He may have found out about Techno­cracy Inc. from Robert Cromie, the publisher of the Vancouver Sun and one of Scott’s most zealous Canadian followers. Haldeman then formally signed on as Technocracy Inc.’s Saskatchewan research director and an “authorized instructor.” His mandate: establish a foothold for the movement among the province’s farmers.

Haldeman threw himself into building up Technocracy’s presence in Saskatchewan, but the political landscape was quickly shifting. In Europe, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party was on the rise, and suddenly Technocracy’s visible similarities—the tailored uniforms, the salutes, the rallies—became a liability. In early September of 1939, shortly after the Second World War began, Technocracy tried to proactively address questions about its members’ loyalties. Canadian Technocrats wrote to prime minister Mackenzie King declaring their willingness to defend the country against “alien attack.” But, on June 20, 1940, the federal government banned the group using the new wartime Defence of Canada Regulations. “The Minister of Justice reports that there is an organization known as Technocracy Inc.,” the government wrote in a press release, “which is considered to be of a subversive character and which should be declared an illegal organization.” The RCMP’s commissioner at the time likened Technocracy to “a poison toadstool that sprang up overnight to destroy our social structure.”

Despite the government prohibition, Haldeman didn’t relent. Instead, he took out an ad for Technocracy Inc. in Regina’s Leader-Post. He wrote that Ottawa’s ban was a “tactical political blunder” and that “Technocracy Inc. from its inception has been unequivocally opposed to Nazism, Fascism, and Communism.” Authorities promptly arrested Haldeman on charges of sedition and membership in an illegal organization. He was convicted in a Regina courthouse, though there’s no indication that he served prison time. But Haldeman didn’t jump ship—yet. Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Technocracy’s American leadership abruptly ditched its opposition to communism and declared its support for Soviet Russia. Haldeman quit over the new allegiance, and soon he was actively distancing himself by accusing the group of “conspiring against the British Empire” and “the sovereignty of Canada.”

Next, he threw his boundless political energy to the far right. Haldeman joined Social Credit, the deeply conservative and conspiracy-minded populist party founded in Alberta by “Bible Bill” Aberhart and led by Ernest Manning, who would later become premier of the province. For the next several years, Haldeman tried to build up Social Credit’s presence in Saskatchewan. He ran as a candidate in the 1945 federal election, but by then Saskatchewan’s voters were mostly in Tommy Douglas’s progressive camp. Haldeman lost decisively and instead became the chair of Social Credit’s national arm.

It was in this role that he came under fire for Social Credit’s antisemitic views. The party’s leaders trafficked in resentment, blaming an international cabal of Jewish financiers for wielding control over Western Canada. Haldeman tried to refute these accusations. “Social Credit is absolutely opposed to antisemitism,” he wrote in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix in early 1947. “The great mass of the Jewish people in Germany suffered greatly and our full sympathy goes out to them.” He received a scathing letter to the editor in reply. “I am sure Doctor Haldeman is aware of the anti-Semitic character of the Canadian Social Crediter, the party newspaper,” wrote a local rabbi, who also claimed that Social Credit’s rhetoric followed “the Hitler line.” He went on to say that Haldeman “must have a short memory as well, if he does not remember his own speeches shot through with anti-Semitic talk.” Perhaps stung by such accusations—or dejected by two more unsuccessful election campaigns, in 1946 and 1949—Haldeman quit Social Credit and withdrew from politics.

Without a political project, Haldeman took up a midlife hobby: he bought, on a whim, a small plane. In Walter Isaacson’s book, he writes that Haldeman was on a trip when he spied a farmer selling a single-engine Luscombe airplane in his field. Haldeman, who had never flown a plane before, was intrigued. He wasn’t carrying any cash, but he persuaded the farmer to take his car in exchange. Haldeman took lessons and began flying around Saskatchewan. His passengers included his second wife, Winnifred Fletcher, and later his four children, including twins Kaye and Maye (Elon’s mother).

In 1950, Haldeman packed up the whole clan and moved to South Africa in search of adventure and a milder climate. They settled on a farm near Pretoria, where Haldeman opened a chiropractic practice. From there, he flew his plane around the country—he’d disassembled it for the move, then put it back together upon arrival. In a dispatch he sent to the Regina Leader-Post a year after his move, titled “A New Life for Haldeman,” he extolled South Africa’s diverse geography and the beauty of Pretoria. He also described the country’s apartheid system. “The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question,” he wrote. “They are endeavouring to make the natives as independent and self-supporting as possible.” Haldeman disparaged the Black population as lazy and overpaid. “It is impossible to make a native work hard,” he lamented.

Haldeman’s chiropractic practice, though, had a large contingent of Black patients. He described his patronizing interactions with them: “At first I would ask the patient what was wrong. He would answer, ‘I am sick.’ Then I would ask him, ‘Where does it hurt?’ He would answer ‘All over’ and look at me as if I were asking a lot of silly questions. With them, I can immediately start looking for and removing any nerve interferences without any unnecessary [trouble]. The results have been very good. One of the more intelligent natives said, ‘You best doctor in Pretoria. Natives no understand. You give no medicine, natives come to doctor sick, get well.’ Then he laughed and laughed.”

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Haldeman’s overconfidence finally came back to bite him. In 1974, at age 72, he was killed in a plane crash while attempting an emergency landing

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Haldeman soon found a new outlet for his restlessness in one of the most enduring and enigmatic legends about South Africa: the tale of a “lost city” in the northernmost reaches of the Kalahari Desert. It had been discovered, as legend had it, by the Great Farini, a Canadian fabulist and acrobat who’d famously walked a tightrope over Niagara Falls. In 1885, Farini travelled to South Africa and embarked on an expedition across the arid Kalahari (now mainly in Botswana) in search of diamonds, big game and the kind of adventure story that would titillate his Victorian audiences. Toward the end of the journey, he and another member of his crew claimed they’d found the ruins of a long-lost city deep in the wilderness, possibly the burial ground of some great civilization. But, until the day he died, Farini refused to reveal its exact location.

Haldeman became obsessed. In 1953, just three years after emigrating, he decided to find Farini’s ruins. He went on a dozen searches, risking his life with his treacherous tactics. On one expedition, a 13,500-kilometre aerial journey, he flew his little plane scarcely 60 metres off the ground in order to thoroughly scan the terrain for clues. The fact that he never found any evidence of the ruins didn’t dissuade him from his quixotic belief that the lost city existed, somewhere—nor did it assuage his desire to find it despite the risks.

Not only was Haldeman willing to fly great distances over empty and often inhospitable swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, but he happily subjected others to these trips. Once, he packed up his wife and their children and set out on a 1,300-kilometre flight from Pretoria to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). “[We] got lost for three hours over the wilds of Africa and just managed to get into Salisbury with the gas tanks showing nearly empty after five hours,” Haldeman wrote. “Winnifred had quite a nervous reaction after that. She had been focusing on those gas gauges too much.” Eventually—perhaps ­inevitably—Haldeman’s boundless confidence came back to bite him. In 1974, at age 72, he was killed in a plane crash while attempting an emergency landing.

After his death, Haldeman became something of a family legend. His daughter Maye, a striking model with a vivacious smile, married a South African man named Errol Musk. When their first son was born, in 1971, they named him Elon, after Haldeman’s father. In 1989, Elon moved back to Canada with his mother and two siblings, where they lived in a rent-controlled apartment in Toronto while he finished high school. He would go on to attend Queen’s University before founding SpaceX, becoming the CEO of Tesla, buying Twitter and helming, for a frenzied and polarizing stretch, the US Department of Government Efficiency under Donald Trump.

Musk was too young to have known his grandfather well; he was just three when Haldeman died in that plane crash. But Haldeman’s life story loomed large, and his appetite for risk-taking endured. The family’s motto was “Live dangerously—carefully.” When Elon discusses his grandfather, it’s clear that Haldeman’s penchant for adventure, his willingness to launch himself full-tilt toward his various compulsions, is what left the most enduring impression. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Musk told Isaacson. “Risk energized him.”

Haldeman and Musk share much in common: the conspicuously short attention span, the anti-establishment world view, the attraction to radical ideas. Haldeman wanted to find a lost civilization in an African desert. Musk seeks to create a new civilization on Mars. Both were initially attracted to, and then ultimately repelled by, the Klieg lights of populism. They believed that technology was the answer to the problems of their time—and they were drawn to ambitious ideas, however flawed and untenable, of how to fix a society, fast.

This story appears in the August 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.