The Great Depression (24 page)

The Imperial Conference accomplished very little more. Nobody wanted to make major sacrifices where protective tariffs were concerned. Each country, including Canada, wanted more than it was prepared to give. Twenty leading Canadian manufacturers were holed up in the Chateau, reportedly in a panic because they feared Bennett might give away too much. They needn’t have worried. In simple terms, the Canadian government wanted the mother country to continue the preference it was extending to Canadian imports and increase it by taxing all natural and processed foreign products that competed with imports from Canada. Britain was being asked to boost taxes on butter from Denmark and beef from Argentina in favour of Canadian products. Such a “stomach tax,” as it was called, was politically impossible.

Canada offered considerably less. Bennett had promised to extend the free list and the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association provided a lengthy catalogue of goods that it announced it would be happy to admit from Great Britain without any protective tariff. On the face of it, this was a magnificent gesture of goodwill. But the British had not come unprepared; accompanying
that delegation was a formidable group of trade and tariff experts who combed through the CMA’s list after Bennett presented it and began to hoot with laughter at such items as “hog de-hair-ers,” “Queen bees,” “herring de-boners,” and – most hilarious of all – an item described as “Mickey Mouse machines, for making noises of.”

The list was a sham. Many of the items were unobtainable in either Canada or Great Britain; others were under patent in the United States and weren’t applicable. When the experts translated the impressive-looking array of free goods into dollars and cents, they discovered that the advantage to British exporters would not reach even one hundred thousand dollars.

Another stumbling block to achievement was Bennett’s own abrasive personality. By turns intransigent and bombastic, he tried to impose his will on the men who ran the empire. According to Stanley Baldwin, Bennett “had a brainstorm every day which wiped out what he had agreed to the day before.” Baldwin then maliciously quoted a former Liberal minister’s characterization of Bennett: “He has the manners of a Chicago policeman and the temperament of a Hollywood film star.”

The negotiations grew so ugly that, at one point, Bennett asked the Canadian Pacific to have a liner standing by to take the British home. That ultimate breach didn’t occur, but there’s no doubt that Bennett made a lifelong enemy of Neville Chamberlain, who complained at the outset of “Bennett’s very aggressive tone.” Chamberlain later declared that “most of our difficulties centred around the personality of Bennett. Full of high Imperial sentiments, he has done little to put them into practice. Instead of guiding the conference in his capacity as Chairman, he has acted merely as the leader of the Canadian delegation. In that capacity he has strained our patience to the limit.” The breach between the two men was never healed. Chamberlain’s revenge came a few years later after Bennett had retired and was living in England. The name of the former prime minister was advanced as a candidate for a peerage. Chamberlain blocked it, and Bennett had to wait until Churchill was prime minister.

As the bargaining and haggling in Ottawa “tolled the bell for the funeral of Empire solidarity,” to quote a disconsolate Beaverbrook, the moderate left wing of the Canadian political spectrum was preparing for a more modest gathering in Calgary. The
launching of the new movement, in the words of its leader, J.S. Woodsworth, was “of far greater consequence to the future of Canada than the Imperial Economic Conference now in session in Ottawa; for while the Ottawa Conference is seeking to restore prosperity by adding a few patches to the disintegrating system of capitalism, the object of the Federation is fundamental social reconstruction.”

The federation was, of course, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which its founders insisted on calling a “movement” rather than a political party.

The time was ripe. Since the days of the National Policy, few Canadians had seriously questioned the basis of the social and economic order that had seemed to work so well. Now it was apparent, especially in the West, that the government was not prepared to deal with the new crisis in any imaginative way. The country was in a ferment. The illegal Communist party, using a series of front organizations, had seized the initiative on the left, promoting hunger marches, farmers’ revolts, and industrial strikes. But the government was still talking as if old panaceas such as the protective tariff would solve the economic crisis. To the old-line parties, the horrors of a deficit were greater than the demoralization of unemployment.

Suddenly the concept of a new political movement gathered momentum, revolving around the spare, goateed figure of J.S. Woodsworth, the one man who had the confidence of all the disparate groups striving to form a new coalition of the Left. Critical mass was reached in less than six months – a remarkably short period in which to form a new party. In February, the League for Social Reconstruction was officially formed in Montreal and Toronto. That same month, the United Farmers of Alberta determined to organize a similar group in the West. In May, members of the Ginger Group of Farmer-Labour M.P.s met in Ottawa with some of the founders of the LSR to plan a “Commonwealth Party,” with Woodsworth as temporary president.

On July 1, the UFA set the date and the place for its proposed meeting of left-wing organizations. It was to be August 1 in Calgary. Later that month, in Saskatchewan, provincial farmer and labour groups agreed to form a common front. Finally, the Western Labour Conference – the umbrella organization representing both labour and socialist parties in the four western provinces – switched
its annual convention to Calgary to coincide with the UFA meeting.

The West dominated the convention that followed, with the United Farmers of Alberta supplying the greatest number of delegates. The names of the organizations represented in Calgary show how fragmented was the democratic Left in Canada: the Canadian Labour Party, the Dominion Labour Party, the Socialist Party of Canada (British Columbia), the United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan), the Independent Labour Party of Manitoba, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Engineers, and the newly formed LSR. Individually, these splinter groups had little political clout. Bound together, they hoped to change the social and economic environment of the country.

After a rousing public meeting in Calgary’s Labour Temple on Sunday, July 31, the delegates on August 1 got down to work. They represented a cross-section of the Left: fifteen farmers, twenty construction workers, two lawyers, six teachers, one miner, one professor, six housewives, three accountants, six railway workers, three journalists, two steam engineers, one hotel-keeper, one retired minister, one motion-picture operator, three nurses, two union executives, twelve working politicians, and nineteen jobless men and women.

They chose a name and they chose a leader. The first was contentious, the latter foreordained. Of J.S. Woodsworth, an acerbic commentator in
Maclean’s
noted that “it can hardly be said that he is a politician, since no politician would handicap a new party with a descriptive label like Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation.” As usual, the establishment press failed to understand the significance either of the movement or of its name. As it turned out, the initials CCF fitted as easily into the headlines as “Grit” or “Tory.”

The convention’s purpose was to form a federation to work for a socialist Canada, but not through violence or agitation in the communist style. Change would be effected through Parliament in the tradition of the British Labour Party. The details of the program would be laid out the following year in Regina in the form of a manifesto to be written with the help of the young intellectuals in the LSR. The human symbol of the movement would be the incorruptible Woodsworth, a man who cared for
neither fame nor gain – perhaps the only party leader in Canadian history who was totally selfless.

Woodsworth had been raised as a Methodist activist. His doctrine was the Social Gospel, which had swept the evangelical churches in the early years of the century. His personal credo could be summed up in his own words: “A curse still hangs over inactivity. A severe condemnation still rests upon indifference.… Christianity stands for social righteousness as well as personal righteousness.… We have tried to provide for the poor. Yet, have we tried to alter the social conditions that lead to poverty?”

The slums of England, where Woodsworth had worked in his youth, and the All People’s Mission in the heart of Winnipeg’s immigrant district had politicized him. The Winnipeg General Strike made him a national figure. Jailed, tried, and acquitted of sedition, he emerged as the leader of the democratic Left.

A skilled parliamentarian, he it was who had sparked the unemployment debate in the House that helped defeat Mackenzie King’s Liberals. He had waged an exhausting but eventually successful battle to establish the first divorce court in Canada – divorce having been as inflammatory a subject then as abortion in the 1980s. He had made an exhaustive study of unemployment insurance and argued vainly year after year for its establishment in Canada. He fought for civil liberties, bombarding the House with case histories of police brutality, suppression of human rights, invasion of privacy, and unwarranted deportation.

They called him a Red, but he had no use for the shrill communists and for all of his life would keep them at arm’s length while fighting in and out of Parliament to allow them to state their views without interference. For that he got no gratitude. The communist
Worker
sneered at him as “the pacifist flunky of the ruling class.”

He had visited the Soviet Union and had hobnobbed with the British Fabians, but his own brand of socialism was distinctively Canadian. “I believe that we in Canada must work out our salvation in our own way,” he was to say. “I am convinced that we may develop in Canada a distinct type of socialism. I refuse to follow slavishly the British model or the American model or the Russian model. We in Canada will solve our problems along our own lines.” He was a Canadian through and through. In those days the
census takers insisted that all should list their racial origins, no matter how many centuries their forbears might have spent in Canada. Woodsworth stubbornly refused.

He looked ascetic and frail, but he wasn’t. He was blessed with the inner toughness that is bestowed on those who refuse to veer one millimetre from the moral principles they set for themselves. “We are starting with not a dollar in the treasury,” he wrote that September, “– an immense task ahead.” He would not spare himself to meet it. In the year following the Calgary convention he would travel the country to rouse support, sleeping in nothing more luxurious than an upper berth to keep down expenses. Indeed, he sometimes sat up all night in a day coach rather than pay for a sleeping-car. He was prepared to go to any lengths to spread his political gospel, which, to Woodsworth, was the Christian gospel. He talked to brakemen and conductors on the trains and he talked to housewives in their kitchens, often helping them with their chores. As his Marxist son-in-law, the lanky West Coaster Angus MacInnis, once remarked: “If J.S. heard of three Eskimos in the Arctic Circle who wanted a meeting, he’d be off to them on the next train.”

In the twelve-month period following the Calgary convention, Woodsworth, in spite of his heavy parliamentary schedule, managed to make two hundred speeches and give innumerable press interviews. In those despairing years, he was the conscience of Canada.

Having exhausted their appeals, Tim Buck and his seven Communist comrades began to serve their terms in Kingston Penitentiary on February 19, 1932. Buck would always remember that first day. Joined by six hardened criminals including the notorious bank robber Mickey McDonald, they were lined up before the acting warden, Gilbert Smith, who told them: “Having been convicted of a criminal offence you have no rights. You are not a person in the eyes of the law.” Smith then read off the penitentiary’s list of rules – twenty-two don’ts. “Repression,” Buck later wrote, “seeped out of every one of them.”

Then Smith asked Buck to identify himself.

“So you’re Buck. Now I want you to understand that what I’ve been saying is only part of what could be said. We have the means here by which to tame lions and you don’t look to me very much like a lion.”

“I never pretended to be …” Buck started to say, but the warden cut him off.

“Silence!” he shouted. A guard seized Buck by the arm and repeated, “Silence!” At length the Communist leader was allowed to speak. He asked for reading material to be sent to him but was told he must first read the prison library’s five thousand books. He asked if he could order some biographies; that was refused. He asked if he could subscribe to Hansard, the record of the House of Commons debates; that was turned down because the superintendent of penitentiaries said there were “too many radical speeches in it.” Sometime later he was denied permission to buy books in German for language study because “German is the language of your so-called Communist International.” When Buck asked permission to study French, he was told, “You don’t live in Quebec. The answer is no.… You’re asking to study French in the hope that you’ll be able to use it for agitation and for the fomenting of unrest.”

Conditions in Kingston Penitentiary at that time were close to medieval. That was the word William Withrow used to describe the philosophy of those who ran the institution. Withrow, a convicted abortionist, was released late in 1929 after serving three years. By the time Buck and the others were incarcerated, Withrow had embarked on a campaign to change a situation so evil as “to make the very imps in hell weep.” His tireless crusade for penal reform helped bring about the famous Archambault Royal Commission that looked into penitentiary conditions later in the decade.

A few months after Buck was imprisoned, Withrow told a United Church men’s club, “… there are political prisoners in Kingston today, men whose only crime is opposition to those in power.… These men are no different from you and me and yet they are kept in dungeons, damp and dirty, that would not be used to hold cattle.”