The Great Depression (74 page)

Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. King announced a special war session of Parliament for September 7 and told his council that until Parliament met “all our measures would be for the defence of Canada.” To his annoyance, his own broadcast that evening was ignored by the Ottawa
Journal
, which reported both King George’s speech and Chamberlain’s. “Not a line to our country’s position and part,” King complained. “It is this aspect of Toryism that fills me with grief, dismay and contempt. Anything if it is the King of England, but no mention whatever of Canada’s own noble part or the words of her P.M.”

Canada’s part, however, was more ambiguous than noble. King’s war plans did not call for sending a single Canadian soldier to fight in Europe. When he discovered that the Department of National Defence was ordering supplies to establish encampments to train soldiers for overseas service, he cancelled those plans. King believed, or wanted to believe, that the country’s contribution could be confined to sending supplies, munitions, and pilots to England. He was equally disturbed to learn that the defence department had been spending most of its time preparing for an expeditionary force, apparently with the connivance of Ian Mackenzie, the responsible minister. Canada was not yet committed to anything of the sort.

King’s views did not vary greatly from the attitude expressed by the CCF in January of that year. At that time the party’s national executive had announced that it could not support any overseas adventure. Canada’s forces should be used only for the defence of her own territory. There’s no doubt that the majority of the CCF felt the same way. Of all the parties, it was the most pacifist, the most committed to neutrality. But by early September, with war almost certain, a good many CCFers, like a good many Canadians, had a change of heart. The old country was in trouble; British values, British justice, British fair play were in danger. Could Canada really stand by and let the mother of nations succumb to the German bully? The more pragmatic members of the CCF leadership found themselves stuck with what increasingly seemed to be an unworkable and eventually unpopular policy.

Given its disparate origins – farmers, progressives, union men, Marxists, intellectuals, British Labourites, Canadian nationalists
- it was not surprising that the CCF should crack in several directions on what many considered to be a matter of conscience. Woodsworth had helped to keep this uneasy partnership glued together as long as it faced the common enemy of capitalism. But what exactly was the new enemy? Hitler? The merchants of death? Or war itself?

On September 6, the party’s national council of twenty-eight together with fourteen M.P.s met in Ottawa in a heated and racking session that would occupy two full days. Under the Gothic windows of a long committee room in the main block on Parliament Hill, the widening differences in the CCF’s approach to international affairs became painfully apparent. The party was badly divided. Its selfless leader left no doubt about his own position. James Shaver Woods worth was totally, unequivocally, and irreversibly opposed to his country’s going to war. From that rock-like stance no power could shake him. Stanley Knowles, also a confirmed pacifist, nourished like his leader on the Social Gospel, stood by him as did the Fabians, Frank Underhill and Frank Scott. The practical politicians – Abe Heaps and David Lewis were among them – saw the danger of opposing the inevitable and argued that the party must support the coming war.

Angus MacInnis, married to Woodsworth’s daughter, supported intervention. In doing so he alienated his Marxist colleagues in British Columbia, who insisted that Canada should keep out of an “Imperialist War.” The Nova Scotians were going so far as to demand conscription for overseas service, while most of the delegates from Manitoba were for non-participation. On the other hand, the Saskatchewan CCF leader, George Williams, was urging the party to support the war.

Woodsworth put the question squarely to the meeting when he moved that “this council refuses to discuss any measure that will put Canada into the war.” The council skirmished around that and decided finally not to put the motion to a vote. Instead a committee of six was struck to frame a compromise.

The party statement, which was debated through the following day and far into the night even as Parliament was sitting in its special war session, was intended to paper over the fact that the party had no clear policy. It contained a motherhood clause that “the root causes of war lie deep in the nature of our present society” and went on to urge that civil liberties be guarded during
the coming hostilities, that the government extend economic aid to England and provide for home defence, but that no expeditionary force be sent across the water.

With six members forced to leave the meeting before a vote could be taken, the compromise passed fifteen to nine. To the dismay of the others, Woodsworth rose from his seat to say: “You all know, as I know, what this must mean.…” With that he resigned from the leadership and the party. That his followers could not countenance. He was persuaded to remain on the condition that he would speak for himself alone in Parliament and that M.J. Coldwell, the future party leader, would follow to deliver the CCF’s shaky position.

For the CCF and for Parliament itself, this was an emotional moment. King had been closeted with Woodsworth for two hours, apparently in an attempt to change his mind. Now, during a lengthy speech, he turned to the CCF bench to remark that “there are few men in this Parliament for whom, in some particulars, I have greater respect than the leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. I admire him, in my heart, because time and again he has had the courage to say what lay on his conscience regardless of what the world might think of him. A man of that calibre is an ornament to any Parliament.…”

Those honeyed words did not affect Woodsworth’s fighting form. With his wife and two sons looking down from the gallery, he rose in his place and launched into a speech that none who were there that day would ever forget.

There he stood, a frail figure, grown frailer during the grim years of the thirties when he had criss-crossed the country carrying the message of the movement. His mind, Coldwell had told King in confidence, was beginning to falter, but there was no hint of that now as he lambasted the Prime Minister, regretting in passing that he had to do so in spite of King’s earlier flattery.

Woodsworth saw through King’s obfuscations. The Prime Minister had carefully fudged the whole question of exactly what Canada’s war effort would be. “We stand for the defence of Canada,” he had declared. “We stand for the co-operation of this country on the side of Britain!”

What exactly did that mean? Woodsworth wanted to know. King had talked vaguely about standing with Great Britain to the last man, but he had also promised there would be no conscription
in Canada. Well, what did that mean? Was the country going to send an expeditionary force or wasn’t it? King had carefully slipped round that issue.

“We do not know,” Woodsworth pointed out, “whether or not wealth is to be conscripted. If we are to stand to the very last man in this country … wealth should be conscripted before men are conscripted.”

He reminded the House that King himself had attacked the Bennett government for giving a “blank cheque” (King’s words) for the relief of the unemployed. “But in the speech today we are asked to give a blank cheque to the government. So far the Prime Minister has not enlightened us in any detail as to what the policy of the government is to be.”

As Woodsworth continued, a veil of silence fell across the House, for now he was speaking personally as the Conscience of Parliament. He had no intention of departing for an instant from a lifetime’s conviction for the sake of popularity or political gain.

“I would ask: did the last war settle anything? I venture to say that it settled nothing; and the next war into which we are asked to enter, however big and bloody it may be, is not going to settle anything either. That is not the way in which settlements are brought about.

“While we are urged to fight for freedom and democracy, it should be remembered that war is the very negation of both. The victor may win; but if he does, it is by adopting the self-same tactics which he condemns in his enemy.… As one who has tried for a good many years to take a stand for the common people, personally I cannot give my consent to anything that will drag us into another war.”

The common people!
Coming from Woodsworth’s lips the phrase did not sound hackneyed. All of his years here in the Commons he had fought for commoners – for the Communists (whom he loathed) driven to prison by an unspeakable law; for the single jobless banished to the slave camps; for the boxcar cowboys riding the freights, beaten by the police; for the helpless victims of the Padlock Law; for the hungry children, deprived of proper nutrition by an unheeding government; for the union organizers, the maverick clergymen, the dust-bowl housewives, and all the desperate men and women who wrote him letters or met
him in back-kitchens and on railway sidings in small towns and poured out their anguish and anger because they trusted him to bring their case before the bar of the House.

Absolute silence now, as he continued.

“I do not care whether you think me an impossible idealist or a dangerous crank. I am going to take my place beside the children … because it is only as we adopt new policies that this world will be at all a liveable place for our children who follow us. We laud the courage of those who go to the front; yes, I have boys of my own and I hope they are not cowards, but if any of those boys, not from cowardice but really through belief, is willing to take his stand on this matter and, if necessary, to face a concentration camp or a firing squad, I shall be more proud of that boy than if he enlisted for the war.”

“Shame!” cried George Tustin, a Tory from Napanee. In the words of Woodsworth’s daughter, that was no more than “a little stone that rolled away into the cavern of stillness where men sat alone with their thoughts.” No one answered. A hush of respect still hung like a pall over the House as Woodsworth finished.

That speech marked the end of an era – not only for the CCF, which lost its innocence, but also for the nation. It was the last crusading speech of the decade, the speech of an “impossible idealist,” and even as the speaker took his seat, the echoes of that decade reverberated through the House. Woodsworth stood as the human symbol of the best of the thirties. Now his long political career was ended. The other symbols of that bitter and violent era, in which the people were so badly served by their leaders, were also about to go. But the folk memories of the hunger marches, the bloody riots, the soup kitchens, the black blizzards, the Bennett buggies, the grasshoppers, the relief depots, the police truncheons, the sit-ins and lockouts, and all the populist Messiahs who promised so much and delivered so little – these would linger on in the subconscious of those who survived.

On that day, September 8, Parliament declared that a state of war existed between Canada and Nazi Germany. On that day, the Great Depression can be said to have ended. For war, which would bring mutilation and death, would also bring jobs. There would be jobs in the munitions plants and the shipyards for women who had been kept out of the workforce by the Depression.
There would be jobs in the services for men who had once ridden the freights and begged for handouts. There would be jobs even for teenagers and old men. Suddenly a country that had been unable to provide work for a fifth of its people found work for all. The chronicle of the Great Depression is a catalogue of ironies, but that is the bitterest irony of all.

December 10, 1939: a cold, raw Sunday in Halifax, the harbour a-bustle with wartime shipping. The five big luxury liners stand out in the soft mist, their former dazzle erased by the camouflage of war, their prows now as grey as the ocean itself.

Here is the
Empress of Britain
, the vessel that brought Baldwin and Chamberlain to Canada in 1932, in the days when R.B. Bennett believed a new trade agreement could solve the country’s economic problems. Beside her rides the
Duchess of Bedford
, which had brought remnants of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion home. The
Empress of Australia
, which took Mackenzie King to the Coronation and brought George VI to Canada, forms part of the convoy as does the
Monarch of Bermuda
. And the oldest ship of all, the venerable four-stacker
Aquitania
, which had served as a troopship in the first war, is serving again in the second, reprieved from the scrap heap at the last moment.

Half of the Canadian First Division – seventy-five hundred men, including their new commander, Major-General Andrew McNaughton – is already on board. The other half is to follow in a second convoy a week later. The Depression is winding down as Canada girds up for war.

Suddenly, the government was offering to pay a living wage to those who were willing to risk their lives for their country. What eighteen-year-old Fred LeBlanc was earning was scarcely a living wage; as a stock boy at Northern Electric in Montreal, he was paid five dollars a week. He joined up in the first week of September, but when he went home to Point St. Charles, his mother was aghast.

“You silly ass!” she said. “You’re the only one in the family working.” So she sent Fred’s jobless twenty-two-year-old brother, Leon, to take Fred’s place and claim the army pay. (Leon told the army his middle name was Fred.)

All during the Depression the LeBlanc family had existed mainly on relief. With Fred’s weekly five dollars and Leon’s army pay as a private in the 9th Field Ambulance ($1.30 a day, seven days a week) their total income would magically triple. Now Leon was aboard the
Aquitania
, leaving the Depression behind.