Canada's C.C.F. ANNIVERSARY in CRISIS
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Canada's C.C.F. ANNIVERSARY in CRISIS by GEORGE WOODCOCK Anniversaries are not always happy occasions, and in July this year the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation of Canada, the most powerful...
...program which was drawn up in January, 1958, and in which the following three aims appear in this order: • Extension of public ownership where necessary to facilitate economic planning (as in transportation and communication and basic iron and steel) or to break the strangle-hold of private monopoly (as in the manufacture of farm implements and agricultural chemicals...
...As experiments they seem to have been reasonably successful, but it is significant of the caution with which the C.C.F...
...With the prairies lost, with French Canada permanently hostile, the C.C.F...
...it has, until the present year of electoral disaster, kept to a fairly even 10 per cent in its representation in the House of Commons...
...At this meeting the C.C.F., the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, came into being, but it was not formally constituted until July, 1933, when the first national convention was held in Re-gina...
...In 1958, apart from the three industrial and mining constituencies which remained faithful to the C.C.F...
...in 1920, inspired GEORGE WOODCOCK, prominent Canadian author, has contributed to Time and Tide, The Saturday Review, Partisan Review, the Canadian Forum, and the New Statesman...
...has been almost complete...
...In 1919 the United Farmers contested and won the provincial elections in Ontario...
...The reason for this perhaps lies in the fact that in its origins as well as in its political career, the C.C.F...
...in Ontario which is largely submerged because it is scattered over many constituencies and is rarely quite large enough to bring off an election success...
...It was, in view of the distrust that had long existed between farmers and urban labor, a remarkable feat of compromise...
...It was born out of a compromise between the scattered Canadian progressive groups of the 1930's, and this element of compromise, running through its whole history, must always be borne in mind in assessing the strength and the weakness of the C.C.F...
...For the most significant aspect of the C.C.F's defeat is not so much the abrupt fall in the total number of its M.P's as the fact that the core of wheatland support has dwindled so catastrophically that only one out of the former fifteen prairie members was returned and such respected party leaders as Cold-well and Knowles have been turned out of constituencies that had once seemed solid C.C.F...
...by this success, the radical fanner groups formed the Progressive Party, which attacked large-scale capitalism and put forward a characteristic agrarian program demanding the public ownerhip of public utilities, tariff reductions, monetary reform, restrictions on big business, and improvements in farm conditions...
...Doubtless a similar caution would dominate the actions of the C.C.F...
...it has never won either a federal or a provincial seat there, and the few thousand votes it has received have been mostly in communities of mixed French and English extraction...
...They were partly due to the fact that in the west the C.C.F...
...There has been a natural stress on assistance to farmers and on ambitious programs of rural electrification and road building...
...making even the slightest breach in the hostility of the four million French Canadians...
...In Quebec the failure of the C.C.F...
...then Mackenzie King won back agrarian support for the liberals by stealing the Progressive thunder, and now John Diefenbaker, himself a prairie man, has led the wheat farmers into the Conservative fold by incorporating in his program those very features—better prices and conditions for farmers, more public works, a tougher attitude towards foreign financiers—that formerly attracted them to the C.C.F...
...were stated...
...On this platform the Progressives won 65 seats in the elections of 1921, which made them the second party in the Canadian Commons and gave them a virtual balance of power...
...has seen many of the reforms it first suggested put into operation by more powerful parties which have subsequently claimed all the credit for them...
...in Saskatchewan has restricted itself to the formation of a number of small crown companies which have operated in fields where, with one exception, they did not enter into competition with established business interests...
...The farmers deserted, but the industrial workers, miners, and Pacific fishermen continued to vote C.C.F., and this fact may suggest the beginning of a new phase, of a shift of emphasis which the C.C.F's broad basis and vaguely defined aims would make relatively easy...
...emerged under the dual influence of the North American agrarian populist tradition and of the British Labor Party, for the socialism that entered into its theories was Fabian rather than Marxist in character...
...the first step towards this was taken when Woodsworth and his associates called a meeting of M.P.'s from the various splinter factions of farmers and socialists with the object of forming what was provisionally called a Commonwealth Party...
...gained power in Saskatchewan...
...in Ontario, at least fourteen other constituencies returned more than 5,000 votes for the party...
...popular vote ever recorded (15.6 per cent) and the highest number of parliamentary seats (28...
...Out of the activities of this informal group and the mounting distress caused by the depression in the prairie provinces arose the feeling of the need for a more coordinated left-wing political movement...
...The development of the Progressive Party was similar in many ways to that of the Populist movement—a rapid ferment of discontent among the farmers' organizations, followed by a decision to take political action in order to gain a better deal for agriculture...
...On the other hand, there is a considerable urban working class support for the C.C.F...
...Since 1945 the C.C.F...
...In 1944 the C.C.F...
...Thus the C.C.F...
...in Saskatchewan applies the socialist part of its program that in recent years the crown company system has not been greatly extended...
...was not, in fact, a socialist group at all, but the old Progressive Party, a rural movement which emerged in the years after World War I when the radical agrarianism of the American Mid-West flowered belatedly north of the border...
...as they did the Progressive Party in the past, largely because, as dairy and mixed farmers, they did not feel the pinch of the depression so severely as the wheat farmers of the prairies...
...been able to step beyond its role as the provocative third party, and here, within the limitations imposed on provincial governments by the British North America Act, it has endeavored to carry out the general policies of the party...
...approach—the tendency to encourage the formation of cooperatives as a valid alternative to state socialism...
...vote in the prairie provinces, where 15 members were elected...
...Only in Saskatchewan has the C.C.F...
...if it were ever in the position to form a federal government...
...In spite of the considerable criticism they have aroused, the scope of these crown companies has been slight—altogether they employ only about 5,000 people—and they can be regarded as experiments in socialism rather than as a full-scale attempt at nationalization...
...it may be the beginning of a radical transformation from an alliance attempting to reconcile farmer and labor interests into a party increasingly concerned, in a country that grows steadily more industrialized, with the interests of urban labor...
...Yet the C.C.F...
...can look back is by no means negligible...
...the second demonstrates an acute anxiety not to alienate small property owners and business men...
...The French Canadians who make up the bulk of Quebec's population are opposed to the C.C.F., partly on religious grounds, out of an exaggerated fear of its theoretical socialism, but to an even greater extent because of its distinctively English Canadian character...
...Trade unions have been granted fuller rights, and a Department of Cooperation and Cooperative Development has been founded, under whose benevolent surveillance the number of cooperatives in Saskatchewan has doubled...
...has now to gain what consolation it can from the fact that, while its center is routed, its east and west wings in Ontario and British Columbia have stood reasonably firm...
...That eventuality seems, in the light of this year's elections, more remote than ever...
...it has remained predominantly a western party, with relatively little success in the more populous and more industrialized eastern provinces of Quebec and Ontario, where the real political power in Canada remains (these two provinces alone elect 160 out of the 265 members in the House of Commons...
...Its important leaders—J...
...It has gained enough support (on an average one Canadian in eight votes C.C.F...
...But so far as actual state socialism is concerned the C.C.F...
...in August of the same year more than a hundred delegates from agrarian, labor, and socialist intellectual groups gathered in Calgary to _plan a movement aimed at the creation of what was rather vaguely called "a new social order...
...But farmer parties are rather like peasant armies...
...took over the followers of the old farmer and labor groups, and partly to the fact that it was the first Canadian party to advocate a planned attack on the depression...
...to form a vigorous third party in the federal House of Commons, where on occasions as many as 28 of its members have sat...
...The exception was in the field of insurance, where the Saskatchewan government set up its own service in a successful attempt to bring down by competition the high rates charged by the private companies for automobile insurance...
...Yet the high point in C.C.F...
...The most important ancestor of the C.C.F...
...The first item shows how the C.C.F's heaviest fire is still concentrated on the particular groups of capitalists who have been the traditional bugbears of North American farmers...
...But the C.C.F.'s successes have always fallen short of its goals, and at no time in its career has it gained a broad enough support to stand any real chance of becoming a dominant party in Canada...
...The later history of the C.C.F...
...The first C.C.F...
...today...
...It has lasted longer as a live and fighting body than any other Canadian left-wing party...
...Appropriate opportunities for private business and industry to make its contribution to the nation's wealth and to earn a fair rate of return...
...Ontario is a somewhat different matter...
...And it has ruled for fourteen years in the province of Saskatchewan as the only socialist government in North America...
...Yet, even though the C.C.F...
...election successes, which sent seven members to Ottawa in 1935 and eight in 1940, came in British Columbia and the prairie provinces...
...Encouragement of cooperative enterprise...
...What happened to the Progressive Party 30 years ago in the rural areas of Canada has happened to the C.C.F...
...It is true that the record on which the C.C.F...
...strongholds...
...approach...
...At present there seems no likelihood whatever of the C.C.F...
...S. Woods-worth, M. J. Coldwell, Stanley Knowles, T. C. Douglas—have been men of the prairies, and up to now it has belonged more to the radical traditions of western politics than to the more conservative political background of the east...
...As with the old agrarian radicals, anti-capitalist propaganda tended to concentrate on attacking the large corporations and particularly those controlled from abroad...
...among the prairie farmers, more strongly hit than any other group in Canada by the conditions of the Thirties, it came to be regarded as the nearest thing in Canada to the New-Dealing Democrats south of the border...
...have been necessarily limited by the nature of its election fortunes...
...This year even the moderate bridgehead created over the past quarter of a century is endangered by the Conservative landslide of the 1958 election, which has reduced the C.C.F...
...Federally it has never been able to exercise any functions other than those of an opposition—to criticize and to suggest—and these it has done reasonably well...
...So, by coincidence, the 25th anniversary of the C.C.F...
...The highest number of C.C.F...
...The practical limits of C.C.F...
...From the beginning these efforts at reconciliation resulted in a modification of the socialist content in the C.C.F...
...its radicals swung towards the left and began to seek links with the various small labor and socialist groups which began to appear, particularly in western Canada, during the years after World War 1. The first product of this alliance was the formation of the "Ginger Group" in the House of Commons, led by the Winnipeg socialist, J. S. Woodsworth, and dedicated to progressive criticism of government policies...
...representation in the House of Commons by two-thirds (from 25 to eight), has sent its most active leaders into at least temporary political retirement, and has practically eliminated it as a federal party in its former prairie strongholds of Manitoba and Saskatchewan...
...vote in Ontario was higher than the combined C.C.F...
...has this large and mostly unrepresented popular following in Ontario, its most active elements, as well as its greatest parliamentary representation, have always come from the prairies...
...Unemployment insurance, old age pensions, family allowances, a federally-aided hospitalization scheme—all these started as C.C.F...
...By enlisting the prairie farmers, it brought to the agrarian movement a definiteness and consistency of direction and an organizational efficiency which it had not known before...
...election successes in Ontario has been three, yet in 1957 the C.C.F...
...The other crown companies included a rural bus service, a telephone system, a fur marketing service, and a few small factories...
...government," it said, "will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full program of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the cooperative commonwealth...
...ANNIVERSARY in CRISIS by GEORGE WOODCOCK Anniversaries are not always happy occasions, and in July this year the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation of Canada, the most powerful socialist party north of the Rio Grande, will celebrate its 25th year of political campaigning in an atmosphere of unexpected defeat and anxious reassessment...
...Its program, which may well suggest the approach the C.C.F...
...has shown enough resilience in the past to suggest that it may very well survive this latest setback, and it is indeed the power of surviving as an active and politically influential minority without the encouragement of spectacular success that makes this party remarkable in a sub-continent where most socialist groups, however glittering their beginnings, so quickly dwindle from movements into sects...
...political fortunes came, not in the depression, but in the years at the end of the war when a wave of progressive feeling and of discontent with the old political parties swept over the Canadian west...
...This meeting took place in May, 1932...
...may well be something more than an arbitrary milepost in its history...
...the third expresses what has always seemed to me the most positive element in the C.C.F...
...demands which were first pushed aside as impractical by the Liberals and then adopted at appropriate moments...
...socialism were shown clearly in the National C.C.F...
...in 1945 the general election produced the highest C.C.F...
...Its farmers have never supported the C.C.F...
...The achievements of the C.C.F...
...At this convention a constitution was adopted, based largely on the constituency organization of the British Labor Party, with provision for the affiliation of trades union branches, and a Manifesto was drawn up in which the radical aims of the C.C.F...
...It has kept control in Saskatchewan, but has won no other province...
...unless well-led, they disperse for the harvest, and when the Liberals, under Mackenzie King, adroitly accepted many of the agrarian demands, the Progressive Party quickly disintegrated...
...has marked time so far as political success is concerned...
...would adopt if it ever came to power federally, has been progressive and reformist rather than radical...
...Its moderate members followed the example of Crerar and gravitated towards liberalism...
...Its leader, T. A. Crerar, was lured away by King and became a Liberal cabinet minister, and in the later elections of the 1920's the Progressive Party rapidly lost ground and ceased to exist as a distinct movement...
...No C.C.F...
...Some of its parliamentary spokesmen, like Coldwell and Knowles, have made themselves respected as constructive critics, while, like earlier Canadian third parties, the C.C.F...
...can be seen largely in terms of its double ancestry and of its constant efforts to combine and reconcile the interests of farmers and other small business men on the one hand and those of the radical sections of the working-class movement on the other...
...Much stress has been placed on such humanitarian needs as better social assistance, penal reform, and the introduction of Canada's first general hospitalization scheme...
...has been something much broader and more comprehensive in its appeal than a mere socialist party...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
