From Woodsworth to Layton

If NDP organizers want a primer to hand out to all first-time convention delegates about how to make sense of the sometimes unintelligible undercurrents at work in the policy-rich but fractious world of the New Democratic Party of Canada, they could do worse than order up a few boxes of Lynn Gidluck’s Visionaries, Crusaders and Firebrands: The Idealistic Canadians Who Built the NDP. Non-NDP readers would learn a lot as well. For example, it will surprise many to learn about the role of that political party (or more precisely its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) in the creation of the Bank of Canada and the country’s current banking regulatory environment, which many would argue helped save Canada from the worst impacts of the 2008 market meltdown. This and many other threads of the political and policy fabric of Canada can be traced to the early activists and their successors profiled in this book.

Gidluck writes in an interesting and approachable fashion, capturing the drama of the earliest days of the formation of the CCF. The constant tensions among the interests and aspirations of rural Canadian farm organizations, various socialist groups, academics, social gospel adherents and representatives of different parts of the organized labour movement were real, understandable and almost impossible to reconcile. Overlay those tensions with regional differences and the head-to-head battle between the “movement idealists” and the “electoral pragmatists” and you have a book full of intrigue, plot twists, antagonists and protagonists, heroes and villains, builders and turncoats. It makes for stimulating reading.

Gidluck begins her story in the early 1900s, sitting among the congregation of Grace Church in Winnipeg, listening to Methodist minister J.S. Woodsworth expound his Fabian-based fundamental belief that we all need to work together to create a better society for everyone. He sermonized:

Woodsworth went on to lead the Methodist Church’s All Peoples Mission focused on social justice advocacy and social work in the community. He took up membership in the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Congress and then got involved in political activity supporting the Social Democratic Party in the provincial elections. Gidluck documents that “between 1907 and 1913 he averaged about a hundred speeches a year in communities across the country and even into the U.S. During this time he implemented one of his most influential achievements—the Peoples’ Forum, which brought people together to discuss social problems and build community.” In 1913 he began work with the Canadian Welfare League to promote the need for minimum wage laws and other social justice reforms, including the need for government support for social research. In 1916, the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta created the Bureau of Social Research. (This is striking to read at a time when we are currently watching the diminishing of social research institutions such as Statistics Canada and the National Council of Welfare.)

To the west in Calgary, William Irvine, a student of Woodsworth’s and another Methodist minister, progressed from the preaching to the doing of community work. He helped organize a farmers’ buying and marketing co-op, sparking opposition from local merchants. Irvine followed in his mentor’s footsteps and established a Peoples’ Forum, which met every Sunday in a Calgary theatre to discuss political and social issues.

During the first decade of the century (1900–10), the Western Canadian farmer movement was organizing itself in response to the Laurier government’s failure to introduce promised tariff reductions. “They set up the Manitoba Grain Growers’ Association … the Saskatchewan Grain Growers’ Association … the United Farmers of Alberta … The Grain Growers’ Grain Company, by 1910, had more than nine thousand farmers marketing their grain through it. This struggle to maximize the farmers’ returns continued into the 1920s with the establishment of the prairie wheat pools.” (More resonances will occur to the reader as we are currently watching the mandatory versus voluntary wheat board debate taking centre stage once again.)

Starting in the late 1910s and into the early ’20s, a number of farm organizations, including those in Ontario, began to turn their efforts to supporting or organizing political parties that could win seats and take farming issues into the land’s legislatures and the national parliament.

This time period also saw the growth of organized labour. The post–World War One depression was a fertile time for union organizing. A hallmark of this era was the 1919 Winnipeg general strike. Right at the heart of the community organizing was Woodsworth, leading the demands to the federal government for a zero unemployment rate, equal pay for equal work irrespective of sex or nationality, programs to increase agriculture, to provide work or assistance for soldiers, to supply health care and education to all Canadians, to ensure women’s rights and build social insurance programs for accidents, old age, illness and unemployment. (A final reverberation with the present: today we are seeing federal government policy initiatives to lower wages for temporary foreign workers, cut veterans’ disability supports, and reduce old age security and employment insurance. It would appear, as the saying goes, that everything old is new again.)

Gidluck takes us through the years of organizing to bring various elements of the progressive left together at provincial and national levels. Names such as Grace and Angus MacInnis, George Williams, Frank Scott, Eugene Forsey, Agnes Macphail, David Lewis, M.J. Coldwell, Louise Lucas and many others appear, moving in and out of collaborative efforts as they worked to improve the political fortunes of reformers. The entire first half of this 248-page book is dedicated to the years leading up to the 1932 Calgary planning conference to establish a new party and the 1933 founding convention of the CCF held in Regina. Gidluck concentrates her writing on the stories of the individuals involved in the forming of the party over the first few decades of the 20th century. Despite this effort to focus on the people and personalities, I found that with the exception of Woodsworth and a couple of others, these key figures—who drove the founding of a movement and a political party that was to have a profound effect on the culture of our country and the lives of all of us—remained flat individuals without character or passion on the pages of Gidluck’s writing. I wanted to know more about them and get a better sense of not just what they did but what drove them to give so much of themselves in pursuit of a better life for all.

The story is more about the ins and outs of the process of founding the new party and writing the foundational Regina Manifesto than about the “visionaries, crusaders and firebrands” of the book’s title. Despite this mild critique, the book is full of interesting facts and insights into the birth of what has become a mainstay institution in the political life of our country.

The second half of Gidluck’s writing takes us through the years of Tommy Douglas, Coldwell again, Knowles, Lewis; the rebranding of the party in 1961 with the establishment of the New Democratic Party; the leadership of David Lewis, Ed Broadbent, Audrey McLaughlin, Alexa McDonough and the late Jack Layton. The book ends in 2011 with Jack’s untimely death and a brief look at the candidates who threw their hats into the ring, to pick up the reins of leadership at a time that can only be described as the highest and the lowest for the federal NDP.

I read this book following the March 2012 leadership convention with the hindsight of not only knowing that Thomas Mulcair was ultimately the victor but also having listened to the discussion of themes emerging from the leadership alternatives. Interestingly, many of them echoed the themes that weave in and out of Gidluck’s historical review.

From the earliest days and throughout the party’s history, the push and pull of the “movement” advocates versus the “electoral party” advocates has shaped today’s party. From the intrigue that surrounded the insertion of the final sentence of the original Regina Manifesto, which committed the CCF to bringing an end to capitalism, to the rise and fall of efforts such as the Waffle, the Left Caucus, the Campaign for an Activist Party and the 2001 New Politics Initiative, there are recurring examples of the creative tension that many in the party describe as the kind of democratic debate that keeps the party healthy.

At the founding convention of the CCF, Agnes Macphail would pronounce “that she had no desire for the CCF to hold the balance of power. The job of prodding and driving other parties was too difficult.” She declared: “What I want to see is a Co-operative Commonwealth government in power!” Every federal NDP leader has spoken to this recurring debate in the party—from Tommy Douglas, who in 1983 said, “the growth and development of the New Democratic Party must never allow us to forget our roots. Don’t sacrifice conviction for success. Don’t ever give up quality for quantity,” to Jack Layton in 2008, who said, “there are people who think that if you win seats, you must’ve done something wrong. You must have betrayed some principle … Well I’m not that kind of leader … The complaint about us focusing on winning seats, I thought that was the purpose.” The very psyche of the party has been formed by the tension between these polarities, to the benefit, I would argue, of the party and the country. By simultaneously forging and popularizing new directions, fighting for and protecting basic values, working in partnership with community movements and making real gains in public policy inside legislatures and Parliament, the party remains a vital contributor to the Canadian political scene.

Another recurring theme that was expressed again in this year’s leadership campaign is the question of strategic voting and strategic cross-party cooperation. There were some who expressed horror at Nathan Cullen’s proposal to explore this idea of cooperation between centre and left-of- centre party candidates, to ensure the defeat of the current government. Those expressions of outrage could have been lifted from the pages of history. The 1935 federal election saw the CCF receive more than twice the electoral votes of the Social Credit but wind up with only half as many seats. Discussion of the need for unity between the two protest parties began to swirl. Examples of local cooperation, in fact, ensured some of the CCF wins. As Gidluck writes:

In an interesting turn of events, three years later, Williams would find himself following the same strategy.

The relationship between the party and the people of Quebec also plays a prominent role throughout the CCF/NDP history. The historic breakthrough in Quebec under Layton’s leadership and the pragmatic choice of Mulcair, aiming to consolidate that breakthrough, also has its roots in the early days of the CCF. The new party, founded in 1935, was rejected by most of Quebec and that has largely been the case up to the last election. After the signing of the Regina Manifesto, the archbishop of Montreal condemned the CCF for its socialist ideology and the party was held at a distance by French-speaking Quebecers. Over the years, as the party grappled with issues such as its opposition to free trade (an issue largely favoured in Quebec) or the repatriation of the Constitution and various constitutional accords, navigating the “Quebec and the Rest of Canada” waters has been a top-of-mind challenge for the NDP. Whether the party can remain a player in Quebec will be the legacy of the new NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, and his caucus.

Lynne Gidluck makes a valuable contribution to the chronicling of Canadian political history. She reminds us that while political parties are institutions, they are in fact made up of people. In the case of the visionaries, crusaders and firebrands she writes about, they are people with strongly held dreams, hopes, aspirations and commitment to improve the lives of others.