The report, which contained five hundred pages of recommendations alone, was then the most important and exhaustive study of economic and social problems ever made by an official body in Canada. Its chief recommendation, which called for a federal trade and industry commission with wide powers of law enforcement, heralded the growing involvement of government in private business.
Other recommendations included a tightening and tough enforcement of the Combines Investigation Act, the regulation of industrial monopolies, the prohibition of unfair business practices, and more protection for investors and consumers. The report represented a victory for the Retail Merchants Association, which had enlisted Stevens in its fight with the big merchandisers and now saw its long struggle for retail price maintenance and the banning of loss-leader selling reflected in the commission’s recommendations.
The government quickly established a three-man commission to oversee enforcement of the Combines Investigation Act and to prevent cut-throat competition among retailers. Within two years, Ontario, the most heavily industrialized province, accepted the principle, at least, of a minimum wage for men – only a tiny step forward, since the practice wasn’t effected until 1963. The recommendations of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads were accepted piecemeal or sometimes not at all. But its lasting effect has been incalculable. It helped convince ordinary Canadians that business enterprise could never again be entirely unfettered and that the state had not only a role but also a duty in regulation of the marketplace. That, too, was a form of revolution, as influential in its own way as the one advocated by the radical Left. The irony is that it was initiated by the one party to whom state control of any kind was anathema.
It was also Harry Stevens’s monument. When his successor in the Department of Trade and Commerce, R.B. Hanson, tabled the report in the House, it was Stevens, only a private member, and not W.W. Kennedy, the commission chairman, who leaped to his feet to move its adoption, another breach of the unwritten rules quite in keeping with Stevens’s style. By this time, the Stevens-for-Party-Leader campaign was beginning to be overshadowed by the Stevens-for-Leader-of-a-New-Party campaign. Stevens, the closest thing to a knight in shining armour that the Conservative party could muster, was about to tilt his lance at the Prime Minister himself.
3
The tin canners
The purblindness of Andy McNaughton and R.B. Bennett on the matter of the unemployment relief camps passes all comprehension. Throughout that winter, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they had continued to insist that all was well and that the camps were fulfilling their promise.
Duff Pattullo, British Columbia’s premier, and Gerald McGeer, Vancouver’s ebullient new mayor, deluged Ottawa with lengthy telegrams and letters that became increasingly peevish – as, indeed, were the replies from the ailing, reclusive prime minister and his deputy, Sir George Perley. Over and over again, Pattuito and McGeer urged a full-scale investigation of the camps plus a federal program of public works to give real jobs to the camp workers. Over and over again, Bennett and his deputy continued to insist that there was nothing wrong and that the Premier himself should visit the camps to “reassure” a public that was clearly on the side of the workers.
With seven hundred former camp workers congregated in Vancouver, British Columbia was demanding help from Ottawa. But Bennett insisted that it was the province’s responsibility under the constitution to maintain law and order. McNaughton’s solution was simple – and also simple-minded. Jail them all as vagrants, he urged.
By March, after three months of resisting the appeals of the province, the city, prominent citizens, and various organizations, Bennett realized he could no longer ignore their demands for a commission of inquiry. But again he dawdled and, typically, blamed someone else. On March 6 he wrote a testy letter to his Minister of National Defence, Grote Stirling, charging “a complete failure on the part of the Department to properly discharge its duties” regarding the relief camps. He wanted an immediate report, he said, because it was now clear that a royal commission or a parliamentary committee would be needed to reassure the public about the camps. The following day the Prime Minister suffered his heart seizure. Incredibly, a month elapsed before a commission went to work, and by then the relief camp workers, organized by the Communist party, were on the move.
On March 9, sixty delegates from the various camps in British Columbia and Alberta met secretly in an old store in Kamloops to plan a massive walk-out the following month. Most were members of the communist-controlled Relief Camp Workers’ Union. The parent body, the Workers’ Unity League, which had organized the two-day meeting, sent only one representative, its district organizer, Arthur Herbert Evans, but he was the one who counted. Although he kept quietly in the background, he was the guiding force behind the conference and the events that followed.
Evans is one of the great figures thrown up by the Depression – a dedicated communist, a brilliant organizer and stump speaker, “persistent and forceful,” in the words of a royal commission that heard his testimony later that year in Regina. But it also described him as “suspicious and intolerant of anyone who does not agree with him” and “reckless and indifferent as to the truth of his utterances.”
Ron Liversedge, the chief chronicler of the events that followed, knew Evans well. He was so dedicated to communism, Liversedge recalled, “that he was like the absent-minded professor. Nothing outside the working class struggle held any interest for him. [He] had experienced police clubs and prison, and to him it was just a nuisance, in that it took him away from his work.”
Evans was long and lean – his nickname was Slim – with red-brown hair parted soberly in the middle. His strongest feature was a square, pugnacious jaw. He habitually wore overalls and his face, in his photographs at least, was dominated by a scowl: his eyes burn out of the newspaper cuts as if to challenge the viewer.
He might have been created by Steinbeck or Dos Passos, for he was a member of that vanished breed, the itinerant labour organizer. In 1935, at the age of forty-two, he had a long history of left-wing radicalism behind him. He had known and worked with some of the mythic figures of the radical Left – men like Big Bill Haywood and Joe Hill. He walked with a limp sustained when two machine-gun bullets struck his leg during the bloody miners’ strike in Ludlow, Colorado – the same one that brought Mackenzie King into the embrace of the Rockefeller family.
Evans’s father was an English house-painter, his mother an Irish housemaid; both had been enticed to Toronto, where Evans was born, during the pre-war immigration boom. Young Arthur quit school at thirteen and eventually became a union carpenter. Five years in the United States, working on and off for the Industrial Workers of the World – the doomed “Wobblies” – moulded and shaped his radicalism. In 1912 he was jailed for his part in a free-speech demonstration on a Kansas City street corner, a role that involved nothing more than reading the Declaration of Independence. When he returned to Canada, he became an organizer for another lost cause, the One Big Union, which lost its battle with the United Mine Workers of America. He was a rebel through and through, within the union movement as well as outside it. Blacklisted for a year by the UMWA, he returned to that fold as a business agent for the Drumheller local, only to find himself in trouble with the international headquarters in the United States for calling a strike. When the Americans refused to issue strike pay, Evans supported the strikers’ families by using funds that were supposed to go to the international. The parent union brought suit against him for “conversion” of funds, and, in 1924, Evans was sentenced to three years in the Prince Albert penitentiary.
It was this sentence that enabled his opponents, from the Prime Minister down, to label Evans as a thief and an embezzler. These were unfair epithets. Evans had long since rejected the opportunity for an easy life in favour of the Cause. Theft for his own purposes was not in his character. He was, in fact, so popular and the sentence was considered so unfair that eighty-seven hundr
ed miners signed a petition successfully demanding his release. Nine months after entering prison he was out again.
Having joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1926, Evans became district organizer for British Columbia of the National Unemployed Workers’ Association, whose hunger marches and demonstrations were a feature of the Depression years on the West Coast. He shortly moved to the same post with the parent body, the Workers’ Unity League, and also helped to organize the breakaway Mine Workers’ Union of Canada in Princeton, B.C. He played a prominent part in the strike that followed – a strike so bitter that Princeton businessmen organized a branch of the Ku Klux Klan to burn a fiery cross of warning to the strikers on a nearby hillside. Evans was arrested under Section 98 of the Criminal Code. In September 1933, he was sentenced to a year in prison and held without bail pending his appeal, which he lost on March 4, 1934. In a vicious ruling, the B.C. appeal court refused to subtract the extra time from his original sentence. Evans, with time off for good behaviour, was released on December 4, 1934, having spent sixteen months behind bars.
While Evans was in jail, his home in Vancouver was seized in a mortgage foreclosure and his family forced onto relief. That in no way dampened his revolutionary ardour. When he was released, he plunged back into organizing. Now three months later, he was in Kamloops, quietly planning tactics for the Relief Camp Workers’ Union.
Evans outlined his plans. The union would call a walk-out for April 4, three days after payday so the men would have a little money in their pockets. It was not technically a strike. The workers would simply leave camp and go straight to Vancouver. That would require considerable organization. Food would have to be squirreled away. Clothing must be repaired or replaced. Exit routes and transportation would have to be planned and billets provided in Vancouver – in churches, ethnic halls, and union headquarters. And recalcitrants – or at least some of them – would have to be dragooned into joining the walk-out.
The meeting made its objectives clear. Briefly, the men wanted “work and wages” – Pattullo’s election slogan – fifty cents an hour for unskilled labour, union rates for the rest. They demanded a thirty-hour week, better first-aid equipment in the camps, the end of blacklisting and military control, democratically elected camp committees, the federal franchise, non-contributory unemployment insurance, and the repeal of Section 98 and the vagrancy laws. In the turbulent months that followed, these demands were heard again and again.
There was as yet no hint of any tribunal to look into the camps. McNaughton was still toying with the idea of camps of discipline, and even went so far as to ask whether a Doukhobor detention camp might be available. The General was so far removed from reality that he thought public opinion might be favourable to these draconian measures if the situation worsened. In fact, the public was solidly behind the camp workers, as were Vancouver’s two afternoon papers. Had the leaders been placed in isolation behind barbed wire without benefit of a trial, a most unholy row would have ensued.
Duff Pattullo was frustrated to the point of fury. For almost four months he had been vainly warning Ottawa that the men would riot if their needs were not met. Pattullo was, of course, a lifelong Liberal nagging a Tory government, but he was more than that – a disciple of Roosevelt attempting to give his province what came to be called a “little New Deal.” One of the several populist leaders who emerged during the Depression, he believed that “no person in British Columbia should be allowed to want for food, clothing and shelter through inability to obtain employment.”
Pattullo was an Ontario Grit turned B.C. booster by way of the northern frontier. In his youth he had been an editor of the Galt Reformer. He had gone to the Yukon in 1898 during the gold rush as part of a government delegation. He stayed on as gold commissioner and then moved to British Columbia, where he served as mayor of Prince Rupert before entering provincial politics. At sixty-two he was big and beefy, with pink jowls, blue eyes, and silver hair. The frontier had given him a boldness, even a recklessness, that the voters of British Columbia found refreshing after the caution of the Tolmie regime. “Work and wages” had touched a chord, and that was what he was now demanding from Ottawa.
“I have tried in all my correspondence to use temperate language,” he told Sir George Perley, the acting prime minister, on March 25, “but the situation is getting so serious that I must convey to you in the strongest possible terms that some form of permanent solution must be found.…” To Pattullo, the government’s failure to come to grips with the situation was “incomprehensible.” If there was a riot and bloodshed, he said two days later, Ottawa would be to blame.
McNaughton was unmoved. Why was he being so stubborn? For it was the General who was calling the shots. Not only was he drafting Perley’s responses but he had also persuaded Bennett the previous year, against the Prime Minister’s political instincts, to keep the camps going. Now even General Ernest Ashton, the District Officer Commanding in British Columbia, having reported that a general walk-out was planned for April 4, went so far as to say that he, personally, would not object to a public inquiry. But McNaughton continued to insist that nothing of the sort was necessary, that nothing was wrong, and that the men would be happy and contented if it were not for a handful of professional agitators.
In this attitude, McNaughton was a product of his class and of his time. For most of the Depression, politicians, businessmen, army leaders, and police had tried to pretend that “agitators” (the RCMP word) were at the root of the nation’s troubles. Get rid of them, Commissioner MacBrien had said, and the problem will go away. Jail them as vagrants, McNaughton had advised, or put them in cells behind barbed wire; that was how the army handled malcontents. But Bennett had jailed the Communist leadership without noticeable effect. At that very moment, Tim Buck, newly released from Kingston, was on his way to address a mass meeting of the unemployed in Vancouver.
McNaughton was acting like a typical Colonel Blimp, and that was odd because in the Great War he had been anything but Blimpish. His meteoric rise was due to his flexible mind, his imagination, his eagerness to test new ideas that the Blimps in the British army had rejected. His unorthodox approach to gunnery had helped win the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
But now, at forty-eight, the shaggy general seemed incapable of seeing past his nose. Why? The simplest answer is probably closest to the truth. The relief camps were his baby. He had planned them, organized them, and, as at Vimy, basked in the warm enthusiasm they had originally inspired. He could not allow them to fail. Failure, after all, was not an admired word in the military lexicon.
Having risen to the peak of his profession, the General was not used to having his plans or his orders questioned. He had been a good soldier but was, as future events would demonstrate, a poor politician. On March 28, just one day after the last stonewalling letter had gone off to Pattullo, the Cabinet did a sudden about-face, caved in to British Columbia’s demands, and at last ordered a royal commission of investigation into the relief camps.
The commission, headed by a retired provincial Supreme Court justice, W.A. MacDonald, was seen as little more than a last-ditch attempt to defuse a dangerous situation. Ernest “Smoky” Cumber, secretary of the Relief Camp Workers’ Union, who appeared before the commission on April 4, categorized it as “only a stop-gap.” Its terms of reference were narrow; it was empowered only to investigate conditions in the camps based on individual complaints. It had no power to deal with the union’s demands.
By the time the commission held its first hearing, the walk-out that it was supposed to prevent had begun. Very little had been left to chance by the organizers. To keep the men from being apprehended before they could stage the walk-out, work crews were organized to cut telephone lines and fell trees across key roads. Others smuggled tents from the camp stores, dragged them into the bush, and cut them up to make knapsacks. Some piled logs and ties near the rail lines, ready to stop freights so that the waiting men could climb aboard.
Some walked, so
me hitchhiked, some rode the boxcars, some even arrived in Vancouver by water. James “Red” Walsh, who had chaired the organization meeting in Kamloops the month before, trudged and thumbed his way from camp to camp, inspiring the men to follow him. By the time he reached Princeton, hundreds were tramping along behind him, four abreast, military style. Walsh set up pickets around the taverns and brothels to keep his followers in check and arranged for food for 450 men until the first freight train arrived.
Similar scenes were enacted across the province as the union leaders routed out their members. At Half Moon Bay on April 3, the men walked out a day early in order to board the only boat for Vancouver. So did the group at Squamish – sixty strong – who were warned that the police were ready to pounce. Sixty-four men from a camp near Nelson weren’t so fortunate. They were hauled off a westbound freight, charged with trespassing, and thrown into jail, to become the last contingent to reach Vancouver.
By mid-April, a human torrent was pouring into Vancouver, crowding the trains so thickly that, in the words of Robert “Doc” Savage, who brought a contingent from Spence’s Bridge, “the freight was like a hill with ants on it – you couldn’t have stuck another man on it.”
Arthur Evans met each group as it arrived. He and the other leaders of the walk-out faced a superhuman task: they had fifteen hundred men on their hands, all broke, all requiring food and shelter. They had to maintain morale, prevent violence, and weld a ragged mob into a disciplined force capable of undertaking a series of carefully planned demonstrations.
What followed was a miracle of organization. It was also a wrenching example of the waste of human talent during the Depression years. A group of young men with minimal education was about to demonstrate a capacity for the kind of leadership and organizational ability that any industrial corporation – not to mention army or government – would prize. To have kept that many young, restless, hungry, and embittered men in a seaport one week without untoward incident would have been remarkable. To have kept them under strict discipline for the best part of two months and then to have moved this miniature army all the way to Regina was a feat that passes comprehension. Yet it was done without violence or bloodshed and with only one minor clash until the government moved in and, with unbelievable ineptness, precipitated a historic riot.
The Great Depression Page 34
