We're Going to Run This City

Stefan Epp-Koop

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780887554735
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Stefan Epp-Koop's "We're Going to Run This City: Winnipeg's Political Left After the General Strike" explores the dynamic political movement that came out of the largest labour protest in Canadian history and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Few have studied the political Left at the municipal level—even though it is at this grassroots level that many people participate in political activity.Winnipeg was a deeply divided city. On one side, the conservative political descendants of the General Strike's Citizen's Committee of 1000 advocated for minimal government and low taxes. On the other side were the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Canada, two parties rooted in the city's working class, though often in conflict with each other. The political strength of the Left would ebb and flow throughout the 1920s and 1930s but peaked in the mid-1930s when the ILP's John Queen became mayor and the two parties on the Left combined to hold a majority of council seats. Astonishingly, Winnipeg was governed by a mayor who had served jail time for his role in the General Strike.

CHAPTER 1

THE SECOND ROUND

Less than five months after the General Strike came to an end, the city was once again embroiled in class conflict, although this time the fight was to be waged at the ballot box instead of the picket line. This was not the first time that labour candidates were running for office. However, between 1874 and 1914 only three of 515 elected aldermen could be considered to be labour representatives and there was not a history of running a labour candidate in mayoral elections.1 In the early twentieth century, labour parties regularly ran unsuccessful municipal election campaigns, constrained by disinterest amongst workers and restrictive voting rules that prevented many Winnipeg workers from voting.2 It was not until the election of Dick Rigg in 1913, under the banner of the Labour Representation Committee, a combined effort of the Social Democratic Party and labourites, that labour would have a regular presence on city council.3 While this number would grow during the First World War, with the election of future leaders such as John Queen (1882–1946) and A.A. Heaps (1885–1954), labour still remained in the minority at city hall.

This would be the first of many elections that would be fought along the lines that had been defined in the General Strike: Citizens and labour. In an election described as “one of the most fiercely contested municipal elections in the history of twentieth century Canada,”4 a newly empowered working class would nearly upset the balance of power in the city through the ballot box. Labour saw the importance of this election, as government had played an important role in defeating the General Strike of that summer. A letter to the editor in the Western Labour News by P. Callaghan pointed to the importance of electoral victory: “Wake up Mr. Worker! You put the present government in. You are to blame. Are you going to repeat your blunder, or have you learned your lesson through the strike?”5 The strike had drawn attention to the key role that municipal and other levels of government could play in supporting, or damaging, the goals of labour.

Early in his campaign, labour’s mayoralty candidate S.J. Farmer (1878–1951) acknowledged what everyone already knew. “This civic election,” he declared at a large campaign gathering, “is the second round of the strike which took place last May and June.”6 Furthermore, he declared on a different occasion, “the strike taught labor the necessity of representation on the city council. We will set a beacon on fire in Winnipeg that will be seen by all workers in Canada.”7 This effort drew the unprecedented unity of several labour parties, the Dominion Labour Party, Social Democratic Party, and the Ex-Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Labour Party, which all joined forces in a single campaign.

For labour candidates, the November 1919 election was a chance to right some of the losses from the Strike and to improve the living standards of Winnipeg’s working class. Labour candidates trumpeted tax relief for any property valued at less than $3,000, a measure which would have lifted much of the working class off the municipal tax rolls and shifted the tax burden on to larger home owners. They also sought to re-hire 200 civic employees who had been fired for their role in the summer’s Strike and called for the ability of civic employees to participate in outside unions. Additionally, Farmer called for municipal trading (such as milk distribution), a municipal house-building scheme, and the elimination of tax exemptions for the city’s railways. But beyond the immediate issues at hand, labour candidates often spoke of an end to a broad system of bondage and discrimination in which property was held superior to human well-being. Farmer declared that the real issue of the campaign was “whether the people of Winnipeg are content to be dominated by an old system which keeps them in slavery and maintains itself by fraud, or whether they will turn to progressive people in the community and march onward with truth.”8

S.J. Farmer had not actually been labour’s first candidate for mayor. William Ivens, the leader of the Labour Church and a long-time labour advocate, was the first choice of the voting delegates, winning by a narrow margin of 222 to 206. Ivens, who was on a speaking tour of Ontario at the time, refused the nomination and threw his support behind Farmer, telegraphing back to the convention gathered in Winnipeg, “Thank you for the vote of confidence. It was a complete surprise. Cannot possibly accept the nomination.”9 Farmer, who had narrowly lost the first ballot, was selected as labour’s mayoral candidate for 1919 in his place. Interestingly, neither Farmer nor Ivens were labourers themselves, although both had long histories of involvement in local labour politics.

Farmer would be joined by a diverse group of labour candidates. The Manitoba Free Press, which was vocally anti-labour throughout the campaign, dismissed the slate as an “oil-and-water mixture of Socialists with Single Taxers,” an alliance they claimed “could not last when confronted with the practicalities of administration.”10 Many of these candidates had had a role in the General Strike as leaders and grassroots strikers. Some, like incumbent alderman John Queen, already had experience in politics while others were political neophytes. Several of these candidates, such as Queen, Thomas Flye, and John Blumberg, would spend decades involved in municipal politics, providing a link between the earliest post-Strike campaign and the eventual victory of labour in municipal politics sixteen years later.

Labour would be opposed by the Citizens’ League, comprised of fifty-six leading business and professional men.11 The Citizens referred to the Strike even more regularly than to labour, frequently reminding Manitoba Free Press readers in full-page ads of the indignities of life during the General Strike. “Citizens of Winnipeg,” one advertisement read, “should not forget the days when they were told that the strike committee permitted them to secure bread and milk. When the peril was facing them, the citizens united to combat it and they defeated it...Let us drive this menace from our midst.” Another ad portrayed a volunteer firefighter looking hopelessly at a burning building with thirty pounds of pressure clearly indicated on his ineffective fire hose. “Is Thirty Pound Citizenship Good Enough for Winnipeg?” asked the caption, a reference to reduced water pressure during the strike.12

The Citizens declared that this was a critical moment in Winnipeg’s history. The Manitoba Free Press, which sided quite publicly with the Citizens, wrote in an editorial that the election was of “vital importance to the future welfare of this city.” More was at stake than a year of control of city council. The Free Press suggested that “a vote for the radical candidate tomorrow will be a vote in favour of an eventual radical-socialist autocracy,”13 employing a tactic used during the General Strike of dismissing labour as radical, wild, and Soviet. One of the Citizens’ many prominent full-page newspaper ads went further to describe Winnipeg under labour control as a “Would-Be Soviet.”14 The future of British-style democracy was at stake, with the results of the election to be felt “all over Canada, indeed all over the Anglo-Saxon world.” In defending his mayoralty, Mayor Charles Gray declared “there is only one issue [in this campaign], whether the city is to be administered by the British traditions of law and order and equity, or by one class who are fanatics.”15 If labour candidates were to win, it was argued, not only would British traditions be in danger, but Winnipeg, as the seed of this dissent, would be an embarrassment around the world.

Consequently, according to the Citizens, Winnipeggers had a choice to make: constitutional rule or rule by radical labour. The Manitoba Free Press declared that “a vote cast for any of the radical-labor candidates...is a vote in favour of substituting eventual class domination for public control of the public property and services.”16 Frequently, both the media and the Citizens used the One Big Union as a bogeyman figure. The OBU, they claimed, controlled the labour candidates and, if elected, would control the city as well. Why would Winnipeggers, they asked, hand over control of their city to a class of radical outsiders, suggesting, for example, that OBU control would effectively mean that the city could not control its own police force or workers. The result, warned the Free Press, was “threatened or actual lawlessness, starvation, and deprivation of the public services.”17

Finally, in a theme that would be repeated in Winnipeg for decades, Citizen supporters declared that labour candidates were dangerous for the economy, could not be trusted with money, and would scare investors away from the city. Aldermanic candidate Frank Davidson suggested, “you could not sell a bond of the city if these ultra-radicals were in control, nor would the banks retain their confidence in civic integrity for a moment.”18 Labour’s promise to eliminate taxes on homes valued at less than $3,000 was seized upon by Citizens as not only financially irresponsible but as class warfare. Such an action, they declared, would have ominous consequences for the middle class and businesses that would have to make up for the lost revenue.

As election day neared, tensions were running so high that police recruited forty special police constables to keep order. Despite the concerns, election day passed peacefully and order, as the Citizens saw it, was maintained, albeit with a smaller margin than they likely hoped. Charles Gray, the mayor that led Winnipeg through the General Strike, won 56 percent of the vote over S.J. Farmer. The aldermanic results point to the divided nature of the city. Labour candidates won three of the seven seats up for grabs in the election and won 58 percent of the vote in the three northern wards. Yet the four southern wards were won convincingly by Citizen candidates, with 70 percent of the votes in those ridings. It would not be long before these results pushed city council to change the election boundaries, reshaping the city’s political geography and curtailing labour’s chance for political success.

The conflicts that divided Winnipeg in the summer of 1919 were alive and well not only that fall but for the coming decades. The terminology used to refer to the different sides was borrowed from the Strike. “Citizens” represented the pro-business interests of Winnipeg’s elites.19 Many of the leaders from the 1919 Strike Committee and Citizen’s Committee of One Thousand would play defining roles in municipal politics. And many of the issues would remain the same, as pro-labour and pro-business representatives put forward radically different conceptions of the city. General R.Y. Patterson, a prominent local Conservative, proclaimed in a campaign speech that Winnipeg was a battleground in the fight between established institutions and socialists.20 These divisions would continue to polarize the city throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Municipal politics was about more than sidewalks and sewers. Key foundational understandings of the role of the city, the nature of public institutions, and even the existence of the capitalist system were all fodder for debate during local campaigns or city council meetings. Municipal politics became a venue for intense ideological debate, a place to talk about grand social visions, not just day-to-day issues. Yet it was that too. A place where grand rhetoric or revolutionary bravado ran into the very real concerns of constituents, where there was still a city to be run.

Three main political bodies would define municipal politics in Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. On the political right were the Citizens, which existed not as a party per se, but as an alliance of Liberals and Conservatives intent on preserving the status quo: low taxes and minimal civil services. On the political left, the largest party was the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The Communist Party of Canada (CPC) also developed a strong following in the city, primarily in the North End. It is these two parties that this book will focus on, but it is also important to understand the political philosophy of their primary opponents, the Citizens.21

The Citizens

The political descendants of the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand, the organization formed by the local business community to fight the General Strike, took on various names during the following decades. Whether known as the Citizens’ League...