The Impossibilists: A brief profile of the Socialist Party of Canada by Peter E. Newell In memory of Geoff Verco (1925 – 2006), a friend for 66 years ii By the same author Fighting the Revolution: Makho-Durruti-Zapata (London, England, 1972) Zapata of Mexico (Sanday, Scotland, 1979) (reprinted: Montreal, Canada, 1997) (reprinted: London, England, 2005) Stamps of Alderney (Chippenham, England, 1982) (reprinted and enlarged: Brighton, England, 1988) Photographs supplied by the late George Jenkins, Karla Rab Ellenbogen, Steve Shannon, Steve Szalai, John Ames, Adam Buick, the author and the Cumberland Museum on Vancouver Island. Front cover designed by the author. Peter E Newell left school at 17 years of age without any qualifications. He has been a draughtsman, a postman, a trade union journalist and official, a sewage worker and a local government officer. He has been a member of an appropriate trade union since 1944, and is a member of the retired members’ section of UNISON. He retired from Colchester Borough Council in 1995. He spent some time Mexico, in 1979, and his Zapata of Mexico has been published in Scotland, Canada and England. i “…the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class – in our case, therefore, the proletariat – is not ripe for its self-liberation, so long will it, in its majority, recognise the existing order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing. But in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation, in the same measure it constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists. Universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state; but that is enough. On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling- point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand. ii …The society which organises production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong – into the museum of antiquities, next the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” Frederick Engels (The Origin of the Family) Imagine Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope some day you’ll join us And the world will be as one John Lennon (1971) iii “The Socialist Party of Canada was small and carefully organized. Its members were well-informed and often had been required to pass an examination in Marxist doctrine before admission. They accepted the strictures of the executive upon the necessity of discipline and unity and education, fundamentals of a revolutionary movement, and often paid the price for doctrinal purity by forfeiting popular support. Organized by means of constant correspondence with headquarters in Vancouver, the few thousand party members studied the writings of Marx and Engels and Liebknecht and Kautsky, and a dozen others in weekly educational meetings of their locals in Western and, in rarer cases, Eastern Canada.” Gerald Friesen iv CONTENTS Preface......................................................................................................................1 Canada: An Introductory Note.................................................................................2 Acknowledgements..................................................................................................iv Chapter One.................The Origins of the Socialist Movement in Canada............6 Chapter Two................Controversies, Schisms and Defections.............................48 Chapter Three..............War, Revolution and Bolshevism......................................72 Chapter Four................General Strike and the One Big Union..............................95 Chapter Five.................The Decline and Fall of the Socialist Party of Canada......108 Chapter Six..................New Beginnings ................................................................119 Chapter Seven..............War Again (1939-1945).....................................................133 Chapter Eight...............Post-War Progress and Problems?.....................................142 Chapter Nine................Collective Death Wish? The Party Self-Destructs.............140 Chapter Ten.................Aftermath: The Seventies...................................................168 Chapter Eleven.............In Conclusion?...................................................................183 Postscript......................Summing up.......................................................................195 Appendix One..............DeLeonism.........................................................................211 Appendix Two.............Socialist Party of Canada Pamphlets.................................221 Appendix Three...........An Electoral History of the Socialist Party of Canada.......225 Appendix Four.............Socialist Party of Canada locals (post 1931)......................229 Appendix Five………..SPC locals 1933-1939…………………………………….??? Sources.........................Books, articles, essays and reports.....................................230 i PREFACE The following is not a detailed, academic study of the socialist movement in Canada in general, or a specific history of the Socialist Party of Canada in particular. That was not intended. It is, hopefully, a profile. A more detailed account would have been possible, but in the view of this writer would have been boring to all but academics and professional historians. Although masses of facts could have been gleaned from existing correspondence, journals and newspapers, records and reports, and reminiscences, including tape recordings, much has been either lost or widely distributed at numerous locations. Much SPC material was lost in the Winnipeg floods. Other archives have been moved from Winnipeg to Victoria or Vancouver. Is, then, what follows accurate? In the main, yes. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that some accounts, as well as some dates, may be incorrect. Indeed, some of the reminiscences, including taped accounts by old-timers such as Bill Pritchard or Jim Brownrigg, are known not to be accurate in some details. Even so-called electoral results, at the time, could not be said to be correct. Official results from Alberta, for instance, often merely refer to the candidate as SOC (“socialist”) without differentiating between the Socialist Party of Canada and the Social Democratic Party, or even an independent ‘socialist’. Some official reports include percentages; others do not. Some accounts and reports are taken from local newspapers, which were not even at the time accurate. Generally, where the result is reported in, for example, the Western Clarion, it states whether the candidate was a representative of the Socialist Party of Canada. This writer, however, has done his best to give as accurate a general account of the socialist movement, its theories and policies, as well as many of its often colourful members, as possible during the last hundred years or so. That is all. PEN CANADA: An Introductory Note Canada is the world’s second largest country (Russia is the first), with a land area of almost ten million square kilometres, covering 7% of the Earth’s surface. From Lake Erie in the south to its northern borders on the Arctic Ocean, it measures 4,800 kilometres, and from east to west it spans more than 5,000 kilometres, putting Vancouver on the Pacific coast closer to Mexico City in Central America than to Halifax in Nova Scotia on the Atlantic seaboard. Canada has two million lakes, containing 50% of the world’s fresh water. It has 18 islands of more than 10,000 square kilometres in area, including one, Baffin Island, which is almost the size of France, and another, Ellesmere, which has a glacier twice the size of Switzerland. Its prairies alone cover more than the combined area of India, Pakistan and Nepal. Yet much of the land is still a wilderness. Almost 50% of its territory lies within the zones of permafrost, where the ground is frozen to a depth of 400 metres, and where the winter temperature falls as low as -60°C. Indeed, Canada’s climate is of the extreme continental type, with scorching hot summers and long winters, where the temperature remains below freezing in every part of the country except for a small area in the south-west. In fact, the cities of Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto experience winters in which the temperature may fall below zero for more than 150 days in the year, although as elsewhere in the world, Canada has felt the effects of global warming in recent years. All of which means that barely 12% of the country’s landmass is suitable for farming, concentrated mainly in the prairies of the west. Nevertheless the area is almost equivalent to the combined areas of England, France, Germany and Italy. Canada, moreover, is rich in fish, furs and timber, as well as minerals of more than 60 different types, including iron ore, copper, gold, nickel, uranium and crude