The first full Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) convention was held 75 years ago, July 19 to 21 in Regina. The price of wheat that year was 39 cents a bushel, the lowest in history, and the Queen City was preparing to welcome the World's Grain Exhibition and Conference, which drew an incredible 200,000 participants, from 40 countries.
General Motors had opened an assembly plant in Regina in 1928. Bad timing. The Depression followed, triggered by the stock market crash, a year later. By 1932, relief camps were being organized to keep the prairie unemployed out of sight. No wages, just 20 cents a day for sundries, plus bed and board. The largest was in Saskatchewan.
Regina was where the police met the on-to-Ottawa trekkers in 1935, threw them off the trains, and put them into the relief camps. A riot ensued, two men died. The Ottawa trek started up again.
The CCF had been formed the previous year in Calgary. In Regina, J.S. Woodsworth, the Independent Labour MP was elected party leader. He was part of the Ginger Group, the 12 remaining radical MPs representing the prairies, which included Agnes Macphail, the first woman MP. Most of those elected in the 1920s under the banner of the Progressives, or United Farmers had ended up with the Liberals who cleverly took up rural issues. Meeting May 26, 1932 in the sixth floor Centre Block office of Alberta MP Wiliam Irvine, the Ginger Group agreed as to the need for a new farmer, labour party.
The CCF convention of 1933 is remembered largely because of the party’s founding document, the Regina Manifesto. Speaking at his memorial service, longest serving MP Bill Blaikie recalled that Les Benjamin, elected in1968 as NDP member for Regina, used to refer fondly to the Manifesto as “pure poetry." Ottawa historian and archivist John Smart and his wife, noted literary critic Patricia Smart are inviting people to a public reading of the Manifesto at the Glebe Community Centre in Ottawa August 18. The Kingston and the Islands NDP riding association wanted the party to hold a75th birthday party celebration of the Regina Manifesto.
If you want to put down socialism, the CCF, and the NDP, you sure do not want people to know about the history of Canada under capitalism. The lasting value of the manifesto is its account of how things went so terribly wrong in the 20th century, the bloodbath of World War I, the impoverishment of farm communities and working people, the speculative excesses of finance capitalists and the march of fascism. The initial draft of the manifesto was prepared at the request of Woodsworth by members of the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR). In the early 1930s, the Depression and the spreading fear of fascism had inspired some academics in Montreal and Toronto to create the socialist LSR, a membership circle of activist intellectuals, which flourished for over a decade, with chapters established across the country.
The leading figures in the LSR, Frank Underhill, a historian from University of Toronto and Frank Scott, a McGill law professor, were important figures in the CCF, though Underhill eventually became a Liberal. Scott became party president, and with national secretary David Lewis, wrote “Make This Your Canada” an important account of the party that appeared in1943 when it briefly led in national polls.
Six years and two months after the adoption of the Regina Manifesto, Canada had entered the war against fascism. In a dramatic moment in parliamentary history, party leader J.S. Woodsworth, a leading pacifist handed over to M.J. Coldwell. The party voted for the entry of Canada into the war, following a powerful pacifist attack on war by J.S. Woodsworth who then voted against entry into the war.
The Regina manifesto famously promised in its conclusion: "A CCF government will eradicate capitalism." The irony is that because of the war, Canada adopted large slices of the Regina Manifesto inspired CCF programme. Large-scale economic planning, so much laughed at after the war, was needed to build an efficient and effective economy in order to win it.
Full employment co-existed with stable prices, thanks to Regina Manifesto style planning, a package later sneered at as unworkable because it included wage and price controls. And, yes, to meet the challenge of war, the government went deeply into debt by having the Bank of Canada lend to the government and allowing citizens to buy war bonds. This was one of the favoured policy planks of the manifesto, the socialization of finance. After the war, the national debt equalled about 120 per cent of GDP. Canada then struggled under what the right would label, the "burden of the debt," to its best economic performance in history, arriving in 1975 with a debt equal to20 per cent of GDP.
The CCF gave way to the NDP in 1961, but its founding manifesto was full of ideas that are familiar today, such as unemployment insurance, Medicare, and charter of rights and freedoms. Of particular interest is the detailed account of what needs to be done to build a country where people can be free.
In order to warm up the audience for readings of the Regina Manifesto across the country, you can do no better than show the remarkable film about the CCF by Barbara Evans. Her title captures what the delegates in Regina most wanted Canada to become: "A Heaven on Earth."
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