The Company Province 1934-1972 Pillars Of Profit 077107672X

Citation preview

Pfllarsof Profit The Company Province

1934-1972 “ H ere c o o l C o o k traced in su d d en b lood his final bay and scu rvied traders trailed th e w ak es o f yesterday u n til th e o tter rock s w ere bare and all th e tribal feath ers p lu ck ed ” E arle B irney

“Pacific Door”

M cC lella n d and Stew art L im ited T o ro n to

Martin Robin

© 1973 by Martin Robin ALL RIGH TS RESERVED

0-7710-7672-X Printed in Canada The Canadian Publishers McClelland and Stewart Limited 25 Hollinger Road, Toronto

Contents Preface / 7

I Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 / 9 II The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 / 38 III The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 / 63 IV Cold Warriors: 1946-1949 / 89 V Saturday N ight Government: 1950-1952 / 109 VI Sunday M orning Politics: 1953 / 163 VII The N ew Romans: 1954-1960 / 189 VIII A Tale o f Two Rivers: 1961-1963 / 221 IX Big D am Government: 1964-1969 / 250 X The G ood Life: 1970-1972 / 276 N otes / 314 Index / 347 Illustrations Between Pages 154 and 163

To Grace

Preface

What follows is the second, and final, volume of my two-part political history of British Columbia. The first - The Rush For Spoils - took the story from the date of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation in 1871, up to the defeat of the Conservative government of Simon Fraser Tolmie in the general election of 1933. The present narrative begins with the accession of T.D. Pattullo and the Liberal Party to power during the Great Depression, and ends with the remarkable victory of the New Democratic Party in the election of August 30, 1972. It was my original intention to close the story at the province’s centenary in 1971 when Social Credit and W.A.C. Bennett still ruled the roost in British Columbia. But the sudden demise of the Bennett government, and rise to power of the socialists, was altogether too fascinating, and important, a story to ignore. Hence the final chapter docu­ menting events leading to the turnover of a regime which had shaped the province’s history for two decades. My acknowledgements are many. The Canada Council and Simon Fraser University helped out with research and leave grants. Mrs. Anne Yandle, Miss Shirley Mooney and Willard Ireland, together with their colleagues in the Special Collections Section, UBC Library, the Pacific Press Library, and the Provincial Archives, were helpful and co-operative. Messrs. Paul Phillips, Emil Bjamason, Paddy Sherman, Bruce Hutchison, and Harold Winch critically perused a draft of the manuscript. Mrs. Moira Gort, taking up where Donna Watt and Jean Jordan left off, typed the final chapter. Any inaccuracies which may remain are, of course, entirely my own responsibil­ ityMartin Robin

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CHAPTER I

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937

“To that clime go ye people, ye sons of the west, ’Tis a land of exuberant plenty and joy; Go, ye children of cities, by fortune opprest, Where gold may be gathered which knows no alloy.” Kinahan Cornwallis, The New Eldorado.

On November 15, 1933, the resignations of Simon Fraser Tolmie and his ministerial rump were submitted to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Prov­ ince of British Columbia. For the outgoing Premier, this was a welcome day. Few Premiers in the history of the province had been so utterly rejected, so battered and abused in office, as the genial gentleman from Saanich. What Simon Fraser Tolmie needed and wanted after the 1933 provincial election was a rest, a spell of relaxing with friends and neighbours at the family farm, an opportunity to renew his acquaintance with gentle sheep, snorting swine and Holstein Friesian cows. For Thomas Dufferin Pattullo, these were days of challenge and glory. Pattullo had benefited from his years in opposition. According to Bruce Hutchison, he grew more in the five years of opposition than during his earlier twelve years in office.1 Pattullo had been a quiet pillar of the Oliver and MacLean Cabinets. He looked after his constituents, closely and competently supervised his department, reformed some of the abuses of the land laws and prudently experimented with a few settlement, irrigation and reclamation schemes. There was no reason and little time, during the decade of Liberal hegemony, for Pattullo to search his mind, question or defend the assumptions of a system which he helped administer, or articulate a systematic social and economic philosophy. But his banishment to the opposition had a chastening effect and afforded him an opportunity for study, for contemplation of mistakes, for prepara­ tion.2 During his years in the wilderness Pattullo studied extensively, read widely and developed an economic and social philosophy which was barely formed in his mind when he left the Lands Department. “His entire attitude 9

I

10 Pillars of Profit

toward Public Affairs,” Hutchison wrote on the eve of Pattullo’s accession, “as anyone can see who has watched him these fifteen years, has been altered, revised by the black years which happen to correspond to his years of opposition . . . .” 3 Pattullo learned that only a modified capitalism, in which the state played a prominent role, could rescue the people from their plight of poverty. Pure socialism offended his liberal and individualistic instincts. “It has been represented times without number that all men are born equal,” he told a radio audience, “and a great deal of misunderstanding and false hopes have been built upon this statement.”4 Pattullo was convinced that all men were not born equal in either physical or mental capacity, and that special privileges always existed “by tradition, by custom, by tribal relations and by state law.” Special privileges existed under the capitalist system just as they had in all previous economic systems, including primitive organiza­ tions in which property was held in common, giving “advantages to in­ dividuals not shared by the people as a whole.” 5 There was no way of eliminating special privilege, which was a natural attribute of all societies. " . . . There is no system,” Pattullo insisted, “that can be devised that is not capitalistic, including socialism . . . Pure socialism, far from elim­ inating privilege, would aggravate it, “for those who by superior ability or force of circumstances, or both, might be able to obtain control would force their will on the people as a whole, and could only continue to do so and retain control by the power of force.” 6 Socialism, therefore, could not eliminate economic inequality and would add to it the special burden of rule by force. The scope of political action under capitalism was necessarily limited to the reform of the abuses of special privilege. Untrammelled business government, embodied in traditional Toryism, involved abuses, since businessmen, representing a special selfish interest group, cared only for their own. The duty of the politician was to wrest concessions from business for his dispossessed constituents, to help create new business op­ portunities, thereby maximizing employment, “and where private en­ deavour is not able to take up the slack of employment, to inaugurate public undertakings and public support of undertakings.” 7 Economic and social inequality to Thomas Dufferin Pattullo was inevit­ able. The duty of the Liberal politician was to try all methods, short of extensive public ownership and expropriation, to facilitate full employment and relieve the poor from the despair of poverty. Aiding the poor was a matter both of Christian conscience and political prudence since poverty bred discontent and insecurity. “The welfare of every individual in the state is the concern of all the individuals of the state. No longer can any of us rest secure when any portion of our people are insecure.” 8 Pattullo was fond of lumping the business reactionaries and socialists together since both

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 11

precipitated conflict by doctrinaire adherence to impractical solutions. He was incensed at the editors of the Financial Post, whom he counted among his fiercest critics, for not realizing “that men of forward views,” like himself, were “a stabilizing influence.”9 With the onset of the depression, Pattullo was convinced that British Columbia, like the entire Western world, was entering on a new period in which the state was destined to play a fresh creative role in lightening the burden of others “unable to carry the load.” 10 When Leader of the Opposi­ tion, he designated the new period as “socialized capitalism.” 11 Under the new system, characterized by wider government control, regulation and direction, individual initiative and individual ownership would be pre­ served, but capital would be used “for the benefit and not the detriment of the people as a whole.” But Pattullo was no philosopher. He theorized only because the economic system, hitherto unquestioned in its ability to provide employment and profit, had suddenly collapsed. Everywhere, including British Columbia, socialists and communists denied the basic assumptions of capitalism, ad­ vocated its overthrow, and forced answers from the Liberals, who appealed to similar constituents. Pattullo’s major virtues were not theoretical exposi­ tion and philosophical eloquence. Instead, he thrived on incurable opti­ mism, boundless self-confidence, and bold pragmatism. Pattullo was an energetic problem-solver, willing to apply a myriad of solutions to the host of immediate problems which attended his premiership. Simon Fraser Tolmie was a defensive politician who reacted rather than acted, misunder­ stood the needs of the times, wilted before insistent internal pressures and drifted in the oblivion of indecision. Pattullo was his own man, an offensive politician, an eclectic experimenter who substituted perpetual motion for drift. Pattullo did not let old debts interfere with his construction of a brave new Cabinet. Old Cabinet timber, like former Public Works Minister Dr. Sutherland of Revelstoke, Alex Manson of Omineca, seven years Attorney General after Farris’s resignation, and E. Barrow of Chilliwack, Oliver’s Minister of Agriculture, were discarded. Equally ignored was Gerry McGeer, who gave yeoman service to the Oliver government in the freight rates fight and had recently launched a fierce proselytizing campaign on credit and banking reform. McGeer had worked closely with the Premier in preparing the program for the 1932 Liberal convention and was a prime vote-getter in Vancouver, where he mesmerized the electorate with his florid Irish invective. McGeer, however, was a maverick, an independent crusader, and Pattullo sensibly perceived that McGeer’s wild egotism, monetary fetishism and beet-red outbursts would not be conducive to the construction of a co-operative team. McGeer was livid over his exclusion.

12 Pillars 0/ Profit

He wrote Mackenzie King that Pattullo deliberately “catered to the worst element in the Liberal party” in choosing his Cabinet, condemned the Premier for “bold and ruthless repudiation of his own associates,” in­ timated that the liquor and banking interests had made up the Premier’s mind, and pronounced himself an Independent since the crying need for the province was for real opposition to the Pattullo government.12 Pattullo, for his part, was glad to be rid of McGeer, whose quick defection confirmed his view that the Irishman was an uncertain Liberal. “You will have seen of the defection of Mr. McGeer,” Pattullo wrote King, “through my having left him out of the Cabinet. There is some satisfaction in having one’s judgment so speedily confirmed. I would have preferred if Mr. McGeer had not run provincially as I thought that his crusade was rather of federal character. . . . ” 13 Pattullo assured King that he would see to it that McGeer would never get a Liberal nomination again, either provincially or federally.14 McGeer had been angling for the Attorney General’s portfolio which went to Gordon Sloan, son of the former Minister of Mines and a young lawyer in the Farris office. The key Finance portfolio went to John Hart, the grey fox from Victoria, who had straightened out the provincial finances after the Bowser debacle. George Pearson, a substantial wholesale grocer from Nanaimo, familiar with the needs and operations of the coal mining industry, and a friend of the trade unions in the Island mining areas, became Minister of Mines and Labour. A. Wellesley Gray, an insurance agent, the former Mayor of New Westminster, was chosen to head the Lands Depart­ ment, while the Agricultural portfolio went to K.C. MacDonald, a Vernon dentist who had been appointed Provincial Secretary in the Oliver Cabinet before losing a by-election two weeks after his appointment.15 A garage proprietor and financial director from Cranbrook, Frank Mitchell Mac­ Pherson, took on the Public Works portfolio. The resident Cabinet intellec­ tual was George Moir Weir, Provincial Secretary and Minister of Educa­ tion, a graduate of Queen’s and Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in Education, author of a number of books and monographs on educational problems in Western Canada, and chairman of the Department of Educa­ tion at the University of British Columbia. The Pattullo Cabinet was balanced in ideological colouration, regional representation and experience. Hart and Pattullo both had previous Cabinet experience. MacPherson, Wells Gray, Pearson and MacDonald had each served in the Legislature for a minimum of five years. Only Sloan and Weir were new to the House. The Liberal team was regionally dispersed. Pattullo represented the north Coast area; MacDonald and MacPherson, the central and north-eastern Interior; Gray, the lower mainland. Weir and Sloafl spoke for Greater Vancouver while Hart and Pearson were Island represen'

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 13

tatives. Ideologically, the Cabinet was neatly spread. Hart, MacDonald and MacPherson were moderate old style Oliver Liberals. Pearson and Weir, both admired by the C.C.F., were progressive reformers, practical idealists, charged with legislating and administering the key areas of social welfare, education and labour. The first session of the eighteenth legislature was treated to a flurry of bills calculated to relieve the tax burden on wage earners, aid hospitals, schools and municipalities, and create the machinery to administer Pattullo’s New Deal program. The Hart budget, described by the Sun as a “People’s Budget,” 16 introduced a huge refunding scheme predicated on federal assistance, not yet forthcoming, through the guarantee of a new issue of provincial securities at a lower rate of interest to replace outstanding bond issues.17 Low wage earners were exempted from the one-per-cent tax, originally imposed under the “Special Revenue Act” of 1931 and subse­ quently incorporated into the “Income Tax Act” of 1932. The income of single persons to the extent of six hundred dollars and of married persons to the extent of one thousand dollars escaped taxation, while other exemp­ tions were provided for dependents, life insurance premiums, employee contributions to superannuation funds, and taxable income for charitable purposes.18 The Meal Tax was repealed. Municipalities were aided by the provision of provincial loans covering the full cost of unemployment relief for the coming year.19 The University grant was restored. The session was characterized by a flurry of social and labour legislation. George Weir, who assured the House that he would not be a party to the “crucifixion of the youth of British Columbia on a cross of gold,” sponsored important amendments to the Public Schools Act, increasing the pay of teachers and grants to schools, and raising the age limit of free education from twelve to fifteen years of age.20 Investigating committees were set up for the summer months to inquire into State Health Insurance and the financial basis of provincial education with a view to complete revision of the existing system.21 Important changes were made in the labour laws. A new Minimum Wage Act was passed conferring powers on the Minister of Labour to establish minimum wage schedules and maximum hours of work in all industries and authorizing the creation of a Board of Industrial Relations empowered to fix minimum wages for any industry or group of workers and investigate conditions were it deemed necessary.22 There were, in addition, a host of other measures designed to realize Pattullo’s promise of “work and wages.” Three million dollars was voted for unemployment relief. Gordon Sloan, in an attempt at “getting rid of the Shylock spirit,” sponsored a mortgage moratorium bill which gave wide authority to the courts to make equitable orders as between mortgagor and mortgagee with­ out regard to the letter of the written contract.23 An economic council was

14 Pillars of Profit

created, with Professor A.W. Carrothers of the Department of Economics of the University of British Columbia as chairman, to investigate and make policy recommendations on matters covering practically the whole field of industrial and commercial activities in British Columbia. A Natural Pro­ ducts Marketing Act was passed in the dying hours of the legislature, supplementing Dominion legislation then in progress, conferring powers on a board to regulate the marketing of natural products within the provincial jurisdiction. Municipalities were awarded with a Department of Municipal Affairs charged with reviewing and studying the report of the Municipal Taxation Commission, set up under Tolmie’s tutelage, and making recom­ mendations at the 1935 session. By far the most controversial measure was Bill 36, “An Act to provide for the Exercise by the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council of certain Powers during the Interim between Sessions of the Legislature.” 24 Known as the Special Powers Act, the new measure delegated broad powers to the Cabi­ net, during the specified period, covering the administration, sale and dispo­ sition of natural resources, the borrowing and lending of money, provincial public works, property and civil rights. According to the Premier, the act was dictated by the uncertain state of relations between the federal and provincial governments involving financial aid, unemployment relief and other matters, which might require the provincial government to act quickly and decisively during the summer months in response to federal enactments. To the Opposition, however, the Special Powers Act was evi­ dence that Pattullo was heading in the direction of Hitler and Mussolini. Both the Province and the Sun led a bitter assault on the bill. Inside the House, C.C.F., non-partisan speakers, and Gerry McGeer, who defined the S.P.A. as “Supreme Provincial Asininity,” 25 raged for days against the measure. After a week of shouting the act passed its second reading with few amendments. By the 1935 session, the activist impulse had cooled somewhat. The second session of the eighteenth legislature contained few legislative enact­ ments of major importance. Welfare spending increased somewhat, the Minimum Wage and Hours Act was tightened up and a new Apprenticeship Act adopted.26 Funds were released for the construction of a home for the aged in Essondale and for a T.B. sanitorium in Coquitlam. A new road­ paving program was inaugurated and a highway loan bill provided for the raising of three million dollars for highway construction. The municipalities of Prince Rupert, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam were aided by a provincially-guaranteed refunding scheme. The beleaguered city of Vancouver was lightly aided with a bill which authorized the borrowing of one million dollars for a new city hall and five hundred thousand dollars for other purposes.27 The government undertook a forestry-training camp project,

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 15

along the lines of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, designed to train from three hundred to five hundred young men “in the art of constructing fire trails and other worthy fire protection endeavours.” 28 Plans were drawn up to train youth in elementary prospecting and to grubstake the junior prospectors for a week in provincial mineral reserves.29 A Civil Service Superannuation Act was passed, conferring additional pension rights on civil servants while the draft of a health insurance scheme was distributed to the members in preparation for the 1936 session. And, for the good people of New Westminster, the government voted four million dollars to construct a new bridge over the Fraser River at the Royal City. All of this, however, was minor stuff, hardly calculated to curtail the high unemployment or, in Pattullo’s words, “mobilize effort in support of the new collectivism.” The truth of the matter was that Pattullo was wrestling with a fierce demon, the federal system, which, to his mind and others, severely circumscribed the domain and effectiveness of local effort. Social­ ized capitalism prescribed vigorous state action to stimulate growth, return purchasing power to the people and take up the slack of employment where private enterprise had failed. Provincial action was strangled, however, by inadequate revenue sources which, to Pattullo’s mind, derived from the exploitive relationship between the federal and provincial governments. Pattullo quickly realized that a provincial New Deal, a new arrangement between the Government of British Columbia and the people whose man­ date it received, was dependent upon an inter-governmental New Deal, a restructuring of the relationship between the federal and provincial govern­ ments. Pattullo’s assault on the federal authorities began quickly and consisted of a short-run demand for loans and outright grants. The Premier and his Attorney General attended the Dominion-Provincial Conference at Ottawa in January 1934, where they first presented the province’s case.30 Negotia­ tions proceeded in the spring of 1934 when Pattullo announced, on May 18, that an understanding had been reached with the federal government, in­ volving a total contribution of ten million dollars covering old relief ac­ counts, municipal aid, current deficits and maturing loans. In addition, the Dominion agreed to make a direct per diem contribution to the cost of government road work. Further federal aid was forthcoming in August, through a loan of one million dollars towards a program of public works and monthly loans and grants in support of direct relief. Finally, the federal government agreed to an interim increase of $750,000 in the Dominion subsidy to the province. But the Pattullo government was looking for more than short-run hand­ outs. What was needed was a restructuring of federal-provincial relations involving the use of the national credit to relieve the provincial debt through

16 Pillars of Profit

a refunding at lower interest rates, a broadening of the provincial tax base through the transfer of tax rights to the province, and a national employ­ ment insurance scheme which would reduce the province’s relief burden. Pattullo’s economic council produced a document which argued that Brit­ ish Columbia’s terms of trade with Eastern Canada adversely affected her economy and resulted in inadequate government revenues. The province bought heavily in the eastern market, at prices inflated by high freight rates and protective tariffs and sold few goods to Eastern Canada in return. In 1933, British Columbia bought one hundred million dollars worth of goods in Eastern Canada and only sold a mere four million dollars worth.31 The bulk of British Columbia products were sold abroad where they competed on the world market. Throughout 1935, Pattullo and his colleagues publicized on the radio, on the public platform, in the press and Legislature, their claim for “better terms.” They demanded co-operation from the federal government and the Bank of Canada in a refunding scheme involving $127,000,000. They called for a redistribution of the tax field as a means of relieving the beleaguered municipalities. The Dominion government was requested to vacate the income tax field, discontinue the taxation of gold and authorize the province to impose a sales tax. Demands were made for an increased yearly subsidy to the province, a comprehensive national scheme of unemployment relief, regional tariff adjustments or compensation to the province for the effect of the tariff, a readjustment of freight rates, provision of capital for pub­ lic works and development, and the absorption by the C.N.R. of the P.G.E.32 The frontal attack on the federal authorities was exacerbated by the different partisan coloration of the two levels of government. R.B. Bennett quickly became a scapegoat for provincial ills and Pattullo shouted that federal Toryism was the one obstacle in the way of provincial recovery. But the partisan excuse lost its usefulness with the accession to power in October 1935, of William Lyon Mackenzie King, another master Liberal muddler, who promised to preside over a rejuvenated federalism and commence a bright new era of federal-provincial co-operation. One of King’s first acts, after consulting his medium and walking his dog, was to call a DominionProvincial Conference for December 1935. But the conference was an un­ certain affair and ended inconclusively. A number of key questions were left for further consideration by continuing committees while others were clearly dependent upon constitutional amendments whose enactment awaited a grand reconsideration of the constitutional question by a Royal Commission. The conference was followed by a number of short-term aid measures. In February 1936, the federal government loaned the province $4,300,000 to enable it to meet a five million dollar maturity while, during

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 17

the autumn session of the House, the Premier announced that the Dominion government had made available $1,500,000 for the care of transients in British Columbia.33 For the moment, however, the King government fore­ stalled any substantial changes in federal-provincial relations pending the results of the Rowell-Sirois Constitutional Commission, which began delib­ erations in 1936. Pattullo’s knightly assault on the federal dragon doubtless stirred the hearts of loyal Liberal British Columbians, who complained of Ottawa’s obstinacy. “Up and down the province,” Bruce Hutchison reported in the summer of 1935, “in the best clubs of Vancouver, in the ranch houses of the old Cariboo road, even in the Legislature itself, you hear the whispers of despair, ‘secession’. ” 34 But to the mass of unemployed and struggling wage earners, the federal-provincial squabble was a remote, complicated dispute irrelevant to their immediate distress. The other New Deal, with the federal authorities, mattered little. They wanted immediate local action; a fulfilment of the Liberal promise, delivered in the heat of the battle with the Tory dragon, to manufacture work and wages. “In normal times,” Hutchi­ son observed, “your average British Columbian is a busy, bustling happy sort of fellow; profoundly ignorant and pretty contemptuous of poli­ tics.” 35 But, in 1935, he concluded, British Columbia was “probably the most radical area in all of Canada.” An intoxicated electorate filled with high expectations swept the Liberals to power in November 1933. Two years later, however, Pattullo’s grip on the masses had weakened notice­ ably. The legislative opposition, the press, the employed and unemployed, wanted more than perpetual motion. They demanded results. Not the least of the Premier’s troubles were the unemployed, who num­ bered more than one hundred thousand in the winter of 193 5.36 Many of the relief workers, who laboured for a pittance in drab and dreary camps in the Interior, had taken the Premier’s promise of work and wages at his word. Accordingly, in the spring of 1935, relief-camp workers took matters into their own hands and began to agitate for immediate redress. The centre of the unemployment agitation was the city of Vancouver, now presided over by the majestic Gerry McGeer, who had assumed the mayoralty of the city in January 1935. Refugees from federal relief camps throughout the Interior flooded the city during the winter of 1935 and paraded, demon­ strated and “tin-canned” along Hastings and Granville Streets. McGeer, whose sensitive Irish nose sniffed an incipient general strike and a proletarian dictatorship, issued an order forbidding parades. His edict was soon followed by demonstrations, skirmishes, repressive police action and arrests, and his reading of the Riot Act before two thousand scowling unemployed. Matters went from bad to worse after a detachment of R.C.M.P. was ordered in from Regina. Some three thousand people

18 Pillars of Profit

marched through the streets in mid-May, paraded through large downtown department stores, and occupied the city museum. The direct action of the unemployed evoked huge public sympathy, frightened the local authorities, and moved T.D. Pattullo to do nothing, except to repeat that the reliefcamp workers were a federal responsibility. Pattullo, like McGeer, was convinced that the unemployment problem “furnished fertile soil in the encouragement of the untoward activities of those who are opposed to the so-called capitalistic system, and who desire to overthrow the existing order and usher in a socialist state.” 37 He was immensely relieved to hear, at the end of the month, that the hard core of camp workers had undertaken an “On-to-Ottawa” trek in search of aid from the federal government. Demonstrations and discontent were not the sole province of the unem­ ployed. In May 1935, a waterfront strike occurred among longshoremen who clashed with the powerful Shipping Federation of British Columbia. The police entered the dispute and a serious confrontation, replete with tear gas, fist-fighting and clubbing, occurred on Ballantyne Pier, resulting in numerous injuries, the arrest of seventeen persons on riot charges and further shouts from the incensed mayor about communist agitation. Exten­ sive violence occurred at a strike at the colliery of Corbin’s Coal Mines Limited in Corbin, in which forty persons were injured, including sixteen police officers. Several persons were convicted and jailed on charges arising out of the disturbance. During July and August, widespread trouble deve­ loped in the Interior, where men from relief camps attempted to make their way eastward by boarding freight trains which were halted, in some in­ stances, by greasing the rails.38 Direct action, by the employed and unemployed, was one component of a broad assault on the government which peaked during the summer of 1935. The Province, one of Pattullo’s most vicious enemies, was joined in its opposition by the Sun, which had strongly supported Pattullo in the years preceding his accession. The Sun raged at the Special Powers Act, at the high expenditure on the New Westminster bridge, and accused the government generally of inaction and Pattullo personally of “popinjay play at dictatorship.” 39 “For almost two years,” R.J. Cromie editorialized, “Pat­ tullo has sat over there in Victoria and not moved a finger to remove or alleviate those conditions of high interest rates and the technological dis­ placement of men that gave birth to radical protest in the first place. About the only time the public has heard of Pattullo is when he was grabbing off special powers he was too fearful or too stupid to use, or else flouting public opinion by insulting responsible delegations of citizens.” The Sun was delighted to report of the collapse of the economic council, whose business representatives began to withdraw in the summer of 1935.40 Pattullo, for his part, was not averse to publicly chastising and threatening the press. In

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 19

one of his frequent radio broadcasts, which increased in number with the growth of Vancouver press opposition, Pattullo referred to the actions taken in some countries to restrict the operations of newspapers and concluded with the assertion: “I am not sure that it will not be necessary that action will have to be taken in this country.” 41 The Premier saved his choice invective for the Province which, he asserted, exhibited “a spleen and a venom which a self-respecting newspaper should avoid.”42 He was even less kind to the Sun, whose publisher, R.J. Cromie had once been a close confidant. “Its chief owner,” Pattullo said of Cromie, “is given to fads and fancies and suffers from mental dyspepsia. He takes a hop, step and jump around the world, picks up a lot of neurotic ideas and exploits them through the media of his newspaper in terms of finality which are evidently designed to create an impression of great profundity.” 43 Pattullo could not under­ stand why the Terminal City press so disliked him, since he had helped effect a reduction in the price of newsprint which, he claimed, saved the Sun and Province one hundred thousand dollars per year.44 Not all of Pattullo’s problems were external. There developed, in the summer and autumn of 1935, several domestic tensions within the Liberal family which the Premier was hard pressed to relieve. The New Westmin­ ster toll bridge project, the largest single public works undertaken during the little New Deal, aroused a huge public controversy and was stubbornly opposed by a faction of the government legislative party, which deprecated the projected imposition of tolls, defined the bridge as an extravagant concession to a favoured section, and joined the Opposition in allegations that patronage was involved in allocating the contracts.45 When the final vote was put, five government members voted with the Opposition. There developed, in addition, severe strains in the extra-parliamentary party, which increased significantly following the strong C.C.F. showing in the October 1935, federal election. Pattullo, who campaigned strongly for the Liberal candidates, complained that party soreheads were looking for a scapegoat and wanted to vent their spleen on him.46 A move to separate the federal and provincial organizations was squashed by Wendell Farris. The Vancouver Liberal machine, shaking and snorting for a hefty swill from the patronage trough, raged at Major S.F. Moodie, Pattullo’s trusted organ­ izer, who resigned his office.47 The provincial executive was in serious disarray. Party president M.E. Smith died, and Dugald Donaghy, the vicepresident, had turned coat and joined the Bowserites, while H.W. Herridge, another vice-president, defected to the C.C.F. and ran as a socialist candi­ date in the 1935 federal election.48 According to the Province, Liberal associations in Burnaby, Yale, Lillooet and Rossland demanded a conven­ tion in order to elect a new executive and iron out internal difficulties. Pattullo, who laid the cause of all social and political woes on the door step

20 Pillars of Profit

of R.B. Bennett, was incensed at the internal attacks on his leadership and wrote King, shortly following the federal election, about a drive “being started to bring about a union provincial government at the next provincial election.” 49 He reported that several prominent Liberals were advocating a saw-off with the Conservatives for the approaching Vancouver and Omineca by-elections, in order to keep the C.C.F. out, and expressed his firm opposition to electoral co-operation, since it would drive Liberal voters into support for the C.C.F. and would be the thin end of the wedge of a union government.50 The C.C.F. threat, Pattullo averred, derived less from a split in the free-enterprise vote than from depressed labour conditions arising from the incurable stupidity of Bennett conservatism. Pattullo’s troubles, external and internal, were magnified by the fierce struggle for health insurance which attended the third session of the eight­ eenth legislature, meeting from February 25 to April 1, 1936. The Throne Speech was a spare and reticent utterance which announced the postpone­ ment of further weighty legislation, save Medicare, until the autumn ses­ sion, by which time more certain information on federal aid would be forthcoming. The outstanding legislative proposal in the session was health insurance, which had been examined by a committee following the 1934 session. A comprehensive draft bill was drawn up, published in March 1935, and submitted for public discussion. The result was the activation of an acute consciousness of interest by various groups which fiercely lobbied for and against the measure. “The apparent result of the democratic experiment in public discussion,” Professor H.F. Angus shrewdly observed, “was to make every group peculiarly conscious of its own interests and of the conflict between these and the interests of other groups.” 51 There ensued, not a united effort to relieve human suffering, but a period of intense bargaining in which each group-employers, employees, and doctorspressed the government with selfish urgency. The employers as a class disliked the idea since it compelled contribution of one per cent of the wage bill, thereby raising costs and placing firms at a competitive disadvantage. Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce, and numerous other trade as­ sociations pronounced the new measure a dangerous socialist experiment. Most adamant was the medical profession which, in the words of Dr. Angus, had “acquired an obstinacy in rear-guard action that would do credit to the highest military traditions.” 52 The Canadian Medical Associa­ tion set up a political fund of ten thousand dollars and joined with delega­ tions of businessmen and farmers in lobbying the Liberal caucus. The doctors were noticeably pleased when one of their own, Dr. W.J. Knox, past president of the British Columbia Medical Association and also of the Canadian Medical Association, was elected president of the Liberal As­ sociation at an executive meeting in July.53

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 21

The Medicare Bill was steered through the dangerous shoals of the House by George Weir, who was praised by C.C.F. M.L.A.s for his humanitarianism, perseverance and hard work. “We hate to see his knowledge and ability wasted on the Liberal party,” Dorothy Steeves told the House, “which just intended him as a political convenience and now regards him as an adminis­ trative inconvenience.” 54 The Weir Bill was a forward measure which called for a commission to administer insurance to all employees receiving less than eighteen hundred dollars a year, farmers and other persons enjoy­ ing private health insurance being excepted. The employees contributed two per cent of wages received and the employer, one per cent of his payroll. Mandatory benefits included medical care by physicians or surgeons, chosen by the insured, hospital care, laboratory services, medicines and a cash maternity benefit.55 The commission was authorized to pay doctors on a salary basis, on a per capita basis, or on a fee method. Weir estimated that the plan would cover three hundred thousand persons at a cost of forty cents per week to the wage earner. The bill received the support of the C.C.F. members, but the Liberals were keenly divided among supporters, outright opponents, and those who demanded modifications. The Liberal caucus bristled with dissension and indecision. Five Liberals voted against the second reading of the bill, which passed by a vote of twenty-eight to ten. On the final reading, seven Liberals joined with two C.C.F. members, four Independents and one Unionist in opposition to the measure.56 Medicare now awaited only the setting up of the administrative machinery and proc­ lamation by the minister. The exhausting Medicare dispute was hardly calculated to raise the flagging spirits of the Pattullo party, pushed by external and internal pres­ sures into a defensive posture. Apart from the Medicare Bill, and a con­ troversial measure which authorized an extension of the time for the pend­ ing by-elections in Omineca and Vancouver-Burrard, beyond the prescribed constitutional limit-a breathing spell needed by a suffocating governmentmost of the legislation of the spring session of 1936 was, in the words of the Canadian Annual Review, “of a routine or minor nature.” 57 Pattullo’s ministers, when they were not quarrelling with one another over Medicare, castigated the federal government for failing to release funds and to provide the taxing powers necessary to guarantee work and wages. “I was not the author of ‘work and wages,’ ” George Pearson disclaimed to the House, “but I will say that some day it will have real merit.” 58 To the burgeoning C.C.F., however, Pattullo’s day of reckoning seemed to be fast approaching. At no time did the immediate future of the C.C.F. appear more luminous than in the troubled winter of 1936. The October 1935 federal election resulted in an increased C.C.F. vote and the return of four socialists to the federal parliament. In the subsequent federal by-election in Victoria, Profes­

22 Pillars of Profit

sor King Gordon failed by only eighty-five votes to win an old Conservative stronghold.59 C.C.F. clubs increased their membership across the province in the wake of disenchantment with the Liberal promise of work and wages. Pattullo reported to Mackenzie King in October 1935, that “barely a round dozen” of the thirty-five Liberal members expected the government to survive the next general election,60 while Bruce Hutchison predicted that the Pattullo government could not endure another wait-and-see session. He pronounced British Columbia the most radical area in Canada and noted it was “an accepted commonplace of politics-accepted by all sides- that the socialist C.C.F. would sweep the province if an election were held tomor­ row.” 61 On April 1, 1936, when the third session of the eighteenth legisla­ ture prorogued, when fatigued Liberal M.L.A.s cleared their desks and drearily trundled home, there seemed little reason to revise Hutchison’s gloomy assessment. The C.C.F. had, in fact, made great strides during the past two years. After the 1933 election, steps were taken to merge the two wings of the new movement: the haughty Socialist Party of Canada, exclusive keeper of the party’s correct line, and the Associated C.C.F. Clubs, the enthusiastic product of the fusion between the League for Social Reconstruction and the orphaned C.C.F. clubs. Following the provisions of the 1933 convention, a referendum was held by both groups on the question of merger. The Associated C.C.F. Clubs voted by a ten-to-one margin in favour of merging. But the stubborn old-school socialists proved more difficult and defeated the proposal by twenty-three votes. A second vote was held shortly after and the measure passed. The marriage of the two groups was consummated at a convention in July 1935, attended by over two hundred delegates.62 The delegates elected a new executive, headed by Arnold Webster, and drew up a concise platform variously described as a model of clarity and a master­ piece of evasion. The new program which favoured ownership of the means of life by the whole society and “orderly political action by an intelligent electorate,” conceded that a period of transition was necessary unless so­ ciety was to be “precipitated into a revolutionary condition,” repeated the need for social ownership “where possible,” and stressed the role of educa­ tion in preparation for the revolutionary change.63 The delegates rejected a proposal favouring co-operation with the communists in a united front and refused to allow any C.C.F. units to affiliate with the League Against War and Fascism, which was declared to be dominated and controlled by the communists. For the rest, there was a decided attempt to democratize the party by restricting the independence of the M.L.A.s and stressing their accountabil­ ity to the mass organization. The representation of M.L.A.s and M.P.s on the provincial council was limited to three. A special examining board was

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 23

empowered to test candidates for public office on their knowledge of social­ ism and all candidates required the approval of the provincial executive. A powerful speakers’ committee was created to supervise public speakers and ensure that they did not engage in utterances inimical to the party plat­ form.64 Elected legislative representatives were required to report quarterly to the executive and once a year to the convention. There was, in addition, a hard-core group of socialists who wished the convention to go much further in its control of the M.L.A.s. The convention defeated a resolution condemning the parliamentary members “for their vacillating policy” and demanding their resignations. A further proposal, which sought to “institu­ tionalize the lives of parliamentary representatives during their stay in power by requiring them to live in a C.C.F. house under disciplinary control,” met a similar fate. It was this sort of profound mistrust of leader­ ship, long characteristic of the Socialist Party of Canada, which prompted party leader Robert Connell to confess during the convention that “the sort of thing an elected representative has to put up with within the ranks of the C.C.F. is enough to discourage any man from wanting office.” 65 Connell, so it appeared, was piqued by the chronic skirmishing within the new party. The fact was that the wedding between the Socialist Party of Canada and the Associated C.C.F. Clubs, between the old socialists and the new, was an uncertain affair. There developed severe tensions within the new organization which, by the spring of 1936, threatened to offset the great gains the party had made in the previous months. Not the least of the internal problems in the C.C.F. related to leadership. The C.C.F. fought the 1933 election without an official leader. W.A. Pritchard served as campaign leader but was removed from the picture entirely after failing to win his seat. A meeting of the provincial executive, in conjunction with the elected M.L.A.s, chose Robert Connell as leader over Ernest Winch, subject to the approval of the next C.C.F. convention. Connell, to be sure, seemed an unlikely sort to lead a British Columbia socialist party. An Anglican minister who gathered and sniffed flowers in the rustic splendour of Victoria, and who wrote learned articles about his discoveries in the Victoria newspapers, Connell was a Christian gentleman who felt, in the warm, liquid depths of his genial heart, that Karl Marx and Jesus Christ were ideological twins. Connell was a Red Tory, a pacifist, a Christian-Socialist who told the Victoria electors during the 1933 campaign that “in the history of England we find that the clergy at one time, for nearly one hundred and fifty years, was a leading factor, and during that time the country was referred to as ‘Merry England.’ ” 66 He saw little difference between the attacks on usury by feudal clerics and the contemporary assault on capitalist profit by scientific socialists. “For twenty years,” Connell confessed, “I have been advocating the platform of the C.C.F. and I believe

24 Pillars of Profit Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 25

it the only Christian way we can manage our affairs and live our lives as Christians.” 67 More than a few prominent C.C.F.ers, like Dorothy Steeves, who thought Connell “a humanitarian and a socialist-a man who believes in change, not stagnation,” 68 were delighted with the party’s latest clerical acquisition and with the pleasing prospect of bourgeois respectability he could bestow upon the foundling socialist movement. Connell was an exotic item, like the crimson rhododendrons he gathered in the quiet verdure of Vancouver Island. A slender man with a sallow, brooding countenance, Connell pacified distrustful militants within the party, in the months after his election, with soothing lectures on the life and works of Karl Marx. According to Dorothy Steeves, he drew a warm picture of Marx as a family man, explaining skilfully that Marx’s economic theories were practical applications of Christian principles and “displayed such evidence of thorough study of the subject that the old socialists who came to scoff, stayed to praise, if not to pray.” 69 But Connell’s familiarity with the socialist classics, like his mastery of the mysteries of botany, were inadequate substitutes for the coarse political skills and unflagging energy necessary to lead the C.C.F. through the throes and torments of early childhood. The angular gentleman was a good fellow, with the highest motives and noblest intentions. But he was not a politician. In the House he was no match for Pattullo, who daily lashed and bullied the stunned cleric. Connell dreamt of green fields, petals, pistils and sta­ mens. He scented roses, daisies and chrysanthemums, but had little taste for the cut and thrust of debate, or addressing numerous meetings, or attending to the details of organization. There soon developed a fierce rivalry between Connell and the Winches, father and son, who were both elected to the House while on relief. The Winches were proletarian work­ horses, dedicated party men who, together with Lyle Telford and Sam Guthrie, were largely responsible for building the party in its early days. They were chronic busybodies who dedicated their entire lives, day and night, to the new movement and supplemented their organizational acumen with rustic mannerisms and a flamboyant Marxist rhetoric. It was under­ standable, therefore, that Ernest Winch, his son, and some of their proletarian ilk from the Socialist Party of Canada, were not Connell’s cup of tea. Nor was Connell, for that matter, Winch’s bottle of beer. The differences between Winch and Connell were cultural, ideological and political. Winch was proud of his proletarian origins, his labours as a longshoreman and bricklayer, his endurance of poverty and exploitation. He daily beat his breast and declared himself a proletarian Marxist. To Winch, Connell was an interloper, an ethereal gentleman, a yawning cleric who refused to dirty his hands with organizational work.70 To Connell, Winch was a compulsive busybody, a screaming communist and a represen­

tative of a group within the party which rejected the hierarchical principle and wished to prostrate the leader and M.L.A.s before the mass organiza­ tion. Tensions between Connell on the one hand, and the Winches and their ilk within the mass organization on the other, increased sharply during the spring 1936 legislative session. The occasion for open conflict was a rather florid speech by the elder Winch, who waved his fist, repeated his claim that the C.C.F. would settle for nothing less than outright public ownership, and asserted that the C.C.F. was built upon, and abided by, the principles of Marxian socialism. Winch’s breast beating, so it appeared, had a deleterious affect on Connell who, during the course of the budget debate, informed the House that the C.C.F. stood for scientific socialism, not to be confused with Marxian or other specious brands.71 Connell, in direct reference to Winch’s outburst, declared the C.C.F. to be neither communist nor revolutionary, emphasized the severe limitation of socialist action within the federalprovincial framework, but noted that, within those limitations, many things could be done. He then listed a fourteen point program which included an independent civil service, an independent highways commission, “frankness and openness in government,” honesty in finance, abolition of lobbying, progressive taxation, control of monopolies through a public utilities com­ mission, improved education, and a government monopoly of liquor pro­ duction and distribution. While the Winches glared and sulked, Connell repeated that the C.C.F. was in “no way whatever tied to Marxian social­ ism,” then quoted from the text of the Regina Manifesto to show that democratic political action, rather than revolutionary activity, was the proper means for instituting changes.72 The breach was now in the open and both parties sparred with each other during the months preceding the July 1936, convention. Before the session was over, Harold Winch resigned as Party Whip. Connell presented his case before a public meeting, where he admitted his differences with Winch on the floor of the House, reminded his listeners that the C.C.F. was no longer an academic group, denied that the C.C.F. adhered to “Karl Marxian socialism as stated by Winch,” stressed the gulf with the communists which n° united front could bridge, warned of the constitutional restraints on expropriation, and urged those who did not subscribe to the principles of 1 e Regina Manifesto to leave the party.73 Connell’s opponents did not desert. Instead, they turned out in large numbers to attend the July C.C.F. convention, where they launched a concerted attack on their leader. In his legislative report, Ernest Winch n^heized the lack of co-ordination and direction of the caucus, and alluded in ? ntS occurrin8 during the session “which tend to create the impression e minds of the people that there exists a cleavage in the ranks of the

26 Pillars of Profit

members.” 74 A host of speakers rose to criticize Connell’s leadership, and strong support was given to a series of resolutions favouring the principle of accountability of elected legislative members to the mass organization. A vote of non-confidence in Connell’s leadership failed by 138 to 76.75 The new platform, drawn up by the aroused delegates, bristled with radical planks: the adoption of provincial socialized credit and finance; early state control and operation of the distribution of milk, bread and other foodstuffs, logging, fishing, mining, gas, oil, liquor and insurance; steeply graded income tax and death duties; public housing; active support for volunteer co-operatives “in the process of transition from individual to collective agriculture”; free education from pre-school to adult training; “the establishment of a progressive educational system designed to prepare youth for creative living and for co-operation in a co-operative society.” 76 The new program met with the usual moans and groans from the bour­ geois press, which felt that the creeping phase of British Columbian social­ ism, “with the soft and moderate accents of the cultured Rev. Robert Connell,” was officially ended.77 Yet, as the Financial News observed, the C.C.F. program was “a master of ambiguity” which could be made to cover the most drastic changes or to excuse a later apparent lack of accomplish­ ment.78 To Robert Connell, however, the intent was clear enough. The good reverend, who was accustomed to polite church board and ministerial meetings, lapsed silent during the convention, wincing occasionally as neo­ phyte radicals raised their voices and referred to their clerical leader as comrade. Instead of unburdening himself, venting his theological spleen, calling down the wrath of heaven on the radicals, Connell quietly muttered in his scanty beard-but not for long. After brooding among the daisies for a few weeks following the convention, he sent a letter to the C.C.F. execu­ tive, subsequently released to the newspapers, in which he condemned the party platform and executive, headed by Dr. Telford, all of whom he identified as renegade culprits. He denounced the platform as “totally un­ suitable as a statement of immediate policy for a C.C.F. government,” and maintained that it was calculated “to excite hopes that cannot be fulfilled and so cause disillusionment and disappointment.” 79 Particularly offensive was the socialized finance plank, drawn up by Dr. Telford, which he de­ scribed as “fantastic and impractical.” Connell was further annoyed about the omission of any reference to patronage removal and the failure to emphasize the need for adult education, so essential to “successful co­ operative enterprises.” There were, in addition, a host of other objections and complaints about dealings with the Communist Party, working with an executive which had E.E. Winch as chairman of the organization committee-since he was a “self styled pro-communist”-the attitude of suspicion and mistrust of M.L.A.s expressed in various resolutions passed at the

___

J

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 27

convention, and the assertion, expressed in the resolution of certain clubs that “because I am not ashamed to profess loyalty to God and my King, I am therefore a traitor to the peoples’ cause.” Connell closed his letter by reiterating the necessity of presenting socialist goals to the people “in a sane and wisely considered platform,” keeping them “well within the confines of possible and probable fulfillment.” 80 Connell’s letter was not well received by the provincial executive, which replied with an expression of regret that the renegade reverend had not expressed his views on the floor of the recent convention, accused him of falling victim to “treacherous advice” and reiterated the principle that M.L.A.s and M.P.s were accountable delegates rather than independent representatives: “This is a movement built up by the people,” the reply ran, “by the effort of the people and in the hands of the people control will remain. . . . We have had too many examples in the old parties of the parliamentary leaders acting as political dictators and cracking the whip over the people who elected them.” 81 A provincial council meeting on August 2 expelled Connell from the party together with Jack Price, the street railwayman and M.L.A. from Vancouver-East who had rushed to Connell’s defence.82 Subsequent expulsions and defections within the par­ liamentary group included Robert Blatchford Swailes, representing Delta, and Ernest Bakewell, the chemical engineer and member from Mackenzie, both of whom endorsed the Connell heresy.83 The rupture outside the legislative caucus was not nearly as severe. In the few days following Con­ nell’s expulsion, ten district councils of the C.C.F. rushed to support the executive, while members of Connell’s own club repudiated his position.84 A spate of constituency resolutions in subsequent weeks, supporting the executive, indicated that the expulsion decision did not have a severely disruptive effect on the mass organization.85 For Thomas Dufferin Pattullo and the depressed Liberal Party, the Con­ nell split was a godsend, a magnificent opportunity to recapture the initia­ tive from the C.C.F. The Liberal comeback began, in fact, in June, a month before the C.C.F. convention, when Pattullo attacked, with characteristic vigour, the huge task of fence-mending. Pattullo had been a peripatetic premier, but a good part of his perpetual motion was spent on supplicatory tours to Ottawa. Now, with the Omineca by-election beckoning, Pattullo steered his course inward and cut a wide swath across the province, shaking hands and beckoning, promising and reckoning, opening fairs, addressing Board of Trade meetings, bussing kiddies, promising roads, bridges and other assorted goodies. To speed his saving mission, Pattullo hopped and skipped across the province, to outlying areas in the North, Cariboo and Peace, in an airplane-the first airborne Premier in provincial history. Pattullo’s mad dash and ample promises produced excellent results in Omineca

28 Pillars of Profit

where the Liberal candidate was returned with a two-hundred-vote majority over S. Goodwin of the C.C.F.86 The Omineca victory raised the flagging Liberal hopes and strengthened Pattullo’s hand before the ap­ proaching executive meeting, held in July, which endorsed his leadership and postponed a leadership convention until the next year. Harry Perry, who constantly quarrelled with the Premier, was defeated for the party presidency by Dr. W.J. Knox. The real fight, however, was the Vancouver-Burrard by-election, sche­ duled for September 2, 1936, which shaped up as a two-way fight between the Liberals and the C.C.F. The Liberals nominated J.H. Forester in opposi­ tion to Lyle Telford, the new C.C.F. Party president, who saw a Burrard victory as a springboard to the party leadership. The Tories chose Dr. F.P. Patterson, the new party leader. The Burrard campaign was long and bitter, and the Connell split was a key issue persistently exploited by excited Liberal speakers. The Liberals flooded the campaign with Cabinet ministers and party brass, each of whom was equipped with a copy of Connell’s letter repudiating the C.C.F. program and organization. The Connell letter was the major compaign document in Burrard, read and reread from every platform. Its choicest phrases and strongest adjectives were memorized and strenuously repeated by Liberal orators, including the Premier, who re­ ferred to Connell as a very estimable gentleman drummed out of the C.C.F. for his liberal views.87 The C.C.F., the Premier averred, was run by “an all-powerful inside junta which cuts off the political heads of those who disagree with it. . . . If such a body were in absolute control governmentally in this country it is equally certain that off would go many physical heads.” Mr. Forester was loud in his protestations that the C.C.F. was a gang of communist hoodlums who had roughed up the good Reverend Connell. He appealed to the “home-owning and home-loving members of the constituency who do not want a communist dictatorship.” 88 The Lib­ eral broadside succeeded and Forester was returned with 7,459 votes to 7,072 for Telford.89 The Burrard victory was a major landmark in the recovery of the Liberal Party from its despondent state. The government, facing an Opposition party which had just cannibalized its leader, shifted from a defensive to an offensive posture and no longer saw need to defend itself for nonfulfilment of the promise of work and wages. The counsellors of despair, the propo­ nents of a Liberal-Conservative coalition, were henceforth ignored by twitchy Liberal M.L.A.s. Throughout the autumn session of 1936, which began on October 27, and the spring session of 1937, a new spirit was discernible among the jaunty Grits who lined the government benches. The legislative fare served up by the goverment was meagre enough, and con­ sisted mostly of minor tidbits hardly consistent with the grand vision of

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 29

earlier days. But the economic situation was somewhat improved, and, besides, the people were becoming inured to adverse conditions and cynical about what governments could do to change them. The government ex­ pended further aid to municipalities by authorizing them to refund their debts and by providing relief for social service costs.90 Minor amendments were made to the Workmen’s Compensation Act, while extensive borrow­ ing for public works was authorized in order to raise funds for fencemending, road-building and vote-purchasing. In his budget speech in November 1936, Finance Minister Hart joyfully announced that there had been major recoveries in the lumber, agricultural and fishing industries. Between 1933 and 1936, forestry production increased by 69.2%, agricul­ ture by 30.44%, fisheries by 45%, and tourist trade by 162%.91 For the first nine months of 1936, bank deposits in British Columbia increased by 38% over the corresponding period of 1933. Since 1933, 1,637 new companies had been incorporated with a total authorized capital of $312,044,320. Hart attributed the influx of new capital to assurances by the government that investments would continue to be regarded as a sacred trust. The cherry on the Liberal cake was a statement by Morris W. Wilson, president of the Royal Bank of Canada in Halifax, which Hart repeated with a wan grin, that British Columbia was first among the provinces in Canada’s march back to complete business recovery.92 By the spring of 1937, the sole fly remaining in Pattullo’s ointment was Medicare. The Medicare commission set up by Dr. Weir after the passage of the bill in the spring of 1936, headed by the able Dr. Alan Peebles, did yeoman work during the summer and autumn in constructing the adminis­ trative machinery. But the intensity and commitment of Weir and his staff was more than matched by the fierce bellowing of the lobbyists and their friends within the Liberal caucus and organization, who insisted that the plan not be implemented. The doctors, the druggists and hospital adminis­ trators, all of whom loudly opposed the measure, were supported by delega­ tions of businessmen from the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, the Vancouver Board of Trade, the C.P.R., the B.C. Loggers’ Association and the Mining Association of British Columbia.93 By pressing onward with the Act, by forcing a confrontation with the political medicos and their affluent ilk, Pattullo risked the possibility of alienating a large section of the busi­ ness, professional and possessing classes and driving them into support of the Conservatives, who were beginning to show faint signs of life. By rescinding the bill, however, he faced the worse prospect of antagonizing the lower strata who had flocked to the Liberal camp in the work and wages election of 1933. So Pattullo did the political, the sensible thing. In midFebruary, Weir announced that the operation of the health insurance plan would be deferred indefinitely. Upon dissolving the House on April 15, the

30 Pillars of Profit

Premier decreed a general election for June 1, at which time the people would be afforded a new opportunity to express themselves on the Medicare issue through a referendum. “I’m not going to tell you now what we are going to do about health insurance,” Pattullo harangued a crowd in May, “I don’t know. But we are not going to ram it down everyone’s throat. We will iron out all difficulties.” 94 The Liberal campaign, unlike the crusade of 1933, was noticeably free of grand promises and reform zeal. The Premier and his colleagues fought a sober, traditional battle. They bragged about restoring the credit of the province, creating a semblance of order out of government finances, insur­ ing a stable investment climate, building long roads and toll bridges, ex­ panding welfare benefits, municipal aid, the abolition of the one-per-cent Jones Tax.95 The Premier reminded the voter that he had taken on the federal demon, that the province was on the threshold of a new deal with the dominion authorities, and that only the Liberals had the skill, experi­ ence and determination to adequately represent the province at the ap­ proaching Federal-Provincial Conference destined to be “the most momen­ tous conference Canada has ever witnessed since Confederation.” 96 “There isn’t a doubt about this government going back,” Pattullo assured his gaping supporters, “but I want it perfectly clear that you will make it so overwhelming, so nearly unanimous, that Ottawa and Eastern Canada will know that all British Columbia is behind its Liberal government in its demand for better terms.” 97 Pattullo was not content merely to wage war with the federal Goliath. He hoped, as well, to rouse the martial spirits of British Columbia provincialists against the four thousand desultory residents of the Yukon, half of whom were indigent Indians. In a grand expression of parochial imperial­ ism, Pattullo declared his intention to annex the Yukon, thereby adding 207,000 snowbound acres to the province’s hinterland and extending its borders to the Arctic Ocean. That the Yukon had its own territorial council which opposed annexation, that the local population expressed itself in opposition to joining British Columbia, that there was little real sentiment in southern British Columbia for inheriting the Yukon, that British Co­ lumbia already had a large hinterland to administer at great cost, and that the federal government administered the Yukon at a loss, altogether es­ caped Pattullo’s imagination. A true north man, strong and free, a whitesneakered friend of the sourdoughs, Pattullo liked the idea of pocketing “that immense and magnificent territory,” for a penny and a song.98 The Liberals, once again, faced fragmented opposition. The C.C.F., de­ spite its recent trauma, fought a spirited campaign on a program not dis­ similar from the product of the radical 1936 convention. The socialist election manifesto was drafted by thirty delegates to the provincial council

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 31

meeting on May Day, and included planks favouring the establishment of boards of planning experts to collaborate with government departments in preparing plans for social reconstruction, consultative councils elected from various interest groups to advise the planning boards, government commis­ sions to control public utilities, natural resources and highways, acquisition 0f “value producing” industries, strict supervision of the private enterprise sector, redistribution of the tax burden and support for co-operatives. C.C.F. supporters were instructed to vote in the affirmative on the health plebiscite. There was a notable absence, however, of the controversial “so­ cialized finance and credit” plank which so irked Mr. Connell. The renegade cleric and his friends ran under the banner of the B.C. Constructive Party which was born in the autumn of 1936. Since Connell claimed more legislative supporters than either the rump C.C.F. which counted three supporters,99 or the few disparate Independents, who were Conservatives in disguise, he was chosen by the Speaker of the House as Leader of the Opposition during the remaining two sessions. But there was little Connell did in the intervening months to broaden his base. The new group of independent socialists received the backing of the Commonwealth, a socialist organ edited by W.A. Pritchard, but drew little support from elements of the mass organization. Accordingly, when Connell announced the creation of his new party, based upon the gospel of Regina as pro­ pounded by Rev. Connell, there was no mass defection from the C.C.F. The Constructives, who entered only fourteen candidates in the campaign, fought a quiet, gentlemanly, unobtrusive, Christian battle; as Robert Con­ nell would have it. There were, in addition, two new political groups who pursued Pattullo across the barren campaign trail. Back to spread the ancient wisdom of business economy were the Conservatives, who gathered their disparate forces and wits in preparation for the election. The Tory spirits began to revive after the 1935 general election, in which the local Conservative candidates made a strong showing. Several organizers were put in the field, 8 spate of meetings called and a membership drive launched. The spirit ehind the renewed organization was Dr. F.P. Patterson, a McGill graduate and sPecialist in bone and joint surgery, who had been afforded the singular opportunity of attending to the young Duke of Gloucester’s regal collarone after the young gentleman had slipped off a skittish pony during a polo ^atch in Vancouver.100 Patterson, a friend and admirer of R.B. Bennett, I 0 had influenced his decision to enter politics, headed the British CosU ^ bia Conservative Association for two years before contesting the leader^ dt a party convention in June 1936. The good doctor defeated Herbert Anscomb.- o—hng 266 votes out of 389 cast,101 then hit the campaign trail ln e Vancouver-Burrard by-election, mouthing conventional conser-

32 Pillars of Profit

vative wisdom about economy, efficiency and the restoration of free enter­ prise. The Conservative program, announced in late April 1937, was designed to convince the electors that British Columbia, under Pattullo’s socialized capitalist regime, was “visibly over-governed.” The Tories called for a reduction in the size of the legislature and cabinet, establishment of a non-political highways commission and public utilities commission, a health insurance program “actuarily sound” and economy of administra­ tion.102 “You have had three and a half years of costly experimenting with your affairs,” Patterson told T.G. Norris’s nomination convention, “of high-priced brain trusters and scientific theorists, and of narrow-minded demagogues.103 The Liberals, he averred, had handed the province over to an army of Ph.D.s and B.Sc.s, a brain trust bureaucracy of “so-called experts enlisted from far and wide to tinker with the lives and future of the citizens of British Columbia.” The Victoria Times correctly noted that, with the exception of Herbert Anscomb, whose ideas came out of the Ark, the Tories were devoid of any novel thoughts: “The only wisdom they have shown is not to promise anything new, and that was because they didn’t know what to promise.” 104 The same could not be said for the erstwhile representatives of the British Columbia Social Credit League, who fielded fifteen candidates for the cam­ paign. The Socred candidacies were the culmination of five years of prepara­ tory educational work carried out by disparate coteries of monetary feti­ shists. The British Columbia Social Credit movement began in 1932, in a cluttered, stuffy room in the Shelly Building, owned by the Vancouver Sun, where gathered Henry Torey and William Rose, both Sun reporters, and William A. Tutte, an accomplished faddist and fetishist, who earnestly studied the writings of Major Douglas. The Torey-Tutte bund, which called itself the Douglas Social Credit Group, British Columbia Section, limited itself during the next few years to educational work and sponsored forums, meetings and study groups across the province. Organizational work was inspired, in 1934 and 1935, by the Socred explosion in neighbouring Alberta and by the visit to the province of renowned Socred personages. In March 1934, Major C.H. Douglas, who spoke, according to the Province, “in the deep intonations of a cultured Briton,” 105 appeared at a dinner meeting at the Hotel Vancouver, attended by one thousand citizens, and sponsored by the Kiwanis Club, at which he described the system known as Douglas Social Credit. The following year, Vancouver was blessed with the visitation of another Socred priest, the Very Rev. Dr. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury and former geologic and hydrology engineer, who pronounced Social Credit, from the majestic heights of his room at the Hotel Vancouver “a tide-an oncoming tide-which is slowly and irresistibly advanC'

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 33

ing. . . ” 106 “I am a socialist at heart,” the green Dean protested, “a liberal with my head and a conservative in my bones. And Social Credit appeals to my heart, head and bones.” 107 Contact with the Social Credit saints, together with the remarkable sweep to power of their spiritual brethern from the Alberta foothills, inspired the local devotees to further organiza­ tion with a view to participating in electoral politics. In the spring of 1936, the Douglas Group changed its name to the Social Credit League of British Columbia, and issued a manifesto which declared the goals of the movement to be political power as well as economic reform. The program denounced communism, fascism, dictatorship, the socialization of economic activities, credit monopoly of international finances, and loudly favoured the con­ sumer, producer, taxpayer, the profit system, the institution of private property.108 Poverty, unemployment and idle industry were laid at the door of the malfunctioning monetary system and could be eliminated by the cessation of deficit financing and long term borrowing for public works, and by the restoration of easy credit financed on a pay-as-you-go plan.109 The war cry of the local monetary savages echoed across the mountains and, in September 1936, just a few months after the formation of the new league, there galloped into Vancouver Mr. William Aberhart, who offered a warm, helping hand to the local politicos in their projected assault on the Pattullo fortress. Aberhart had paid an earlier secret visit to Vancouver in July, when he met with several Socred supporters who had fallen out with the league, and urged them to organize a local adjunct of the Alberta movement.110 Aberhart’s autumn visitation was missionary in intent. He addressed a series of seven meetings, five in Vancouver and two in Victoria, where he strongly urged the formation of neighbourhood Social Credit Groups across the province. He attended as well a number of private meetings where he plotted, with a few local dissidents, to steal the move­ ment from the Douglasites by creating a dual organization affiliated with, and dominated by, the Alberta movement. Aberhart’s visit was followed by a series of conferences in Edmonton, between a group of British Columbia Socreds and Alberta government members, at which the Coast delegates were promised co-operation and aid “ . . . to bring about a complete co-ordination of the plans of all the various interests striving to affect a United Social Credit Party of the Province of British Columbia. . . . ” n i The upshot of these deliberations was the formation of an organization known as the British Columbia Social Credit Union, designed to act as a “service office of Social Credit in British Columbia,” and to “act under Aberhart’s direction and leadership.” 112 Appropriately enough, the chair­ man of the Board of Directors of the new organization was William Aber­ hart, while his “designated personal secretary” was John Loveseth, who acknowledged Aberhart as “leader of the movement and . . . director of

34 Pillars of Profit

its principles and policies.” 113 Loveseth offered co-operation with the other Socred organization, expressed his intention to run candidates in every riding in the approaching provincial election and specified that nominated candidates must be approved by a board of Social Credit technical experts within the constituency as well as by the provincial board. The Aberhart putsch, however, was a fleeting affair. The new group was soon torn by dissension. A Mr. Lund, a member of the advisory board appointed by Aberhart, quickly resigned and denounced the Alberta sage as a Mussolini who sought to capture the movement for his own purposes. Equally incensed was the recording secretary, a Mrs. M. Bower Hopkinson, who wept that the Alberta Mussolini had not seen fit to incorporate the “Canadian Plan,” a silly document drawn up by herself and a group of friends, into the Socred program.114 She felt that if the Canadian Plan was good enough for the Duke of Windsor, who had been sent a copy which he “approved in principle,” and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was also pleased to receive a copy, it should have been good enough for Mr. Aber­ hart. Besides, the good lady was displeased with Aberhart’s tardiness in paying wages and sued the Alberta premier for five hundred dollars in back pay.115 More important, however, was the rivalry between the Aberhart group, or what was left of it, and the Douglasites, organized in the British Co­ lumbia Social Credit League, who refused either to truck or trade with the new body. “Oh, there is only one kind of Social Credit,” the League Secre­ tary, J.S. Adam, declared, “it’s all set out in the Douglas book.” 116 The Douglasites were first in the electoral field and announced, in late Novem­ ber, a slate of candidates for the approaching provincial election. Their announcement was quickly followed by the resignation of Loveseth, who wept over the League’s failure to co-operate and ordered “in the name of Aberhart” the dissolution of the British Columbia Social Credit Union for the sake of unity in the political field. The League candidates, a mixed bag of special pleaders, civil engineers, retired police magistrates and British Israelites, added a slight exotic touch to an otherwise mundane election which resulted in a new mandate for the Pattullo Liberals. The government returned thirty-one candidates, includ­ ing the entire Cabinet. The Conservatives elected eight and the C.C.F. seven. Thomas Uphill and R. W. Bruhn were returned as Independents. The health insurance referendum won by a four-to-three margin.117 For Pattullo, this was a sweet but hard-earned victory. Just a year earlier, his party lay weak and dormant, in imminent danger of decimation by a swiftly growing and exuberant socialist party. But the Connell split, together with the first gleanings of economic recovery, and the assured personal leadership of the Premier, hugely aided the government, which

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 35

successfully flogged the traditional “better terms” and stable government issues. Pattullo had achieved the impossible; a renewed mandate during the depression. “The government’s victory,” the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote, “was an achievement never seen since the depression set in, for it is the first of the era to survive at the polls. . . . ” 118 For all of his perpetual motion and weird inaction, Pattullo knew, like his predecessor and mentor, John Oliver, the art of muddle, of building a viable majority from a scatter­ ing of disparate local interests and class elements. For the C.C.F., the Constructives and the neophyte Socreds, the 1937 election was a sad event. The fifteen Social Credit candidates, despite the aid tendered by J.H. Blackmore, the national party leader, and other federal M.P.s, managed to trail the list in virtually every constituency and gained no more than one per cent of the popular vote. The Constructives were equally ineffectual and none of their fourteen candidates made a strong showing. They gained less than four per cent of the popular vote. Robert Connell ran eighth on the list in Victoria. The C.C.F. leaders were not pleased with the results. The socialists retained five seats, lost their Victoria and Mackenzie representation, but made up their losses by electing Colin Cameron and Guthrie on Vancouver Island. The party popular vote dropped to 28.3% of the total votes cast. The Connell split had plainly hurt the socialists, not by stealing members and wrecking the organization, but through adverse publicity among wayward voters swayed by fierce Liberal propaganda. Perhaps the major result of the election was the recovery of the Conserva­ tive party, which re-established its support in several traditional Tory con­ stituencies which had deserted the party cause in the 1933 election. The Tories elbowed their way back into the cities by capturing the two Point Grey seats in Vancouver and returning two candidates in Victoria, and they regained the fringe farm areas of Dewdney, Esquimau and the Islands. In the popular vote, they equalled the C.C.F. with 28.3%. Had the Conservative recovery been balanced by a C.C.F. surge, then British Columbia probably would have been blessed with minority rule, possibly a socialist minority government. Pattullo just barely saved the day by steering the middle course, drawing from disparate class elements, rural and urban. The viability of the Liberal class and regional coalition depended upon successful intrusions into the Conservative vote, which derived from farm and upper class areas, and the C.C.F., which flourished in working class constituencies. In 1933, the Liberals were aided by the utter collapse of the Conservative organization which threw the rural and affluent voters into the arms of Pattullo. In 1937, however, the Conservatives were recov­ ered and the Liberal hold on the upper class areas of Victoria and Van­ couver, and the fringe farm areas, also reasonably affluent, was substantially

' 36 Pillars of Profit

weakened; a change reflected in the decline of the Liberal popular vote to 36.98%.119 Pattullo endured because, on this occasion, the C.C.F. suffered from organizational disruption, though not nearly as severe as the Conser­ vative debacle of 1933. The hegemony of the Pattullo position rested on twin pillars. The first was the ideology of socialized capitalism which inte­ grated, in the short run, the disparate class needs of change and order; the working classes wished change and the upper classes order. Secondly, it was predicated on the ability of the Liberal Party to disarm either one of the two opposition parties before an election. This the Liberals successfully achieved in both the 1933 and 1937 elections. But for nervous, anxious, twitchy Liberals, the road ahead looked rough and tough. A renewed surge of C.C.F. support, together with a holding of Conservative strength, pre­ saged a collapse of the Pattullo coalition. Such gloomy considerations, which filled the sleepless nights of unionists like Rolf Bruhn, were foreign to the mind of Pattullo, a jaunty optimist who liked to play his elections one at a time. Attired in a dark semi-formal coat with natty grey trousers, a purple flower in his lapel, Pattullo was his usual, dapper, confident self at the Kamloops Liberal convention of August 1938. The convention was a love feast. Gone was the acrimony of the fateful years following the work-and-wages election, the quarrel over the New Westmin­ ster bridge, the tug of war over Medicare, and the doom and gloom which seized the party before the Burrard by-election. If there had been any doubts about Pattullo’s leadership, they had long disappeared in the wake of the recent victory. “It is as clear as crystal even to a newcomer,” Elmore Philpott observed, “that the Liberals are extremely well satisfied with their leader.” 120 Pattullo, in his account of the government’s stewardship, dis­ pensed with high eloquence and pretty oratory. Firmly in control, he chose to speak bluntly, without the frills. “The Premier talks to his associates like a Dutch Uncle,” Philpott continued, “he makes not the slightest attempt at oratory. There is little attempt to polish sentences or turn neat phrases. Yet the meaning is clear beyond all manner of a doubt. . . . He has obviously established for himself somewhat of the same position that Sir James Whitney used to occupy with the Ontario Conservatives. They re­ garded his bluntness as a fatherly privilege.” 121 The convention mood was conservative and ritualistic. The Premier spoke about the projected Alaska Highway, the large-scale road-building program, oil drilling in the Peace River, the union of British Columbia, the Yukon and part of the North West Territories into one province, and the difficulties involved in institut­ ing health insurance. The delegates nodded, applauded and dutifully passed a spate of resolutions supporting the Alaska Highway project, the prohibi­ tion of oriental immigration, the repatriation of orientals who came to Canada illegally, and sundry other matters.122 “Work and wages,” the

Socialized Capitalism: 1934-1937 37

grand old formula was “finally buried . . . without a murmur of regret, without a decent pause for mourning.” 123 The sole murmurs audible at the meeting were little hymns of praise for the Premier, comments on how well he looked, how dandy were his clothes, how justly he ruled his northern possessions. All of this made Pattullo feel confident and expansive. “Even if it sounds egotistical, I tell you this,” he waved a stubby finger at R.A. Farquarson of the Globe and Mail, “what I say goes in this province.” 124

CHAPTER II

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941

“Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being no people to speak of . . . except Coodle and Doodle, the country has been without a government.” Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.

For all of the ritualistic adulation evident at the Liberal Convention of August 1938, there existed, among not a few of the delegates, a certain queezy feeling about the projected direction of the new government. The burial of work and wages was a happy event for the company men and their political agents, the “tight little inside group,” 1 which had long pressed the government to abandon experimentation. Pattullo’s announcement after the election that the health insurance program would not be instituted until the Royal Commission on federal-provincial relations was completed, the rebuff of George Weir, who threatened to quit the Cabinet, and the resigna­ tion of his two able administrators, Dr. Alan Peebles and Howard Cassidy, were heralded by the medical politicos and their company friends as a return to sanity. But Pattullo, for all of his wandering and backtracking, had not abandoned his ideology of “socialized capitalism” of which “work and wages” represented merely the first phase. The work and wage phase of the new collectivism attempted, through extensive government borrow­ ing and spending, to return purchasing power to the people, relieve the misery of unemployment, and aid the recovery of private enterprise. To Pattullo’s mind, the formula was unrealizable without extensive federal aid and a redefinition of the federal relationship; an event which awaited the deliberations of the Royal Commission. “This government are (sic) not going to put into effect a measure that will not work out as intended,” he answered the C.C.F. during a Medicare debate; “the Rowell Commission is not an excuse, but it is a reason for not doing a number of things.” 2 Whether the Rowell Commission was an excuse or a reason or both mat­ tered little, however, to the Premier in his determination to pursue the second phase of the program of socialized capitalism which involved price control through government regulation of key industries in the private 38

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 39

sector. The first phase, stultified by 1935, involved an attempt to raise mass purchasing power through government borrowing and spending, money management and other devices.3 The second phase, embarked upon in the autumn of 1937, sought to raise the income of the consumer, not by pump­ ing out government money, but through the reduction of the cost of goods by attacking the forces which raised prices. Socialized capitalism, in the years following the 1937 election, meant the regulation, or, if circumstances dictated, the breaking up, of certain key monopolies.4 Pattullo’s skirmishing with the company lords began after the passage of two regulatory bills during the 1937 and 1938 sessions of the Legislature. The Coal and Petroleum Control Board Act, enacted during the autumn session of 1937, followed the recommendations of the report of the Honou­ rable M.A. Macdonald, head of a Royal Commission which inquired, for over two years, into monopoly conditions and price setting in the coal and petroleum industries.5 Dr. A.W. Carrothers of the Department of Econom­ ics at the University of British Columbia was appointed a one man board charged with administering the Act which empowered the board to fix maximum and minimum prices, issue and recall licences and regulate all aspects of the industry. The second bill passed the next session, creating a three-man Utility Commission with authority to rule on how much people should pay for electric lights, transportation, water, telegraphs and tele­ phones. During the debate on both bills, the Premier went out of his way to dispel the fears of businessmen, to ensure them that he meant no harm, to request co-operation, and to emphasize that he was merely trying to deal with a long standing problem.6 “We’re not out to fight the gasoline compa­ nies,” Pattullo announced during the debate on the Petroleum Board, “nor, for that matter, are we out to fight the British Columbia Electric or any other utility company in our public utilities legislation . . . but we are out to see that the people who are served by these businesses get their products at a fair price.” 7 Such, indeed, were the good intentions of Dr. Carrothers who took his new job as .fuel czar very seriously. On October 1, 1938, the government passed an Order-in-Council, on the recommendation of Dr. Carrothers, requiring that gasoline be sold at prices from three to six cents a gallon lower than the prevailing prices for standard fuel.8 Four days later, the gasoline interests obtained an injunction restraining the government from putting the reduction into effect. A fierce battle ensued which continued for over two years. A lower court decision invalidated the petroleum regulatory act, ruling that it fell within the federal jurisdiction over trade and commerce, and therefore was ultra vires of the provincial Legislature. The government then amended the Act, and appealed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal which reversed the

40 Pillars of Profit

lower court ruling.9 The companies, represented by J.W. deB. Farris, re­ sponded with a further appeal, to the Supreme Court of Canada, which unanimously upheld the validity of the legislation. The company men re­ sponded with guerrilla tactics, refusing “to sell gas except to such as they themselves might determine essential services.” 10 Pattullo countered with special legislation providing for the creation of a government trading corpo­ ration empowered with the right to explore, sell and distribute gasoline in competition with private enterprise.11 A further measure empowered the government to step in at distribution outlets, at times of emergency when the companies refused to deliver their goods, “and see that such gasoline as is on hand follows the usual channels until other arrangements are made.” 12 The government was granted the power, under the new measures, to buy up the shares of domestic or foreign gas companies. Private compa­ nies were denied exploration rights in the Peace River area which was reserved as an exclusive domain for government exploration. Pattullo’s skirmish with the fuel barons revived the hostilities of sections of the business community which had long labelled the Premier a dangerous experimenter. The influential Financial Post hailed the regulatory legisla­ tion as the beginning of “a new era of regimentation” in which the Premier and his colleagues appeared to be “definitely committed to a program of more rigid control over business and industry.” 13 It reported that uncer­ tainties about “how far the Government will go were causing businessmen in the province no end of worries.” The same journal maintained that the tax load on industry, which supported the government’s social welfare program, was pricing British Columbia primary produces out of world markets. Leading company men, in Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce, were incensed at the new regulatory shift and nodded their heads in unison when H.R. MacMillan, during an address to the Vancouver Board of Trade, charged that “political control of the capitalistic system” was driving capital from British Columbia.14 MacMillan observed that “capitalists felt a little safer outside British Columbia with their capital,” and that the province was “governed by men without very much considera­ tion for economic foundation.” The business editor of the Province wrote in May 1940, after the passage of the new gasoline legislation, that “invest­ ment houses have hoisted alarm signals” and predicted that John Hart would encounter difficulties in his refinancing operations since “the money markets may not be so responsive as in the past now that the government has definitely challenged the rights of private trade and industry.” 15 Mr. S.G. Blaylock, president and managing director of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company, expressed his alarm over the new legislation in a letter to Pattullo in which he confessed, “One of our main fears . . . is the reaction to such legislation . . . and the impetus given thereby to the

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 41

platform of the C.C.F., the Socialists and the Communists. . . . ” 16 Pattullo, for his part, was incensed at the insolence of the fuel barons and their friends who interfered, through the courts, boycotts and incendiary editorials, with his new program of “regulated competition.” 17 When the editor of the Financial Post accused Pattullo of aping Roosevelt with his Little New Deal, the Premier replied with a short note expressing his admiration for Roosevelt who was intelligent enough to adopt policies which he, Pattullo, while Leader of the Opposition,18 had enunciated sev­ eral years before Roosevelt became President. Shortly before passing the new fuel regulations in May 1940, Pattullo wrote to J.L. Rolston about “the dependence of the public upon a powerful and essential industry which insists upon being a law unto itself.” 19 He hoped the government would strike it rich in its Peace River oil explorations “ . . . so that this part of the country, and I hope other parts of the country, will not be dependent upon foreign gasoline in the hands of insolent companies such as is the situation today. . . . ” 20 The Premier assured the alarmed Mr. Blaylock that the government was “individualistic,” and that he was personally “individualistic,” but “no industry merely because it is powerful and has a monopoly, is going to be able to place itself outside the law of the land, and I hope that no industry in this province will ever again be so unpatriotic and foolish as to go on strike.” 21 The fuel strike was “a very bad example to labour and an insult to constituted authority.” The Premier was strongly supported in his joust with the oil giants by George Weir and George Pearson, who referred to the oil industry as a “great octopus” which defied the laws of the province.22 Pattullo’s marginal skirmishing was no substitute, however, for a con­ certed attack on the corporate giants who controlled the life chances of most British Columbians. The new government policy was neither clearly ar­ ticulated nor fiercely pursued; it involved no grand assault on the company fortress and no attempt to mobilize mass efforts in a broad attack on the companies. Instead, what occurred were piecemeal skirmishes with selected industries which satisfied neither the labour movement and the socialists, who wished a wide frontal attack, nor the business classes and conservative supporters, who preferred that Pattullo remove his nose from the business world. As the decade came to an end, it was apparent that Pattullo was in danger of being outflanked on the right by the Conservative Party, which seemed more alive than ever; and on the left, by the C.C.F. which was rapidly solving its organizational problems and broadening its support base. The Conservatives, British Columbia’s most consistent and principled party, greatly enjoyed their restored status as the Official Opposition. The sudden death of Dr. Patterson, and their subsequent defeat in the Dewdney by-election, momentarily eliminated the Conservatives’ slender majority

42 Pillars of Profit

over the C.C.F. But the return to the fold of Rolf Bruhn, the maverick Independent, who announced his atonement and repentance after the 1938 convention, preserved the Tory majority. The new party leader was Royal Lethington Maitland, a Vancouver lawyer and former Minister without Portfolio in the Tolmie government, who possessed, in the words of Bruce Hutchison, a remarkable “capacity for putting passion into a platitude.” 23 Maitland defeated Herbert Anscomb by sixteen votes out of the 522 cast.24 The war, the depression, the marches of the unemployed, and the world crisis, little affected the party’s platform which included such stale residues of bygone days as control of oriental immigration, franchise restric­ tion of the Japanese, elimination of waste and extravagance, removal of the civil service from political control, revisions of mining laws to assist all legitimate mining ventures, and an independent highways commission.25 Maitland and friends, so it appeared, were as immune to the late conversion of R.B. Bennett as they were to the experimental “socialized capitalism” of Pattullo. Yet, to the businessmen perturbed by Pattullo’s dangerous ex­ perimentation, the Conservatives, who prescribed clean, economical, effi­ cient government, free of Liberal frills and socialist chills, seemed more attractive than ever. And, with the war approaching, the Conservatives became the true imperial party, the loyalists, determined to defend Empire, Crown and country from the barbarian hordes. More ominous than the Conservative obstinacy was the C.C.F. recovery. The Connell split traumatized the party but, in the years following the 1937 election, great strides were made in healing the wounds, solidifying the organization, and communicating with an electorate radicalized by de­ pressed pre-war conditions. By June 1939, the thorny leadership question was satisfactorily resolved when Harold Winch, just thirty-two years of age, was elected leader by an overwhelming majority at a party convention. There had developed, following the 1937 election, a severe rivalry between Winch and Telford for the leadership. Winch was elected “chairman” of the caucus shortly before the fifth annual convention held in July 1937, and firmly established himself as a forceful and competent legislator. At the convention, however, the House members decided, over Telford’s wild objections, against the appointment of a House leader “as tending to the detriment of the movement,” 26 since it would “give the individual an undue prominence and a sense of importance to which they are not entitled.” In the meantime, Telford steadily lost ground in his struggle for party support within the caucus and mass organization. The good doctor’s reputation was weakened by the sad fate of his “Plenty For All” Products Limited, a co-operative selling agency founded by Telford to supply groceries to the poor people of the province at discount prices. All was proceeding well with the new scheme until Mrs. Elwood Dunbar, a Burnaby housewife, collapsed

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 43

and died of poisoning after eating biscuits made with “Plenty For All” baking powder. Telford’s scheme collapsed. Equally discomforting to the doctor was his repudiation by the entire caucus during the 1938 legislative session after a House committee swiftly exonerated the government of charges of graft and corruption in the construction of the New Westminster bridge-allegations which Telford had made upon hearsay and miniscule evidence.27 The bridge incident impressed upon the caucus the need for greater discipline, and a recommendation was made at the 1939 convention, by six of the seven caucus members, supporting Winch as party leader. Winch was elected, fifty-six to eleven. Telford meanwhile removed himself entirely from the candidacy by contesting and winning the mayoralty of Vancouver in January 1939. Since the party constitution forbade a member from holding two elective posts, Telford resigned from the C.C.F.28 The 1939 C.C.F. convention resolved not merely the painful and long­ standing leadership question: it resulted, as well, in a strengthening of the power and independence of the parliamentary group within the party. A proposal that elected representatives should devote not less than six months a year to organization work, or contribute twenty-five per cent of their salary in lieu of such service, was easily defeated.29 Given equally short shrift was a resolution excluding the M.L.A.s from sitting on the execu­ tive.30 Resolutions were passed providing for the hiring of a paid secretarytreasurer by the provincial council, rescinding an earlier regulation that limited party candidacies in general elections to persons who had been in the movement a year or more, and removing the two-year restriction on executive officers.31 The net effect of these resolutions was to traditionalize the organization, strengthen the hand of the executive and M.L.A.s and rebuff the populist militants who wished, in the words of Telford, to “tram­ ple and drag in the dirt” the legislative representatives.32 Commenting on the convention, the Sun shrewdly noted that the C.C.F. had placed its house in order and chosen an able leader to steer “a middle course between right and left.” 33 “The C.C.F. seems to be in good hands,” the Sun concluded, “it would be the greatest mistake of their lives for old-line parties to disre­ gard its strength and assume that it is on the wane.” 34 The growing support for the C.C.F. was especially apparent among unionists disaffected with the government’s failure to institute Medicare and provide work and wages. Unemployment slowly declined until 1937 when a severe setback, which continued throughout 1938, resulted in a sharp increase in the jobless. Pattullo, to be sure, was not unmindful of the labour interest and tossed some choice tidbits in labour’s direction. Amendments were made during the 1938 session providing for increased widow’s allow­ ances and higher benefits under the Workmen’s Compensation Act.35 When prominent labour leaders cursed the government for the passage in

44 Pillars of Profit

1937 of the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which restricted collective bargaining to committees of plant employees rather than union representatives, the government responded with an amendment which provided that employee representatives in the bargaining process need not be themselves employees, thus permitting union leaders to represent em­ ployees before conciliation boards.36 Yet, for all of these conciliatory ges­ tures, there developed a powerful independence among the new C.I.O. unionists who feverishly organized among the lumber workers, miners, fishermen and other groups. The credibility of Liberal-love-labour profes­ sions was severely weakened during the bitter Blubber Bay dispute in 1938, the continuation of an earlier conflict involving lime workers organized in the I.W.A.37 The strike was replete with violence and terrorism perpetrated by company hirelings acting in consort with provincial police officers. Grant MacNeil, the C.C.F. M.P. and Colin Cameron, M.L.A., were both bullied and hounded by local police officers who intimidated the workers, assisted scabs and arrested strikers for unlawful assembly.38 A more serious dispute involved the relief workers who trekked into Vancouver and Victoria throughout 1937 and 1938 after the government began to close relief project camps and curtail relief loans to municipalities. When the provincial gov­ ernment ordered an end to relief for all prairie migrants and the Vancouver municipal authorities banned begging, the men responded by invading the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Georgia Hotel and the Post Office, all in the heart of the city. The Georgia Hotel was shortly evacuated after an offer of relief vouchers worth five hundred dollars. The Art Gallery was cleared some five weeks later with the aid of Harold Winch, whose personal inter­ vention was critical in preventing violence. The Post Office occupation, however, did not end easily. The workers were flushed out after an assault by a contingent of mounted police who aided their passage into the streets with tear gas and clubbing. Thirty-nine persons were injured, including five policemen, and twenty-two arrests were made.39 The Blubber Bay and Vancouver sit-ins did not involve a great number of workers. But they were ugly confrontations which commanded wide sympathy from fellow unionists and labour supporters and severely da­ maged Liberal credibility among workingmen. Pattullo’s stubborn insist­ ence that relief was a federal matter and that, in any event, no aid would be offered to alien transients, was hardly calculated to win the hearts and loyalty of workers, most of whom were, or had been, immigrants. Bruce Hutchison, no enemy of the Pattullo government, described the first week of the sit-ins as “the blackest week in the history of the Pattullo Govern­ ment.” 40 In the waning years of the depression, the union movement gained a new lease on life and began to make strong inroads among the unem­ ployed. By the end of the decade, unionism had been re-established in all

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 45

of the major industries, the proportion of the male labour force unionized increasing from twelve per cent in 1929 to more than eighteen per cent in 1940, the highest proportion ever.41 The chief political beneficiaries of the labour explosion, aside from the communists who played a key organiza­ tional role in the new unionism, was the C.C.F., which included among its elected representatives men like Winch, MacNeil and Colin Cameron who had fought the labour fight long and hard, inside and outside the Houses of Parliament. Threatened by disaffection on both the right and the left, from business­ men and workingmen, Pattullo continued, in the early months of the 1940’s, his assault on the federal fortress. To the class conscious and divisive sentiments of “selfish interests,” businessmen and unionists, Pattullo coun­ terpoised the unitary ideology of provincialism which assumed a common local interest against a hostile external authority. Provincialism was an important application of Pattullo’s ideology of socialized capitalism, involv­ ing, as it did, the expansion of local revenue sources, thereby enabling the local government to redistribute benefits and aid industrial growth. Pattul­ lo’s quarrel with the federal authorities had stalemated by 1937, and awaited the outcome of the Rowell-Sirois Commission which promised a fundamental redefinition of the federal-provincial system. In its brief to the Commission, the provincial government presented a forceful case for better terms based upon the traditional assessment of British Columbia’s excep­ tional needs.42 The Dominion government was requested to agree to as­ sume entire responsibility for relief, to aid the province in easing its debt, to an adjustment of income tax rights in favour of the province, to allow the province-wide authority to raise revenues in any manner found neces­ sary, to absorb the P.G.E. in the national railway system, to pay all costs of old age pensions and mothers’ allowances, to make grants in aid to the province for health and welfare services, to pay for vocational training, to further adjust the tariff and freight rates to aid local interests, and to enforce oriental exclusion and repatriation.43 However loud and clear may have been Pattullo’s protestations, they met with a dull response from the local populace. British Columbians, workers and businessmen, socialists and Tories, were not disposed, in the dying years of the 1930’s, after endless spats between the two levels of government, Wlth national participation in a great war imminent, to nod and warm to Jaded provincialist planks. If there was any consensus in British Columbia at the turn of the decade it revolved around Canada’s sacred war mission, which implied a national patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice local claims to the larger national interest. Boards of Trade, Chambers of Com®*erce> trade unions, Tories and socialists, however much they differed in e'r motives, specifics and ultimate goals, were agreed on the necessity of

'

46 Pillars of Profit

greater centralization and earnestly pressed their views before the Royal Commission.44 The government brief was a lonely document whose spirit and program in no way echoed the outlooks and policies of the groups Pattullo hoped to placate. To the sundry parvenu patriots, the real test of Pattullo’s loyalty was his performance at the Federal-Provincial Conference, called for January 1941, to consider the recommendations of the Rowell-Sirois report. Pattullo played coy during the early days of the autumn 1940 session of the local legislature when he announced to the House that he would attend the conference with an open mind and heart, feeling free to work out a satisfac­ tory compromise agreement with the federal authorities.45 When pressed further, however, Pattullo repeated the provincial rights argument ex­ pressed in the government’s brief to the commission,46 and vowed that he would never allow British Columbia to be “ham-strung or hog-tied” by a powerful central government.47 Pattullo warned that he was not prepared to accept the recommendations of the Rowell-Sirois report "in toto as suitably applicable to British Columbia,” and he felt that the war had changed the very conditions which the report had originally examined. He also strongly objected to Mackenzie King’s opinion that the adoption of the report was essential to the war effort. Pattullo’s views were echoed by other Cabinet ministers, including George Weir, who insisted during the budget debate that the adoption of the commission’s report would involve a drastic curtailment in social services.48 Pattullo’s swaggering provincialism was notably in evidence at the Janu­ ary conference when he joined with William Aberhart and Mitchell Hep­ burn in a petulant assault on the conference agenda and the commission report. Pattullo took particular objection to the so-called “Plan One” of the report, favoured by the federal government, which provided for the assump­ tion by the federal government of responsibility for unemployment and provincial debts, payment of an annual national adjustment grant to the provinces and the guarantees, if approved by a proposed financial commis­ sion, of all future provincial and municipal borrowings.49 In return, the provinces were asked to surrender their, rights to personal and corporation income taxes and succession duties. According to Pattullo, “Plan One” in particular, and the commission report in general, assumed that “the prov­ inces must be curbed,” and that the central authority was the instrument to do the curbing.50 Pattullo felt that the adoption of the recommendations by the conference would result in the end of provincial “independence to pursue policies developmental in manner” and suggested that the wise thing to do was “to get on with the war and postpone so far reaching and contentious a problem until after the war.” 51 Pattullo followed this cold declaration, which echoed the views of Aberhart and Hepburn, with stub-

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 47

born haggling over the conference agenda, drawn up by King, which in­ cluded a discussion in committee of the various aspects of the hateful “Plan One.” The three musketeers remained adamant in their refusal to abide by the agenda and insisted that the broader program, which ignored “Plan One,” be substituted. The result was a deadlock which ended when “the Prime Minister on behalf of the Dominion closed the conference in a friendly spirit.” 52 Less amiable were the spirits of the provincial Boards of Trade, Cham­ bers of Commerce, socialists, Tories and acerbic editorialists of various political colourations, who wildly pummelled and cudgelled the Premier after the conference closed. In less stressing times, Pattullo’s obstinacy would have been viewed as a bold expression of local patriotism, a princi­ pled defence of the rights of the spoilt child of confederation. But the war, the wave of national patriotism, the disillusionment which followed a decade of intergovernmental quarrelling amidst vast unemployment, had changed attitudes. Pattullo had stepped on many toes, offended many inter­ est groups, including former friendly ones, during his erratic pursuit of the goal of socialized capitalism. Now that he had overstepped the bounds of parochialism and behaved like a petty obstructionist, the way was open for a common assault on the Premier, a vast venting of the public spleen. And it came from every side. The Colonist and Province, traditional Tory ene­ mies, devoted numerous editorials to attacking Pattullo’s immoral conduct at the conference and his rigid attitude toward the report.53 Pattullo’s assertion that British Columbia was in “a category by itself,” a very ordi­ nary expression of traditional claims of British Columbia exceptionalism which would have been lauded at other times, was quoted and requoted as evidence of Pattullo’s petulant provincialism.54 When Harold Winch warned a junior Board of Trade luncheon that British Columbians would have to change their attitudes and “look at things from the standpoint of Canada first and British Columbia second,” the Province applauded a tradi­ tional socialist enemy, whom it had formerly called a dangerous commu­ nist, and pronounced him a local patriot. “In that one luncheon speech,” the Province editorialized, “there was more statesmanship, there was more broad Canadianism than all of the pronouncements of Mr. Pattullo to the conference and in all of the speeches of justification made by the Premier and his colleagues since their return.” 55 Equally hostile was the Liberal press. Both the Times and the Sun, erratic supporters at the best of times, accused the Premier of grave stupidity in refusing to abide by the agenda drawn up for the conference. The Times demanded an immediate election after the Premier’s return, in order to test his right to continue in office.56 The press tirade was complemented by a broad assault from the acquisi­ tive gentlemen assembled in Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce,

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who had made strong representation to the commission hearings in favour of greater federal tax powers. Businessmen saw the report as an opportunity to lighten their taxes, standardize their tax loads, and remove cumbersome double taxation. In the weeks following his return, Pattullo was flooded with resolutions and telegrams from trade associations which condemned his stand at the conference. The Premier, never one to avoid a scuffle, replied in kind, condemning the assault as an ugly conspiracy between the centralizers and the pluto­ crats. His local opponents, he averred, were motivated not by patriotism, but by selfish group interests, the same egotism he had encountered in his struggle with the oil companies. “The reason for the intense feeling exhib­ ited is not hard to discover,” he told a home town audience in Prince Rupert, “apart from antagonism to myself it is clear that certain interests hope, under the proposed plan, to push taxes off themselves upon other shoulders, and there is hope also that the value of bonds now outstanding, which are at a heavy discount, will be increased.” 57 To Pattullo, the inter­ ested plutocrats formed one wing of the centralizers; the other consisted of the socialists who wished to concentrate power in the central authority unresponsive to local interests. Pattullo was convinced he headed the patri­ otic party which defended the interests of British Columbians against the combined attack of the socialists and financial bureaucrats “working together separately” to achieve centralized control in Canada.58 His cru­ sade was for the welfare of all British Columbians “against the onslaught of selfish interest which, under the guise of patriotic endeavour, would subject all Canada to centralized control, and in the process would not hesitate to besmirch the name and character of all who oppose their de­ signs.” 59 The Premier saved his choice outburst for the Trail Board of Trade whom he maligned in a public letter-“you make yourselves believe that you are Canadians first, whereas, as a matter of fact, you are yourselves first, the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company second, and your Canadianism trailing somewhere down the line.” 60 The Premier was not alone in his counter-attack. Hart, Pearson, Wismer, Leary, and George Weir all issued statements or delivered speeches defending the government’s position. There was little evidence to support the Sun's hypothesis of strong Cabinet divisions on Pattullo’s conference strategy and upon the general attitude of the government to the report.61 The post-conference duel between the government and its eager critics continued throughout the winter of 1940. By late spring, however, there was a noticeable change in mood as the government laboured hard to arrive at a rapprochement with Ottawa and convince the electors that the provincial and federal Liberals were, after all, of the same mind and body on the war question. Pattullo waved the olive branch, emphasized the province’s patri-

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 49

otic motives, and repeated an earlier assertion that little damage had been done by the conference failure since the federal government had “ample power under the War Measures Act to take all necessary steps to the winning of the war, without changing the Constitution. . . . ” 62 The new conciliatory mood was reflected during the spring session of the Legislature, replete with patriotic emanations from earnest Cabinet ministers. As evi­ dence of its good intentions, Pattullo’s government agreed to the assump­ tion of the total cost of relief by the province, provided for a special de­ preciation allowance for firms engaged in war work, and repaid treasury bills held by the Dominion. The Province hailed the Liberal budget as an important step towards the healing of the wounds caused by the recent squabble and congratulated John Hart for leading the way. “Around the distended paunch of provincialism,” the Province poetically opined, “Mr. Hart threw the dressing gown of his own patriotic purpose.” 63 Thus newly attired, Pattullo was prepared, by the summer of 1941, to go to the people for a renewed mandate. The times were now good. Thriving war industries drained the unemployed. For the first year in a decade, the economy was running at full capacity. The overwhelming concern with the war mission obscured local political issues and, to Pattullo’s mind, blunted the edge of the opposition parties who could easily be saddled with the label of disloyalty for criticizing a government now dedicated to full co-operation with the federal government in prosecuting the war effort. Pattullo’s confi­ dence and self esteem, never in a weakened state, was especially bloated during the summer of 1941. There is little reason to doubt Bruce Hutch­ ison’s assertion that the government regarded an election “as the easiest cinch in the last twenty-five years.” 64 Few who noted the relaxed smile of the Premier, who observed the hastily filled pot holes on truck roads, or the feverish repair of bridges in outlying areas, were surprised when Pattullo, on July 22, 1941, announced an au­ tumn election. Pattullo’s election manifesto was an uninspiring document which emphasized the need for a new public mandate in order to fortify the ministry for ‘the implementation of its pledges of full co-operation with the federal government in the national war effort.65 It spoke of the need to co-ordinate provincial taxation with Dominion proposals through the pas­ sage of appropriate legislation at the next legislative session. Before this could be done, “an expression of the electors” was needed.66 In addition to the government pledge to assist in the war effort and keep the home front functioning “as adequately as the war effort will permit,” Pattullo promised increased highways construction, further prosecution of the British Co­ lumbia-Yukon-Alaska Highway, continued oil exploration in the Peace River area, a northern anschluss involving the annexation of the Yukon,67 and government aid in the development of an iron and steel industry. The

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/ \ \ [

Premier’s election proclamation mentioned nothing of the war with the oil barons or the need for “better terms” from the federal government. Instead it spoke lovingly of British Columbia’s “glorious destiny,” quoting from Captain George Vancouver who, in the month of May, 1792, pondered over “the serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes and abun­ dant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, in a land on the threshold of becoming the most lovely country that can be imagined. . . . ” 68 The political landscape, in the year 1941, was not nearly as exciting. The press seemed genuinely confused as to what exactly were the issues of the campaign since all parties were agreed on the necessity of co-operation with the federal government. The Toronto Globe and Mail, watching from afar, thought the campaign dreary and lethargic. The Sun pronounced the gov­ ernment a failure when judged by the standards of its original promises, but deemed it worthy in “its ordinary schedule of daily performance,” 69 its freedom from scandal and its commendable intention to co-operate with the federal government. In late September, the Sun noted that no real issue appeared in the election and certainly “no issue between the major parties concerning the great business of the nation and the province, which is the war.” 70 The Province, whose mind was still tangled with the empty rhetoric of the twenties, thought that the major issue was roads and pronounced Mr. Maitland a certain victor since, by advocating an independent highways commission, he proposed to make politics subservient to roads rather than the reverse.71 Pattullo, in the late stages of the election, which was finally called for October 21, sought to rescue the pundits and electors from their apparent confusion by defining a new issue: the retention of full incorhe tax rights by the province, in perpetuity. Throughout the month of October the Premier broadcast everywhere that the single large issue, the reason for calling the election, was the income tax, a birth right of the province, the basis of the “whole governmental financial economy and consequently our social economy.” 72 The C.C.F., Pattullo maintained, would destroy the social benefits won by liberalism through progressive income taxation by ensuring that “not another dollar of outside capital would come into British Columbia.” 73 The Conservatives would destroy the welfare system by sur­ rendering the income tax to the federal government.74 Both the socialists and the Conservatives fought vigorous campaigns. The provincial convention of the C.C.F., held in March 1941, endorsed a program favouring heavy taxation of war profits, the eventual socialization of all war industries and financial institutions, greater labour representation on all new boards, and the creation of a provincial government marketing agency.75 The party campaign manifesto, which advertised “victory abroad, security at home,” promised the conscription of industry and wealth before men, comprehensive planning, public ownership of natural

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 51

resources, extensive labour legislation defending the right to organize, and comprehensive social insurance.76 The Tory program was replete with passionate platitudes, fiercely mouthed by Royal Lethington Maitland, de­ manding greater economy in government, greater efficiency, elimination of patronage, the establishment of an independent highways commission, ex­ tensive public works to maintain post-war unemployment,77 and govern­ ment aid to mining development.78 ‘ It was a cherubic, confident Pattullo who walked to the door of his fine residence in Victoria on the evening of election day, October 21, 1941, to greet his several high Liberal guests invited to share with him the good news, shortly expected over the radio, of a Liberal victory. The assorted gentlemen sipped their tea and alcholic beverages, nibbled tidbits, and exchanged pleasantries and memories as the first results were announced. But their evening soon turned out to be a long and dreary vigil. When the final results were in, the Liberals counted no more than twenty-one elected members, four short of a majority; the C.C.F. had doubled their representa­ tion to fourteen while the Conservatives elected twelve.79 The socialists, for the first time in the history of the province, gained the largest share of the' popular vote, 33.36%. The Liberals gained 32.94%, while the Conserva­ tives trailed with 30.91%. The major Liberal setback was in the lower mainland constituencies which returned only one Liberal, A. Wellesley Gray, in New' Westminster. George Weir and Gordon Wismer were both defeated in Vancouver ridings. The C.C.F. gained powerfully in Vancouver city, returning six members in the three dual ridings of Vancouver-Burrard, Vancouver-Centre and Van­ couver-East. Burnaby, Delta and North Vancouver all remained in the C.C.F. camp. In addition to winning Similkameen, the socialists captured Rossland-Trail, Comox, Cowichan-Newcastle, and Mackenzie, all indus­ trial constituencies with powerful industrial unions who played a key organ­ izational role in the election. The Tories ran strongly in the wealthy Point Grey area of Vancouver, where they returned three candidates, the gentle­ manly Oak Bay, Saanich and Esquimalt burroughs on Vancouver Island, and in the traditional rural strongholds of Chilliwack, Dewdney, Grand Forks-Greenwood, Salmon Arm and South Okanagan, the latter constitu­ ency returning a grinning and exuberant political freshman named William Andrew Cecil Bennett. Again, the Liberal north, close to the Premier’s heart and favoured by his helping hand, held strong and true; NelsonCreston, Peace River, Prince Rupert, Revelstoke, Skeena, Omineca, Co­ lumbia and Atlin, all returned Liberal candidates. Pattullo himself escaped with a bare 178-vote majority in his pocket burrough, Prince Rupert, where the fishermen, loggers and longshoremen threw their combined support behind his C.C.F. opponent.80

52 Pillars 0/ Profit

The 1941 election was a rude setback for T.D. Pattullo and his centrist Liberal coalition, which rested on a class and regional alliance; a happy combination of support drawn from the solid north, from disparate inland and Island seats, and from the lower mainland. The Liberal Party, to Pattullo, was an omnibus party profoundly wedded to no particular class and determined to curb the “selfish interest” of all classes. The ideology of socialized capitalism involved the representation of the interests of both workingmen and businessmen within a political party dedicated to curbing the abuses of capitalism without fundamentally altering the system. By the end of the depression, the coalition was growing increasingly untenable. Its success rested on the emasculation of either one of the opposition parties. The Conservatives were organizationally decimated before the critical 1933 election and a large proportion of the Conservative “free-enterprise” vote drifted into the Liberal party. By 1937, the Conservatives had recovered somewhat and established a viable organization. But the Liberal day was saved by severe organizational problems within the C.C.F., culminating in the Connell split. The Tory revival in the 1937 election was balanced by the C.C.F.’s decline, enough to save key Liberal seats, especially in metro Vancouver. By 1941, however, Pattullo was faced with an entirely new situation. For the first time since the onset of the depression, both of the opposition parties, Conservative and C.C.F., were organizationally intact. Pattullo’s wavering Liberal ideology was unable, in the closing years of the decade, to make inroads into either the socialist or Tory vote, incursions which were formerly facilitated by organizational disintegration. The depression itself resulted in an increased class polarization, a conflict obscured during growth periods by an expanding boom economy. As leader of an omnibus party, Pattullo attempted to speak for all classes but soon discovered that their disparate needs and wants precluded placating. Pattullo, in short, was felled by a withering cross-fire. His joust with the oil interests and commit­ ment to a progressive welfare program, which implied high taxes, were inimical to the business community which increasingly looked upon the Conservative party as an effective class instrument. To workingmen and socialists, however, the Liberals were not radical enough. The Medicare failure, the Post Office and Art Gallery sit-ins, were dramatic evidence of the government’s failure to vigorously prosecute an aggressive program. Pattullo’s fight with the oil companies was bitterly contested but there was no attempt on the Premier’s part to lead the masses on a great trust busting expedition, no effort to steal the socialists’ thunder from the C.C.F. Pat­ tullo, like Mackenzie King, wished to speak for every man, at a time when group interests and organizations hardened. A blunt and corpulent gentle­ man, Pattullo was an able, but not a masterful, political acrobat. He had

J

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 53

turned some neat tricks but, in the words of the Edmonton Bulletin, “was not well-qualified to face both ways at once and meet these diametrically opposed attacks.” 81 Certainly the 1941 election was a sleeper, but had the Premier been less drowsy, less stubbornly optimistic, he would have taken greater heed of the danger signs. The victory of Laura Jamieson, in the May 1939, VancouverCentre by-election, in which there was both an increase in C.C.F. support and a neat split in the “free-enterprise” vote, was a keen harbinger of things to come and, more particularly, of the weakening hold of the Liberals in the volatile Vancouver city. Pattullo, the incurable optimist, took little heed of George Weir’s gloomy prediction after the by-election “that very proba­ bly not a Liberal candidate would be elected in Vancouver in the next provincial election.” 82 The Liberal victory in the September 1940, Macken­ zie by-election in which Manfred McGeer was returned, was guaranteed only by the decision of the Conservatives not to contest the constituency; an action dictated by the sane consideration that a C.C.F. victory meant a replacement of the Tories as the Official Opposition. There is little doubt that Pattullo, a keen student of public opinion, misread the fragmented and beaten public will during the summer and autumn of 1941. The protracted joust with the fuel barons, his squabble with the political medicos, hardened and crystallized the opinion of the propertied against the Premier who was defined as a dangerous experi­ menter. “The real reason,” Pattullo later wrote a friend about his loss of seats, “dates back three or four years ago when we took authority to control the retail and wholesale price of gasoline. This antagonized some very powerful interests, not only those engaged in the oil industry, but high finance generally who are antagonistic to legislation of this kind. From that date to this, a constant campaign has been waged against myself personally. In fact, what was said in the United States against President Roosevelt was hardly more severe than what has been said of myself.” 83 The Premier’s ill-fated performance in Ottawa in January 1941, was not the sole or major reason for his setback. But his misreading of the public mood provided an excellent excuse for his opponents to mobilize opinion against the govern­ ment. “There was such an onslaught,” he later complained to King, “as to make it appear in the minds of a considerable number of people that I was actually traitorous to Canada.” 84 The Premier’s subsequent conciliatory gestures and patriotic protestations never quite offset the damage done during the winter months when the virulent press attack on Pattullo took the heat off Winch. “Who is concerned with the pink socialism of the C.C.F.,” the Province queried in 1939, “when Joe Stalin is loose on the front pages?” 85 Whatever the causes of the events of October 21, 1941, Pattullo found

54 Pillars of Profit

himself in a precarious and vulnerable position. No sooner were the results in than a cry arose, within the Liberal party and without, among Conserva­ tives, socialists and editorialists, for a coalition government to extricate the province from its precarious state. The idea of coalition was hardly new. Since the early days of the Tolmie collapse, leading Conservatives had entertained, at different times and with varying degrees of commitment, the idea of non-partisan government, a project long advocated on the editorial pages of the Vancouver Province. The union idea grew increasingly attrac­ tive with the rise in strength of the C.C.F., peaking in popularity at critical moments, during the winter of 1936, and after the Vancouver-Centre byelection of May 1939, when the C.C.F. seemed destined to power. After a long, hard look at Laura Jamieson’s by-election victory, Bruce Hutchison concluded that needless shadow boxing between the two major parties had split the anti-socialist vote and assured a socialist victory. “Eventually,” he concluded, “the logic of the situation is almost certain to force a union of those who believe in the present system of society and a union of those who wish another system. When this realignment appears, we shall have realistic party politics in Canada and British Columbia, but not before.” 86 The sudden renewal of the cry for coalition in October 1941, derived not from a sudden effluence of love, but from a stark recognition of necessity, from a proper appreciation of the “logic” of a “situation” which placed the socialists on the threshold of power through a fracturing of the free-enter­ prise vote. Had Pattullo muddled through with a majority in the 1941 general election, had the socialists, or the Tories for that matter, run weakly and saved the day for the Liberals, the unionist infant, swaddled in patriotic rhetoric, would have been quickly disposed of, much as it was in 1933 when the prospect of a Liberal victory seemed assured. But the Tories and social­ ists ran strongly and Pattullo was faced in the dying days of October 1941, with the prospect of a House defeat by a combined Opposition vote. The press, rural and urban, Liberal and Conservative, took up the cudgels for coalition immediately after the election. The Nelson News, Nanaimo Free Press, Kelowna Courier, Kamloops Sentinel, Vernon News, Trail News, North Shore Press, Similkameen Star, Penticton Herald, Grand Forks Ga­ zette, and sundry others, registered early agreement with the larger met­ ropolitan newspapers, the Sun and Province in Vancouver, the Times and Colonist in Victoria, that coalition or union was both a virtue and a neces­ sity.87 The mood was set by the Vancouver Sun which demanded, in an editorial the day after the election, that “logic” be returned to the party system “where it has been missing since the C.C.F. became a great power in British Columbia.” 88 After years of wild partisan editorializing, decades of inflammatory denunciations of the Tories, the Sun editorialists discov­ ered, in the wee hours of the morning after the day before, that the party

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 55

battle as it had hitherto existed was an empty debate, a mock dispute which wasted everyone’s time and energy. The C.C.F. explosion presented a chal­ lenge, a spritely opportunity to return meaning to the party struggles; “a government of Liberals and Conservatives will be opposed by an able C.C.F. Opposition, representing the principle of socialism. Then the real issue of our politics will be plain, then our Legislature will cease fighting sham battles and will stand divided on an issue that all men can understand and vote upon.” 89 The Sun envisioned little good resulting from a Liberal attempt to stay in office. A government carrying on with the support of the Conservatives would provide weak leadership where strong authority was needed. In the likely event of a Liberal defeat in the House, an election would be called which would distract people from the war and, in any case, result in union to prevent another stalemate. The Sun reserved high praise for the C.C.F., variously described as “patient”, “able”, “honest” and, in the words of Bruce Hutchison, as a “grass roots movement with a great future simply because it springs out of the soil.” 90 The doyen of British Columbia political columnists, Bruce Hutchison, urged the old party politicians to emulate the C.C.F. by turning to the masses and forming a people’s movement; a co-operative commonwealth federation of the right. To Hutchison, the legislative stalemate was a glorious opportunity to rejuvenate the old parties who, unlike the C.C.F., had lost contact with the minds and feelings of the ordinary citizens: Until the other parties get back to the soil, they will continue to die like a plant with no roots. They must dissolve their huge and expensive machines, their mighty structure of patronage and favour, their vast armies of camp followers, political lawyers, friendly contractors, local road foremen and ward bosses. These were the things on which they largely relied to get elected. These things have failed. The public is weary of paying for them and a large part of the public has turned to the C.C.F. only because it seems to be a poor but honest movement of common men. If the people who do not believe in socialism are to have a chance in this province, the two old parties should unite permanently and com­ pletely, not a marriage of convenience but a permanent union. Then they should slough off the past, dissolve the old discredited machines, kick out the old party manipulators who have ruined her and seek their strength among the people. If the C.C.F. can beat such a people’s movement as that it deserves to win.91 Such a grand denunciation of traditional partisanship and machine polit­

56 Pillars 0/ Profit

ics was not what the fallen Liberal and Conservative politicians, who nagged Pattullo for a coalition in the weeks following the election, had in mind. The Province, to be sure, took the opportunity to whine, not for a Liberal and Conservative coalition, a prelude to a democratic class struggle, but for a non-partisan union government in which all of the parties, includ­ ing the socialists, would put forth their best selves in a common Christian endeavour.92 The non-partisan unionist idea was early taken up by Mr. Royal Lethington Maitland who suggested a three party coalition, a union government similar to the British regime which represented “all shades of political thought” and attempted to achieve a “maximum war effort.”93 The Maitland idea was quickly dismissed by Harold Winch who felt that the difference in basic fundamentals between the C.C.F. and other parties was too vast to enable them to work together.94 After consulting the caucus, Winch repeated that a steep ideological gap between the C.C.F. on the one hand and the Liberals and Conservatives on the other precluded co-opera­ tion. The C.C.F. believed in mobilizing the resources of British Columbia on a non-profit basis and developing unused resources and new industries under the principle of public ownership. The Liberals and Conservatives ^ believed in carrying on the war effort “on the profit basis. . . . ” 95 Winch was supported in his views by a new friend, the Vancouver Sun, which described a non-partisan three party union regime as a “government of opposites privately at war in the council chamber. . . weak, divided, a split personality.” 96 In proposing a union government, the Sun averred, Mait­ land was asking too much of the socialists: “The C.C.F. under this remarka­ ble formula, is to forget that it stands for anything, that it believes in any special policy, that it holds for socialism, and it is to accept the views of the capitalistic parties, which it has denounced from the beginning. It is to lose its identity, surrender its hope of future office and stultify itself by pretending to share the philosophy of the Liberals and Conservatives.”97 The C.C.F. refusal in no way deterred Maitland and friends from pursu­ ing their second plan, involving a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives. The Tories well realized their precarious position. Ever since the collapse of the McBride-Bowser regime in 1916, with the sole exception of the election of 1928, they had been unable to build a House majority and gain over a third of the popular vote. The Tories, quite sensibly, were not gladdened by the prospect of remaining poor cousins in a minority House. They were faced with the unhappy choice of either maintaining the Liberal government, and allowing Pattullo to recoup his losses in a subsequent election three or four years hence, probably at the expense of the Conserva­ tives, or defeating the government in a combined vote with the C.C.F., precipitating an early election and, given the split free-enterprise vote, ushering in a socialist government. The Conservatives much preferred to

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 57

avoid a quick election, to support the government and preserve free enter­ prise. They were pleased to discover that they had many friends among the Liberals, also anxious to avoid an early election, and who were open to the coalition idea. The Conservatives demanded a price for their co-operation. They wished to join the government, and grab a share of the patronage, prestige and decision-making authority, using the excuse of the war crisis as a patriotic cover for partisan considerations. Royal Lethington Maitland and friends, unlike Mr. Hutchison, sought not a rejuvenated, purified, social-movement politics, a co-operative commonwealth federation of the right. They pursued, instead, the more mundane course of conservation and survival. Coalition did not imply the destruction and dissolution of the Conservative Party. It merely involved a temporary arrangement, a mini­ mal co-operation at the electoral and parliamentary levels, necessary to preserve free enterprise and the Conservative Party from the socialist threat. Besides, who could foresee the distant future? In the event of a domestic feud, or a socialist decline, there was always the expedient of divorce and a return to the earlier partisan state. Similar thoughts were not far from the minds of Liberal insiders and outsiders, men like George Pearson, John Hart, George Weir and Senator Farris who were convinced that a stable majority could rest only on a firm coalition with the Conservatives. The Liberal coalitionists, like their Tory friends, were faced with the stark fact of a C.C.F. surge. They entertained no grand thoughts of a rejuvenated people’s movement, no profound desire to revivify Coast politics through the introduction of “logic” and genuine debate into party politics. The only logic they recognized was in the electioiT statistics which presaged a C.C.F. victory in the absence of sensible electoral agreements between the two major parties in subsequent elections. Their pure crystalline love was distilled from the dry pages, replete with ominous figures, of the Statement o f Votes o f the Chief Electoral Officer. The Liberal coalitionists found the union idea attractive from both class and partisan viewpoints. A Liberal minority government, in the absence of firm commit­ ment of co-operation from the Tories, faced the unhappy prospect of early defeat, followed by an election in which a growing C.C.F., aided by a fractured free-enterprise vote, might gain a majority. To the businessmen who financed Liberal campaigns, the medical politicos who buried health insurance, and the fuel barons who fought Pattullo, this was unacceptable. Coalition did not mean the end of the Liberal party. The Liberals would remain the senior partner in the arrangement. The bulk of the Cabinet representation would remain Liberal, since the Grits counted greater sup­ port in the House, and the Liberal organization would remain intact, feed­ ing as usual on patronage, a small portion of which would be shared with ihe Tories. But this was a small price to pay for stable free-enterprise

58 Pillars of Profit

government. Again, in the event of a domestic rupture, or a happy decline of support for the C.C.F., the arrangement could be ended with little damage. It was with these thoughts in mind, that Liberal Cabinet ministers like John Hart and George Pearson, assorted Liberal M.L.A.s, party officials and interested company friends, exhorted the Premier to invite the Conser­ vatives into a coalition or, in the event of his unwillingness to do so, to resign and let John Hart, the darling of the coalitionists, form the sacred union. But Pattullo had other ideas in mind. While editorialists and politicians babbled about coalition, the Premier cooly announced his intention to leave for Ottawa within a few days, where, with the aid of John Hart, he would conclude with the Dominion government tax rental agreements to be enacted into law at the next session of the Legislature, scheduled to meet December 4. Spurning requests to forego the trip from provincial Liberal leaders like George Pearson, who argued that the Premier had no mandate to represent the people of British Columbia in the approaching negotia­ tions,98 Pattullo decried the “attempts . . . to do the ‘rush act’ and precipi­ tate . . . a coalition administration. . . . and insisted that no one was better qualified than himself to represent the province. “One would think from attacks of militant minorities that I am an interloper and have no right to speak upon behalf of the people of British Columbia. In 1933,1 not only led the Liberal party to victory, but certainly prevented its disintegration at that time. I also led it to victory in 1937. At the present time, I have been elected for the seventh time in my own district with a clear majority in the House with some closely contested seats against us. The Liberal party also received a larger vote than any other party in British Columbia. Who then is there to represent the people unless I do?” 100 Having thus unburdened himself, Pattullo hopped a C.N.R. train to Ottawa.101 John Hart departed the same evening, for the same conference, but left separately on a C.P.Rtrain. Pattullo’s obstinate departure was followed by dark mutterings and rau­ cous editorials from rabid coalitionist politicians. But the dapper Premier was unflappable. The further he sped from British Columbia, the greater his obstinacy grew. Along the way to Ottawa, and on the return route weeks later, the Premier smiled and repeated to eager reporters that he had no intention either to resign the premiership or to form a coalition. The matter was made official in early November, shortly after his return, when Pattullo announced that he intended to meet the House as Premier and leader of a Liberal minority government. “Not one of the three parties in the House has a mandate from the people to coalesce. The people elected us as we are and I believe that they expect us to carry on during this war. I was elected with the largest group and I think I have the right to expect the co-operation

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 59

of the two opposition parties as well as of the Liberal members of the House under existing war conditions, and I can see no reason for changes in party alignment in the Legislature merely because vicious and powerful minority interests wish to accomplish their own purpose.” 103 Hurried meetings with Vancouver organizers Charles Reid, J.A. Campbell and Brenton S. Brown, did little to alter his intentions. Thomas Dufferin Pattullo had no use for the coalition idea. Pattullo was a constitutional Grit who felt that there were basic differences between Liberals and Conservatives which precluded effective co-operation. There were, to Pattullo, three “isms”; liberalism, toryism and socialism.103 Tory­ ism was class tyranny; the domination of society by business interests who had no regard for the wants and needs of the dispossessed. Socialism was both quackery and tyranny, involving the imposition of impractical solu­ tions through the destruction of individual freedom. Toryism and socialism had much in common. “They are both monopolistic,” he later wrote the Liberal associations, “they are both centralizers, and if there is one province in Canada which more than any other should oppose centralization, it is British Columbia.” 104 Since liberalism differed fundamentally from conser­ vatism and socialism there was no firm ideological basis for co-operation with either opposition party. Pattullo asserted that coalition was in the interest of the Tories and the socialists. The Conservatives were a dying party, in search of a new lease on life which the coalition would bring. Pattullo supposed that the Tories, obsessed with survival, would support a Liberal minority government since an early defeat, quickly followed by an election, would probably decimate their party. The Liberals could, there­ fore, expect co-operation without paying the high price of coalition. Since a coalition would probably involve control by “the worst elements of both parties . . . with the public the common prey,” progressive voters within the Liberal party might shift their support to the C.C.F., thus robbing the Liberals of their reform base.105 Coalition was therefore in the interests of the C.C.F. J o a man of Pattullo’s challenging temperament and powerful optimism, the coalition idea was the inimical offspring of the emotion of fear. The coalitionists trembled that the “goblins would get them if they did not watch out . . . the particular goblin being the C.C.F.” 106 There was only one way to beat the C.C.F., “to persuade the people that Liberal Policies are more for the general and individual welfare than that of your opponents.” 107 Duff Pattullo did not forgive or forget easily. He was convinced that the assault of the plutocrats and their editorial henchmen, which began in 1935 a«d continued throughout the Medicare dispute, the oil wrangle, and the Joust with the centralizers, cost him a majority in the recent election. The Same elements, frightened of the socialist bogey, now wished him to coalesce

60 Pillars of Profit

with his traditional enemies. Pattullo recognized no obligations to the “mili­ tant minorities” and was determined to resist their machinations. Possessed of an aggressive and pugnacious temperament, he was delighted with the challenge of minority government. “Well, I’m not going to die of boredom,” he assured scribbling reporters after explaining that he had read an article which argued that people died from inactivity, “I enjoy a fight-why, in recent years I’ve had no opposition in the House, I’ve just sat there for hours-now I’m going to resuscitate myself.” 108 Pattullo’s resuscitation met with a chilly response from his fellow Cabinet ministers who balked at his attempts to form a partisan Cabinet. Shortly after his return from Ottawa, on November 10, Pattullo met with his Cabinet to discuss the two vacancies caused by the defeat of the Attorney General and Provincial Secretary. Nothing of substance resulted. A few days later, the Premier announced a Cabinet reorganization which included the transfer of Mr. W.J. Asselstine, formerly Minister of Mines, to the Labour portfolio, the appointment of the member from Golden, Tom King, as Minister of Public Works, and the elevation of Mr. Norman Whittaker, to the Attorney Generalship. But the Premier’s Cabinet building was soon interrupted by a spate of resignations. George Pearson declined Pattullo’s offers of the Education and provincial secretary portfolios and accused the Premier of flagrantly disregarding the wishes of the Cabinet, caucus and mass organization which he had barely consulted. When Pattullo requested George Weir to carry on in the Education department, Weir refused and endorsed the coalition idea. The fiercest blow was delivered by John Hart, the Premier’s trusted confidant, who had served with him in the same Cabinet over two decades. Hart, long the darling of the coalitionists, issued a statement favouring a two or three party coalition for the duration of the war. Pattullo responded with a request for Hart’s resignation.109 Hart’s defection was a major personal blow to Pattullo and a victory for the coalitionists. “The coalitionists, of which Hart is now the spearhead,” Pattullo subsequently wrote to Mackenzie King, “have been doing every­ thing possible to get me out before the House meets. This plotting has been in progress for many months, the press constantly boosting Hart and de­ precating myself. If Hart had been loyal, he would have squelched this himself.” 110 Hart’s resignation was followed by pronouncements in favour of coalition by Asselstine, Whittaker, and K.C. MacDonald all of whom quit the Cabinet. Pattullo was now alone and the Sun pronounced him a “sawdust dictator” who needed to be “dethroned as a menance to British Columbia democracy.” 111 The Premier’s troubles did not end with his Cabinet ministers. While Pattullo desperately manoeuvred to construct a Cabinet, the coalition infec­ tion spread rapidly throughout the entire Liberal organization, parliamen­

The Fallen Centre: 1938-1941 61

tary and extra-parliamentary. Harry Perry, the Prince George squire, J.J. Gillis, the M.L.A. for Yale, W.T. Straith and Nancy Hodges, both M.L.A.s from Victoria, joined with other legislative members in the demand for coalition while Dr. W.J. Knox of Kelowna, the president of the Liberal Association, was flooded with requests from areas across the province to call a convention to endorse coalition.112 Knox acceded and, on November 18, announced a convention scheduled for December 2, two days before the opening of the Legislature, to discuss “the momentous events now happen­ ing within the ranks of the party and the very evident difference of opinion existing between important members of the Liberal group in the legislative assembly.” 113 The coalitionists immediately set to work nominating dele­ gates and gathering proxies. By convention time, they enjoyed powerful Island support, especially in Victoria, which unanimously supported Hart, and a strong mainland following in Vancouver and the Interior.114 The Liberal convention was a one day affair, enough time for the coali­ tionists to dispose of their leader. The introduction of a resolution favouring a union government of all parties in the House or, failing that, a LiberalConservative coalition to ensure “competent stable administration for the duration of the war” was followed by speeches from a host of Cabinet ministers, all of whom explained their break with Pattullo and preference for coalition. Prominent among them was Hart, the leader-designate, who reminded the delegates that Pattullo had ignored the wishes of the party and caucus when he insisted on going it alone and blocking coalition appro­ aches.115 Hart warned that a minority government would fail, that there would not be a handful of Liberals returned if another election were called, that B.C. would be forced to default payments of twenty million dollars worth of P.G.E. bonds, maturing in 1942, if stable government, the prov­ inces crying need, were not quickly established.116 Pattullo fiercely de­ fended his position in an impassioned speech during the four hour debate. He argued that a coalition was basically unworkable, that Liberals and Conservatives were ideological enemies, that they would fight like cats and dogs, that the big interests, especially the oil companies, who had attacked him over the past years, were behind the idea, that the Liberal Party would collapse through organizational disruption by opposed interests between the federal and provincial wings and that the party’s reformed electoral base Would be stolen by the C.C.F.117 Pattullo invited the party to support the government until the Legislature met, asked his former Cabinet ministers to return to their portfolios and promised to form non-partisan House committees to bring Conservatives and C.C.F.ers into the decision-making process.118 “If that fails,” Pattullo concluded, “you can have your coalition government and I will not be in it.” 119 The delegates gave the old warrior ° big hand, just as they effusively greeted him when he first entered the

62 Pillars of Profit

convention. They knew that Duff had rendered great service to the party and they wanted him to know that they appreciated his good work. But Pattullo was no longer number one; Hart was number one. The convention voted 447 to 312 in favour of the coalition resolution, the large opposition vote indicating that Pattullo still enjoyed powerful rank and file support within the party. Pattullo took the verdict with his characteristic bluntness. “You have given your verdict,” he told the meeting, “which I accept. But you must remember you are no longer Liberals-you are coalitionist. 120 Seconded by George Weir, George Pearson then moved a resolution that Hart be chosen leader. Hart was elected by a unanimous vote. In his acceptance speech, the new leader was careful to assure the reform Liberals that the new government would pursue progressive policies and that the traditional Liberal centrism would be streamlined with new social welfare enactments.121 Hart was careful to pacify the large bloc of anti-coalitionists, to insist that coalition would not be the end of the Liberal Party. He promised to do his utmost “to rehabilitate and rejuvenate the grand old Liberal Party.” 122 All that remained were the formalities of the power transfer. At a Liberal caucus meeting before the House opening, Pattullo released all newlyelected Liberal members including Cabinet colleagues from obligations of of any kind to himself as Premier, thereby freeing them to carry out the wishes of the recent convention. With one dissenting ballot, the caucus endorsed the coalition idea.123 At the opening of the Legislature, Pattullo announced that he had recommended to Lieutenant-Governor Woodward that he call upon John Hart, first member for Victoria and recently elected leader of the provincial Liberal party, to form an administration. The House was then adjourned until January 8 to allow John Hart to build his Cabinet and attend a tax-rental conference in Ottawa. The gentlemen of the Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club, the Termina City Club, the Union Club, the myriad propertied who feared the socialist demon, spent a merry and secure Christmas in December 1941. They were pleased that the patriotic parties had united to preserve the rule of law, guarantee a stable investment climate and save the province and country, and their possessions, from the Nazi hordes without and the socialist bar barians within. They had tired of Pattullo; a blunt, stubborn, discomfitting fellow and were delighted to replace him with Mr. Hart, the product ot Mohill, County Leitrim, Ireland; a shrewd, cautious financier and adminis­ trator, whose fluid delivery and soft mannerisms pacified the twitching capitalist beast.

C H A P T E R III

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945

Whereas the rich have feelings, if I may so express myself, in every part of their possessions, it was much easier to harm them, and therefore more necessary for them to take precautions against it.” J.J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins o f Inequality.

Among the merriest of the gentlemen who dined at the plush Vancouver Club during the Christmas of 1941, was Mr. D’Alton Corry Coleman, sometime member of the Mount Royal, Ranchmen’s, Manitoba and Ed­ monton Clubs, where, on similar festive and business occasions, he oft times indulged himself with fellow corporate notables. Coleman had travelled a good distance since his days of sun and youth in Southern Ontario, where he briefly served as an editor of the Belleville Daily Intelligencer, before entering the service of the Dominion’s august octopus, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.1 Thus shackled and tenacled, Coleman slowly and surely ascended the company ladder, first serving as a superintendent of car services in Nelson and Winnipeg, later as the assistant general manager in Winnipeg and finally, in the year 1918, as vice-president of Western Lines, y 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, Hirohito bombed Pearl Harbour and Uiomas Dufferin Pattullo lost his job in British Columbia, Coleman had runk his full measure of power and esteem. In addition to serving as ■ e ey rfd ait, director and member of the executive committee of the •P.R., he held directorships in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Canadian Marconi Company and the Hudson Bay Company. and ^ lt0n ^ orry c °ieman was plainly a corporate power, managing assets directing investments of companies with a huge stake in the land eyond the Rockies. It is for this reason that he, like so many of the other mpany men who supped at the Vancouver and Union Clubs, was perDre d-by b°th thC irascibility of Thomas Dufferin Pattullo in the years eceding the War and the unsatisfactory results of the 1941 provincial ction, which presaged an era of political instability and investment uncer63

64 Pillars of Projit

tainty. Like his company friends, Coleman was convinced that only a coalition of the non-socialist parties could make British Columbia safe for democracy and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. And, like many of his company peers, he lent his considerable weight, financial and political, in the weeks following the October election, in support of the movement to oust Pattullo and form a coalition of the old parties. It was only appropriate, therefore, that Mr. Coleman, and his wife Flo­ rence Mary, be present and smiling in the lavish gold and white drawing room of Government House in Victoria in the late afternoon of the tenth day of December, 1941. Present as well were Messrs. R.W. Bruhn, Herbert Anscomb and R.L. Maitland, all of the Conservative Party; and Messrs. John Hart, G.S. Pearson, A. Wells Gray, K.C. MacDonald and Harry Perry, equally dedicated and honourable Liberals. Completing the coterie was Col. the Hon. William Culham Woodward, president of Woodward Stores Ltd., director of the Royal Bank of Canada, the Union Steamship Company, Neon Products Ltd., and, incidentally, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of British Columbia; Mrs. Woodward and the wives of Messrs. Maitland and MacDonald, who basked in the solemnity of the occasion. This was no ordinary meeting. The Lieutenant-Governor, barely three months at his new post, was presiding over a most important event; the swearing-in ceremony of a coalition Cabinet composed of politicians who had bawled and squawked at one another for decades. The wedding ceremony, pronounced by the pleased Mr. Coleman, with characteristic acuity, as “a most historic occasion,” 2 was the culmination of several hectic days of jockeying and bargaining. Pattullo’s announcement of his resignation after the opening ceremonies of the Legislature on Decem­ ber 4, was followed by declarations by Premier-designate Hart and R.L. Maitland favouring an all-party coalition. In his lengthy address to the House, replete with empty rhetorical bluster and passionate platitudes, Maitland lauded the union government in Britain, reminded the world and the House that just two days after the election he had sent letters to Pattullo and Winch advocating an all-party coalition, and urging Winch to recon­ sider since, “if one party stays, discord is substituted for unity. If one stays, we are going to have controversy, class warfare, party against party, attack and counter-attack, political maneuvering.” 3 Hart, less given to bombast, repeated the need for three-party coalition and informed a press conference the following day that the Opposition leaders had been sent identical letters to which he was awaiting an early reply. Winch’s answer came soon enough, in an open letter which confirmed his earlier rejection of the coalition idea. The socialist leader affirmed the C.C.F.’s commitment to win the war but reiterated his earlier assertion that fundamental policy differences existed between the C.C.F. and the older parties which precluded the establishment

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 65

of a stable coalition. He insisted upon the C.C.F.’s need to be free to criticize constructively and propose alternative policies. “The existence of a legisla­ tive group exercising these functions,” his letter closed, “is . . . an essential requisite for the efficient operation of a parliamentary democracy.” 4 Having thus removed himself from the bargaining game, Winch left the field to Maitland and Hart who huddled with their colleagues in earnest deliberation. Maitland emerged from a lengthy caucus meeting on Decem­ ber 6 with a series of proposals expressive of the timeworn tory philosophy of “economical, efficient and honest government.” These included conced­ ing the premiership to the Liberals but demanding equal Cabinet represen­ tation, an independent highways commission, the removal of highway con­ tracts from politics, the reconsideration of the Rowell Sirois report through further conferences with federal representatives, an efficiency study of gov­ ernment departments with a view to reducing costs and eliminating patron­ age, a study and reorganization of the government supply and purchasing system, the commencement of immediate planning for post-war rehabilita­ tion and full co-operation with the federal government in mobilizing British Columbia’s resources for war purposes.5 Hart’s reply, issued a day before he was sworn in as President of the Council, was friendly, co-operative, optimistic, yet firm on the critical question of Cabinet representation. He tossed the Tories the Deputy Speakership and argued that Cabinet represen­ tation should be on a pro rata basis, in proportion to the number of members of the respective parties in the Legislature. Since the Liberals had twenty members and the Conservatives twelve, the Cabinet representation should have been five and three. But Hart was willing to concede the Tories four ministers, one of whom would have no portfolio, in view of his keen desire “to ensure, the fullest co-operation.” 6 For the rest, Hart expressed “sympa­ thetic consideration” for most of Maitland’s policy proposals, reiterating his belief that there were no fundamental differences between the parties, “and no difficulties affecting the formation of a coalition government which cannot be composed in conference.” 7 But he reminded Maitland that the coalition was a new entity, a merger of the most progressive ideals of both the Liberal and Conservative parties, “but not necessarily restricted to the previously announced tenets of either of these groups.” 8 He therefore re­ jected the “enumerated stipulations” and reminded Maitland that the Lib­ eral coalition invitation was free of any policy declarations and ultimatums. Hart’s persuasiveness was enhanced by a private assurance from Winch, subsequently communicated privately to Maitland, that, in the event of Tory truculence, the C.C.F. would maintain, for an unspecified period of time, a minority Liberal administration.9 Hart’s firm reply, together with the ominous possibility of a stable Liberal government supported by the C.C.F., did the trick and the initiation

66 Pillars of Profit

ceremony of the new Cabinet was replete with friendly protestations and conspicuous camaraderie. The new Cabinet colleagues seemed pleased with one another and, more importantly, Mr. D’Alton Corry Coleman, a proxy representative of the people of the province at the gracious meeting, was obviously delighted with the bi-partisan crew of the new caboose attached to the government on wheels. There were, to be sure, a few Cabinet leftovers from the Pattullo regime, aside from Hart who decided to continue in the Finance portfolio. Kenneth Cattanach MacDonald, the Vernon dentist, kept the Agricultural portfolio, George Pearson acted as provincial secre­ tary and Minister of Labour and A. Wells Gray returned to his old post as Minister of Lands. The sole new Liberal Cabinet addition was the eloquent Prince George squire, Henry George Thomas (Harry) Perry, a product of Whitwick, Leicester, England, former Mayor of Prince George, Deputy Speaker and Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, broker of insurance and real estate, and owner and editor of the salty Prince George Citizen. Of the Tories, both Rolf Bruhn, the new Minister of Public Works and Railways and Royal Lethington Maitland, the Attorney General, had previous Cabi­ net experience. Bruhn, a product of Goteborg, Sweden, learned the political ground rules under the McBride-Bowser regime, serving as road foreman and superintendent in the Department of Public Works from 1906 to 1917. A substantial lumberman with ancillary gold mining interests, Bruhn served as an alderman of the city of Salmon Arm for five years, and as a Justice of the Peace for twenty years, before entering the Legislature in 1924. He was appointed president of the executive council in the Tolmie government in 1928, which position he soon resigned, then served as Public Works Minister which he also quit when the Tolmie ship floundered on the rocks of incompetence and depression. The formation of the coalition, in which he was acceded senior membership was, to Rolf Bruhn, confirmation of his prophecy, oft repeated in the mid and late thirties, that a union government was an inevitable and necessary device to make the province safe for the entrepreneurship he had successfully practised in the Interior. But the two Tory Cabinet heavyweights were Maitland and Anscomb. Born of Scotch-Irish parentage in Ingersoll, Ontario, in 1889, Maitland read law with Burns and Walkem, served as Vancouver City Prosecutor between 1915-1919, then headed, with his father, the prominent Vancouver law firm of Maitland, Maitland, Remnant and Hutcheson. A master of windy rhe­ toric and empty bluster, he served as president of the British Columbia Liberal-Conservative Association in the mid-twenties and as Minister with­ out Portfolio in the Tolmie government after his first election to the House in 1928. Maitland’s lieutenant, and clearly the toughest and most outspoken of the Tory group, was Herbert Anscomb, the basso-profundo from Maid­ stone, Kent, England, who served as Reeve of Oak Bay and Mayor of

J

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 67

Victoria before entering the House in 1933. A chartered accountant some­ time employed by the British Columbia Electric Railway Company, An­ scomb managed the Victoria Phoenix Brewing Company before building the Growers Wine Company into one of the province’s leading wine produc­ ers. Anscomb was a loud and pugnacious debater, a fervent believer in little government and big business, and a profoundly vituperative enemy of the socialists whom he daily denounced as agents of Satan and Stalin. There was doubtless no man better suited to lead this motley and compos­ ite crew, and to pacify Mr. Coleman and his company friends, than John Hart, the expatriate Irishman who became the first Catholic to occupy the premiership of British Columbia. A Cabinet colleague and close political collaborator of Thomas Dufferin Pattullo for almost two decades, Hart was in many respects remarkably dissimilar from his former chief. Pattullo was the blunt and garrulous citizen of the North, who thrived before unruly hustings’ crowds and in the boisterous debates in the House. A blatant partisan Grit who spoke the rude tongue of the rank and file, Pattullo’s incurable pugnacity and mistrust of corporate power eventually proved his undoing. Hart was no hustings politician. Throughout his entire Cabinet career he remained reticently in the background, quietly preferring the smooth black leather chair of the boardroom to the unvarnished podium of the meeting hall. Hart was no orator and was one of the first premiers of a province replete with colourful and vociferous politicians to do away with “grandiloquent declamation.” 10 His widely publicized budget speeches were delivered in the drab monotone of a businessman talking to his shareholders, the sole human note being hints of an Irish accent, which faded noticeably after he took up the game of golf. Pattullo spoke the raw salty prose of the brisk northern hinterland; the neatly clipped hedges and green shrubbery of Victoria were conjured up by Hart’s calm and prudent words. John Hart was enamoured of reckoning and figuring, and during his childhood, when his friends dreamt of high adventure and brave soldiery, of brightly clad constabularies, blood red fire engines or, perhaps, Stanley and Livingston, the young Hart was determined to become, of all things, a banker. Where others played cricket and hunted hares, solemn John stayed at home and added up figures. “I always had the desire to deal in finances,” he once told an interviewer, “even as a boy it was a hobby with me.” 11 It was little wonder, therefore, that when John Hart landed in British Columbia in 1898, at the fresh age of nineteen, he cared little about hiking to the Klondike to seek his fortune in the unruly North. He preferred instead the hushed and wooded interior of the financial house and applied for a position as junior clerk with the Bank of Montreal. There were none available, so Hart took employ for the next five years with a financial and

68 Pillars of Profit

importing house, Robert Ward & Company, which later became the R.V. Winch Company Limited.12 After serving a further six years with a promi­ nent Victoria business house (R.P. Rithet), Hart, in the year 1909, formed a financial and brokerage partnership with Messrs. Gillespie and, later, Todd, which eventually earned a tidy fortune for each of the partners. Being a master reckoner, Hart was a logical choice for Finance Minister after the Brewster sweep in 1916. His annual budget appearances, always delivered in a precise monotone, by the wan gentleman dressed in impecca­ ble semi-formal garb, was repeated over thirteen times under the premierships of Brewster, Oliver and Pattullo.13 Each was given the inevitable front and editorial page attention by press analysts, both Liberal and Conserva­ tive, who, regardless of whether they were pleased or displeased by the sense and content of the Finance Minister’s figures, always found time to praise his sound abilities and good intentions. During his first tenure in the Fi­ nance portfolio, between 1916 and 1924, Hart was usually depicted as a “wizard”; later references to him, under the Pattullo regime, inevitably included the word “genius.” A political animal of bland and cautious disposition, the white-haired Hart was the press’s fair-haired boy. Hart always escaped the violent partisan rancour reserved by editorial henchmen for the abrasive Pattullo and blunt Oliver. If ever there was a Tory’s Grit it was Hart, who, as an intelligent and prudent financier devoid of his Liberal predecessor’s populist proclivities, thoroughly enjoyed the trust and confidence of the business class. It is difficult to imagine anyone better qualified to lead a faceless, bi-partisan caretaker government which in­ cluded, as active partners and active backers, hardened Conservatives and corpulent businessmen. The reign of John Hart began, appropriately enough, in a bland and inauspicious way. Provincial politics became, in the year 1942, parochial politics, shrunken to insignificance by an international war of awesome dimensions in which Canada’s commitment daily grew. Provincial govern­ ments became co-operative caretaker regimes, local adjuncts of the federal government which directed the huge war effort. Provincial political news in British Columbia was shunted to the back pages of the newspapers replete with screaming headlines dramatizing events in the blazing Pacific theatre. Fed by a feverish press, and by local and federal politicians scrambling for votes, anti-Oriental sentiment blossomed anew; the primary recipients of the new venom being the local Japanese community, numbering over 23,000 citizens, 13,400 of whom were Canadian-born and 2,400 naturalized citi­ zens.14 With the active support and collaboration of the provincial govern­ ment, federal authorities suspended the fishing operations of the local Japa­ nese on the coast, immobilized 1,100 vessels which were subsequently trans­ ferred to non-Japanese operators,15 and, with barely a twinge of conscience,

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 69

arranged for the dismemberment of the local community, whose unhappy remnants were scattered among internment camps in the Interior and other provinces. Aside from the Japanese travesty, which whetted both the xenophobic and acquisitive instincts of the Coast residents, there was little on the provincial scene to divert the public gaze from the high drama of the international conflagration. The first legislative session under the coalition, which lasted a short five weeks, was purely a caretaker affair. House speeches, from both Government and Opposition benches, were filled with patriotic fulminations and avid promises to co-operate with the federal government in winning the war. Momentarily absent from press editorials and government speeches were the old attacks on the C.C.F. as an insidious internationalist party dedicated to the subversion of the war effort. Dorothy Steeves and Colin Cameron, whose earlier anti-imperialist and anti-war utterances invited a flood of invective, escaped further censure, while Ha­ rold Winch’s statement on war policy, which included demands for labour representation on all major war boards, an excess profits tax and price controls, was greeted by the Sun as “reasonable, constructive and co­ operative.” 16 Hart was treated lovingly by the local press and his willing­ ness to co-operate with the federal government in prosecuting the war effort was contrasted with Pattullo’s alleged petulant provincialism, displayed at the Federal-Provincial Conference held a year earlier. “It was almost ex­ actly a year ago, on January 14, 1941,” the Sun pronounced, “that the government of British Columbia participated enthusiastically in the tor­ pedoing of the . . . Conference, a fifth-column job that will live long in infamy.” 17 Now all was changed. The ratification by the Legislature of the new financial agreements with the federal government, initially negotiated by Pattullo and concluded in late December by the new Hart Cabinet, in which the Province agreed to cede all major income and corporation tax revenues to the federal government for the duration of the war in return for a fixed grant, was hailed as final proof of the new provincial patriotism. The routine ratification of the tax agreements was, in fact, one of three major items passed during the truncated session. A post-war rehabilitation council, headed by Harry Perry and including the socialists Grant MacNeil and Harold Winch, was created and charged with making recommenda­ tions on returned soldiers’ problems. The most controversial bill, however, which invited stormy C.C.F. criticism supplemented by some sharp prose from the fretful Pattullo, provided for amendments to the Coal and Pe­ troleum Act giving the Cabinet power to lease oil lands for exploration and production purposes, in the Peace River, to private companies in return for satisfactory guarantees to carry on exploration work and drilling opera­ tions. 18 To Pattullo, long an enemy of the fuel barons who helped effect his

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demise, the fuel bill was confirmation of the coalition’s capitulation to grasping interests. His denunciation of the bill as “iniquitous” 19 differed little from the declaration of Samuel Guthrie against “the Tories handing the oil possibilities of the Peace area to the robber barons.” 20 All of this, however, did not deter Herbert Anscomb, who believed, with Conservative Point Grey M.L.A. Alex Paton, that there was “no reason why some of the robber barons can’t sink their money in a wildcat in the Peace River,” 21 from steering the bill in short order through the House. To skeptics and socialists, the passage of the Coal and Petroleum Act amendment was a clear sign of the direction in which the coalition was headed and fulfillment of the prophecy, made by Pattullo among others, that the Tory spouse would quickly recover from an unseemly shotgun marriage and dominate the new household. The proud boasts and jaunty demeanour of Herbert Anscomb, the wan grins of the fuel barons who rushed to stake out the Peace, seemed to confirm that the coalitionists were prepared to practise a mean concessionary politics, and that the favours granted would be restricted to the company lords. But the Hart-Maitland bund, for all of their company proclivities, were elected politicians, and, like most of their fellow Canadian practitioners in the mid-war years, were subject to the demands and pressures from the disgruntled who grew in number as the war progressed. By 1943, the corner of the war had been turned, and the minds and thoughts of British Columbians turned home­ ward where there awaited a huge task of reconstruction. The windy patri­ otic rhetoric, the diffuse pleadings for sacrifice and unity, were no longer acceptable to workers, soldiers, professionals and farmers, whose needs, expectations and organization rose in due proportion with their sacrifices. The Coast union movement underwent a huge expansion during the war years, equalled in extent only by the dramatic leap at the turn of the century. Affiliates of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, feeding on the war boom, federal enabling legislation, and the competitive challenge from a new rival industrial congress, enrolled thousands of new members from among the carpenters, plumbers, painters and other groups in the building trades.22 The Fishermen’s Union and the Cannery Workers increased their numbers to five thousand members and merged in March 1945, to form the militant United Fishermen’s and Allied Workers’ Union. Street railwaymen, teamsters, and machinists concentrated in the aircraft factories around Vancouver, and the pulp and paper workers, who had bravely fought truculent employers for decades in company towns, strengthened their organization and formed the nuclei of new central and district coun­ cils. Among the white collar workers journalists formed a local of the Newspaper Guild, local customs officials affiliated with their national or­ ganization, librarians abandoned their bookish lairs for the union meeting

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 71

hall, while school-teachers gathered in the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, which affiliated with the Trades and Labour Congress in 1944.23

But the real expansion occurred among workers in unions affiliated with the break-away C.I.O. which combined in September 1940, with the AllCanadian Congress of Labour, the former rival union centre to the T.L.C., to form the Canadian Congress of Labour (C.C.L.). The militant member­ ship of the new organization derived from a variety of industrial occupa­ tions. Shipyard labourers, blacksmiths and shipbuilders combined in the Shipyard General Workers’ Federation of British Columbia which, in Feb­ ruary 1943, counted 12,700 workers.24 A Pacific coast section of the Pack­ inghouse Workers was organized the same year while, in June 1944, the powerful Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union, eight thousand members strong, finally obtained certification to bargain with the Consolidated Min­ ing and Smelting Company in Trail. In the giant forest industry, the Inter­ national Woodworkers of America, counting a bare fifteen hundred mem­ bers in District No. 1 in British Columbia in August 1940, enrolled thou­ sands of workers during a prolonged and intense organizational drive. By 1943, when the first general contract covering the greater part of the British Columbia lumber industry was signed, District No. 1 included eight locals and fifteen thousand members, a tenfold increase in three years.25 The industrial unions provided the constituency of the new secondary organizations which sprang up across the province. The Vancouver Labour Council (C.C.L.) claimed sixteen affiliates and twenty-seven hundred mem­ bers in 1940. Four years later, the same council counted thirty-eight affili­ ates and twenty-eight thousand members; a growth of more than one thou­ sand per cent in four years.26 Similar explosions occurred in Victoria where thirty-five hundred unionists were affiliated with the C.C.L. council and in Prince Rupert, where the C.C.L. council counted fifteen hundred members in 1942, at the peak of the shipbuilding boom. The Vancouver Island Labour Council included fifty-five hundred workers in 1945 and a fifth C.C.L. chartered council was established in the staid Okanagan in 1943. The new council’s core union was the Fruit and Vegetable Workers’ Union, the first agricultural-based union in the province’s history.27 The largest and most politically consequential of the secondary bodies to emerge in the wake of the C.C.L. expansion was the British Columbia Federation of Labour, formed on September 30, 1944, by a group of seven­ ty-three C.C.L. delegates assembled in the Boilermakers Hall of Vancou­ ver.28 The resurrection of the provincial federation, whose predecessor expired in 1921 following the emergence of the One Big Union secessionist movement, was effected primarily by communist leaders who captured executive positions in a number of large C.C.L. unions. Dedicated and

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relentless organizers, the communists played a key role, in British Columbia as elsewhere, in spreading the new unionism. The sole major unions with communist leadership in the craft-dominated T.L.C. were the United Fish­ ermen and Allied Workers’ Union and the West Coast Seamens’ Union, both autonomous Canadian organizations. Among the C.C.L. unions, however, communist control was widespread. The huge I.W.A., the metalminers, the boilermakers, shipyard workers and longshoremen were organ­ ized and led by skilled communist unionists. And the new provincial federa­ tion, created as a rival legislative mouthpiece to the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council and British Columbia executive of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, was quickly dominated by communist supporters. Included among the slate of executive officers returned at the founding convention were three prominent communists: Harvey Murphy, the pugna­ cious leader of Mine Mill elected vice-president;29 Alex McKenzie of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, second vice-president; and Harold Pritchett, the able president of District No. 1 of the I. W. A., who served as secretary-treasurer. The presidency fell to Daniel O’Brien, a regional direc­ tor of the C.C.L. sympathetic to the views of Murphy and friends. The industrial union eruption had important political consequences for the C.C.F. as well as for the reigning coalitionists, who warily noted the increase in numbers and insistency of deputations, the threatening noises of labour lobbyists, and the growing exuberance of the rank and file. For the C.C.F., it happily presaged the birth of a new political awareness among workingmen, an increase in demands for collectivist legislation, and the transfer of union political resources marshalled through political action committees to the socialist party and, ultimately, a wider electoral constitu­ ency. But the relationship between the new unionism and the C.C.F. was not free of the torments and tensions which plagued the craft unions and earlier socialist parties. The national C.C.L., to be sure, was the C.C.F.’s good and reliable friend. Delegates to the 1942 convention expressed ap­ preciation for the legislative services rendered by the C.C.F.’s elected re­ presentatives, and congress affiliates were urged to study the C.C.F. pro­ gram.30 At the 1943 convention, C.C.L. locals were urged to affiliate di­ rectly with the C.C.F. In British Columbia, however, the union-party rela­ tionship was, to put it mildly, uneasy, since a high communist union re­ presentation, the highest in the country, precluded effective co-operation. The price of communist endorsement and support was a united front elec­ toral agreement, a coalition of the left between the C.C.F. and L.P.P. which the socialists could never agree to. Hence, the founding convention of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, far from endorsing the pro-C.C.F. policies of its parent C.C.L., where the communists were in a minority, adopted a resolution calling for unity between the C.C.F. and L.P.P. and

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 73

the election of a Liberal-Labour coalition government.31 The C.C.F., for its part, was not without a significant segment which held an anti-union as well as an anti-communist bias. A constitutional amendment providing for un­ ion affiliation, presented to the party delegates at the 1943 convention, was postponed for consideration until the next meeting, where it was finally passed. But no affiliation drive was launched and only two small locals affiliated, the Coal Miners of Nanaimo and the Kamloops local of the C.B.R.E. The meagre affiliation pleased both the pro-union anti-commu­ nists, the major party faction who wished extensive affiliation only after the communists had been exorcised from the labour movement, and the anti­ union militants, latterly described by David Lewis as “pseudo-Marxists^ who considered unionism and unionists as unreliable from a socialist point of view . . . (and) really irrelevant to the socialist struggle,” 32 who proudly traced their ideological pedigree to the old Socialist Party of Canada. Whatever the tensions between the party militants and unionists, the pro-communists and anti-communists, the C.C.F., by the mid-war years, had gained a new confidence and elan. To the wary ears of the coalitionist” and their press and company friends, the bravado of Harold Winch and his colleagues, whose patriotic protestations waned as the war progressed, had an ominous note. By 1943, the Sun, echoing coalitionist sentiment, no longer thought Winch to be so “reasonable, constructive and co-operative” as he had been a year earlier. The C.C.F. attack during the 1943 budget debate was led off by the radical W.W. Lefeaux, who urged the government to introduce legislation to expropriate the British Columbia Power Corpo­ ration (British Columbia Electric) and its fourteen subsidiary companies, provincialize the brewing and distilling industries, and create a government sugar and insurance monopoly.33 Lefeaux’s views were in tune with the mood of the party conventions of April 1943, and 1944, which supported public ownership of public utilities and power production, government sponsorship of collective farms on an experimental basis, a government monopoly in the purchase, processing and wholesaling of farm products, a comprehensive social security insurance system, a steeply-graded income tax, the establishment of public corporations empowered to issue securities guaranteed by the province as part of “an integrated program of social ownership and controls” with the ultimate object being the inclusion of the provincial economy in a “Dominion-wide Socialist economy.” 34 Convem. tion resolutions were, however, pale stuff compared to Harold Winch’s widely advertised Calgary statement, made during the Alberta election in November 1943, in which the C.C.F. leader was reported to have promised instant socialism-enforced by the police and military if necessary. “When we become the government, we will institute socialism im m ediately . . . if capitalism says ‘no’, then we know the answer-so did Russia.” 35 When

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asked to expand further, Winch stated that the police and military would be used to handle those company men and others who disobeyed the law.36 Winch’s speech was loudly reproduced in newspapers across the country, large and small, weekly and daily, from Victoria to St. Johns, who variously described the socialist leader as an agent of Stalin, an outright brigand or, at the very best, an honest but dangerous revolutionary. “Let this be said of Mr. Winch,” the Ottawa Journal editorialised under the heading, The Cat Out o f the Bag, “he is honest. There are those in the C.C.F. who, sugar-coating their revolutionary pills, speak o f‘Constitutional Social­ ism.’ Mr. Winch, with more integrity and courage, knows that this is hum­ bug. . . . ” 37 The Winch speech was given celebrity treatment in Manitoba and Ontario during their provincial elections when rising C.C.F. support presaged socialist victories. No man was better pleased to bandy and mis­ shape the Winch utterance than George Drew, who, during the heated Ontario campaign, bellowed that the people at last had final proof that the C.C.F., the party of the mild J.S. Woodsworth, of the soft methodist glove, of Fabians and red Tories, Frank Scott and Eugene Forsey, was really an “anti-British revolutionary national socialist party.” 38 So much for George Drew. Back home, the coalition politicians, Hart and Perry, Maitland and Anscomb, watched with jaundiced eyes the pink swell on both sides of the Rockies. The Manitoba and Ontario elections, in which the C.C.F. commanded huge support and gained the status of Official Opposition, were ominous. The Saskatchewan C.C.F. victory of June 1944 was proof that the socialists could do it; that they were not condemned by God and nature to forever dwell in the wilderness of opposition. A national gallup poll, taken in September 1943, indicated that the C.C.F. commanded greater support across the nation than either of the older parties.39 And at home, in fickle British Columbia, where the socialists had long been the Official Opposition, there was no evidence of a halt in the pink tide. Salmon Arm, a Tory and Unionist seat for eighteen years, vacated by the death of Rolf Bruhn, fell to the C.C.F. in the by-election of November 26, 1942, in which the socialist candidate George Sterling more than doubled his party’s popular vote. A further election, in neighbouring Revelstoke in June 1943, necessitated by the death of Harry Johnston, resulted in another C.C.F. victory, and in a fierce determination by John Hart and Royal Maitland to skin the socialist cat. The strategy of counter-attack was multifaceted. A key element was the revival and methodical application of smear and scare tactics which the coalition politicians briefly and selflessly abandoned in early 1942 when Joseph Stalin of all people became a hero and Harold Winch a patriot. But the laudable restraint and amorous bellows were soon abandoned in favour of traditional fulminations. The Salmon Arm by-election, in which the

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 75

C.C.F. was denounced as a gang of scurrilous class politicians, was merely a pale prelude to the vast rhetorical assault launched in 1943, inside and outside the House, on the radio and on the hustings. A key architect of the campaign was Maitland who repeated, in a legislative speech on February 18 which was hailed by the Vancouver Province as a masterpiece of sound exposition and trenchant analysis, the old wisdom that a C.C.F. govern­ ment would mean party dictatorship, the asphyxiation of parliament, the collapse of the economy through a flight of investors and the death of freedom of choice.40 “One cannot hope to own and develop an industry,” Maitland trumpeted, “to own or build a factory, to go out into the hills and look for minerals with the hope of owning one’s own mine, nor to have a great orchard or a large farm, under this system.” 41 But the Tory boss’s platitudes formed a mere rivulet in a torrent of rhetoric which continued unabated after the June 1943 Revelstoke by-election, during which John Hart warned that the C.C.F. would liquidate the trade unions the day after it gained power, and Herbert Anscomb, never to be outdone, shouted that socialists loved Japanese and wished to give them the vote. Whether it came to summoning the Red Menace or the Yellow Peril, there were few politi­ cians anywhere in the province or country equal to Herbert Anscomb, the local George Drew, who enjoyed nothing better than reminding his hustings and radio audiences that the C.C.F. was a dictatorship built on exactly the same lines as those “the free world fought in Europe.” 42 Smear tactics were, however, of limited value in the coalition assault. Workers and farmers, teachers and soldiers, long exposed to hysterical propaganda, had become immunized and wished for more than windy rhetoric. Not a few, so it appeared, had taken John Hart seriously when, during his acceptance speech at the December 1941 Liberal convention, he promised both a progressive coalition government and a rejuvenated Liber­ alism. The political exhortation of the masses to sacrifice, and sacrifice more for the state and nation, produced the inevitable counter-demands; that the state, and the politicians who ran it, recompense the people for the toil and tears expended. By the mid-war years, exhortation, whether anti-commu­ nist or anti-Axis, no longer sufficed. The masses wished for something material, tangible. There were among the many needy, a small minority of political activists, Liberal and Conservative, whose claims for recompense and tangible prefer­ ments derived from political rather than military or industrial services rendered. Their demands differed little from those of the hoards of minions who, from the earliest days of party organization in the province, performed the chores, big and little, comely and unseemly, which kept the machine in running order. Non-partisan enthusiasts like Tilly Rolston, the dowager Point Grey Conservative M.L.A., and Bruce Hutchison, the Sun journalist,

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were convinced that the minions would be orphaned under the new politics. For them, the advent of the coalition presaged the end of patronage politics. What else could Mrs. Rolston have had in mind when she announced to the Legislature in January 1942 that the coalition would bring “government without patronage, government without favouritisrri, government without the evils of patronage.” 43 Or Bruce Hutchison, when he predicted in the Sun of December 5, 1942, that patronage would become a relic of the past: “For the first time in nearly four decades there will be in the offing no party organizations to satisfy, no party adherents to receive admonitions from.” To Rolston and Hutchison, the coalition promised a politics of purity, the fulfillment of the noble idea of non-partisan administration envisaged by the authors of the Kidd report. It was not long, however, before the illusions of the purity prophets were dispelled. The new politics of the coalition, Hart’s rejuvenated Liberalism, while making allowances for reform and welfare legislation, was notably free from assaults, rhetorical or real, on the old machine style. Coalition politics was not non-partisan politics. It merely reduced the number of competing provincial parties to two: the C.C.F., and the fragile hybrid of Liberals and Conservatives who, for all of their unionist utterances, jeal­ ously hugged their separate machines. The need for an organization to challenge the C.C.F. was as great as ever; and no party organization, whether pure or hybrid, could long endure without the spoils to compel adherence. Coalition implied not the end of patronage, but merely the devising of new mechanisms for dividing scarce resources between two grasping partisan factions. For those intoxicated by the prospects of a new purity politics, early revelations before the Public Accounts committee, and the Haldane enquiry into irregularities in the purchase of police supplies, had a sobering affect. The government purchasing agent, F.H. Harrison, admitted to the House committee that buying was to a large extent governed by advice given by candidates, even in constituencies where government supporters were de­ feated at the polls,44 while Agriculture Minister, K.C. MacDonald, in­ formed the same committee that appointments in his department were not subject to the Civil Service Act, and that candidates from outlying areas were not required to pass exams for positions not advertised.45 MacDonald felt that this was necessary in order to reduce the preponderance of Victori­ ans in the civil service. Labour Minister George Pearson was as frank as MacDonald and stated before the same hearings that the Civil Service Act was never “really in operation in British Columbia,” 46 and that the minis­ ter, rather than the Civil Service Commission, made most of the appoint­ ments in his own department. When Pattullo asked Maitland during the debate on the estimates of the Attorney General’s department whether

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 77

appointments of C.C.F. supporters would be considered, Maitland replied that the C.C.F. had had its opportunity to join the government and “help direct the making of appointments,” but had refused.47 Subsequent police corruption trials revealed that Arthur Cox, treasurer of the Liberal Party in Victoria, had been supplied by the government purchasing agents with lists of firms with whom the government did business. Furthermore, there was ample evidence in the Haldane enquiry that the son of a prominent Victoria merchant had paid Cox a sizeable sum of money, and had taken out a $1,500 insurance policy in order to continue receiving government purchasing favours.48 When the government appointed a purchasing com­ mission by Order-in-Council following the police scandal, it was found that its powers were identical with those described in an ineffectual order drawn in 1929, when the Comptroller-General was appointed to a similar body. Two of the three members of the new body had served on the former purchasing authority.49 Purity was clearly not the coalition forte. Nor was it, for that matter, the real concern of workers, farmers, soldiers and professionals, who had long accepted the inevitable rolling and barrelling of partisan politics. What did concern the people was more and better reform and welfare legislation; and the Hart government, composed of intelligent Conservatives and sensible politicians, was not unmindful of the new wants indirectly registered in the rising popularity of the C.C.F. Red baiting was the negative side of the coalition assault on the C.C.F.; the positive thrust was a reform program calculated to assure the voter of the government’s benign solicitude. The shining new coalition face was bared at the 1943 session of the Legislature which passed a host of welfare and labour bills. Rising union pressures were reflected in amendments of the Workmen’s Compensation Act providing for increased benefits as recommended by the recent Sloan commission, in amendments to the regulations governing shops and half­ holidays,50 and in changes in the Industrial Conciliation Act which clarified the status of unions as bargaining agents-a subject of heated controversy following the original passage of the act-and which provided for compul­ sory recognition, discouraged company unions and made it illegal for an employer to interfere with a union.51 According to Professor Phillips, the new legislation “was the most advanced in Canada,” 52 and met with fav­ ourable response from unionists and even the C.C.F. opposition. A labour delegation composed of representatives from the provincial executive board of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council and the I.W.A. appeared before the government during the session to suggest minor amendments, but “assured the Minister of Labour of its full support behind the government in its adoption of the proposed amendment.” 53 Representatives of the British Columbia branch of the

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Canadian Manufacturers Association were, conversely, “alarmed at the nature of the amendments proposed.” 54 Winch himself commended the government on the compulsory recognition amendments, which, he noted, were intended to curb “the stubborn reactionary attitude of some employers who are not willing to give workers their rights.” 55 There were other measures at the 1943-1944 sessions which proved equally attractive to the pressing reform groups. The age of dependents under the Mother’s Allowance Act was raised from sixteen to eighteen.56 A system of family courts was established. School-teachers were treated to the abolition of summer-school fees and the raising of minimum salaries. A committee was appointed to examine the hydro-electric power possibili­ ties for rural electrification. Farmers were aided with the elimination of vehicle licences for tractors, the reduction of school taxes, and the remission of taxes on farm improvements; a reform, according to H.W. Herridge, dear to the heart of Henry George who would have been startled to know that his theories were practised “in part by the British Columbia govern­ ment.” 57 The third session of the twentieth legislature, which prorogued in mid-March 1944, was replete with further reform bills designed to prepare for post-war conditions; a post-war rehabilitation bureau was established, gifts of millions for the settlement of veterans under the Dominion Veter­ ans’ Land Act confirmed, provincial land taxes eliminated for men in active service, and succession duties remitted for dead soldiers.58 Reductions were made on auto fees and farm taxes while school districts were aided with higher grants.59 The coalition’s venture into social reform met with loud prolonged ap­ plause from its loyal press audience which happily noted that Honest John Hart had not reneged on his promise to provide sound and progressive government. And it gave the lie, so the government defenders argued, to socialists and Pattullites who prophesied that the reactionary Tory wing would quickly dominate the composite government. Maitland and Anscomb (the latter described by Bruce Hutchison as carefully looking under his bed every night in search of a communist with a bomb)60 seemed in fact highly pleased with their new benign image as partners in a government which looked after the needs of ordinary people. “The steady progress of social legislation belongs to no party,” Maitland stated during a speech condemning the C.C.F. as communist brigands, “it is in the hearts of our people and certain of moving forward as the rising sun.” 61 T.D. Pattullo noted that his old friends and enemies had purchased new clothes, that Maitland and Anscomb had changed their attitude toward government expenditure while Hart, long a tight-fisted fellow, had suddenly turned profligate. “This government,” Pattullo opined in sourdough prose, “has a faculty of putting on a governmental dickey without a shirt and without

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starch . . . before, Dame Hart was a cheat and a hag on financial street. Now, lo and behold, these honourable gentlemen sit in adulation of her and even claim credit for what has been done. . . . ” 62 Bruce McKelvie, the Province’s legislative reporter, delighted to see R.L. Maitland second George Pearson’s social security resolution following the Throne Speech of the second session, wrote that the coalition government was moving “to­ wards the maximum in social security legislation . . . the Hart-Maitland administration, combining the progressive elements of the two old-line parties, had surprised even the C.C.F.” 63 Sun editorialists, equally effusive, pronounced the coaltion a genuine people’s regime: “Mr. Hart has shown that he knows the needs of this province, the legitimate demands of the working people, the farmers and all the poor people who make up the bulk of the population.” 64 The chorus of adulation continued unabated into 1945 when the coalition embarked on a bigger and better spending spree. Returning to the legislative beat after a few years absence, Bruce Hutchison observed a marked change in the House’s style and tone, an alteration reflected on both sides, Govern­ ment and Opposition.65 The C.C.F., “conceived, born and reared in griev­ ance,” seemed strangely deflated and subdued, while the government hea­ vies dispensed with the low invective and mock heroics of past days. The socialist opposition, the very Legislature, had absorbed the deceptive radi­ ance of Hart’s bloodless persona, and appeared as the grey extension of the technocratic Premier. British Columbians, Hutchison concluded, were ex­ periencing a new brand of quiet unheroic government: “ . . . The most competent and honest . . . within the twenty-five years of this reporter’s experience.” 66 The transformation of howling socialist wolves into woolly pink sheep, was merely one miracle imputed to Hart’s bland wizardry; another was the remarkable increase in government revenue which financed the new expen­ diture. Under the forced draft of the war, industries in British Columbia made spectacular progress.67 The value of gross production increased from 311 million In 1940 to 629 million in 1945,68 while per capita net value of production rose from $345 to $553. Without any basic changes in tax policy the government announced continued surpluses on current account.69 That the new revenue and prosperity derived less from the Premier’s personal genius or sound, unheroic administration than from national and interna­ tional sources outside the province (described by Professor Carlsen as “for­ tuitous”) was largely ignored by a press which daily sang the Premier’s praise. Whatever the causes and the origins of the new boom, John Hart was prepared to take the credit. For the Premier and his friends, the ample revenues derived from the prospering economy were political manna which

L

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the government obligingly sprinkled on wanting electors. The fourth meet­ ing of the twentieth legislature of British Columbia was accurately de­ scribed by a Sun reporter as the “big money session” 70 involving, as it did, an unprecedented forty-five million dollar development program. Thirty million dollars was designated for a long delayed public works programincluding construction of the Peace River Highway, the Hope-Princeton Highway, and other road paving and highway improvements. Allocations for public buildings, courthouses and schools, were substantially increased while new funds were made available to the University of British Columbia and to rural school districts in aid of teachers’ salaries.71 The major bill of the session, which occasioned wide media coverage and extended House debate, involved the allocation of ten million dollars to the British Columbia Power Commission for the purpose of extending power services in rural areas through the consolidation of twenty-three separate private power systems across the province, the extension of municipal ownership, and the undertaking of urgently needed power development near Nanaimo. Adver­ tised as a scheme to put a light bulb in every barn,72 the power bill was hailed by government supporters as a great leap forward in rural electrifica­ tion, a golden key designed to unlock the door for countless new industrial enterprises, scientific farming and a new life of comfort for the rural housewife.73 The bill was, in fact, excellent electoral fare. It pleased the rural electors, farmers, small businessmen, industrialists long starved for services in a province which left power development, unlike Ontario, purely in the hands of private companies. And it was perfectly acceptable to the British Columbia Electric Railway Company and the West Kootenay Power Company, a subsidiary of the C.P.R., and producers and distributors of ninety per cent of the electrical power in the province, both of which were preserved intact. Having served up a fine legislative feast, John Hart and his colleagues were prepared, by the summer of 1945, to seek a first electoral mandate for their composite government. By the war’s end, the question of the disband­ ing of the coalition was no longer seriously considered by senior politicians of both parties who doubted neither the efficacy nor the necessity of the alliance. Sensible rules and procedures were evolved to cement the forced union. Although separate whips and quarters were retained, a joint caucus was instituted which facilitated inter-party co-operation. Arrangements were made for joint seating based upon seniority-a practice which placed a preponderance of Liberals in favoured positions near the Speaker, since more Tories were newer to the House-with the composite Cabinet establish­ ing its own order of precedence. Front and back-benchers of both parties obligingly followed the new rules of etiquette which banned public partisan recriminations. Where House members saw need to criticize their partner’s

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federal party, it was obligatory that careful distinction be made between the provincial and federal organizations. For the rest, members of both parties were expected to repeat the proven formula, daily mouthed in the press, that the coalition was “the best government British Columbia has ever had.” There were, to be sure, strains and tensions which were unavoidable. Both parties had to contend with their federal colleagues who were, at best, reticent supporters of the connubial arrangement; at worst, overtly hostile to a union which threatened federal successes. Liberal federal politicians were generally suspicious of coalitions and opposed to the idea of a federal wartime union. But they supported the creation of the provincial coalition as a necessity, in view of the local C.C.F. threat, and as a way of ridding their party of the troublesome Pattullo. While many federal Liberals fol­ lowed the lead of the senior federal Cabinet minister from the province, Ian Mackenzie, who refrained from taking sides in public during the coalition’s formative days, it was well known within the party that almost every member of the federal wing supported the coalition and Hart’s leader­ ship,74 an endorsement subsequently reinforced by Hart’s policy of co­ operation with Ottawa. No amount of rhetoric or party feeling, however, could hide or suppress the tensions created by certain basic contradictions which inhered in the coalition arrangement. Federalists were perturbed by the growing inactivity of Liberal riding associations in provincial constitu­ encies with Conservative incumbents, and by the threatened transformation of Liberal associations into coalition organizations in areas where joint meetings were held for purposes other than the nomination conventions, as well as the weakening of the party label by the removal from the provincial list of candidates of all partisan distinction between coalition candidates, and the reluctance of provincial Liberal M.L.A. and Cabinet ministers, including the Premier, to actively participate in the federal election, sche­ duled for June 1945.75 When a twenty-fifth anniversary party for Macken­ zie King was held in Vancouver, Hart tactfully stayed away in order to demonstrate the non-partisan nature of his administration.76 The Conservatives were not free from troubles of their own. Back-bench­ ers grumbled about the unhappy House seating arrangements which scat­ tered them to the far right of the Speaker, and among Opposition benches. Others were never accepting of the fact that they, Conservatives, certainly the moral if not the political equal of the Liberals, were accorded fewer Cabinet representatives. A lonely back-bencher from Kelowna, W.A.C. Bennett, pursued a characteristic maverick course and publicly advocated the outright fusion of the two provincial organizations into a provincial coalition party.77 Meanwhile Maitland, responsive to pressures from fed­ eral Conservatives, stoutly criticized federal Liberal policies and politicians on numerous occasions, always careful, however, to differentiate between

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federal and provincial Liberals.78 When federal Conservative leader John Bracken visited British Columbia in July 1944, Maitland enthusiastically shared the platform with him, an action which a Province reporter cited as proof “ . . . that the Liberals in the coalition are playing the coalition game just a little more squarely than the Conservatives.” 79 But these were minor troubles in a union which, in the year 1945, was basically sound. To the elite of both interested parties, the benefits of coalition far exceeded the cost. Patriotism inspired the formation of the coalition, and partriotism required its continuance. The war in Europe was won; the battle at home, against the pink menace, continued as ever and considerations of prudence demanded that the free-enterprise parties re­ main united to further the public weal. “ . . . God never meant that man should be denied freedom of action socially or industrially,” Maitland defended the government before the executive of the British Columbia Conservative Association in February 1943.80 Herbert Anscomb was even more to the point when, in a moment of analogical brilliance, he told the House that the reasons for the coalition were similar to those which inspired Churchill and Stalin to unite-“to save the world for common sense and decency and from National Socialism . . . . We joined together to save the country from the same kind of socialism that Hitler gave Germany and the destruction and misery that will follow it.” 81 Quite apart from Anscomb’s antics, there was, in fact, little reason to disband the happy alliance. Times had rarely been better. The economy boomed, government revenues rose to almost double their pre-war level, and spending, on both welfare and deve­ lopment, increased proportionately. Overnight, the coalition became the new sponsor of the assault on the frontier, the happy boom party, whose aggressive development policies were tempered by a humane consideration for the welfare of working people. The coalition provided gainful employ­ ment not merely for wage workers in the resource and manufacturing sectors riding the war boom, but for party workers who skimmed the cream off the new government spending. “Confidence in the government has been restored,” Pattullo commented on the new Tory love for Hart, “the Tories are getting more jobs.” 82 And never before, except during the intoxicated days of Richard McBride, had a government and a premier enjoyed such unanimous press adulation. What the C.C.F. News sourly described as “the luckiest government in British Columbia history,” was successfully pur­ veyed by Hart and his press friends as the most competent, efficient and humane. “No previous premier,” the Aewi aptly concluded, “has been half so competent as Mr. Hart in developing the legend of his government’s competence.” 83 All that remained for John Hart and Royal Maitland, during the balmy summer days of 1945, was to work out the details of electoral co-operation

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 83

in preparation for the provincial election, called for October 25. The collec­ tive wisdom was embodied in a formula known, appropriately enough, as the Hart formula, presented for consideration, and adopted, at separate meetings of the executives of the Liberal and Conservative Associations. The Hart formula guaranteed the incumbent coalitionists freedom from competition with their partner.84 Liberal sitting members were guaranteed renomination. The same immunity from competition was guaranteed the Conservative incumbents. Candidates would run as Liberal or Conservative “coalitionists.” Open bipartisan nomination conventions with an equal re­ presentation of Liberals and Conservatives, would choose candidates in constituencies currently held by the C.C.F. In each of the three dual mem­ ber Vancouver ridings represented by the C.C.F. each party would run one candidate. The Hart formula was quickly endorsed by the executives of both parties. Except for a few pouts and grunts from a minority of constituency and federal representatives, Maitland had little trouble selling the package to his colleagues. Hart was equally successful in his dealings with the Liberal executive which, in late July, endorsed in a joint resolution both the coali­ tion and the electoral formula over the objections of a quintet of opponents which included two recently elected federal members.85 According to the Victoria Daily Times, Hart was firm in dealing with reluctant colleagues. He denied reports that he would resign if the executive rejected the coalition arrangements, and assured the one hundred and sixty delegates of his determination to “take off his coat, roll up his sleeves and go to work,” regardless of their decision.86 And he was blunt about the party’s chances of gaining a majority without an electoral deal with the Conservatives-'T submit this formula if you wish to go on. Neither party can win alone.” 87 The coalition campaign was a melange of old effective ingredients. Voters were alerted to the red and yellow menaces and the C.C.F. was denounced as a band of renegades, traitors to the British flag and empire, brigands dedicated to the economic ruin of the province, friends of the Japanese who butchered the flower of Canadian manhood in the steaming Pacific war theatre. And Winch’s Calgary speech was inevitably trotted out by Mait­ land who reminded his audiences that the socialist leader had actually promised police action to enforce state expropriation.88 Government candi­ dates, front-benchers and back-benchers, Liberals and Conservatives, joined in a chorus of adulation of the record, repeating, in drab and endless unison, the catechism that the coalition was the best administration that the province had ever seen; a declaration so often made that a socialist M.L.A., Herbert Gargrave of Mackenzie, earlier admitted that this was probably true, “but . . . only because of the growing strength and pressure of the C.C.F.” 89

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The major theme of the Hart-Maitland manifesto, a forty-three point statement, was development, endless limitless development; the old boom song of frontier conquest which included the encouragement of shipbuild­ ing, expanded electrification and extensive highway programs such as the construction of the Hope-Princeton, Alaska and Peace River Highways, the latter linking the metropolis with the “vast empire of the Peace.”90 Voters in rural areas, starved for electricity, were reminded of the virtues of public power and the government’s rural electrification scheme. On the lower mainland and Vancouver Island, where a huge private monopoly was pre­ served intact, an extensive camouflage propaganda campaign against public power was carried out on behalf of the government by the British Columbia Electric Railway Company, which employed for some months before the election, two hundred sales representatives, directed by high salaried public relations technologists, who went on a door-to-door campaign boosting private power.91 Homeowners were assured that government-owned power plants were inefficient, that Ontario Hydro needed huge subsidies from the public purse, that public ownership involved regimentation and centraliza­ tion similar to fascism in Italy and national socialism in Germany and, finally, that unions would be destroyed by socialist bureaucrats.92 On the lower mainland, the coalition was the private power party; in the wanting Interior, it was the public power party.93 The coalition fire was directed almost exclusively at the C.C.F., although the socialists were not the sole opponents of the composite government. Back for another electoral outing was the drab collection of monetary fetishists, British Israelites, naturopaths, chiropractors, preachers, pleaders and anti-Semites painfully co-existing in the Social Credit Association of British Columbia. The Social Creditors had done little since their ill-fated sortie in the 1937 election except squabble. The united front established for that campaign had quickly disintegrated when the inevitable schisms, which chronically infect sectarian organizations, began to work their magic charm. A coterie of adherents to the party’s London secretariat, led by an enthusiastic druggist named J. Vans MacDonald, seceded in 1938 from the parent organization and formed the United Democrats. A succession of other groups, front organizations and back organizations, purists and simon-purists, coteries and circles quickly followed: the Democratic Mone­ tary Reform Organization, a melange of Aberharters and Douglasites, one or two of whom contested the 1940 federal election under the guise of Herridge’s New Democracy, the Federation of Canadian Voters, an adjunct of the Armed Forces Federation peopled by a few beery Canadian Legionaires, and the National Dividend Association, a weird hybrid of Dou­ glasites and British Israelites who might have better called themselves the Douglas Israelites. In December 1944, an organization called the Social

The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 85

Credit Association of Canada (British Columbia section) was formed at a convention in Vancouver addressed by Solon Low, the head of the Social Credit Association of Canada, which chartered the local body. The presi­ dent of the provincial organization, who doubled as a vice-president of the parent federal body, was Major Andrew Henry Jukes, DSO, OBE, a resi­ dent of Saanich and a product of Brandon, Manitoba, the Royal Military College of Kingston, and the Ninth Gurkha Rifles of the Indian Army. Jukes, a latterday Beaumont Boggs, was an accomplished yachtsman and mustache twiddler, an avid monetary reformer and charter member of the funny greenback organization known as the New Economic Institution of London, England.94 The good Major, together with Margaret Murray, an outback populist lady from Kansas, were to be found among the sixteen-odd candidates carrying a Social Credit banner in the 1945 provincial campaign. Unlike the Socreds, who represented no one save a few scattered and dissident panacea mongers, the communist Labour Progressive Party, which fielded nineteen candidates in the election, had an industrial base in the few large unions which they had diligently and ably organized in the years previous. But the communists were faced with their perennial prob­ lem: how to convert their industrial following, however precarious it may have been, into political, electoral power in the face of the competing socialists who had sent powerful organizational roots into the working class.95 The C.C.F. and communists appealed to the same class constitu­ ency, and the official communist strategy, in British Columbia as elsewhere, was to advocate a united front with the C.C.F.; an electoral agreement between the two left parties to eliminate mutual competition in much the same way as the two free-enterprise parties did.96 Only a coalition, Sam Carr argued, could defeat the coalition.97 It was with this end in view that the communists, through their industrial and political arms-the British Columbia Federation of Labour and the Labour Progressive Party-formally approached the C.C.F. on sundry occa­ sions. At the August 1945 convention of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, a resolution was passed supporting electoral unity between the C.C.F. and L.P.P. “so that only one candidate seeking working class sup­ port would be in the field at each riding,” 98 and instructing the executive to approach the C.C.F. A similar motion passed at successive L.P.P. con­ ventions. But the C.C.F. would not bite. “An agreement never works,” the C.C.F. M.L.A. Grant MacNeil wrote in the C.C.F. News, “when one party is asked to commit political suicide to serve the ends of the other party or surrender reasoned political convictions. Under such circumstances, the word is not agreement, it is swindle.” 99 The costs of a union, from the C.C.F.’s viewpoint, plainly exceeded its benefits since the communists had only a miniscule vote, amply registered in their weak showing in the June

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/ federal election, to bring to the C.C.F. And the socialist vote, as MacNeil : observed, was hardly transferrable to the communists, who were far from. popular within the C.C.F. A united front, moreover, presaged a significant loss of support from sections of the middle and working classes fearful of the red, as opposed to the pink, menace. It is little wonder that the C.C.F., at its eleventh annual convention in April 1944, rejected after much debate a policy of collaboration with the L.P.P.;100 a proposal which was not even considered at the party convention a year later. Acrimony between the communists and socialists had reached unprecedented heights during the spring and summer months of 1945 when a labour lobby, comprised primarily of communist executive members of the British Columbia Federa­ tion of Labour, closeted with the coalition Cabinet and agreed to co-operate with the government in setting up a joint labour-government committee, to advise the government on labour problems. The sweetheart agreement un­ dercut both a previous labour deputation, which contained C.C.F. union­ ists, and the C.C.F. opposition in the House which had long fought for the activation of the House’s Select Standing Committee on Labour.101 The coalitionists were ecstatic about the war within the left and took great pleasure in pronouncing the C.C.F. a totalitarian party when Herbert Herridge, the Kootenay squire who worked closely with the communist Mine Mill Union, was expelled from the party following his nomination as a federal candidate. By accepting the nomination while sitting as a provincial member, Herridge contravened a party ruling passed by the executive of which he was a member.102 Party president Tom Alsbury pronounced the errant rancher an “actual spokesman of the Communist Party now renamed the Labour Progressive Party.” 103 Much to Alsbury’s discomfiture, Her­ ridge ran successfully as a “People’s C.C.F. candidate” with the aid of a campaign committee supported by the local communists.104 For the rest, the C.C.F. fought a gritty campaign which included several addresses from T.C. Douglas, the new socialist Premier of Saskatchewan, and a loud defence by Winch of his Calgary speech when he asserted that, in the event of big business interfering with government expropriation, “they will have the full force of the law imposed on them.” 105 The party I program, which reflected the deliberations of the April provincial conven/ tion, included demands for the socialization of the production and distribution of electrical energy, transportation and communication utilities, brewI ing and distillery industries, and the development, processing and distribu1 tion of petroleum and petroleum products: industries “deemed essential for ' the maintenance of employment, the protection of living standards, and the ( provision of social services.” 106 The manifesto affirmed that complete so\ cialization was not possible within “the constitutional limitations of provin\ cial jurisdiction,” an assertion which prompted the Sun to describe the

/I

I The Grand Alliance: 1942-1945 87

socialists as “impatient Liberals” no longer certain of the sort of socialism they wanted.107 It appeared, however, shortly after the polling booths closed on October 25, that the voters were firmly convinced of what they wanted: more of the same. When the results were in, the coalition counted thirty-six supporters and 55.8% of the popular vote; the C.C.F. ten members, five less than its previous total, and 37.6% of the popular vote.108 Without electing a candi­ date, the communists gained 3.5% of the popular vote counting 16,479 of the 457,017 votes cast; the Socreds received less than half, a miniscule 6,627 votes. To Hart and friends, the results were gratifying, especially in the lower mainland, and the metropolitan areas of Victoria and Vancouver. Victoria voted overwhelmingly for the coalition while Vancouver, which sent Grant MacNeil, Grace Maclnnis, Dorothy Steeves, W.W. Lefeaux and Laura Jamieson to the House in the C.C.F. sweep of 1941, reversed itself. Only Winch and Arthur Turner in Vancouver-East salvaged victories. Had it not been for a remarkable surge in certain northern constituencies, old Liberal development burroughs pocketed by Oliver and Pattullo, where both the Liberal machine and local economy languished, the C.C.F. would have been thoroughly routed. In addition to returning candidates in the traditional unionized industrial constituencies of Cowichan-Newcastle, Grand Forks-Greenwood and Mackenzie, the C.C.F. captured Fort George, Omineca, Peace River and Prince Rupert and nearly won in Skeena, Atlin and Cranbrook.109 Among the Liberal casualties were the two architects of the Liberal northern bailiwick during the twenties and thirties, T.D. Pattullo and Harry Perry. The coalition fought a proficient campaign. The big boom talk, the\ burgeoning economy, the rural electrification scheme, the new spending, the anti-Japanese advertising barrage in the late stages of the campaign in Vancouver, the widely advertised Herridge split, the traditional red scare propaganda, and the competing communist candidacies which badly hurt ‘ the C.C.F. in Comox and Cranbrook, all worked their magic. Helpful as well was the chaotic condition of the voters list. The coalition refused to establish a basic list by enumeration, despite the huge popular shift during the war. The onus for adding names to the list was placed upon volunteer election commissioners nominated by the political parties. Well financed by loyal companies, the coalition enlisted an army of paid commissioners who dutifully left known C.C.F.ers off their list, while the C.C.F., not in prime organizational shape, had a difficult time getting transient loggers and fishermen, traditional supporters, many of whom had little opportunity to secure registration forms, on the list.110 Equally disenfranchised were the numerous C.C.F. supporters on active service in European, Pacific and American training stations. The results of the June federal election, in

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which the overseas soldiers vote went strongly C.C.F., were carefully perused by the government which refrained from amending the election legislation of 1941 which disqualified numerous overseas voters in Europe and the Pacific. For John Hart and his press and company friends, the 1945 election results were gratifying. The Sun, echoing press sentiments across the prov­ ince, pronounced itself pleased with the outcome and took the opportunity in a self-congratulatory editorial to claim paternity of the bawling brat which had grown into a respectable and eminent gentleman.111 Bruce Hutchison was convinced that the results were proof that the public still regarded the C.C.F. as a “ ‘straight socialist party’ . . . and why shouldn’t it? For whenever Mr. Coldwell makes a gesture towards moderation some­ one like Harold Winch leaps up to say the C.C.F. is a militant socialist party, or Mr. Angus Maclnnis pronounces the doom of private enterprise including the privately-owned farm, or Mrs. Steeves gets off one of her brilliant and dangerous witticisms, or Mr. Cameron talks like Karl Marx. The public rightly suspects that the C.C.F. is split clear down the middle between the gradualists and the sea-green incorruptible socialists, and the latter it will not accept.” 112 The results confirmed, to Hutchison’s satisfac­ tion, that the free-enterprise parties, unlike the socialists who promised “to run the whole economy . . . according to a fixed plan in complete detail,” could stand dissent and even dissension since they were “prepared to leave a large part of the economy to be managed by the play and conflict of rival forces.” 113 Hart’s Irish glee was scarcely less concealed. On the day after the election he announced that the voters had chosen wisely between “ . . . sound business administration with progressive measures based on the traditional foundation of free enterprise or a gamble in socialism.” 114 And he promised more of the same in the days ahead: fuller employment, improved labour conditions, more social security and extensive develop­ ment within the bounds of private enterprise.115 To the skeptics on the executives of the Liberal and Conservative parties with a modicum of arithmetic sense, John Hart, the master reckoner, had read the figures correctly, and drawn the proper conclusion. Although the socialists signifi­ cantly raised their popular vote to a record 37%, and ran strongly in numerous constituencies, their representation had dropped by five com­ pared to the 1941 election. Without the gentlemanly electoral agreements, without the happy Hart formula, without a coalition of Liberals and Con­ servatives, the socialist brigands with their hoarse voices and coarse hands, might have defiled the dignity and splendour of Government House. John Hart’s remarkable words delivered at a Liberal executive meeting on a warm sunny day in late July echoed and echoed again, “I submit this formula if you wish to go on. Neither party can win alone.” 116

CHAPTER IV

Cold Warriors: 1946-1949

“Man was given the power of speech to enable him to conceal his thoughts.” Father Malagrida.

Having amply cleared its first big electoral hurdle, the coalition seemed, in the months following the October 1945 election, in better shape than ever. When the first session of the twenty-first legislature convened in early March, the plush black leather chairs on the government side were filled with relaxed gentlemen who were especially pleased that some of the more virulent socialist gadflys-MacNeil, Maclnnis, Steeves, Lefeaux and Jamieson-no longer buzzed in the House. The gentlemen were looking forward to a relaxed, easy session and, judging from the meagre legislative fare announced in the Throne Speech, and the gloomy mood of the C.C.F. rump, their expectations were not unwarranted. There were, to be sure, a few measures enacted of middling importance: an act to implement the Cameron report on public education designed to equalize the taxation for education and relieve municipalities of some of their costs; minor revisions of the labour laws providing for a forty-four hour maximum work week, a week holiday with pay for all workers and reduced charges on employees for the Workmens Compensation Fund; a few changes in the forestry laws to carry out some of the minor recommen­ dations of the Sloan Commission.1 All in all, this was so minor and unexcit­ ing that the Sun, which hoped for an early implementation of the major recommendations of the Sloan report, including extensive forest protection and reforestation measures, and the long-promised liquor reform, was moved to set aside the catechism and chastise the government for adhering to its “old policy of doing things by bits and patches . . . the coalition is much better in its day-to-day administration than in enacting creative legis­ lation to solve British Columbia’s major problems. If it remains merely an efficient bookkeeper sort of government the coalition will soon fail as com­ pletely as if it were composed of fools and scoundrels.” 2 Beneath the calm House surface, however, there lurked dissension which 89

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provided the coalition with its first major test since its inception. The precipitating cause was the death of Maitland, of heart failure on March 28.3 The Conservatives, so they said, wished to retain the Attorney General portfolio, the source of considerable patronage involving the administration of the liquor laws, and, after a series of caucuses which resulted in the choice of Herbert Anscomb as House leader, they informed Hart of their prefer­ ence in a few strongly worded letters. Press reports indicated that at least part of the Tory House group were determined that the office be left open until the election of a new leader at a convention in June, after which negotiations with the Liberals for Cabinet representation could properly begin. Hart was not prepared to wait for a variety of reasons: the govern­ ment was in the midst of negotiating a new financial agreement with the federal government and, if we are to believe the Premier, desperately needed a qualified Attorney General at the approaching meetings. A candidate of undisputed abilities and liberal sympathies was immediately available in the tough Vancouver lawyer, Gordon Wismer, former Attorney General under Pattullo and renowned boss of the Vancouver-Centre Liberal machine. The Tories did not have a lawyer in their caucus nor anyone eminently qualified to fill the key post. Hart was unwilling to yield to the request of W.A. Jones, president of the British Columbia Conservative Association, who called for the appointment of a Conservative from outside the House.4 From out of the web of negotiations, there emerged a compromise which, for the moment, seemed reasonably satisfactory to most members of both parties. Wismer was sworn in as Attorney General in return for which Anscomb succeeded Hart as Minister of Finance, while two new minor portfolios were handed to Conservatives. Leslie Harvey Eyres, a Chilliwack tire merchant, Kinsman and Oddfellow, was appointed Minister of Rail­ ways, Trade, Industry and Fisheries, while Roderick Charles MacDonald, a Dewdney merchant who settled into the Reeveship of Coquitlam for eighteen years before election to the House, became Minister of Mines and Municipal Affairs. MacDonald had previously distinguished himself as the local champion heavyweight wrestler. The Tories had obviously struck a reasonable bargain. While unable to block the elevation of Wismer, as unpopular among Liberal partisans as Conservatives, they did succeed in extracting the Finance portfolio, raising their Cabinet representation, and guaranteeing a reasonable patronage flow. For Anscomb personally, it was an excellent deal since his position as Conservative House leader, and his leadership prospects, were strengthened by the assumption of a vital portfolio monopolized by the Liberals for over a decade. Anscomb plainly had no interest in seeing the Attorney General­ ship, for which he was not well-suited, (and the acceptance of which by himself would have necessitated the bothersome unloading of his

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liquor directorships) go to another caucus member or, even worse, to an outsider like Howard Green, a federal party competitor, who might have used it as a base from which to steal the leadership. His position fortified, Anscomb was his usual aggressive self at the June 15 Conservative convention. There to challenge him, grinning and blushing as ever, was W.A.C. Bennett, the Kelowna merchant with the rasping voice and jerky delivery, who had made a nuisance of himself in the preceding months by eagerly and nervously, privately and publicly, ad­ vocating the fusion idea. Soon after the June election results were in, Ben­ nett resumed his campaign on behalf of a purely provincial coalition party free from any and all entanglements with the federal organizations. He spoke of fusion in his own and surrounding ridings, badgered Hart, fed the Province and Victoria Times stories of his grandiose plans, announced in the House that planning and proper administration were impossible under the temporary arrangement and, in the soupy prose of the Province, “kin­ dled in the political darkness a promising light” when, in February 1946, he set up a coalition organization in his own riding.5 Bennett’s advocacy of the coalition idea was opportunistic and nonideological. He had no basic quarrels with the major policies of the Hart machine and his stated reasons for a new party were free of ideological rhetoric. His major concerns were professedly organizational and moral; the new party would be more efficient, competent, stable and free of old sniping and grasping after spoils. “There is no division between Liberals and Progressive Conservatives in British Columbia on questions of administra­ tion policy,” the Province, the original advocate of the union idea, nodded in agreement. “The only division there is is on questions of spoils, and that is a disgraceful division.” 6 The old non-partisan idea of General McRae’s Provincial Party, of the Kidd report, of the Tolmie Unionists, had found a new expression and advocate in the mid-forties. It was plainly a safe idea, with morally correct overtones, adequately innocuous, yet sufficiently inter­ esting and newsworthy to keep the name of the frustrated and ambitious Okanagan maverick in the limelight. It was the convenient credo of the political outsider with vaulting ambitions who articulated the frustrations of dissident party elements deprived of status and tangible preferments by an established oligarchy. The creation of a coalition party through the disbanding and reorganization of the local and provincial organizations would have provided an opportunity for the political outsider, through a general reshuffling of persons and positions, to get inside and taste the fruits of office. This is not to suggest that Bennett had no differences with Herbert Anscomb, other than over the need to create a coalition party. An Interior Tory booster, Bennett, unlike Anscomb, had no love for the British Co­

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lumbia Electric Railway Company which, he suggested during an earlier power debate, should have been expropriated through the purchase of shares of the parent company, the British Columbia Power Corporation, at market value.7 And Bennett was a spender annoyed at Anscomb’s tightfisted proclivities. He thought of him as “an extreme Conservative always wanting to know where the money was coming from.” 8 But Bennett’s major quarrel was with his rival’s eminence. The hardware merchant sorely wished to be leader, and the accountant, heavy-set and defiant, blocked his way. It is little wonder that Bennett, who telegraphed national Conservative leader John Bracken to release the Vanouver Member of Parliament How­ ard Green, a lawyer, for the vacant Attorney Generalship, was distraught when the news arrived that Anscomb had been sworn in as Finance Minis­ ter in the deal which brought Wismer the Attorney General portfolio.9 “Nobody had been told about this,” Bennett later protested. “We were hostile, and from then on it was open war.” 10 But the battle proved to be no more than a brief and unequal skirmish. Anscomb, who had done his homework and commanded strong support from Island and lower mainland delegates, was nominated by T. Norris, K.C., an old opponent of Bennett’s, who declared in firey patriotic prose: “Communism can succeed only by putting all opposition in a concentration camp and that is why I have come forward to nominate Herbert Ans­ comb.” 11 The Bennett rites were performed by Tilly Rolston, the Point Grey Baptist and feminist, who noted that there was a lack of female representation among coalition Cabinet ministers-a wrong which Bennett, always sensitive to the rights of Tory women, promised to rectify. But the major issue, as defined by Anscomb, was not women’s representation; it was the veiled treason practised by the wrecking supporters of fusion who had already formed a party within the party. Anscomb declared himself a “strong party man” and loudly disavowed any connection with the insidi­ ous new coalition party. “There has been formed in this province a coalition party,” he roared. “I want every Conservative to know that I will have nothing to do with it.” 12 The delegates were assured, and cheered so wildly that Bennett, in a nervous speech seasoned with cheeky grins and tumbled words, found it necessary to deny that the coalition organizations in his riding contemplated a permanent merger. But the damage was done. Of the 507 votes cast, Anscomb received 319 and Bennett, who enjoyed limited support from Young Conservatives, a few Tory feminists, and scattered Interior delegates, counted 188.13 The June Conservative convention was heartening for neither Liberal nor Bennett-style coalitionists. Resolutions were passed instructing the leader to “uphold the dignity and integrity of the party at all times,” and support­ ing the idea of the single transferable ballot to be implemented at an un­

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specified date as a device to keep the C.C.F. out, in the event of a coalition break-up. Plainly, the junior partner was prudently preparing for the firm’s demise. In the meanwhile, the Liberals were saddled with the fractious Anscomb, an antique Tory, whose imperious platform manner had earned him the soubriquet “II Duce.” Anscomb was the bete noire of both the C.C.F. and Progressive Liberals who rarely forgot his famed exhortation to Pattullo, during the depression years, to cut welfare expenditures to the bone, and then “scrape the bone”;14 or his delicate suggestion, delivered in the carpeted, leathered splendour of the House, that a female C.C.F. mem­ ber, attired in a pretty dress, be horsewhipped. The Tory succession question, which weakened the coalition’s founda­ tions, was not nearly as threatening as the ominous situation created by John Hart’s announcement, formally made at a meeting of the provincial executive of the Liberal Party in October 1947, of his intention to resign as Premier. Rumours of the Premier’s impending resignation were current throughout the previous spring and summer when Hart, more pale and drawn than usual, confided to his friends and colleagues that twenty-two years in the British Columbia Legislature, twenty years as Finance Minister, was quite enough for any man. Hart was tired and in bad health. He wanted rest, more time for golf and arithmetical doodling, and a comfortable sine­ cure in the Senate, a post which Mackenzie King, progressively less ena­ moured of a coalition which threatened federal Liberal chances, subse­ quently denied him. Hart’s announcement, made before one hundred and fifty Liberal executive members in the Mayfair Room of the Hotel Van­ couver, significantly skirted any reference to the Conservative coalition wing and included an assurance to remain in office until the party named a successor at a convention to be called in early December. The Premier’s impending exit inspired a spate of plotting and jockeying from both wings of the coalition. The Tories wasted little time in defining the ball game as entirely new. Press reports soon after the Liberal meeting quoted Conservative M.L.A. A.R. MacDougall, a caucus spokesman, to the effect that Herbert Anscomb, in the name of God and justice, should be the next premier, sentiments repeated in the following days by Anscombites across the province. On October 24, the Conservatives gathered in the Hotel Vancouver for what the Province described as their most important annual meeting since 1941. There, consideration was given to the implica­ tion of Hart’s resignation.15 The Tories waxed tough and concluded that since the union was formed on the understanding that Hart would be premier, his resignation implied a new agreement between the two parties before he could recommend a successor to the Lieutenant-Governor. Far from recognizing any prior Liberal claim to the office, they were convinced it was now their turn and Anscomb was recommended for the premiership

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in a strongly-worded resolution which delegated him power to renegotiate the entire coalition arrangement. Anscomb’s hand was strengthened by the recent death of Louis Lebourdais, Liberal Cariboo M.L.A. and Govern­ ment Whip, the elevation of Saanich Liberal representative and House Speaker Norman Whittaker to the British Columbia Supreme Court, and the serious illness of George Weir who was unlikely to return to his Cabinet post. The Conservatives, with fifteen members, owned nearly as many caucus votes as the Liberals, who counted seventeen. The Liberal leadership campaign raged fast and furious in the weeks following Hart’s announcement of his resignation. The favourite and front runner was Gordon Wismer, the Vancouver lawyer possessed of what one observer described as a “capitalist-shaped head,” 16 and who had earned a wide reputation as a brilliant trial lawyer before and after entering the Legislature in 1933. Wismer was a latterday Bowser; rough, blunt and ruthless; an excellent machine man and an indelicate brawler who rarely paused to kiss babies or munch apples. A product of Sutton and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the latest of a long line of Grits, Wismer worked his way west at an early age on a bridge-building gang of the C.P.R., practised law in Edmonton, and was later called to the Bar in Vancouver where he briefly partnered with Gerry McGeer. Wismer used his accession to the Attorney Generalship in 1937 to fortify, through the artful distribution of club li­ cences, the Vancouver-Centre Liberal machine which, according to Blair Fraser, shared with a similar organization in Montreal-Cartier, “the gami­ est reputation in Canada.” 17 It was perfectly understandable that Gordon Silvester Wismer’s return to the Legislature in 1945, after a four year absence,18 his reoccupancy of the Attorney Generalship in 1946, and announced candidacy for the leader­ ship in 1947, was anathema to a large and restive section of the Liberal Party. Wismer may have been a Farris man, but he had little sympathy from prominent federal Liberals like James Sinclair, who pondered the weakness of the federal organization, from the Young Liberals who decried his old machine style and tight hold over patronage, and from Interior Liberals who thought the Vancouver-Centre organization an urban octopus stran­ gling the party vitals. Wismer’s announced candidacy met with a flurry of activity from the scattered opposition which, after extensive searching, dredged up Bjorn Ingemar Johnson as an anti-Wismer candidate. A whitehaired resident of New Westminster, Johnson was affectionately known among Tory politicians and the general public as “Boss,” not for any pronounced machinist proclivities, but simply because his Icelandic parents had christened him Bjorn and called him “Bjosse.” 19 His schoolmates, who admired his marked abilities at lacrosse, and knew little and cared less about Hague and Pendergast, shortened the name to “Boss.” Johnson was an

Cold Warriors: 1946-1949 95

honest and industrious sort who had risen from modest beginnings to the position of general manager and director of a complex of building supply companies, the parent of which was Evans, Coleman and Gilley Bros. Limited.20 Although a declared Liberal-socialist, he was also director of the British Columbia Power Corporation Limited, the holding company of the British Columbia Electric Railway Company.21 Johnson was the ideal candidate for the anti-Wismerites; a relative politi­ cal outsider, free from the taint of machine politics, tough, genial and hard-working. A back-bencher with good company credentials, Johnson had few personal enemies within the party and fewer still among the Con­ servatives who shook with anger at the thought of Wismer’s succession to the leadership. Johnson was the perfect compromise at a time when both Liberals and Conservatives, while questioning the necessity and utility of the coalition, were not yet prepared to break it. Johnson, after all, had appropriately moved the resolution favouring coalition at the historic December 1941 convention and was more likely than Wismer to keep the Tories in the partnership. In the event of separation, he was the whitehaired New Westminster boy, the successful industrialist, and the back­ bencher far from the patronage slough, all of which seemed to make it very likely that he could lead the flagging Liberals to a victory. Such, indeed, was the tack taken by his supporters at the mammoth Vancouver convention attended by 942 delegates in December. Few party insiders, whether of the Wismer or Johnson camps, were serenely confident of their candidate’s chances in the nervous hours preceding the meeting. Wismer ran strongly early on, but the Johnson campaign, ably directed by the Vancouver-North M.P. James Sinclair, steadily gained ground until, by convention time, support was evenly divided. Neither candidate cam­ paigned on an anti-coalition program; both promised to maintain the part­ nership for the time being.22 But the pro-Johnson organization, manned by federal Liberals and by a healthy contingent of dissident Young Liberals headed by the anti-coalitionist Arthur Laing, made a decisive impact. James Sinclair, who nominated Johnson, told the convention what Johnson sup­ porters had incessantly repeated in the weeks preceding: the Liberal organi­ zation was weak and they could not win alone, the coalition must ultimately split, and the party needed an immediate reorganization spearheaded by a leader who eventually could lead it to victory as an independent entity-“all conditions in the end must break . . . and the man to take on the heavy task of reorganization and when the time comes head this party to victory is Bjorn Johnson.” 23 Johnson, equally candid but less effusive, admitted that the Liberal machine was in a desultory state and promised to rebuild While, at the same time, continuing the coalition.24 The delegates were impressed. When the results were counted, and recounted, Boss Johnson

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won by a mere eight votes, 475 to 467.25 Like the earlier Tory enclave, the Liberal meeting was, at best, a halting and reticent endorsement of the coalition. It was hardly reassuring to the few avid coalitionists in either party. Their pro-coalition resolution endors­ ing “a united front against Socialism and Communism” was qualified with the assertion that it was “essential the Liberal Party should maintain its own identity for the furtherance of its own particular policies and aspirations for the welfare of the people.26 Sinclair’s candid declaration accurately ex­ pressed the sense of the meeting replete with partisan chest-thumping, with loud exhortations to strengthen the party organization as a prelude to schism. The alternative vote remedy was endorsed in principle, to be in­ stituted when the Premier and his colleagues saw fit. And the party presi­ dency fell to Arthur Laing, declared enemy of Wismer, head of the Young Liberal Association, and an active federalist and partisan, nominated, sig­ nificantly enough, by T.D. Pattullo. Laing, an unsuccessful candidate for Delta in the 1937-1941 elections was a key figure in the formation of the Young Liberal Association of B.C., a restive group of business and profes­ sional insurgents who had earlier seceded from the Vancouver-Centre Con­ stituency Association.27 His accession to the party presidency was ample evidence of where the priorities lay. “I don’t favour breaking up the coali­ tion tomorrow,” he told the delegates, “but I shall go to every Liberal Association in this province and do all I can to put Liberalism first in British Columbia.” 28 Such pronouncements merely fed the pique of Herbert Anscomb and colleagues who waited anxiously for the results of the Liberal meeting. To Anscomb’s mind, the Liberals were not deliberating to choose the next premier; their task was the more modest one of electing a party leader. The formal task of recommending a premier rested with Hart, the out-going head of government who, in turn, was obliged to accept the joint recommen­ dations of the bi-partisan meetings called to renegotiate the coalition agree­ ment following the Liberal convention. The Tories probably did not expect the premiership since the Liberals were the majority both in popular vote and representation. But they thought it meet and proper to make noises that they were tired of being junior partners in the firm, fed up with ceding the premiership to the Liberals, the majority of House committee chairman­ ships, the position of chief Government Whip, the House Speakership. And they were tired of an electoral arrangement which gave “a perpetual advan­ tage to one party.” 29 Anscomb was clearly intent on driving a hard bargain, and from the seventeenth day of December, when he and Johnson first met to negotiate a deal, until December 26, when members of the press gallery were summoned to his home to hear an important announcement, a series of conferences ensued at which both parties eagerly pressed their demands.

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What resulted, however, was merely more of the same. In a prepared statement read to a batch of eager reporters in Anscomb’s living-room, Johnson declared the coalition would continue “as it exists at present,” 30 the only Cabinet change being the appointment of W.T. Straith, a Liberal Victoria lawyer, to the Education portfolio, replacing the ailing George Weir. The coalition had clearly survived its worst days. “Out of the night that troubled it,” the Province waxed eloquent, “the coalition appears to have come forth renewed. . . . ” 31 As if to nod their agreement, the good people of Saanich and Cariboo, promised more highways, a pulp mill and a completed P.G.E., voted strongly in favour of the government candidates in the key by-elections of February 1948, the first electoral tests of the reconstituted government. The legislative fare offered by the renewed regime was of mixed quality, departing in no major way from the centrist goal pursued by Hart and Maitland of “an economic system, generous enough to keep the mass of the people quiet and profitable enough to attract new people to the pro­ vince.” 32 The 1947 session, which preceded the Liberal leadership fight, was hardly satisfactory to Liberal purists who noted that little was done to reform the liquor and electoral laws except, of course, the belated decision to enfranchise the Chinese and Indians, a move encouraged by the expecta­ tion, like all such similar moves, that the newly enfranchised would express their gratitude to their benefactors by voting appropriately in future elec­ tions. There were, in addition, a number of other important measures: the implementation of the recommendations of the Goldenberg report on the reorganization of municipal finances, allocation of an additional two m illion dollars in aid to the municipalities,33 ratification of the new tax agreements lately negotiated by Hart in which the province received twenty-three mil­ lion dollars in return for the continued surrender of income tax and succes­ sion duties to the federal government, and an amendment to the Schools Act, George Weir’s last contribution to Liberal reform, providing for official recognition of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and for automatic membership in that organization of all teachers in the province.34 The two major bills were in the areas of forestry and labour relations. The MacMillan interests, Crown Zellerbach, Bloedel, Stewart and Welch Li­ mited and other companies, were delighted with the implementation of the recommendations of the Sloan Forestry Commission setting up a system of forest management licences to place the forest industry on a sustained yield basis; a reorganization which inspired further mergers in the heavily cartel­ ized industry and injured the small independent operators. By far the most controversial bill was the new Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which required a government-supervised strike vote linked with an exasperatingly long procedure involving a conciliation commission, conciliation

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board, a vote of acceptance or rejection of the board’s award, and a fourteen day waiting period after the strike vote. Bill 39, as it came to be called, placed the timing of the strike in the hands of the Minster of Labour, provided for stiff penalties for unions and union officials in the event of illegal strikes, and perpetuated company unions by giving full status to employees’ associations defined as “other than trade unions.” 35 Organized labour left and right, communist and non-communist, was enraged at the bill which C.C.L. research director Eugene Forsey described as “a method of prohibiting strikes without saying so” since the clause covering pre-strike procedures was so comprehensive that it was “doubtful whether more than a tiny fraction of strikes could ever take place at all without breach of the law.” 36 Harold Winch was moved to recall the Art Gallery and Post Office sit-ins, reminding the government that there were times when it was “abso­ lutely ethical to oppose the law and, if necessary, break the law,” 37 senti­ ments obviously shared by the one hundred and sixteen steelworkers hauled before Vancouver and Burnaby police courts in September for illegally striking.38 Among Bill 39’s virulent opponents were leading communist unionists like Harvey Murphy and Harold Pritchett whose honeymoon with the coalition government, hastily manufactured in the patriotic days of 1945, had quickly and bitterly ended. The June emergency convention of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, still precariously dominated by communist supporters, overwhelmingly endorsed the executive council’s recommendation to defeat the government “on both the economic and political fronts.” 39 The executive stated that by enacting the bill without consultation with the Federation executive or use of the lapsed Govern­ ment-Labour committee, which served as a convenient piece of political window dressing, the government had “deliberately broken faith with the representatives of organized labour.” 40 The denunciations of Bill 39, which included demands for alterations from the Liberal Party’s executive committee and Young Liberals, who saw the evil hand of Toryism in the legislation, grew so loud and long that the government, during the 1948 House session, saw fit to amend the act. Bill 87, put through as an amendment to the I.C.A. Act, relaxed the compulsory strike vote provisions of the earlier measure and conferred autonomous powers on the newly appointed Labour Relations Board to order a vote on an offer of settlement during a strike, a provision which, together with others protecting company unionism and endorsing civil action for breach of regulations, met with further union disapproval. The political moral which some labour leaders drew from the government’s latest move was best characterized, in zoological terms, by steelworker representative Pen Baskin: “When mice elect cats to legislate for them, cats will bring down legislation favourable to cats.” 41

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Baskin, to be sure, had not spoken the entire truth since feline quad­ rupeds, whether fat or thin, have, historically speaking, found it necessary on occasion to pacify rather than devour their miniscule opponents, espe­ cially when the mice have been numerous, squeaky and aggressive. Such indeed was the strategy which the coalition politicos pursued so earnestly in the previous years that, by the year 1948, the government found itself in need of new tax revenues to help finance the growing welfare bill. The third session of the twenty-first legislature of British Columbia was notable mainly for its new revenue provisions. Bills were passed to appropriate the Dominion amusement and pari mutuel taxes in preparation for their renun­ ciation by Ottawa.42 Timber royalties were upped and a four-per-cent tax on the net profits of mining operations replaced the previous two-per-cent output tax. Most important, however, was the imposition of a three-per­ cent retail sales tax called the “Social Security and Municipal Aid” tax imposed on retail goods, capital equipment and construction material,43 the major exemptions being food, medicine, farm implements and restau­ rant meals costing less than fifty-one cents.The tax’s regressive characteris­ tics may have been moderate, since food (other than restaurant meals) and rent were not included, and two out of three cents were to be used for welfare purposes, including the financing of a new compulsory premiumsupported hospital insurance plan passed at the same session,44 but Finance Minister Anscomb’s sole personal political gain was notoriety. Local pen­ nies were henceforth described in common parlance as “Little Herbies.” Tax legislation, whether regressive or progressive, was hardly a proper window dressing for an election, and the coalition bosses, being experienced hands, were sensibly aware of this when the fourth session of the twentyfirst legislature of British Columbia convened in early February. The gov­ ernment had experienced some rough sledding. The unseemly display of dirty linen during the succession struggles, the bitter dispute with organized labour over restrictive legislation, the meagre legislative fare and new run of taxes had damaged the authority of the catechism that British Colum­ bian’s were, after all, experiencing the best government in British Columbia history. It became clear, however, soon after the Lieutenant-Governor delivered the Speech from the Throne that the government was determined to regain lost ground and quicken the saliva flow of the masses through the sponsor­ ship of a program of bold and untrammelled development. The government announced a ninety million dollar development program including the extension of the rails of the P.G.E. from Quesnel to Prince George, the construction of a highway from Vancouver to Squamish suitable for use by diesel trucks and buses, a three-year thirty million dollar road-building program with assistance to the cities for the building and maintenance of

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arterial highways passing through their limits, a five million dollar hydro development near Quesnel, a five hundred thousand dollar lumber assembly yard at Squamish, the further extension of the P.G.E. to the Peace River block, half-money for a nine million dollar school-building program, special financial aid to rural districts to keep school levies below eight mills, exten­ sive land rehabilitation, and flood relief in consort with the federal govern­ ment.45 The Premier was delighted to announce, further, that the Alumi­ num Company of Canada was prepared to invest three hundred million dollars in a plant complex in British Columbia; a prospect heightened by the passage of Bill 66, “an Act to Promote the Industrial Development of the Province”-known popularly as the Aluminum Bill-which gave the Cabinet carte blanche to dispose of land and water power resources and, under section four, effectively to tie the hands of any future provincial government in making any changes in the prospective agreement with Alcan. Attorney General Gordon Wismer defended the sweeping powers of the bill, described by Winch as “rotten, absolutely rotten,” by stating that Alcan requested the measure “to ensure that, if any radical government takes office, they can go to Ottawa. They don’t want to be at the mercy of such a government.” 46 To citizens of the Interior and north, to workingmen concerned with full employment and job security, to small businessmen assembled in Boards of Trade across the province, the new development program was good news, and they were reminded of this by a barrage of propaganda from govern­ ment and private sources. The old boom song, the wearying litany of adulation, the heady message of frontier conquest, was insistently carried to the far corners of the province; from the trim working class cottages of East Vancouver to the drowsy hamlets of the Peace, from rainy Prince Rupert to Thomas Uphill’s sleepy coal-town in Kootenay-East. The new expenditure, Johnson announced, was part of a program of full employment and capital expansion which would contribute to “the greatest development this province has ever seen”;47 the growth and settling of the Interior, the absorption of the unemployed, the establishment of new secondary indus­ tries and the emergence of the Prince George area as a major lumbershipping centre. Development, in short, would contribute to the well-being of all classes, represented by a non-partisan coalition government which counterpoised class unity with class struggle. The workingmen stood to gain through higher employment and wages, more jobs, and social security benefits financed by the rising tax revenues; the small businessmen of the Cariboo and Peace would benefit from the expansion of secondary indus­ tries stimulated by power development, road construction and increased spending; the farmer from increased rural electrification; and finally, the companies, the mighty wielders of capital and organizers of production, on

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whom the sun of British Columbia had never set, were afforded the oppor­ tunity for a further feast of profit. The media potentates, the company lords and their junior Chamber of Commerce friends, were quick to provide the Johnson-Anscomb bund with substantial ancillary propaganda support. Beginning early in the new year, a flood of advertisements was let loose in the urban and rural press, spon­ sored by firms like Standard Oil of British Columbia lauding the ability of venture capital to provide jobs and security for honest, decent, hard-work­ ing wage-earners. Daily and weekly newspapers were filled with impressive bank statements and attacks on the records of the Saskatchewan C.C.F. and British Labour governments who, it was alleged, stunted development through restrictions on venture capital. Radio programs were saturated with blurbs and businessmen dutifully broadcast the benefits of coalition policies and private enterprise. Howard Mitchell, past president of the Vancouver Board of Trade, endorsed the government program wholesale and spoke of how Saskatchewan, shunned by investors, was becoming an economic wasteland under socialist rule.48 A leading provincial industrial­ ist described the Johnson program as “the greatest thing since the rail lines were laid into British Columbia,” 49 while all through Howe Sound, Squam­ ish and from the Cariboo to Prince George, Board of Trade people praised the government for its new determination to complete the P.G.E. Finan­ cial-page editors and their analysts pronounced the government policy sound and beneficial and gave wide coverage to the statement of Mr. McNeely Dubose, a vice-president of Alcan, who warned that stable gov­ ernment was needed above all else to guarantee the free flow of capital and realize the true promise of a province standing on the threshhold of a mighty expansion: “No corporation will hazard its capital of millions of dollars unless reasonably assured of a fair opportunity of development and a reasonable return on its investment. . . . Just as long as there are doubts-yes, threats, of confiscation euphemistically called expropriationthere will be hesitation on the part of investors to come into British Co­ lumbia. . . . When those doubts are dispelled or removed, this province will move towards the top of industrialization in Canada.” 50 Such were the views of Bjorn Johnson and Herbert Anscomb who an­ nounced, on April 16, 1949, the day of dissolution of the twenty-first legislature of British Columbia, a provincial election scheduled for June 15, a short two weeks before a similar federal contest. In a carefully prepared statement Johnson assured the voters, while Anscomb smiled and nodded in agreement, that “a clarification of the future political administration” of the province was needed before either the government or the large private investors could safely proceed with their spending plans.51 Prosperity could continue only if “those who are ready and willing to invest large sums of

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money in the development of our province” could be properly assured of a stable political climate.52 Johnson reminded the voters that very shortly the government needed to go into the money market for funds to finance the P.G.E. extension, new roads, new hydro schemes, hospitals and schools and that a resounding answer from the voters meant that the money could be bought cheaply, at less cost to the taxpayer, and construction proceeded with quickly. An affirmative answer also meant approval of “the social security measures that . . . placed British Columbia in the forefront of all Canadian provinces.” 53 The Johnson-Anscomb formula for electoral co-operation, approved by an April Liberal convention and by the executive of the Conservative party, differed in no way from their predecessors’. Among the eighteen seats held by the Liberals, the nominee would be either the sitting member or a person chosen by the Liberal party. In the fifteen Conservative seats, either the sitting member or a person chosen by the Conservatives would get the government candidacy.54 In North Vancouver, Comox and Esquimalt, occupied by straight coalitionists, the candidacies would fall to nominees chosen by joint conventions, as would the ten seats held by the Opposition. In Vancouver-East, where the C.C.F. held two seats, the Liberals would choose one candidate and the Conservatives another. The election announcement was a signal for a new surge of propaganda and organization from coalition and company sources. The old catechism, that the government was the most honest, able and competent in provincial history was revived, dusted off, and endlessly repeated. And so were the warnings that prosperity, development and job security depended upon the return of a stable, free-enterprise government. The government’s thirty-four point election manifesto promised more highways, bigger and better pulp mills, a huge three hundred million dollar aluminum plant, and fortification of the social security system preceded by a review of the hospital insurance and construction programs, old age pensions and social allowances. Mayor Charles Thompson of Vancouver, echoing sentiments expressed by the president of the Vancouver Board of Trade, by British Columbia Electric Company president A.E. Grauer and other company leaders, warned of “a fear in the East that, municipally and provincially,” British Columbia could turn socialist; an event which might “in the opinion of bond dealers, affect to some extent the integrity of our bonds.” 55 A pamphlet entitled The Saskatchewan Story, financed by big mortgage and insurance companies, which described the prairie province as a social and economic wasteland, was stuffed into mailboxes across the province.56 And trade union coalition­ ists like Jack Ross, international representative of the International Broth­ erhood of Electrical Workers, were accorded platform space to affirm, on behalf of the working people of the province, that a vote for the coalition

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was “insurance for continued prosperity and security.” 57 Ross was a labour leader dear to Gordon Wismer’s heart, a non-political, non-ideological sort who cared less for his own political aggrandizement or socialist politics than for the welfare of the common man. “Frankly, I don’t expect to be able to satisfy those sections of labour which form the political action committees of the C.C.F.,” the Attorney General informed a working class audience, “but I am certain that the reasonable and moderate labour man, the worker who is interested more in the welfare of labour than in politics and its personal opportunities, will accept my guarantee of the government desire to deal frankly and swiftly with the problems involved.” 58 Such purring prose was far from typical of the government style. Coali­ tion politicians were not content merely to repeat the government record, promise more of the same and warn of economic dislocation in the event of a socialist government. Instead, they equated the pink swell with the red menace, earnestly and endlessly droning that the C.C.F. would end all freedom, civic, as well as economic, the day after its accession to power. The major thuggery was done by Wismer and Anscomb who asserted that there were few L.P.P. candidates in the election because the communists had “infiltrated into the ranks of decent, Christian socialists,” 59 that commu­ nists were actively collecting C.C.F. party memberships, that the C.C.F. represented “the evil cancer of socialism and its brother communism,” and that most of the members of the C.C.F. sided “with the Kremlin against the free people of the world.” 60 The diatribe peaked in the final hours of the campaign when an audience at a C.C.F. meeting, chaired by Grace Maclnnis, joined in the singing of the marching song “The Red Flag.” Wismer’s charge that the insidious substitution of the “Red Flag” for “O Canada” was an insult to the people of British Columbia and Canada, and further evidence that a secret agreement existed between the C.C.F. and the Labour Progressive Party was given wide front page press coverage.61 C. C.F. spokesmen, from chairman Grace Maclnnis to provincial president D. G. Steeves, to national leader M.J. Coldwell were hard pressed to explain away the harmless rendering of the Red hymn, which Coldwell declared to be the forty-year-old theme song of the British Labour Party “in no way connected with Communism.” 62 Dorothy Steeves, however, described the songfest as a big mistake “due to an irresponsible employee of the auditorium who told the organist to play it.” 63 The weighty “Red Flag” affair was merely one incident in a long cam­ paign, fought in the frigid climes of the Cold War, which placed the C.C.F. severely on the defensive. C.C.F. spokesmen spent most of their platform hours warding off the red bogey, painting Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway a pale pink, describing them as countries where democracy and socialism were happily fused, and defending the

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growth record of T.C. Douglas’s Saskatchewan government. Party candi­ dates soft-pedalled their socialism, talking less about expropriation than about the evils of Anscomb’s three-per-cent tax and the Alcan Bill, about the necessity of an excess profits tax, a national health scheme, and the elimination of the means test for old age pensioners. The Cold War culture, the virulent red-baiting campaign which Coldwell observed to include more vicious advertising than he had ever seen in his life,64 had plainly induced a retreat from socialism. No party, however, suffered as much from the red scare as the miniscule Labour Progressive Party which, by the year 1949, counted far less electoral support than its far-right competitor, the Social Credit Party. The commu­ nists had fallen on bad times since the powerful campaign against them within the union movement began to gain momentum in the post-war years. The growth of the representation of the Retail-Wholesale, Packinghouse and C.B.R.T. unions on the Vancouver Labour Council (C.C.L.), together with the decline of the shipyard workers, resulted in the defeat of the communist executive slate in 1948.65 Within the T.L.C., the Canadian Seamen’s Union was routed by the rival Seafarers International Union while, at the 1949 T.L.C. convention, Harvey Murphy’s Mine Mill Union was expelled from the national body. The bitter struggle within the powerful International Woodworkers of America was settled in 1948 when Harold Pritchett and Ernie Dalskog were ousted from their executive positions by a movement of white insurgents based in the large New Westminster local. The communist-led district council disaffiliated from the International to form the Woodworkers’ Industrial Union of Canada, which soon disinte­ grated as local after local of the giant union affirmed their affiliations with the International. Finally, communist control of the British Columbia Fed­ eration of Labour was broken at the September 1948 convention when five of the nine executive positions fell to non-communists. By the 1949 provin­ cial election, the L.P.P.’s precarious industrial base was all but destroyed. Its political base was non-existent. The sole L.P.P. candidate to contest the election was Nigel Morgan, who ran in Alberni. The Socreds, for all of their desperate infighting, were beginning, by the spring and summer of 1949, to show some signs of organizational life. The 1945 election was followed by a host of sectarian squabbles. The Mac­ Donald faction, enamoured as ever with the comforting idea of an interna­ tional zionist conspiracy, gathered its scanty forces in an organization known as the Union of Electors. Within the Socred Association of Canada (B.C. Section) there developed a severe crisis in 1946 when Peer Paynter, a farmer and carpenter from Saskatchewan who became a prominent local executive officer, was accused, in a bizarre affair, of being a communist agent, only to be exonerated at a hearing presided over by Solon Low. The

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presidency of the association fell to the irascible Jukes who steadily flouted the constitution, avoided conventions and organization work, and sought to turn the organization into a personal appendage. But Jukes had to contend with the growing faction, operating mainly from Vancouver, which sought to broaden the association’s organizational and electoral base and rid the party of its sectarian formalism. The moving spirit of the anti-Jukes group was Paynter and Lyle Wicks, a Vancouver street railwayman, born and raised in Alberta and the Fraser Valley, who was introduced to Social Credit by a fellow driver named Fred Mix one fine day in 1944.66 “There is no reason why a man should have to stand fifteen minutes waiting for a bus,” Mix told Wicks. “Why can’t we have more buses?” 67 Since Mix mixed Social Credit with buses, which Wicks knew and cared about, Wicks was impressed. Social Credit meant more buses; and more buses meant Social Credit. “In a flash,” Wicks later confessed, “I saw that this was what I’d been waiting for. We are headed for a slave state unless Social Credit can cure the evils in our midst.” 68 Wicks quickly rose to the vice-presi­ dency, ingratiated himself with the Alberta emirs of the Social Credit Association of Canada, who had no use for the B.C. president and, by 194-8, was prepared, with the support of the federal executive including party president Solon Low, to steal the organization from Jukes. The struggle peaked in March when the Jukes group, centred mainly on the Island, upstaged the Wicks men, who announced an April party convention after consultation with the national council in December 1947, by calling a provincial convention for Victoria in mid-March.69 Wicks’s supporters boycotted the meeting at which both Paynter and Wicks were removed from the executive. At the Wicks-Paynter convention, a more numerous and serious affair, a new organization was born, the British Columbia Social Credit League. The founding convention of the British Columbia Social Credit Leaguewhich included about four hundred paid-up members-was an important event in the history of the British Columbia Social Credit movement.70 The MacDonald and Jukes factions, the anti-Semitic monetary fetishists who contested the 1949 election as the Union of Electors, had been exorcised and isolated, and a viable new organization emerged with the help of the federal and Alberta Socreds, who saw a fertile field for imperial expansion in British Columbia. The Union of Electors had no base, except among a few Island adherents of the Jukes orthodoxy, and among a tiny coterie of friends and followers of MacDonald. The Wicks-Paynter organization, however, had at least a financial base; the Social Credit Association of Canada, financed, in turn, by the Alberta party and government which by 1949, was already aiding the British Columbia off-spring with money and speakers. The Brit­ ish Columbia Social Credit League counted early support not only from the

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Vancouver area, but from the Interior, especially in the Chilliwack and Abbotsford areas of the Lower Fraser Valley71 where early organization work was done among receptive Mennonites, farmers and small business­ men. In the June 1949 election, the League fielded sixteen candidates all from the lower mainland and Interior, and left the Island to Jukes’s Union of Electors who contested eleven seats, four in Vancouver city.72 The League platform, a mild and pragmatic document, spoke of the abolition of company unionism, greater draining and flood control support for farm­ ers, increased royalties from resource exploitation, increased educational grants to municipalities, higher old age pensions and the early completion of the Trans-Canada Highway. Significantly enough, there was no mention of the National Dividend, the A + B theorem, no woolly scrip or Jewishplot talk which occupied the waking and sleeping hours of the JukesMacDonald group. However neat and presentable was the new Socred package, they com­ manded meagre support, a mere one and a half per cent of the popular vote, from an electorate who bought the coalition story whole. The coalition won an impressive victory, returning thirty-nine of the forty-eight House re­ presentatives and gaining 61.35% of the popular vote.73 The C.C.F. re­ presentation was reduced to seven and socialist candidates gained 35.1% of the popular vote, over two per cent less than their total in the previous election. The C.C.F. decline was most marked in the north where coalition­ ist candidates, predominantly Liberal, rode in on the boom wave. Macken­ zie, Columbia, Omineca, Peace River, Skeena and Prince Rupert, high on the priority list of the government’s growth schedule, whose Boards of Trade clamoured for offal and whose workingmen savoured the prospects of employment and job security, were safely returned to the government side.74 Only faithful Vancouver-East and neighbouring Burnaby proved scareproof in Vancouver city and environs, returning the Winches, father and son, and Arthur Turner. The remaining C.C.F. seats were in the southern Interior, in Cranbrook, Kaslo-Slocan and Grand Forks-Greenwood where C.C.F. candidate R.W. Haggen benefited from a split in the coalitionist camp and an Independent candidacy. Once again, the old Hart formula worked its magic. Although the C.C.F. popular vote was only two per cent less than in 1941, the socialist represen­ tation was cut in half. To coalitionist politicos, the results were more than proof of the sound arithmetic of electoral co-operation; they were evidence that the government’s bold expansionary program, its promise of a huge new development, had captured the public imagination. And the results were calming to the companies who were guaranteed a few more years, at the very least, safe from the socialist demon. The Alcan moguls, the promot­ ers of the proposed one hundred million dollar natural gas pipeline from

Cold Warriors: 1946-1949 107

Alberta, the hundreds of small businessmen who contemplated profits from expansion, the contractors and suppliers of the P.G.E., the highways, hy­ dro, school and hospital expansions, were pleased that business could pro­ ceed as usual. “It is a very definite rejection of socialism and commun­ ism . . . ” Herbert Anscomb roared with delight, “ . . . the people of British Columbia are British still. . . . It shows the heart and core of British Columbia is still sound in spite of all that is coming out of the Kremlin.” 75 T.G. Norris ventured that “the people will look to the govern­ ment to give them, as in the past, sound and able administration of the public affairs of the province in accordance with the principles of free enterprise,” 76 while the Vancouver Sun business editor, Lloyd Turner, estimated that the re-election of the government meant one billion dollars in new industry for British Columbia in the next few years.77 Clearly the election was a happy occasion for both the coalitionists and the companies. But behind the grand display of conviviality, the bi-partisan handclasps and non-partisan embraces, there lurked the demon of partyism, of patronage, the primordial selfish hunt for preferments which obscenely surfaced during the succession crisis of 1946-47, revealing that the coalition was, after all, not an affirmative marriage, a positive wedding of similar philosophies, a selfless burying of partisan interests, but a negative device, a convenience of the companies which willed its existence, a short-run mechanism for keeping the socialists at bay. But their arrangement had worked so successfully, that by the summer of 1949, the partners, chafing at the alliance for different reasons, were wondering whether its continued existence was really necessary or beneficial. The Liberals, the senior part­ ners, had plainly benefited from the alliance since their representation had improved following the 1949 election to the point where standing alone they now had a majority in the Legislature of six or seven. Their ratio to the Conservatives was more than two to one, a happy preponderence partially determined by their ability to wield the patronage club in C.C.F.-dominated constituencies where they stole nominations from the weakly organized Conservatives in joint conventions. Federally, the Liberals performed won­ ders in the 1949 election where they swept the majority of the province’s ridings. Having established a hegemony over their free-enterprise cousins, and kept the howling socialist wolves at bay, the Liberals, who endorsed the single alternative ballot idea at their April 1949 convention, sensibly began to question whether they needed the Conservatives at all; a question insist­ ently put by the restive Young Liberals tired of Herbert Anscomb and the patronage possibilities he monopolized, by the waning Liberal associations in those Conservative constituencies feeding on government pap, and by the federal Liberals who wished an even greater representation in the coast province where the Tory incubus weighed on federal Liberal chances.

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The Tories, for their part, could hardly suppress their festering anxieties about an alliance clearly working to their disadvantage. The Hart formula guaranteed a Liberal hegemony in perpetuity, a dominance further assured by Liberal incumbency of the majority of Cabinet portfolios whose patron­ age powers were used to shore up Liberal strength in constituencies, momentarily electing oppositionists, with open nomination conventions. Equally discomforting was the huge weakness of the federal Tories who returned a mere three representatives in the 1949 federal election. The young buttoned-down urban Tories who wept over the limited mobility and patronage possibilities, the proud federalists who decried the demise of their traditional strength, the disgruntled militants languishing in anaemic con­ stituency associations bled dry by Liberal dominance, the frustrated con­ stituents of associations in the southern and central Interior with no Cabinet representation, the host of political outsiders, dutifully nodded their ap­ proval in unison with their leader, when the results of the coalition victory came through. But they knew better. Like their Liberal partners of conveni­ ence, they knew that the hour of parting, of the return to primordial partisanship, was fast approaching. And they set to work, openly and persistently, to prepare for it.

CHAPTER V

Saturday Night Government: 1950-1952

“Thanks be unto God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’’ Corinthians, 15:57.

The new rash of discord was most pronounced among the languishing Conservatives who, by the hot summer of 1949, more resembled a rump than a political party. Once again, the Tories had fallen on sad days and, as all of their warring factions recognized, were in danger of removing their fractious presence from the provincial scene altogether. The federal wing was in a desperate state, starved for funds, organization, manpower and; most critical of all, votes. The cosy coterie of three candidates returned in the 1949 federal election Was the smallest local Conservative contingent to the House of Commons since the turn of the century; while the party’s provincial base, vulnerable and restricted in the past, was narrowed to the high income district of Vancouver city and the affluent rural area of the Fraser Valley populated by farmers and by small businessmen. The three fashionable water-front Point Grey seats, a split single representation with the Liberals in Burrard and Centre, where Conservative candidates rode in on their partners’ coat-tails, and the Fraser Valley seats of Delta, Dewdney and Chilliwack, were all the Conservatives could command in the lower mainland. Outside of this stubborn pocket, on the Island, in the northern, southern and eastern interiors, the Tory base had rotted beyond repair. Anscomb’s Oak Bay borough was their sole seat on Vancouver Island; except for Lillooet, Salmon Arm, Mackenzie and South Okanagan, the vast and sprawling Interior went uniformly Liberal and C.C.F. Such a drab and hapless electoral landscape, faded from a royal blue to a pale pink, set the numerous federal and provincial Tory factions brooding and plotting. The Tory men sharpened their knives and the women their knitting needles as disaffection, which surfaced during the earlier succession crises, intensified in the months following the 1949 election. The chief plotters were the federal M.P.s prominent among whom were Howard Green of Vancouver Quadra and Davie Fulton of Kamloops, both pedi­ 109

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greed sorts who traced their ancient lineage to former McBride Cabinet ministers; young urban Conservatives, professional, cool and ambitious, like David Tupper and Robert Bonner who gathered in an organization known as the Conservative Action Club,1 where they daily cursed the Anscombite’s monopoly of preferments; and female Conservatives, including Tilly Rolston, who imbibed plenty of tea, and fought the cause of the beleaguered housewife. They all had their separate gripes. The federal M.P.s pouted about the party’s dismal showing in the recent election, at Anscomb’s tight hold over the party purse, at the suffocation and decay of numerous con­ stituency associations. The Young Tories, who worked closely with the federal M.P.s, eager to rise and frustratedly attached to a vehicle going nowhere but down, were irked at a leader participating in a bi-partisan arrangement with little room at the top, who scarcely appreciated their exuberant talents. The women, led by Rolston, were similarly disaffected. The Liberals, after all, were the women’s party, of Mary Ellen Smith and latterly of Nancy Hodges, who was elected to the House Speakership. The political Tory women, tired of pouring tea and displaying loud hats and powdered faces, sick of licking piles of envelopes, wished for a place in the sun, or at the very least, a place in the provincial Cabinet and party execu­ tive. These were the disaffected party elements which, in the gloomy months following the Liberal coalition victory of June 1949, sought a Moses, or somebody like him, to lead them out of the electoral wilderness. They did not have to look far. There to offer himself, blurting, tumbling his words, chattering and grinning, was the Kelowna cherub-British Columbia’s Sam­ uel Smiles-who, since his sad defeat at the Conservative convention in 1946, followed a circuitous, pouting, maverick course. W.A.C. Bennett’s fruitless grab at the party leadership in 1946 had estranged him further from the party fount and he spent as much time during the 1947 session criticizing the government as defending it. Nothing pleased him; he wished a High­ ways Board, more government aid to irrigation, the single transferable vote, the elimination of multiple ridings in Vancouver and Victoria, a royal commission to study the liquor problem. He criticized the Dominion-Pro­ vincial financial arrangements, the reorganization of school districts and the maintenance of highway tolls, although British Columbia had taken the gasoline tax back from Ottawa.2 And he voted with the C.C.F. on a resolu­ tion which would have activated the House’s Labour Committee directing lobbies to present their briefs to it, rather than directly to the Cabinet. Bennett, to be sure, was not becoming a socialist; he was merely continuing to be a nuisance. His criticism of the government was of the scattergun sort; an indiscriminate pack of snipes at government policy bound by no philo­ sophy except, perhaps, that of localism: the concern with getting more for

Saturday Night Government: 1950-1952 111

the^good people of the South Okanagan and environs. Behind it all was his own frustrated ambition, and the parched maws of spurned Tory party workers of the southern Interior where, in the whole area south of the two main railroads, there was only one Conservative in either the federal or provincial House. And he, despite his proven abilities in selling hardware, his perpetual motion and penchant for grinning, had been cruelly denied both a Cabinet position and the party leadership. k It is little wonder, then, that Bennett, in the spring of 1948, announced^ his candidacy for the federal seat of Yale in a by-election necessitated by the resignation of Grote Stirling who had held the seat for the Conservative Party for twenty-four years. Bennett explained his move as an act of ideal­ ism and selflessness, a dutiful adherence to the unanimous request by resolu­ tion of the Kelowna and district Progressive Conservative Association and to the wishes of the people of the Yale federal riding, which comprised four provincial constituencies. He also explained it as a personal favour to Progressive Conservative Leader John Bracken, who had released Howard Green for the Attorney General’s portfolio at Bennett’s earlier request, and who now was under attack in the federal party and needed more loyal adherents.3 But his real reasons, however well-seasoned they were with good intentions, were more mundane. They derived from a momentary perception of the limited opportunities for mobility; a perception enhanced by Anscomb’s domination of the local party. The shrewd hardware mer­ chant surveyed the provincial Tory market and found it tight and wanting. But Conservative chances, whether federal or provincial, had badly degenerated. Since the coalition arrangement did not hold at the federal level, Bennett found himself competing for scarce free-enterprise votes with the Liberal E.J. Chambers, a prominent agriculturist and former Reeve of Penticton, and against the venerable Owen Jones, the socialist Mayor of Kelowna, who enjoyed wide popular support. Tory federalists Howard Green and Davie Fulton, aided by a Prince Albert back-bencher named John Diefenbaker, spoke for Bennett, but to no avail. The anti-socialist vote split evenly; 7,953 for Bennett and 7,500 for Chambers. Jones won with 12,838 votes.4 In February 1949, when the Yale Conservatives met to choose a candidate for the approaching federal election, Bennett was there to offer his services. This time he did not even get the nomination.5 Bennett’s brief venture into federal politics was sobering. He became more receptive than ever to the complaints of the federalists that the mori­ bund and hostile provincial organization injured federal chances. And he became more hostile to continuing the provincial partnership with the Liberals, who had sabotaged his chances by running a candidate and split­ ting the anti-socialist .vote. But what to do? The only answer was to return from whence he came, to the South Okanagan people who loved him dearly.

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If, during the past few years, he had perceived there was no future in provincial politics, he now discovered even less opportunity in the federal sphere. At least he could get elected in provincial politics; as a federal Conservative he could not even win a nomination. Bennett’s further survey of the political arena led to the inescapable conclusion that a circuitous return to provincial politics was desirable. Accordingly, in the months following his federal nomination defeat, Bennett set to work to regain his provincial seat. When Robert Browne-Clayton, who won the South Okana­ gan coalition nomination and subsequent by-election following Bennett’s defection, announced he was tired of politics and did not wish to run again, Bennett’s task was made easy. The good people of South Okanagan, who loved their own grinning cherub, welcomed him back with a resounding victory in the 1949 provincial election. With his foot back in the door, Bennett wasted little time in joining the renewed assault on Anscomb. The 1950 session was replete with back-bench muttering, with press reports hinting of Tory disaffection, with furious activity by federal members, Young Conservatives, Tory women, and stray constituency outsiders who plotted Anscomb’s demise and the coalition break-up. The initiative was taken by the Young P.C.s, by Bonner, Bewley and Tupper, working in consort with the federal members who discovered, after years of blissful indifference or ignorance, that Herbert Anscomb was an immoral fellow because he continued as owner and director of Growers Wine Limited and as a director of Coast Breweries Limited, while serving as the Finance Minister of a government which purchased supplies from his firms. In short, Anscomb, was charged with being ethically unfit for leader­ ship, as well as being an autocrat who cared little about the views of the rank and file. The personal attack on Anscomb was given wide circulation in a pamphlet in the months preceding the October Conservative conven­ tion. In the meanwhile, Bennett, circuitously and perpetually in motion, toured the lower mainland, Cariboo, Kootenays and Island in pursuit of the elusive road to the premiership. He wound up his trip in Victoria, in mid-September, where he pronounced the coalition in deep trouble, hav­ ing “slipped more in the last fifteen months than in the previous nine years.” 6 The Victoria speech was his first big shot in the renewed war with Anscomb. The government was castigated for its arrogance, its inept han­ dling of the federal-provincial tax negotiations, the bungled hospital insur­ ance operation, and the failure to maintain its road and rail completion program in the Interior.7 But his major concern was with the sorry state of the Conservative Party which, in the event of its rejuvenation, was in an excellent position to inherit the government. The people, he discerned, were becoming disaffected with a government too arrogant and autocratic for

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their taste. But the sole present alternative was the C.C.F. which, to his mind, confined its activities purely to a repetition of socialist theories in­ stead of soundly and effectively criticizing government policy.8 The C.C.F. was gaining ground only by default-because there was no alternative sound and competent free-enterprise party. Only a rejuvenated Conservative Party Bennett concluded, freed from the stifling rule of an autocratic elite, could benefit from the introduction of the proposed single alternative ballot sys­ tem and provide an effective alternative to a dying regime. The moral of Bennett’s story was clear: get rid of Anscomb and elect Bennett at the approaching Conservative convention. But he never quite said so as the party constitution did not provide for a leadership contest at the approaching convention, without the resignation of a leader, Anscomb had not yet resigned his position and, as a subsequent campaign pamphlet repeatedly emphasized, W.A.C. Bennett never dealt “in personalities.” 9 But there were no doubts about his intentions. Bennett hotly defended the Young Conservatives, his proxy dealers with Anscomb’s personality, as well as his earlier coalition views which, in the eyes of the Anscombites, made him an uncertain and disloyal Tory. In a marvellous, deductive leap, per­ formed in a haze of tumbled words, Bennett told his Victoria audience that the acceptance of his coalition party idea would have resulted in a Tory premier after Hart, “because, with the Liberals having the largest number of seats our leader would then have been automatically second in line.” The Anscombites, by rejecting the coalition party idea had stabbed the Conser­ vative Party in the back-“If some of our people hadn’t been quite so stupid then they would have the premiership now.” 10 The October convention was another Tory brawl replete with breast­ beating, denunciations, intrigue and candid admissions of the party’s impo­ tence by eminent personages like retiring president Gordon Cameron who confessed to the delegates that his term of office had been “a total loss of time and money” and that the party organization was “chaotic and nothing more than a dogfight.” 11 The meeting quickly turned into a leadership fight when Anscomb, not content with a vote of confidence, resigned the leader­ ship and announced his candidacy for the vacant position in response to an attack made on his “honesty and decency across the breadth of the province for the past six months.” 12 He defended his liquor directorships as sound business activities which had nothing to do with politics and insisted that the only trouble with the Conservative Party was the chronic disloyalty of dissident factionalists who had vilified him “throughout the province . . . using money subscribed by friends of the Party.” 13 Bennett, in league with the factionalists and disrupters, with the federals, the hungry Y.P.C.s, disaffected women and dyspeptic constituents, declared himself, appropriately enough, the unity candidate, the candidate of peace

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and love, his campaign slogan reading “Bennett for Unity.” His speech; jerky, nervous, and tumbled-seemed profoundly empty of ideological con1 tent. His major point, his only point, was that the Conservative Party, in sad electoral and organizational shape, was under the calloused thumb of one man, who had stabbed the party in the back on that memorable day in 1946 when the Attorney Generalship was swapped for the Finance portfolio in a secret deal with Hart. “Our leaders went to the swearing in of Mr. Wismer,” he chattered, “without letting the Party know . . . that’s when we started to slip . . . .” 14 Despite his obvious emotion, his undoubted sincerity, his podium-pound­ ing and sweating, beet-red countenance, the delegates remained unim­ pressed. When the votes were counted Anscomb counted 453 to 167 for Bennett.15 The party executive was filled with Anscomb supporters and the presidency fell to Major General G.R. Pearkes, the Member of Parliament for Nanaimo, one of Anscomb’s few loyal federal friends.16 An attempt to separate the federal from the provincial association was easily defeated. Anscomb was so pleased with the results that he dwindled humble, suggest­ ing that the delegates set to work to seek out a “stable young man” since he, Anscomb, could not after all carry on forever.17 The latest Tory brawl was merely one manifestation of a profound malaise which seized both partners of the coalition in the months following the election of June 1949. The economy, to be sure, was in excellent shape; the companies invested ancTpruflUJdTwbrkers and farmers enjoyed unprece­ dented incomes, and ample revenues poured into the government coffers. Yet the government, elected to provide a stable legal and political environ­ ment for renewed exploitation, wavered and faltered as its fissionable com­ ponents grew active. The first session of the new legislature, which convened for seven weeks and accomplished nothing, was known, appropriately enough, as the “coasting session.” Liquor reform was debated and post­ poned, as were changes, demanded by organized labour, to the I.C.A. Act, which would have more carefully and equitably defined and circumscribed the powers of certification of the Labour Relations Board, notorious for its inconsistencies in handling certification cases.18 But the big issue of both the first and second sessions of the new legislature, was the new hospital insurance scheme which went into effect in January 1949 and, by the same date the year following, was in deep financial and administrative trouble. The floundering insurance scheme, the misshapen child of the welfare Lib­ erals George Pearson and George Weir, exacerbated the latent ideological differences between the two wings of the government and, more important, provided an excellent opportunity for factionalists in both parties to sharpen their partisan teeth in preparation for a dissolution. The Liberals were less troubled than the Conservatives by steeply rising welfare expenditures and

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were willing to finance growing capital costs, necessitated by the new invest­ ment explosion, through loans. Anscomb, on the other hand, an exponent of the antique philosophy of business government, wished to reduce indebt­ edness by financing capital expansion through securing more funds from current revenues, by containing growing welfare expenditures.19 The coalition was wrestling with the standard problem of maintaining a satisfactory level of welfare services, coincident with a large capital expendi­ ture program without incurring excess debt. In ordinary days, policy deci­ sions based upon such differences in priority were satisfactorily made within the joint caucus and Cabinet by the usual mechanisms of consultation, seasoned with a modicum of goodwill. But the mood was now changed and members of both parties, Liberals and Conservatives, back-benchers and front-benchers, increasingly availed themselves of the opportunity to blame one another, and the coalition arrangement itself, publicly and blatantly, for Tfie mal-administration of a hastily implemented scheme which provided meagre and costly services to an increasingly restive and demanding public. Anscomb’s 195p budget revealed that the scheme ran up a deficit of $4.5 million during its first fifteen months and a further deficit of $2.5 million was predicted for the coming year.20 Twelve months later, Anscomb re­ ported a total deficit of $12,700,000.21 Evidence before the Public Accounts Committee indicated that the scheme was inefficiently administered; that steeply rising costs were incurred for the provision of inadequate services. Administrative abuses and political interference were rampant and widely advertised by the media. Although the Insurance Act itself placed no limita­ tion on the length of hospital stays for acute diseases, Victoria bureaucrats found need, on account of a huge bed shortage, to overrule the wishes of doctors and define people as chronic in order to get them out of the hospi­ tal.22 Incidents were reported of patients who died while waiting for long delayed replies from Victoria about possible bed accommodations. Termi­ nal cases were defined as chronic in order to deny insurance benefits. The government responded, haltingly and confusedly, to the rising costs and clamour for reform, with a host of adjustments which merely fed the flames of disaffection. At the 1950 session, after lengthy caucuses, the Act was amended to give the Cabinet blanket powers to set rates for hospital care, raise the penalties for non-payment of premiums, institute compulsory payroll deductions for premiums, and revise moderately upward the limit on premiums to thirty-six dollars. During the 1951 session premiums were raised still further and patients were required to pay $3.50 per day as “co-insurance” towards the cost of the hospital bill. Further changes were scheduled after consideration of the recommendations of a Commission of Inquiry appointed to look into the entire insurance question. To the growing army of government critics, the appointment of the

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commission, which deliberated following the resignation of Health and Welfare Minister Pearson, was merely a stalling tactic.23 The hospital insurance debacle activated a host of pressure groups who launched a massive and co-ordinated attack on the government scheme. People pro­ tested by refusing to pay their premiums; almost twenty-five per cent of the premium payments were delinquent in 1951 with the figure running as high as fifty per cent in some rural areas. The British Columbia Teachers Federa­ tion, representing six thousand teachers, passed resolutions at its four-day convention in Vancouver opposing the prepayment of premiums, increased rates and “the vicious co-insurance” clause.24 Hospital officials, irked at the deduction of the co-insurance charge from the government’s grants to the hospitals, candidly announced to the press that the scheme was inop­ erable,25 while the Vancouver Labour Council (C.C.L.) in conjunction with the thirty-thousand-member International Woodworkers of America and the one-hundred-thousand-member British Columbia Federation of Labour led a prolonged attack on the scheme.26 The British Columbia Federation of Labour sent twenty-five officials to the capital for a week-long lobby during the 1951 House session.27 A petition with over two hundred thou­ sand names was presented to the Cabinet, now freely castigated by its two metro press allies who abandoned the old catechism shortly after the 1949 election. After perusing the meagre results of the second session, the Sun concluded that the government was headed for an electoral disaster unless it returned to its happy Hart ways-“When they go out seeking votes they’ll want something better to talk about than higher hospital premiums and co-insurance charges. They’ll wish to point to more aggressive accomplish­ ments than their do-nothing liquor policy, their stalling on labour legisla­ tion, and their stubborn ruling on white margarine.” 28 The Province, in a spate of critical editorials, referred to the many “disgraceful miscalcula­ tions” which angered the public “not against hospital insurance itself, but against the government for not finding out more about costs before it plunged into this thing.” 29 The fevered war over hospital insurance was the symptom, rather than cause, of the debilitating malady which seized the coalition during the second legislative session. Just as the government was cudgelled from with­ out by an aroused public, so was it gnawed from within by ardent factionalists who, by undermining the authority of its leadership, by converting the governing party into a mass of “confused and helpless men,” 30 encouraged the coalition opponents in their confrontation tactics and supplicatory ac­ tivities. Hospital insurance became a key political issue not merely because people suffered from high premiums, co-insurance and scarce facilities, or because the lobbyists were well-organized and the press critical. It bulked large because the warring elements of the coalition, who had the necessary

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resources, financial and political, to satisfactorily resolve the problem, used the issue to push their several interests. The effect was circular. The growth of factionalism and public recriminations, the~progressive Weakening of the discipline of the governing coalition, the growing crisis in political leader­ ship which threatened to turn the House into a school of loose fish, hugely encouraged the opposition-the lobbies, press and parties-in their maddened frontal attack on the government. And the more insistent the attack, the greater were the dissociative pressures within the governing party whose members spent more time blaming their partners, and plotting separation, than they did defending official policy. In fact, there was no longer any official policy; only a series of contradictory statements, from back and front-benchers, Liberal and Conservative, calculated to further their sepa­ rate partisan interests. The hospital insurance fight marked a turning point in the history of the coalition which, for the first time since its solemn inception, faced a crisis in legitimacy. Neither the warring internal elements, nor the public at large, nor the government’s weary press friends, viewed the coalition any longer as a natural governing party, the competent machine of John Hart and Royal Lethington Maitland, which brought British Columbia the nirvana of stable government. Instead, the government was bared for what it was, for all to see: a fragile, decomposing union of grasping politicians. The insistent pressures for dissociation mounted throughout the winter and spring of the legislative session of 1951 when the hospital insurance dispute peaked. The Throne Speech and subsequent debate was punctuated with recriminatory statements, veiled threats and outright denunciations, as back-benchers of both parties, as well as some of their front-bench col­ leagues, took the opportunity to denounce Cabinet ministers of the opposite party. Back-benchers like J.J. Gillis, who confessed in late March that he never really did like the coalition, Charles Morrow and Maurice Finnerty, made loud noises about the need for dissociation. The Premier, barely recovered from a serious automobile accident in the previous autumn in Quebec, was under fire within his own party for fostering an alliance with a reactionary Tory party which brought discredit on the Liberals. The government’s plummeting popularity increased the demands for dissocia­ tion from frightened Liberal back-benchers who panicked at the thought of losing their seats and political livelihood on account of being seen with Herbert Anscomb, the convenient cause of all of the maladies which befell the government. The Young Liberals who had opposed the coalition in 1947 and passed resolutions at every succeeding convention demanding dissolu­ tion, called for immediate separation, while prominent federal M.P.s like William Mott, Tom Goode, George Cruikshank and Senator Tom Reid, all took the opportunity in March to blame the Tories for Liberal troubles and

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urge a quick end to a union which was destroying the Liberal Party. Reid warned at a meeting of New Westminster Liberals that their party was being scapegoated for Tory wrongs since the three portfolios under fire, Health and Welfare, Labour and the Attorney Generalship, charged with regulat­ ing the liquor trade, were held by Liberal Cabinet ministers.31 Similar sentiments were expressed by the Fraser Valley M.P. George Cruikshank who bitterly complained that since his arrival back from Ottawa he had heard “nothing else but hospital insurance-on the streets, on the dikes, on the field.” 32 He noted that the Liberals had lost touch with the little man and suggested James Sinclair be drafted as leader for the next election since Johnson appeared unable to physically carry on while Gordon Wismer was “not interested in the leadership of the Party.” 33 Burnaby M.P. Thomas Goode charged the government with irresponsibility and arrogance, lam­ ented the decision to introduce a five-year driver’s licence, the high hospi­ tal insurance premiums, and low teachers’ salaries, urged the government to “go it alone in Victoria” rather than continue an “unholy alliance,” and pledged “to do everything possible to break the coalition.” 34 Goode was joined in his broadside by none other than Harry Perry, president of the British Columbia Liberal Federation who denounced the Premier shortly after the hospital insurance amendments for failing to consult with party members “before acting so arbitrarily on a measure in which there is so much public concern.” 35 Perry complained that he “found it much easier to meet the Prime Minister of Great Britain at No. 10 Downing Street, His Majesty the King at Buckingham Palace and the Lord Mayor of London than to meet the Premier of B.C.” 36 Two weeks later he announced a forthcoming meeting of the Liberal advisory council to consider the “dan­ gerous state of the Party’s affairs.” Perry noted the government’s real sore spot was the Finance Department. The major Liberal trouble was the Premier’s inability or unwillingness to stand up to Anscomb, a weakness which was daily injuring the Party’s electoral chances. “It appears to me that these proposals which are arousing so much public resentment were made by the Finance Department, and the Liberal Party was so weak they accepted. Now they are taking the blame because they’re the major party.” 37 The bete noire of the pack of dyspeptic Liberals was the great Tory bull himself, Herbert Anscomb, who was clearly displeased with the profligate inclinations of the welfare Liberals and was doubtless influential, as Finance Minister, in maintaining the high premium rates and instituting co-insur­ ance. He made no bones about his objection to excessive welfare spending during both of his budget speeches, during the 1950 and 1951 sessions, and on other House occasions. “ . . . I have expressed deep anxiety over the ever increasing volume of our expenditures and the manner in which our

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public funds were being applied,” he announced in his 1950 budget speech. “I consider it unfortunate that my repeated warnings were not heeded sufficiently to prevent trends that, unless checked soon may have serious consequences . . . the level of the cost of our services has reached that of our revenue, and any major new project cannot be undertaken unless changes are made in our revenue structure.” 38 A similar partisan slap on Liberal wrists was administered during his budget speech a year later when he warned “the legislature and the people generally t ha t . . . far too great an emphasis was being placed upon social assistance, welfare and educa­ tion . . . .” 39 In opposing excess welfare spending, in stressing the need for further development in order to expand the government’s revenue base, in fighting for higher premiums and co-insurance, as he undoubtedly did, Anscomb was not merely fighting for principles, for free enterprise, which he dearly believed in. He was, in addition, being political, partisan political, preparing the Conservative ground for an approaching campaign to be fought, in all likelihood, by the coalition partners separately. Since the Conservative organization was weak, and traumatized by internal struggles, the moment of separation was not yet propitious. For the meanwhile, Anscomb was prepared to play a double game for purposes of partisan advantage. On the one hand, he was careful during House speeches to praise basic government development policies, to point to the obvious prosperity and to remind anxious partisans that, after all, they were parties to a contract with the Liberals and that honest businessmen must never break their contracts, unless absolutely necessary. But by successfully opposing free hospital care, which the government could afford, and by contributing to the hospital mess, he tarnished the image of the Liberals, the welfare party, which had more political rewards to gain than the Tories from a successful, politically palatable welfare system. Anscomb was probably pleased to discern that the government’s welfare and labour reform programs, the proper areas of concern of welfare Liberals and socialists, were floundering. Its develop­ ment record, however, was unblemished and he was desperate to establish the Conservative identity as the development party, the old boom gang tracing their origins to the large days of Sir Richard McBride, shackled by profligate statist Liberals. His intentions were nowhere better expressed than in a key radio speech made during the end of the session on April 17 in which he announced that “barring an international war of awesome dimensions,” the coalition would dissolve before the next election and straight Conservatives would seek election under the new transferable vote system in every riding.40 Anscomb’s purpose was to carefully draw the pink line between Liberals and Conservatives, to define his present government partners and future electoral competitors as anaemic socialists wedded to

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patchwork social welfare to the exclusion of development. The Tories, he reiterated, were not opposed to social welfare despite the claims of socialist and Liberal critics. Indeed, as full partners in the government for the past ten years, they supported fully “any social welfare measures.” But, as hardened free enterprisers, they asked where the money was coming from. Tories could never agree to direct government participation in business. That was socialism, and therefore bad. Nor could they support increases in taxes which were burdensome, immoral and impossible. The provincial government was precluded by the division of tax powers under the federal system from levying income taxes except in certain phases of mining and lumbering. Any attempt to increase the taxes of large companies like Cominco would be iniquitous and harmful to small companies in the re­ source field since it was wrong to “make separate laws for the so-called rich and poor.” 41 “There is no more futile idea than getting more taxes out of Consolidated Mining and Smelting . . . when that makes it impossible for every other smaller company to operate.” The sole way of supporting the existing level of services, the weighty costs of which-over thirteen million dollars worth-were borne by working people and industrialists, was through industrial development engineered by free enterprisers and sup­ ported by a friendly government which used the state’s powers to insure a favourable legal environment. “We stand for free enterprise in every sense of the word,” he concluded. “We are the first line of defence of the freeenterprise system which built Canada from its beginnings to all we enjoy today.” 42 Anscomb’s speech, a call to party supporters to gird themselves for an approaching election to be fought on straight party lines, surprised few government supporters of either party since it came at the end of a session replete with blatant partisanship. And it followed by a mere three days a pronouncement by provincial secretary W.T. Straith, on the occasion of the introduction into the House of amendments to the Provincial Elections Act, that a dissolution of the coalition at the next general election was “probable, possible or likely.” 43 The Elections Act amendments, providing for the introduction of a system of alternative voting to come into force by procla­ mation of the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council, were passed, after years of consideration and endorsement by Liberal and Conservative conventions, to devalue the socialist vote in the ensuing election. If the next election was to be a “free-for-all” contest, it was imperative that the free-enterprise parties be a little freer than the socialists to reap the electoral benefits. The new system did away with the simple old method of marking a cross next to the favourite candidate. Instead, voters were given the opportunity to rank the candidates according to preference. If the candidate received an absolute majority of the votes cast, he was declared elected. In the likely

I

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event of no candidate receiving an absolute majority on the first count, a second count was made, preceded by the exclusion of the lowest candidate on the first count, whose second choices were then distributed among the remaining candidates. If the second count elected no one, then the next lowest candidate was eliminated and his alternative choice distributed in the third count. The process continued until eventually some candidate secured an absolute majority.44 The new voting system, denounced by Harold Winch as “perfidious, 1 infamous, weird, fantastic” and “one of the most shameful bills ever intro- j duced into any parliament in Canada,”45 was defended by government sponsors and their press friends in the usual patriotic prose. Straith, who j saw the bill through the House, observed that it was purely democratic and calculated to eliminate the traditional iniquitous election of candidates with minority support, while Harry Perry cited its introduction as further evi­ dence that the Liberal Party was acting “in accord with its historic tradition of embarking upon advanced policies ahead of others, e.g., Workmen’s Compensation, Mothers and Old Age and Blind Pensions, Social Assist­ ance, Labour laws and Hospitalization.”46 But the government’s real inten­ tions were abundantly clear. As the Sun candidly editorialized, the reten­ tion of the old system would have threatened the maintenance of stable government in the event of three party contests since the C.C.F., with over a third of the popular vote, could form, with a minimum accretion to its present total, at least a minority government. This was calamitous enough, “but when the minority government is also a socialist one, and the majority of the people would have preferred a non-socialist government, it’s a double calamity.” 47 To the coalitionists, the new system was the only possible resolution of the problems created by the conflicting forces of partisan and class interests. Considerations of class interest, masked as patriotism, inspired the forma­ tion of the coalition as a temporary alliance to keep the socialists out. But partisan interests exacerbated by the weird workings of federalism, threat­ ened its dissolution and the C.C.F.’s accession to office. The new system was calculated to rob the socialists, who rarely gained an absolute majority of votes in any constituencies under the old single choice arrangement, of victory through the transfer of second choices from Conservatives to Liber­ als and vice versa in subsequent counts. The old parties would have their cake and eat it too. They would regain the ancient benefits of partisanship without sacrificing their class interestest. Grits again, and Tories again, the voters were expected to sensibly remember their traditional free enterprise cousins and favour them with their second choices. The second and third counts, even in constituencies in which the C.C.F. candidates led on the first count, would likely bring a Liberal and Conservative victory. “I would ask

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Mr. Winch how much he did to bring Alcan here,” Wismer later roared to a Vancouver-Centre audience. “Let me tell you, the first thing a big company does is to look over resources. Second, and very near first, is the political climate.” 48 It was to clear the air of troublesome clouds, to keep the orange sun shining on the faceless companies, that the new bill was smugly hustled through the House. While the coalitionists were doing their dance of love and hate, rudely denouncing one another, coldly preparing for divorce, yet careful to ensure a prime place for their estranged connubial partner in the new arrangement, there were others-grumbling back-benchers, chronic mavericks, lonesome outsiders, dyspeptic constituents, and stranded political orphans-who ^sought other paths to survival and eminence. Chief among them was the circuitous and perpetually mobile W.A.C. Bennett who sparred, jabbed and ceaselessly pressed his advantage in the months following his defeat at the October Conservative convention. Coldly excluded from the front bench and leadership, the sole Conservative representative in the entire southern Interior from Osoyoos on the border north to Kamloops and Revelstoke-a frustrated jrow th region with no Cabinet representation-Bennett, unlike the Victoria politicians who squabbled with one another oblivious to the rotting state of the outback organization, was sensitive to the growing estrangement among the rank and file and local party elites. Bennett was not a Victoria politician. He was a legislative maverick, an outsider; a firm constituency man looking after the interests of the outback people. He had, to be sure, ambitions. He wished for power, which lay away from the outback, and offered himself for the leadership. But nobody wanted him. As a hardware merchant, he made a lot of money. As a politician he had not yet progressed beyond the back bench after ten years in the Legislature and two galling tries at the leadership. But his most recent rejection by the oligarchy, his preparations for the leadership race which took him to all corners of the province, led to the important discovery that the coalition was losing ground among wide sections of the population who trusted neither in the leadership of Johnson and Anscomb nor in the old discredited labels of Grit and Tory. It was this awareness, that the people, the rank and file, the hardware merchants, real estate dealers, the notary publics, the small loggers, the legionaires, like himself, who understood their innermost feelings, no longer felt at home or professed loyalty in the governing parties, that inspired him, on the sixteenth day of March, during the heat of the debate on Anscomb’s budget, to announce to the world his dissociation from the coalition and determination to sit “as an independent member representing the constituency of South Okanagan.”49 “I am officially advis­ ing you, Madam Speaker,” he rasped to an attentive House, “that I now dissociate myself from the present Cabinet and the coalition government

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both in this House and throughout the province.” 50 His speech was defiant, bitter, and salted with the demand that the government resign since it had badly fallen from the golden days of Hart and Maitland when the coalition was the best government British Columbia ever had. Now, obviously, it was the worst; a hideous transformation had taken place which Bennett, who griped about hospital insurance, the P.G.E., the five-year driving licence, colourless margarine, and highways, never ceased to decry in the following months. His friend Dr. Jekyll had become the hateful Mr. Hyde, no longer the same person with whom the Okanagan merchant, who believed in honesty in business, had contracted. When coalitionist A.R. MacDougall later chided Bennett for disloyalty, Bennett spluttered with anger-“What does the member mean by loyalty? Does he mean loyalty to principle and the people, or does he mean loyalty to a party?” 51 Bennett’s act of dissociation was more than that. He disengaged from the elites, in order to embrace the masses. His separation was association, union, with the people, of the South Okanagan, and the province, with the thousands of outsiders, forgotten men, excluded from the status and material rewards monopolized by sniping oligarchs. Bennett was no longer alone. He was suddenly part of a grand crusade to purify politics. The shareholders, who owned the business, had been excluded from running the firm. The rank and file, the masses, were barred from running the party and government which wallowed in inefficiency. All power to the people. Dur­ ing his dissociation speech, he quoted a letter from Mrs. H.R. Bray of Vancouver, president of the British Columbia Women’s Progressive Con­ servative Association, who congratulated him on his principled stand against the insurance premium boost and expressed the hope other Conser­ vatives would do the same.52 His walkout was immediately endorsed by Division 4 of the Burrard Progressive Conservative Association.53 And he was joined, two weeks later, by his friend Tilly Rolston, the champion of the domestic hearth, who regularly played at bridge, enjoyed an occasional cigarette, and decorated her ample bosom with costume jewelry while resting from her fierce campaigns for the rights of the forgotten woman, the consumer, and the housewife.54 Rolston thought the five-year licence scheme foolhardy, the low salaries of school-teachers appalling and the Margarine Act, which did not permit the commercial colouring of oleo margarine, a betrayal of the housewife. But the final straw was hospital insurance. “I took all I could of this session’s terrible legislation,” she wept “and when the bill to increase hospital insurance rates was passed on top of the new co-insurance plan, I realized I could not stay any longer and keep faith with my constituents.” 55 Bennett, for the meanwhile, was careful to look after his own. More than a thousand persons gathered at a meeting in Kelowna, described by Mayor

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W.G. Hughes-Games as the biggest political gathering in the city since J.S. Woodsworth spoke in the hungry thirties, to hear the fruit land’s prophet of politics, who sold loads of hardware to cherry growers and apple pickers, denounce the government and urge its defeat. Bennett flogged a new move­ ment politics, a mass mobilization, to combat the evil party oligarchies; “The only way to combat the hospital plan, is to form cores of the best citizens of each community in the province to sponsor petitions to the government.” 56 He spoke of the need of similar mass meetings across the province to force the government’s resignation, of the evils of hospital insurance and premium boosts, of the need for an independent highways commission to regulate and plan road building, the travesty of five-years drivers’ licensing, the betrayal of organized labour through failure to amend the I.C.A. Act, Anscomb’s insolent retention of his brewery directorships, the floundering P.G.E. project, and the suppression of back-bench opinion. Hospital insurance was merely the last of many reasons why he left the government. “There was much bulldozing to put it through. That was when we saw democracy go out the window. We were seeing something very sinister right within our province.” 57 Jekyll had become Hyde. “Hart, Maitland and Perry gave us the best government this province ever had, but those days are gone. Nothing remains of the basic principles on which the coalition was built.” The Kelowna meeting was not a farewell party for Bennett. On the contrary, it was the commencement of the campaign to organize a new free-enterprise peoples’ movement to oppose the coalition, the first meeting of the broadly based coalition party which Bennett had long advocated. The press was replete with reports in the days following his dissociation speech of a new political formation in the offing. The day after his defection, the Sun carried a report from Leslie Fox that Bennett was pushing among disgruntled M.L.A.s, “the formation o f . . .a n organization which would bring back independents in every riding who adhere to anti-coalition freeenterprise ideas,” 58 while a similar item appeared four days later noting a general belief current in Victoria that Bennett’s dissociation action was not the isolated decision of the lone member; that Bennett, in campaigning for the Conservative Party leadership, had built up an organization of sorts which could serve as “the nucleus for a new group which would offer voters a free-enterprise alternative to the Liberal and Conservative Parties.” Ben­ nett, to be sure, momentarily played coy about announcing his intentions. Two or three times during the Kelowna meeting, he praised the policy of Alberta’s Social Credit government, with whose party his political aspira­ tions were linked by rumour, but added each time a sly suggestion that his remarks had no political significance.59 When a member of the audience asked about reports that he would lead a new party, he curtly replied that

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he preferred to do one thing at a time. By late May, however, his intentions were made abundantly clear. In a letter to the Province, he declared the key issue in the next election to be “party politics versus a genuine independent movement where members elected would represent their constituencies and not the party machine.” 60 He repeated the Jekyll-Hyde parable, proTiounced the age of parties as ended, and lauded the idea of constituency autonomy. “I believe that the time has now arrived in British Columbia.”' he wrote, “when members must be elected to represent constituencies and not be party rubber stamps and jump through the hoop of the party which is at Victoria.” 61 A short while later, after the prominent Esquimalt Liberal George E. Bonner publicly requested Bennett to help form an independent party before the approaching Esquimalt by-election, scheduled for October 1, and occasioned by the death of coalitionist Commander Charles H. Beard, Bennett admitted to considering the creation of “an Independent Peoples’ Party based on genuine free enterprise in favour of social reform,” a party whose members would “represent their constituents, not act as rubber stamps.” 62 Esquimalt was the perfect testing ground for the new venture. Ever since the renowned Commander Beard, a confirmed Liberal, stole the nomination from Conservative E.V. Finland before the 1945 election, the local riding had become a major coalition sore spot, festering and fevering until Beard’s death which occasioned the fiercest infighting since the late war years. The local Conservatives, together with a minority of disgruntled Liberals, seized the opportunity to press the Independent idea and, together with Rolston and Bennett, who spent ten thousand dollars of his own money in the campaign, prevailed upon the Esquimalt Conservative A.C. Wurtele to oppose, as an Independent, the official coalition nominee, Mayor Percy George of Victoria.63 To the proponents of Independence the ensuing campaign was the first test of the new party idea. Renegade Liberals like Ron Worley, past-president of the Victoria and district Young Liberals and vice-president and secretary of the British Columbia Young Liberal As­ sociation, and J. Donald Smith, a Victoria Liberal and real estate dealer, joined hands with Conservatives like Waldo Skillings, Bennett and Rolston, in support of the Wurtele candidacy. The campaign was bitterly fought. Sniffing the Independent threat, Anscomb, Johnson and a host of other Cabinet ministers, momentarily shelved their suicidal recriminations and descended on the riding, thereby converting a local contest into a miniature general election.64 The Independents fought well, endlessly repeating that the coalition was corrupt, insensitive, machine-dominated, that political power had become the monopoly of a favoured few resident in imperialist Vancouver. “In the shelter of this mushroom aristocracy,” Bennett read to an attentive audience from Bruce Hutchison’s The Fraser, “and usually

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with the aid of its campaign funds, Vancouver has produced some of the worst politics in Canada. The famous machine that has dominated public life almost without interruption for more than thirty years, has appointed its princelings to Senate and Bench, has won elections with more money than prayers, and always found that investment profitable, is about as efficient and ruthless as any in the nation.” 65 The good people of ancient Esquimalt, the old Pooley borough, the dying home of a languishing naval establishment, long resentful of the tycoons of Vancouver, were asked to join a purity crusade against decadent urbanity. And they responded ea­ gerly. Wurtele polled 2,491 votes, a bare few hundred behind the C.C.F.’s Frank Mitchell who gained 2,837. The coalition’s Percy George trailed with 1,703. Wurtele’s strong showing proved that an Independent free-enterprise candidate could steal votes irom the coalition, a conchrsion obviously drawn by Harry Perry, president of the British Columbia-Liberal Federa­ tion, who noted “it was obviously a tremendous prote§t-vdte” against the government.66 Bennett was convinced that the results would warm the hearts of everyone “opposed to monopolies of the extreme right and straight socialism on the left.” 67 Bennett had good reason to be joyful since, as he well knew, the anti­ coalition infection was not localized in Esquimalt. It was, in fact, rapidly spreading across the length and breadth of the province, especially in the southern, central and eastern Interior where a new independent free-enterprise movement threatened a further erosion of the coalition base. The agent of erosion was the miniscule Social Credit Party which, in the months following the 1949 general election, suddenly emerged as a significant politi­ cal force in the Fraser Valley, the southern and central Interior and the Kootenays. The ousting of the Jukes cranks, the ascendancy of hard party workers like Lyle Wicks and Peer Paynter, the opportunistic modification of the party program, slowly converted the Socreds into an organization with political muscle, a transformation facilitated and ensured by the ample monetary and organizational support forthcoming from imperialist Al­ berta, the sacred Socred mecca, which quickly placed the local organization in a tutelary role. The southern and eastern Interior was fair hunting-ground for Social Credit. Peopled by ex-Albertans, sprinkled with sectarian religionists who recalled the Aberhart days and gladly received the message from Ernest Manning’s bible radio broadcast, scattered with small businessmen of mod­ est prominence and ravenous political appetites, British Columbia’s Interior was receptive to the Conservative purity politics advertised by Social Credit. British Columbia in 1951, to be sure, was remarkably different from Alberta in 1935. The province was riding a high boom-wave and extreme economic distress was limited to a minority sector of the working class. But there

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existed, among wide sections of the middle class, among businessmen, farmers and working class people, an accumulation of grievances ripe for exploitation by a new party. Catholics in Nelson-Creston, Rossland-Trail and Vancouver wanted state aid for their schools, small loggers fretted over the new forest law amendments which favoured the large firms,68 business­ men and farmers complained of rising taxes and little patronage, welfare­ conscious workers chafed under high premiums and the co-insurance hospi­ tal charges, and sectarian religionists were appalled at what the Chilliwack Progress described as “Bureaucratic Saturday Night Rich Government.” 69 Where outback businessmen lauded the government in 1949 for its an­ nounced intention to complete the P.G.E. into North Vancouver and the Peace, they now grumbled at the delays in construction while the politicians quarrelled on how best to proceed with the road.70 The farmers around Bums Lake were distraught at the ruination of the shoreline of their beauti­ ful park lakes caused by Alcan’s construction of a reservoir for the giant Kitimat smelter. And they sent an angry young man, Cyril M. Shelford, to Victoria to complain of the company’s actions. Even in the Okanagan, among the berry pickers and apple growers, there was dissatisfaction. High competition from subsidized United States growers, growing costs, the crippling 1949-1950 Okanagan frost which killed twenty per cent of the trees, and the loss of markets in the dollar-short sterling block, left fruit orchardists smarting and grumbling. Mac Reynolds observed that the fruit ranchers in the early fifties were driving older cars, purchased in the mid and late forties. When he questioned a farmer about a gleaming Packard in his driveway, the farmer replied, “Heck, that’s no sign of prosperity. Had to buy that second-hand from a Social Credit politician.” 71 Most important, however, was the limited political opportunity offered by warring local party oligarchies subservient to the will of Victoria politi­ cians. The Interior Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce, Kinsmen and Oddfellows, were peopled with a myriad of political outsiders squeezed out of positions of political power by local elites. Liberals in strong Conservative ridings and Conservatives in Liberal strongholds were tired of an arrange­ ment which denied them access to Victoria, the fount of all favours. For every constituency executive, there was a shadow group which aspired to take their place; for every patronage recipient there were ten who resented his ill-gotten gains. The bloated government revenues and new spending did not satisfy wants or pacify needs; it merely created new wants among the army of chronic seekers of tangible preferments. Bennett was the frustrated small businessman writ large; the prototype of the chafing political outsider. He had done well for himself economically, achieved a local eminence, yet was barred from high office, from either a Cabinet portfolio, the Conservative leadership or the premiership, by the

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exigencies of Victoria politics. There were hundreds like him across the province whose abilities were, to be sure, more modest, but whose hopes and expectations differed little in kind. They wished the power, connections, patronage and esteem monopolized by local oligarchs who endlessly squab­ bled with one another in a bi-partisan arrangement dictated by necessity. Bennett had long spoken their message when he advocated fusion; a new coalition party whose birth implied a general re-shuffling of men and posi­ tions as a necessary prelude to the equalization and creation of opportuni­ ties for the frustrated political outsiders. A new party was the answer to the problem of monopoly, the restriction of political opportunities by the fa­ voured few. A new party would spread political opportunities, with their attendant material and status benefits, to a raft of scattered, aspiring, new men of power. Such were the people who, in the frantic days of the coalition decay, discovered the message of Social Credit which reached them with the ample monetary and organizational aid of their Alberta friends. Social Credit began to expand in earnest in the autumn of 1950, by which time party membership was three times as large"asT!rApril 1949 when the new League was established.72 By November 1951, the membership had increased threefold over 1950. The party’s earliest organizations were in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, but a carefully planned campaign spread the idea to the Kootenays, Okanagan and border areas. Among the local organizers Peer Paynter, whose salary was paid by the Albertans, was instrumental in forming numerous locals. Paynter would usually enter a community, en­ quire of the local grocer or service station attendant whether they knew anyone interested in Social Credit and, in the event of an affirmative answer, immediately contact the individual who usually became a party volunteeer. In the event of a negative reply, he put a further question-whether anyone had recently moved in from Alberta. In nine cases out of ten, he later confessed, the recent immigrant was a Social Credit supporter who volun­ teered his services.73 But Paynter was not alone. In addition to numerous part-time local volunteer organizers, there appeared a raft of prominent Alberta politicians who, perceiving the developing political vacuum in the neighbouring province, spearheaded what a Province correspondent de­ scribed as a “carefully planned invasion.” 74 Orvis Kennedy, the national organizer from Edmonton, Reverend Ernest Hansell, the cartoonist, funda­ mentalist preacher and M.P. for McLeod, Solon Low, the Mormon head of the Social Credit Association of Canada, David Ure, Alberta’s Minister of Agriculture, and M.L.A.s F.C. Colbome and John Blackmore, all toured the length and breadth of the Kootenays, the Cariboo, Okanagan and border country bringing the happy news of Christian good government as practised in Alberta. This was their common message-that Alberta, which

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their audiences well knew, had achieved affluent business debt-free govern­ ment and there was little reason why British Columbia, with its ample resources, could not do the same. All that was needed were a dozen honest men. “Not oil,” David Ure told a rapt convention audience, “but a good, honest Christian government has made Alberta. . . . 75 We are great believers in free enterprise and industries are coming fast in Alberta. But the government will act as a referee when free enterprise goes to the point of robbery. The individual must be protected. . . . All you need for a government in B.C. is a dozen honest men. You are loaded with wealth. Why don’t you keep some yourself? ” 76 The Interior press, papers like the Bridge River-Lillooet News, the Cariboo Observer, the Prince George Citi­ zen, and their numerous country cousins, were filled with enthusiastic reports of Socred meetings and specked with little ads, like the one which appeared in the November 26, 1951 edition of the Prince George Citizen, announcing that Alberta Social Credit led all provinces in debt reduction, lowering of taxes, increased public services, road building and “Social Credit in British Columbia Could Surpass Alberta.” The forgotten men and women, the disgruntled Liberals and Conserva­ tives, the Mennonites, Baptists and Adventists, the numerous Albertans who knew the promised land, the resentful locals who hated Victoria as much as they did the socialists, listened and got the message. Throughout 1951, and in early 1952, the pace of affiliation was frantic. Early locals in Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, and scattered sections of the Interior were supplemented by numerous new groups which followed the train of the Alberta-financed campaign. Groups formed in Nelson, Creston, Ymir, Castlegar, Willow Point, Long Beach, Procter, Balfour, Boswell, Edgewood, New Denver, Nakusp, Trail-Rossland, Cranbrook, Kimberley, Salmon Arm, Wynndel and South Slocan.77 The November 1951 provincial con­ vention was attended by a hundred and forty delegates and additional locals were formed in the months following. The party counted among its new adherents prominent local personages who loudly shed their old party loyalties, men like G.L. Beyerstein, a young lumber operator who headed the Cranbrook local, K.R. Blain, a prominent Kimberley merchant and alderman, W.G. Gillard, past-president of the South Okanagan Progressive Conservative Association who joined the Socreds as early as January 1950, Tom Bate, head of the Dunbar Division of the Point Grey Progressive Conservative Association, hardware and real estate dealer, former president of the Young Progressive Conservatives, and, finally, the wayward Victoria Liberals Ron Worley and alderman J. Donald Smith, dealers in real estate and specialists in political intrigue, who announced their adherence in early October after a Vancouver meeting with Hansell and Kennedy in August. Plainly, these were all good catches for the new movement. But there was

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oae element lacking; a big fish, or fishes, personages of high eminence and established reputation, a prominent, experienced politician who could lend the incipient movement, which ran headless in its waking hours, an added respectability and further its chances in the urban centres of Vancouver and Victoria. There were a few locals who thought such a man had arrived. To Eric Martin, a junior accountant and sometime physical education instruc­ tor who had served as the party’s vice-president since 1945, the ideal man for the job was the wayward Bennett. And Martin was not alone. William Chant, the ex-Alberta Cabinet minister and retired farmer, together with Worley, Smith, Bate and others, including renegade Tories who had lately drifted into the party, were equally enamoured of the prospect of enticing Bennett, with his wealth of experience, his obvious abilities, boundless energies and ample renown, into the Socred camp. Bennett, after all, was no longer considered a lonely maverick or an unprincipled traitor. He abandoned the coalition ship just in time, at the lowest moment of the government’s popularity. He was not a traitor. On the contrary, he verged on being a popular hero, the principled outsider who, following the dictates of his conscience and wishes of its constituents, whom he consulted after­ ward, dissociated from a corrupt, venal and unprincipled administration. Of all the coalitionists only he, and faithful Tilly Rolston, were true to the spirit and precepts of Hart and Maitland. Since Johnson and Anscomb had betrayed these principles, his disengagement was an act of patriotism and loyalty. But there was an element in the Social Credit Party which saw Bennett in another light; as a threatening opportunist and carpetbagger. To men like J.A. Reid, an ex-Albertan farmer and sawmill operator from Salmon Arm, and the sole member of the party’s governing executive who claimed to be one of the holy twelve who started the movement with Aberhart in 1933,78 Bennett, who had no proper Socred pedigree, was a dangerous interloper and renegade Tory. Peer Paynter and Hugh L. Shantz, a Vernon grocer, director of the Youth for Christ Movement and superintendent of a Pentecostal Sunday School, were fellow executive members who shared Reid’s suspicions and reticence. They were all Alberta loyalists, pedigreed Socreds, committed movement people understandably suspicious of ambi­ tious outsiders and late converts. And their feelings were shared by the Alberta emirs, the Hansells, Lows, Kennedys and Mannings who included Paynter, at least, and probably others, on their payroll. The Albertans, who planned, financed and directed the Interior campaign, lending some of their most illustrious names in support of the cause, had imperial longings and ideas of their own. After all, in their own province, in Alberta, the holy Socred province, the opposition had been decimated and a period of bound­ less prosperity prevailed. Safe and flourishing at home, their political hori-

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zons waxed big. In the east, across the bleak prairies and stark pre-Cam­ brian shield, they discerned, with the clairvoyance of the saved, the glisten­ ing spires of Parliament. And in the west, over the snow-capped mountain ranges, and the Straits of Georgia, the more modest turrets of the Victoria House. British Columbia, Canada’s lady with great expectations, momentarily floundering and confused, was ripe to be had by the wild Alberta people who, during seventeen years of successful home rule, had built up a confi­ dence and political acumen fed by the black gold of Leduc, second to none in western Canada. From the vantage of the Alberta foothills, the British Columbia political scene looked doubly green. Not only had a political vacuum developed on account of the coalition decline, but the local Socred organization, which stood to benefit from the loosened party ties, was notably without an experienced and competent indigenous leadership. Wicks and Paynter, Shantz and Reid, were dedicated organizers and com­ mitted movement men. But none commanded great abilities or extensive political experience, or substantial personal followings. They were a pack of plodders, of local pipers whose tune-“Oh God Our Help In Ages Past”was called by the Albertans who paid their way. Alberta had grand imperial ambitions and was pleased to keep the infant British Columbia movement in a tutelary position. , i It is for these reasons, that the Albertans, and their local retainers, were genuinely suspect of eminent outsiders like Bennett, renegade Tories with remnant Conservative support, ambitious, able, widely-known, and im­ properly educated in Social Credit theory or practice. To be sure, they had much to gain from Bennett’s accession; an added respectability through association with a popular name, and an accretion of dispirited Tories who followed the wayward Okanagan. More importantly, they stood to lose from the formation of a free-enterprise peoples’ party independent of both the coalition and the Social Credit Party, an unhappy event which might have dangerously divided the anti-coalitionist free-enterprise vote between competing candidacies. Ideally, they wanted Bennett, as an aid but not as a power within their party. Similar considerations doubtless weighed on Bennett’s discerning mind in the weeks and months preceding and following his defection. There is little doubt that Bennett was early, very early, considering the Socred option. Soon after his defection he met privately with Lyle Wicks in the Hotel Vancouver where the possibility of joining the Socreds was cautiously broached.79 During the big Kelowna rally, which his friends carefully confided was the first organizational meeting of the new independent freeenterprise reform party, he praised Alberta’s sound, efficient, competent, debt-free, Christian government, always careful to remind his audience in

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a sly, jocular way that his remarks had no political significance. Subsequent public utterances in the spring and summer of 1951 contained further praise of Alberta, which he visited during a cross-national tour in the summer and where he conferred with leading Socred officials. Bennett, more than his Socred competitors, had little to gain and much to lose from pursuing an independent course. Both he and the Socreds appealed to the same constitu­ ency, the independent free-enterprise vote which daily loosened from the squabbling coalition partners. To a real extent, their natural bases, class and 1 regional, overlapped. The Fraser Valley and southern Interior was tradi­ tional Tory country now infected with the virus of Social Credit. The emergence of competing candidacies and separate organizations would have injured Bennett’s chances where his real support lay. And Bennett had a fragmented support of his own, in Esquimalt, Point Grey and South Okana­ gan where the Socreds were not firmly rooted. He had something to bring to the Socreds-his eminence, abilities, good name and straggling Tory remnant, just as the Socreds had much to return: their burgeoning organiza­ tion and support in the Interior, their handy label, and the good name of the Alberta government. Both could profit from a deal, from co-operation or fusion. But the truth of the matter was that, for Bennett, the costs of separation were prohibitive. He needed the Socreds more than they needed him. He had no choice but to declare himself Social Credit. Just as he was stealing the Conservative organization from under Anscomb, so the Socreds, who expanded simultaneously with his defection, were eroding his own potential political base, robbing him of the possibility of creating and leading an independent free-enterprise people’s party. The Socreds were the very party he talked about. Bennett had to join them. But he wished to join big. He EadtooTong chafed and fretted on the back-bench, too long been coldly excluded from the Cabinet, the party leadership, the premiership. Why, then, did he hesitate? Why did he not join Social Credit when he declared his independence? His delay was not occasioned by any differences in political philosophy. They were after all no longer cranks and monetary fetishists. He was a non-smoker and non-drinker, a good Christian who regularly attended church and could be expected to tolerably render “Oh God Our Help In Ages Past” at political meetings without stumbling over the words. And he was a practical businessman, sensibly impressed with Alberta’s solid business government. Bennett delayed declaring himself because he wished to feel out the possibility of forming his own party of which he would be assured the leadership. The Social Credit sweep was just beginning in the early months of 1951, when Bennett turned his back on the coalition. It may still not have been clear in his mind whether they would take hold. He may have had illusions that his loosely conceived

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independent free-enterprise people’s movement could win the loyalties of defecting Liberals and Conservatives. But the huge Alberta-sponsored cam­ paign made things abundantly clear, by the autumn of 1951, that the Socreds were gaining a powerful foothold independent of Bennett. His only option was to join them and take his chances over the leadership. This is why the Esquimalt by-election was important to him. It was a test of his vote-getting power and a means of strengthening his bargaining position, his claim on the leadership, before going over. A strong independent show­ ing in the Esquimalt by-elections was calculated not merely to panic the coalitionists and hurry the defection of the masses; it would serve, as well, to impress the Socreds that he packed a political punch, that he was the right man to lead them, to fill the void at the top of their growing movement. But the positive Esquimalt results, however impressive they were to Bennett’s Socred boosters, to Wesley Black, Chant, Rudolph, Worley and Smith, fell short of convincing the Albertans. Shortly after the contest, Worley, Smith and Martin worked feverishly to boost Bennett’s stock before the approaching Socred convention scheduled for the Russell Hotel in New Westminster in early November.80 They wanted to wangle Bennett an invitation from the executive to attend the head table as a guest of honour. But the Albertans were in no accommodating mood. The vote split evenly with Martin, Chant and Rudolph favouring an invitation, and Paynter, Reid and Shantz opposed. Lyle Wicks, re-elected president, cast a negative deciding vote.81 The convention voted to shelve the leadership question, delegating the executive authority to seek out prospects and call a convention when it deemed fit. Bennett, for the meanwhile, did not give up the struggle. He had been snubbed often enough before; he was used to it. If Social Credit would not come to Kelowna, then Kelowna must go to Social Credit. So he went home to Kelowna to contemplate his next move. The results of his deliberations were made public on December 6, when he quietly announced that he had taken out a membership in the Kelowna Association of the Social Credit Party, but would henceforth continue to sit in the House as an Independent. Five days later, amidst wide speculation that the leadership was his, Bennett met in Vancouver with Lyle Wicks who, upon hearing of his conversion, praised his “ability, integrity and public spiritedness.” 82 It was a chummy meeting which afforded Bennett the opportunity to confirm in typical clipped prose that he “accepted the basic philosophy and principles of Social Credit, first fruits of which are manifest in the good government Alberta has received.” 83 When asked by an incredulous reporter how he came to see the Alberta light from the vantage of his Kelowna Bay window, Bennett replied, in his usual informative way: “I studied Social Credit as I studied every political philosophy. I decided I should accept it.” 84 This

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was plainly good enough for Lyle Wicks who seemed amply repentent for his impolite act just a few weeks earlier. Wicks, or so it seemed, had undergone another conversion, this time without Mix. He reiterated that he personally had no aspirations to the leadership, that he would not be a candidate for the post, but that a convention would be held “within the next two or three weeks when a leader will be named.” 85 Plainly, he had become a Bennett man. The way seemed clear. The Socreds had at last found a head, and Bennett a body. But complications set in. From beyond the rocky divide, from the land of the flowing black gold, from the burning Alberta well, a voice was heard, resonant and forbidding. It was the wail of Ernest Manning, Aberhart’s annointed, of Solon Low, Joseph Smith’s latter-day disciple, the nervous chatter of Reverend Ernest Hansell, anti-Semite and honorary minister of the Church of Christ. The message was clear; Bennett was an opportunist, unreliable, suspect. What British Columbia Social Credit needed as a leader was a pedigreed Albertan, with Social Credit in his very blood and marrow. The Reverend Ernest Hansell was the right man, the chosen man.86 This is what Lyle Wicks, and other Alberta people on the executive, heard and assented to during a meeting of the national council of the Social Credit Party held in the heart of the mosque itself, the antiseptic office of Alberta’s purified Premier, in the early days of 1952. The Social Credit leadership convention was not held in the weeks follow­ ing Bennett’s conversion. Instead, it was postponed until the dying days in April; time enough for the Albertans to round up a herd of converts and stampede them to a convention, held in a New Westminster high school, which included 740 delegates and 300 observers, a far cry from the fifty stragglers who attended a similar gathering three years earlier.87 There were so many Albertans present that reporters referred to the gathering as the Calgary Stampede. And the Albertans were prepared to be stampeded. No journalist subsequently described the program, hurriedly adopted in the waning hours of the meeting, as “hammered out.” The program-which included a pay-as-you-go plan for government spending, debt reduction, efficiency, economy, an end to compulsory hospital insurance and the exten­ sion of social services-was refined and shaped by the sturdy hand of the executive, printed and bound in pamphlet form, and swallowed whole, with barely a grunt of indigestion, by the multitude. But this mattered little since they formed, all sweating together, those avid yodelers of “Oh God Our Help In Ages Past,” a community of believers, an army of the faithful, commissioned and paid by the Alberta generals.88 Policy mattered little. Faith was what counted, and there was plenty of it around. But the faith which abounded was not entirely of the sort W.A.C. Ben­ nett, who boasted of a minority of supporters, appreciated. The voice issued

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forth again. “In order to assure the conduct of the campaign in accordance with the fundamental principles of Social Credit it would be in the best interests of the movement for the convention to select a campaign leader from outside who has a solid background of Social Credit knowledge and experience.” 89 The voice droned on, calming and assuring the delegates that if his recommendations were approved, the members of the Alberta government, the Alberta Social Credit League and the National Social Credit Association were prepared to give “what support they can to the British Columbia campaign.” 90 The ultimatum was heeded by the conven­ tion which agreed to amend the constitution to allow for a temporary campaign leader instead of a permanent leader. Low, Hansell, Wicks, Paynter, Chant and, finally, Bennett, were nominated.91 But Bennett well knew there were not enough renegade Tories around to outnumber the Albertans-and he declined to stand. The job fell to Hansell, the fifty-sixyear-old honorary minister of the Church of Christ, a Member of Parlia­ ment since the great sweep of 1935, who made headlines in 1948 by exposing some two hundred Canadians, including B.C. Electric president A.E. Grauer and U.B.C. president Norman Mackenzie, as “traitors or commu­ nist dupes.”92 Hansell was in fine form. He told the delegates that Social Credit was not essentially a political movement but a “great crusade which sought the emancipation of the people from economic slavery.”93 To the disgruntled locals who feared Albertan domination, he was reassuring, disavowing Edmonton outside influence and disclaiming any intention of becoming the Social Credit leader in British Columbia. “So long as I steer the election campaign,” he announced, “there will be no interference in British Columbia’s affairs by the Alberta government.” 94 But these were only assurances; there were no guarantees. Alberta wanted an Alberta leader, an Alberta Premier, for British Columbia, since Alberta knew best. “Edmonton is the chosen city, the mecca of the faith­ ful,” the Province gaily quoted the Calgary Herald, “and it will be interest­ ing to see Pacific coast cities kneeling on the warm sands at each sunset, salaaming to the east as Manning the Muezzin calls from the minarets of the legislative buildings on the other side of the mountains which, we presume, he will allow to remain where they are.” 95 Not being a resident of British Columbia, and momentarily ineligible to contest the seat, Hansell was obviously in no position to lead the party in the Legislature. But there was always the possiblity of a later by-election, to bring him into the House in the event that a pedigreed Albertan did not make it in the ensuing legislative scramble. “The performance at New Westminster,” the Herald concluded, “suggests either one of two things: the people who accepted the dictum from the dome are foreigners of some sort and are not genuine British Columbians, or else summer has come early and caused an epidemic

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of sunstroke.”96 For the moment, Alberta had won; but only a partial victory. Twice robbed of the Tory leadership, and now victimized by the “Calgary Stam­ pede,” W.A.C. Bennett was disappointed, but not entirely disheartened. He was too shrewd for that. Hansell, after all, was only the temporary cam­ paign leader. The real power, as Bennett well knew, rested with the parlia­ mentary leader who, the delegates voted in the closing hours of the meeting, would be chosen by the party’s elected representatives. Possessed of a safe seat, and with extensive legislative experience, he would still be in the running at the appointed hour. The Albertans said no, but the big decision was no longer with them; it rested with the masses, the electorate, and their chosen representatives. There was still hope; he still had a chance. Bennett did not tarry. No sooner did the convention dissolve, than he packed his bags and sped across the province. Bennett was off and running in an election campaign in which the two old governing parties, rulers of the province for half a century, fought for their very lives. The Esquimalt by-election of October 1951 had a sobering effect on each of the coalition partners. Liberal president Harry Perry’s conclusion that it was a protest vote against coalition97 was doubtless endorsed by Johnson and Anscomb whose trust in the panacea of the single-alternative ballot system was enhanced by a C.C.F. victory resulting from a split free-enterprise vote. More important, it was a reminder that any extended prolongation of the coalition, under conditions and circumstances where the coalition partners fought like cats and dogs, and girded their separate organizations for an approaching election, was injurious to both. The results increased the insistent demands within both parties for an immediate, clean and irrevocable break followed by an election fought under the new ballot system. Anti-coalitionists like Dr. R.W. Alward, past-president of the British Columbia Conservative Association and Les Bewley, a young Vancouver lawyer who served as president of the Young P.C.’s, were constantly at Anscomb’s throat for an immediate split. And Johnson was under similar pressure. Art Laing’s replacement as president of the British Columbia Liberal Association by Harry Perry did not help the Premier since Perry, together with a large section of the executive, wished an immediate dissolution and election; a demand which led to the Prince George squire’s resignation in early January when Johnson support­ ers managed to postpone a party convention to consider dissolution, until June. But there was no doubt that a break was imminent. It was only a matter of timing, the meet instance when either or both of the parties perceived that it was in their interest to force a split. For Herbert Anscomb, who enjoyed a robust Christmas and New Year, seasoned with turkeys and cigars, the happy hour of the resurrection of the

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grand old party of Sir Richard McBride-and William Bowser-was near. Ever since the Esquimalt debacle, he continued his double game, accosting his partners, feverishly urging his lieutenants to organize, proudly claiming credits for boom conditions, yet insisting, with uncharacteristic faintness and restraint, that the Tories, as good honest businessmen, had signed a contract upon entering the firm which they were obliged to honour. In his first radio broadcast of the New Year, Anscomb admitted that living with the Liberals was “rather difficult,” but insisted that the coalition would continue until the end of the approaching legislative session or until “some problem or other” arose.98 What he really meant was that he was deter­ mined to press his partisan advantage under the present arrangement until he found it expedient to finally break. The approaching tax negotiations with the federal government afforded him an excellent opportunity for gain. Anscomb criticized the St. Laurent government for its niggardly dealings with British Columbia, then hopped a plane to Ottawa for joint talks on the federal government’s new proposal which had been earlier wired to the provincial government.99 Upon returning to Vancouver, on January 15, he immediately telephoned the Press Gallery in Victoria with a release about the excellent new arrangements which, he never ceased to repeat in the days following, were ample proof of his, and the Conservative Party’s, ability to stand up to Liberal Ottawa. But Johnson, under desperate pressures from his own anti-coalitionist faction which thought him bloodless for allowing Anscomb to publicly stomp on Liberal toes over the past few months, was at long last prepared to move. Johnson had had enough. Anscomb had arrogantly by-passed the Cabinet, his loving colleagues whom he was obliged to inform of the details of the agreement before the press and public. And so the Premier emerged on the eighteenth day of January, 1952, barely a decade after the creation of the coalition, with a statement demanding Anscomb’s resignation in view of his “flagrant and arrogant disregard of the procedure of constitutional government,” 100 which was earlier manifest in “a long series of politically reprehensible actions.” Anscomb, for once, was accommodating. He re­ signed from the Cabinet and took with him the three Tory Cabinet minis­ ters, MacDonald, Carson and Eyres whose resignations the Premier had not requested. The Tory leader was not content to merely desert the Cabinet. He further announced that the Tories, all eleven of them, were finished with the coalition and would go into opposition “as the Premier’s actions make no other course possible.” 101 Since the government, broken up by Johnson on a “flimsy pretext,” had been elected on a coalitionist program, the Liberals no longer had a mandate to carry on. An immediate dissolution and election was therefore needed. This was not the view of Johnson who announced that the vacant Tory

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portfolios would be taken over by Liberal Cabinet ministers Bowman, Kenney and Turnbull, and that Minister of Labour John Cates, elected as an unhyphenated coalitionist, would assume the Mines portfolio. Johnson insisted that the government was still coalitionist, and would dissolve only if both of its composite elements resigned. But this necessary condition of dissolution had not been fulfilled. Johnson had not kicked out the Tories; he had merely asked for Anscomb’s resignation. The Tories defected and the Liberals remained.102 The Liberals were the coalition, and their claim was reinforced by the fact that the Cabinet was still composite; the Tories had left, but John Cates, a coalitionist Cabinet minister, remained. Since the government was elected on a coalitionist program, and was still coalitionist, it had a mandate to continue. There was no reason why they, the Liberals, with twenty-three of the forty-eight seats in the House, could not carry on, especially since they could possibly gain the support of Herbert Welch (Comox) and R.M. McIntyre (Mackenzie), both “pure” coalitionist M.L.A.s. So Boss Johnson decided to meet with the House, as usual, for the new session beginning February 19, 1952. The Premier did not want an immediate election. He wanted time to re-establish the Liberal identity, remind the voters that the Liberals were the governing party, refurbish the party organization, shake the stigma attached to the unhappy partnership and, perhaps, lower the temperature of debate with the Tories in prepara­ tion for an election in which, for all of their partisan differences, the Liberals and Conservatives would be united as against the C.C.F. Given his commitment to meet the House, Johnson had a number of alternative strategies. The committees of enquiry into hospital insurance, the I.C.A. Act and Workmens’ Compensation had all completed their reports and the government was in a position to sponsor a strong reform program with a view to refurbishing its old reform image, badly tarnished by the hospital insurance debacle, and make possible inroads into the C.C.F. electorate.103 But this strategy implied a collision with the Tories who had long opposed labour and hospital insurance reforms and were committed to re-establishing their separate image as a free-enterprise growth party. Without Tory support, the government would have to rely on the C.C.F. to escape House defeat and leave itself open to charges that it had become a creature of the socialists. To centrist and right-wing Liberals this course would have constituted a betrayal of the Liberal class interests and the possible sabotage of the workings of the new ballot system calculated to preserve those interests. C.C.F. supporters it is true, witnessing a new alliance, might have been encouraged to vote Liberal on their second choice. But, more dangerously, Liberal voters, might then see the C.C.F. as their reasonable alternative. By pursuing a strong reform course, unacceptable to the Tories, the Liberals would discourage their supporters from voting

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Conservative on second choice and Conservative supporters from voting Liberal. How could the government hope for Conservative electoral support when they pursued a course akin to, and supported by, the C.C.F.? Such, doubtless, were some of the considerations which Johnson had in mind when he announced in the early days of the session, over the objec­ tions of a large group of activist Liberals, led by Gordon Wismer, who wished a robust electioneering program, that the government did not pro­ pose to act on any of the major reform measures. “If we are to benefit from the studies and recommendations that have been made,” Johnson an­ nounced early in the session, “we must of necessity place this parliament in a position to consider these studies without being unduly influenced by . . . pressure groups or the sort of bargaining that attends a government which in the first place has no mandate from the electorate to deal with such important matters and at the best has only a very small majority in the House.” 104 The Throne Speech was equally explicit. “Because of some changes in personnel since the last election,” Lieutenant-Governor Wallace read, “only matters of a nature considered essential for maintenance of public service” would be presented to the House-"All other matters will be deferred until the people have been afforded an opportunity of clarifying the present situation.” If, as Johnson informed Anscomb in the previous month, the government had a mandate to continue in office, then it was of a special sort: a mandate to do nothing. Boss Johnson, dazed by the swirling eddies of public opinion, was no longer a premier. By the strange alchemy of politics, he was transformed into a caretaker. This was just fine for Herbert Anscomb who had long pocketed the confused and wavering Premier. Counting more House members than the C.C.F., the Tories were accorded recognition as the Official Opposition on a combined vote of Liberals and Conservatives supporting Speaker Nancy Hodge’s ruling. And they sought to use their new position both to firm up their partisan credibility and as a brief legislative prop to their old partners who were, aFter all, still their electoral allies under the new voting system. Since Boss Johnson was committed to do nothing, to take no undue partisan advantage in the approaching session, then Herbert Anscomb was prepared to support him; a generous stance calculated to convince the dazed voter, who by then had lost all interest in Victoria’s unmusical game of political chairs, that the Liberals and Conservatives, who fought like cats and dogs, were really friendly free-enterprise partners. Accordingly, when Harold Winch moved a non-confidence motion during the debate on the Throne Speech, which he described as the most innocuous in his twenty years in the Legislature,105 Herbert Anscomb announced that the Tories would support the government in order to prevent “economic and political chaos.” 106 “It will be a sorry thing,” Gordon Wismer earlier informed his

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constituents in a non-partisan speech, “if either the Liberals or Conserva­ tives try to take all the credit for what coalition has done, and lay all the blame for the mistakes on the other side . . . any time you have a fight between the two major parties it’s music to the ears of Harold Winch.” 107 Assured of Tory support, Johnson and his colleagues waddled through a truncated five-week lame-duck session. Of the three Boards of Enquiry, into hospital insurance, the I.C.A. Act and Workmens’ Compensation, only the recommendations of the latter were considered by a legislature which passed a few minor revisions to the Workmens’ Compensation Act. The report of the Hospital Insurance Enquiry Board was damning. The commis­ sioners concluded that the lower income groups could not afford payments and should be accorded free services, that co-insurance was an injurious and needless imposition which should be eliminated, that premium payments should be lowered, that one-third of the cost of the scheme should be financed out of general revenue, that services were inadequate, inefficient and needed both rationalization and expansion, and that the administrative staff of 660, a happy haven for partisan appointees, could be cut by twothirds without affecting the operation of the scheme. The report, drawn up at a cost of $100,000 by a committee which deliberated nine months, was a slap at both Johnson and Anscomb. Yet nothing was done to make amends. Instead, the report was tabled together with the I.C.A. Act proposal which provided for an end to government-supervised strike votes, curbing of the powers of the Labour Relations Board, and restrictions on the use of the interim injunction in labour disputes. The sole measures enacted during the sleepy session were the ratification of the Federal-Pro­ vincial Tax Agreements, approval of the colouring of margarine, and the release of funds to support the construction of the Squamish-Vancouver Highway of the P.G.E., the Trans-Provincial Highway from Prince Rupert to Prince George, and a batch of schools, hospitals, court-houses and se­ condary roads.108 The new alternative voting system, together with advi­ sory plebiscites on the sale of liquor by the glass and daylight-saving time, calculated to encourage a large outback voting turnout, were enacted by Order-in-Council in preparation for the day of political clarification, set for June 12. The ensuing campaign was long, bitter and muddled. The Liberal mes­ sage was brought to the four corners of the province by the ailing Premier and railing Wismer, by a host of highly paid professional organizers and public relations experts who filled the press with page-long ads, the radio with endless blurbs, and the mails with masses of leaflets, including an explanation of the proper workings of the new ballot system sent out to three hundred thousand homes. The Liberals sang the old song of boom and stability. That the Premier looked wan, confused, tired, and obviously in

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need of an extended rest far from the heat of politics, little deterred his campaign manager from describing Johnson as “British Columbia’s super­ salesman, master-minding the biggest boom in British Columbia’s hist­ ory.” 109 Liberal propaganda was replete with figures chronicling the spirall­ ing prosperity and huge government spending. Voters were told of John­ son’s boom budget which showed spending of $187,500,000, up fifteen per cent in one year and a remarkable twenty-eight per cent more than the “peak revenue” budget Anscomb brought in two years before.110 They were reminded of the government’s new “pay-as-you-go” program, reflected in the recent budget, in which almost half of the government’s capital spending was to come from current revenue, leaving only twenty-eight million dollars to borrow compared with forty million dollars the year before.111 They heard that in barely a decade, the manufacturing output of the province had risen from $413,000,000 to $1,070,000,000; that the new forest manage licence system stimulated a great boom in the pulp and paper industries involving an estimated investment of $250 million;112 that Alcan, which already had spent $160 million, had been safely brought to British Co­ lumbia; that Cominco was engaged in an eighty-two million-dollar expan­ sion and that the seventy-million-dollar, seven-hundred-mile Trans-Moun­ tain Oil Pipeline had begun its slow tortuous journey from the Alberta oilfields to the Pacific coast. The Premier advertised a new British Co­ lumbia, riding outward, toward an endless horizon, on the wave of new investments in the resource industries. Tangled and embroiled in a confused four party contest, operating under a new system of rules, the Liberals flogged the old issue of stable government. A first preferential vote for any of the other opposition parties was advertised as a vote for confusion, for minority government, for a fragmented legislature at a time when the company men sought repose and security. The socialists and Social Credi­ tors were labelled as the main threats to stability; socialists because they were mean confiscators and dangerous experimenters, the Socreds because they were a headless band of unpredictable parvenues managed, like pup­ pets, from the Alberta foothills. “ . . . Voting for leaderless individuals,” a Liberal ad ran, “could result in hopeless chaos such as this province has never before experienced . . . one party must be given a mandate. All parties concede the Liberals will have the largest group . . . anything else is bound to result in confusion, confiscation and frustration.” 113 The voters were expected to vote “ 1-2 . . . for free-enterprise,” to list the Liberals as their first preference and the Conservatives-or the Socreds-as their sec­ ond.114 For Herbert Anscomb, it was a long and frustrating campaign since, unlike the last two provincial contests, he had to contend with three parties instead of one. Anscomb defended the Tories as the only reliable genuine

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free-enterprise party, attributed all of the coalition’s boom credits to Con­ servative good sense, and promised the swift extension of the P.G.E., the end of compulsory hospital insurance, and the reduction of taxes. Socialists were defined in the traditional way, as red bogeymen, while the Socreds, masquerading as free enterprisers, were dismissed as headless confused outsiders beholden to no one save Manning; “the headless brigade from over the mountains,” 115“a leaderless group whose philosophies are beyond all comprehension.” 116 A self-styled spokesman for “the last bulwark for free enterprise in every possible way,” 117 Anscomb urged his supporters to plump the ballot-mark no choices beyond the first-since no other parties, including Liberals, deserved support from genuine Tories.118 Herbert An­ scomb, his base daily eroded by the Socreds, fought the old war-“If it hadn’t been for me,” he roared before a large audience, “Johnson never would have been Premier of B.C. I let him in and then he let me out. This week you’re going to let him out and me back in.” 119 Harold Winch was determined that neither of the old boys be allowed back. The 1949 election had left the C.C.F. in a gloomy, demoralized state with left and right factions cursing and blaming one another for the party’s defeat. Much of the party time was occupied with squabbles with an organi­ zation of militants called the Socialist Fellowship who were ordered to disband by the provincial and national executive in 1951.120 And there began an extended period of self-analysis, of policy review, reflected in the intense debate at the April 1950 convention held in Penticton, at which a new program outlining the party’s aims within the limits of provincial jurisdiction, subsequently known as the Penticton Manifesto, was drawn up. The C.C.F. was not in prime organizational shape by the time of the 1952 election. The peak membership of 8,915 in 1945 declined to 4,425 in 1950 and, at the April 1952 convention the party officers reported a mem­ bership of 3,500.121 The socialists fought a traditional campaign advertising an updated and revised version of the Penticton Manifesto which provided 1 for the extension of public ownership in transportation and communication, 1 brewing and distilling, and in the development, processing and distribution l of petroleum products.122 The manifesto declared that although “complete \ Socialism” was not possible within the limitations of the constitutional /'system, the C.C.F. would use the existing powers of expropriation to take over “those natural resources, public utilities and industries deemed essen­ tial for the maintenance of employment, protection of living standards, and provision of social services.” 123 But the socialists were less concerned with flaunting their loyalty to the principle of public ownership than with chastising the old parties and suggesting remedies in the areas of labour relations, taxation and, of course, insurance. They spoke of the extension of the union shop, a forty

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hour week, a steeply graded resource tax, a new education formula w hich\ would reduce the tax load on municipalities, the elimination of hospital \ co-insurance and sharp reduction or elimination of premiums through I higher payment from general revenue.124 The Tories were dismissed a s / jaded free-enterprisers and the Liberals as captives of the Tories who be­ trayed the people through their hospital insurance bungling. The arriviste Socreds, whose existence was dismissed by the C.C.F. News as late as December 1951 as “not of any real significance to the C.C.F. which stands as the only alternative to all capitalist parties,” were defined as a gang of fascist interlopers. “I thought Nazism and Fascism had been stamped out with the winning of the last war,” Winch commented on the New Westmin­ ster Socred Convention of April 1952,“ . . . who would have thought we would see the ugly head of totalitarianism raised in B.C.?” 125 During the heat of the campaign, he repeated his depiction of Social Credit as “the ugly head of Nazism and Fascism raised in B.C.,” 126 asserting that the Nazis and Italian Fascists climbed to power on a program of anti-Semitism and racial discrimination “and that’s the history of Social Credit in Canada.” 127 Such expletives little bothered the Socreds who prosecuted a boisterous ' and aggressive campaign. A bagful of strays-ministers of the gospel, naturo­ paths, retailers, wholesalers, and notary publics-not a lawyer among themwere nominated at a host of conventions across the province, all prefaced with solemn renderings of “Oh God Our Help In Ages Past.” Back for another round of hooting and hollering were the Albertans who included such notable personages as Alberta Mines Minister W.E. Tanner, Minister of Economic Affairs A.J. Hooke, Agricultural Minister David Ure, Na­ tional Organizer Orvis Kennedy, and the Reverends Hansell and Manning. And back as well were the Alberta greenbacks, distilled from the flowing black gold, which covered the cost of the travel expenses, radio broadcasts and party publications spread over the countryside.128 The Socred campaign was a potent composite of anti-monopolism, politi­ cal Christianity, and business pragmatism. When Bennett and Paynter, Wicks and Shantz, and Hansell, spoke of the restriction of opportunity, political and economic, by grasping party machines and financiers, of the political and moral decadence of citified politicians, and of the profligacy of inaccessible Victorians, they were blessed and cheered by xenophobic outbackers, frustrated aspiring politicians, chafing notary publics and re­ sentful kinsmen; the sea of political outsiders whose suppressed envy and frustration was sublimated into moral fervour. The message was simple; deprivations, frustrations, unhappiness were due to monopoly, the restric­ tion of opportunities by the selfish few. Tilly Rolston, now happily a Socred, observed to the people of Point Grey that the old parties gave “too much

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of a show to the big companies” and what British Columbia badly needed was a lot of “little private enterpise,” 129 a sentiment reflected in the official Socred program which promised to “discourage monopolies” and “encour­ age individual and private enterprise in exploration and development of resources.” 130 To Hansell, the coalitionists were in league with the devil whose wordly embodiments were the international financiers who kept the people in thrall. “There is a government more powerful than governments,” he told his opening campaign audience in the fruit-growing centre of Oliver, “this great monetary power that knows no international boundaries. That is what we are attacking, and everyone who opposes Social Credit is either ignorant of that power or a party to it.” 131 Bennett, less prone to fits of paranoia about the sinister plots of international Jewish finance, laid the blame at the feet of metropolitan machine politicians. Monopoly was politi­ cal, the exclusion of virtuous and able people from positions of power in political parties with the consequent denial to them and their friends of tangible preferments. The dispossessed were neither wage slaves, nor the indebted small businessman or farmer. They were merely political outsid­ ers, like himself. Bennett could barely contain himself when he waved before a Vancouver audience a copy of Maclean’s magazine which con­ tained an article by Blair Fraser on the coalition demise. “Even Quebec,” he read to men who knew of Wismer’s deals, “wouldn’t put up with the things that are tolerated in B.C.” 132 And he jumped up and down with glee when he quoted from The Fraser in which Bruce Hutchison wrote of the “ruthless political machine” in Vancouver-Centre that dominated the prov­ ince.133 I A necessary and flavoursome ingredient of the Socred campaign recipe I was religion. The Socreds were purity politicians who assured the many locals, deprived of adequate jobs, contracts and public works, that the sinful politicians had taken it all for themselves and their friends. As newcomers, never having exercised power, they were untainted, as clean and pure as the severe grey suit, the meticulously placed boutonniere, the impeccable spec­ tacles and scrubbed visage Ernest Manning displayed at a meeting in the Vancouver Forum. The Socreds were a movement, not a party. Parties were corrupt patronage mechanfsms; Christian movements were crusades for a new way of life. Campaigns were purification sessions. At the height of the campaign, Eric Martin told the Vancouver Board of Trade that the Socreds would go to Victoria “with the bible in one hand and our platform in the other.” 134 “Fundamentally, Social Credit is a great crusade for a way of life. . . ” Hansell told a Vernon audience. “It is political because it has been made that. But Social Credit was regarded by Mr. Aberhart as a way of life. It is a subject involving the destiny of the human race.” 135 Tilly Rolston, like Bennett, was less shaken by the holy spirit, but, being a good Baptist,

Saturday Night Government: 1950-1952 145

she shared the Albertan’s view of the essential Christianity of the Social Credit Movement. “I don’t know as much about your party as I should,” she told a Point Grey nomination convention, “but I believe in a return to honest Christian principles in government.” 136 Such sentiments, extreme or moderate,'effusive Or restrained' Were echoed across the province by armies of churchgoers; by ladies in flowered dresses and netted hats, by gentlemen in the severe blue suits of their Sunday best; by the Sunday Morning people, who fought the Saturday Night politicians.137 < But the scenario was not overdone. Being experienced crusaders, the Socreds understood that a little humour, a little self-mockery, was needed to relieve the solemnity of their righteousness. When Ernest Manning strode before his Vancouver audience, he apologized for not wearing a halo, or the “garb of some dark dictator.” 138 A Hansell meeting-hall in Kam­ loops was decorated with a sign “Haloes Checked Free,” while the Reve­ rend Harry Francis, the Osoyoos Pentecostal clergyman who ran in Similkameen, campaigned in a car with a great sign on the back advertising “Eternity Ahead.” 139 For all of their profuse pulpit-pounding, the Socreds did not promise the Heavenly City; instead, they spoke of the Heavenly Province, debt-free, bulging, affluent, efficient ~Alberta"the land of flowing black gold. The Socred platform exuded pragmatism and reason, calling for the abolition of compulsory hospital insurance, to be replaced by a voluntary system, the levying of higher resource taxes on the companies, the reduction of munici­ pal school taxes, a pay-as-you-go fiscal policy, economy in government, the prevention of waste in agriculture, universal widows’ pensions, more gener­ ous old-age pensions and workmen’s compensation awards, the re-structuring of the Labour Relations Board, and a review of the I.C.A. Act with a view to bringing it up to date.140 All of these reforms-the Socred candidates never tired of repeating, had beenjnstituted in Alberta, They answered charges that they were dangerous experimenters with calming assertions that Alberta flourished after seventeen golden years of Socred rule. Alber­ ta’s was the tried, true, tested way. Manning, Hansell, Bennett, Rolston, Kennedy, Ure, Wicks, Reid and Paynter never ceased emphasizing that under Socred rule Alberta emerged from the “poor relations class” of the Canadian economy to become one of the soundest provinces financially; that Social Credit had been in power for twelve years before oil was discov­ ered in any quantity to affect Alberta’s economy; that even before the discovery of oil, the Social Credit government had put Alberta on a pay-asyou-go basis; that Alberta’s oil policy was the best on the North American continent; that Alberta’s health service was subsidized, not compulsory, as in British Columbia; that the Alberta hospital scheme administered by the municipalities, provided wider coverage at less cost than in British Co-

146 Pillars of Profit

lumbia; that Alberta’s prosperity stemmed from a stable government which created an open door for free enterprise to invest hundreds of millions of dollars.141 Since Alberta, with her narrow and modest resource base, had done so well, there was no reason why bountiful British Columbia, blessed by God and nature with a vast storehouse of wealth, could not do even better. Social Credit offered British Columbians a golden opportunity, not merely to develop her resources in the proven Alberta way, but to fight more eflfectivel^Thtffederal authority through active partnership with the sister province! “The dovetailed economies of Alberta and British Columbia,” Bennett rasped ecstatic; "would-place Western Canada on a stronger foot­ ing to deal with Ontario and Quebec.” 142 To federal Socreds and monetary fundamentalists like Hansell, who knew the monetary revolution must come from Ottawa, a British Columbia victory would be a first step in the sacred On-To-Ottawa trek. Social Credit monetary proposals, he admitted to the Alberta people, could be implemented only at the federal level and a British Columbia Socred victory would further the cause. “I am not saying you can do it here. They didn’t even let us do it in Alberta. . . . But with two Social Credit governments in Western Canada, they will have a strong voice and Ottawa will have to hear.” 143 When the results began to clarify in the weeks following the June 12 election, as hundreds of returning officers counted and re-counted the ava­ lanche of votes brought on by the new system, Ottawa, the Liberals and Conservatives, did indeed hear. By mid-July, Barry Mather could no longer wail with frustration, as he did the day after the election, “I don’t know what government we got. I don’t know what goverment we didn’t get. I don’t know what government we are going to get.” 144 Slowly, frustratedly, he discovered, as the results of the second, third, fourth and fifth counts came through, that the Liberals and Conservatives, rulers of the province for half a century, traditional guardians of the bastion of free enterprise, had been decimated. And he noted, with the astonishment and alarm which abounded everywhere in the province, except among the Sunday Morning people of Osoyoos, Kelowna and environs, that the political outsiders, the bawling tribe of outback people, had occupied Victoria. The Socreds, or so it appeared, had won nineteen seats, the C.C.F. eighteen, the Liberals six and the Conservatives four.145 And they took a big bite out of the popular vote. On the first count, the Socreds won 27.2%, the C.C.F. 30.8%, the Liberals 23.5%, the Conservatives 16.8%. On the final count, Social Credit gained 30.2%, the C.C.F. 34.3%, the Liberals 25.3% and the Tories 9.7%. k The new voting system worked disastrously for the divorced coalition partners, just as it hugely benefited the Socreds who enjoyed key ancillary voting support beyond the first-choice votes from all of their opponents. The Socreds caught fire in the Interior: in the Fraser Valley, the Okanagan, the

Saturday Night Government: 1950-1952 147

Kootenays, the Cariboo and the North-East. Cariboo, Chilliwack, Co­ lumbia, Delta, Dewdney, Fort George, Kamloops, Nelson-Creston, North Okanagan, Omineca, Peace River, Rossland-Trail, Salmon Arm, Similkameen, South Okanagan and Yale all fell to their candidates. Not a constitu­ ency on the Island went Socred, while in Vancouver only the two seats in Burrard-won by a hair’s breadth from the C.C.F. in a disputed election-and one seat in Point Grey, won by Rolston, went over to the new free-enterprisers. The anatomy and physiology of the Socred victory was clear enough. Otlly ffiree constituenciess>fariboo, Chilliwack and South Okanagan went 'SociaTCredit on the first count. In all the others, the Social Credit candi­ dates, who either led or placed second on the first count, were pushed over the top by the second-choice votes of their opponents who saw them as the least evil of the possible alternatives. The main culprits, interestingly enough, were the numerous C.C.F. voters who ignored Winch’s depiction of the Socreds as anti-Semitic Nazis, and the exhortations in labour and party newspapers to indicate no choices on their ballots besides the first, since no free-enterprise party deserved socialist support. In Columbia, Fort George, Kamloops, Nelson-Creston, North Okanagan, Omineca, RosslandTrail and Yale, the Socreds either led, or were a close second to the Liberals, on the first count. The Tories, decimated by defections to the Socreds, trailed. Conservatives’ second choices went predominantly Liberal, al­ though the Socreds enjoyed a fair ancillary support and a good number of votes were plumped. But since the Conservatives ran weakly, plumped amply, and distributed some of their votes to the Socreds, the Liberals were unable to cross the threshhold on the second count. The third count was disastrous for them. Here the C.C.F. second choices, in every case, heavily favoured the Socreds over the Liberals, and a large number of ballots were exhausted. The Liberals were starved for ancillary socialist support; Social Credit was not. It was abundantly clear that a large number of socialist supporters did not see Social Credit in the Marxist light of Harold Winch. They may have been confused, as Professor Angus suggested, “by the identity between the two first syllables of Social Credit and of Socialism and to have given second choices under a misapprehension.” 146 Or, somehow thinking that they were not sufficiently civically dutiful if they exhausted their ballots early, they may have decided to vote Social Credit under the misapprehension that the Social Credit candidate had no chance. It was a way of withdrawing the vote from the Liberals and Conservatives, their class enemies, without plumping, which somehow was vaguely impolitic and uncivic. The most sensible conclusion, however, was that they per­ ceived Social Credit differently from Winch who wore urban, Marxist, labour spectacles. They were probably more than the naive victims of a semantic confusion. Many doubtless perceived certain affinity of interests

148 Pillars of Profit S j

and identity. The Liberals and Conservatives were the establishment. The Socreds were anti-establishment, anti-monopoly, social reformers, political crusaders. They had the right instincts, they knew the right enemy. They, like the C.C.F., were outsiders. The Socreds may not have been entirely their cup of tea, but they were certainly better than the Saturday Night Victoria-Vancouver establishment. The tragedy of the election, according to C.C.F. candidate Alex Macdonald, barely beaten in Vancouver-Burrard, was that many “forward looking men and women” supported Social Credit “because they believed it was a movement of social progress.” 147 But the Socreds rolled in not merely on socialist ancillary support. In Delta, Dewdney, Peace River, Salmon Arm, Similkameen, Vancouver-Bur­ rard, and Point Grey, the major Socred competitors, who either led or closely followed them on the first count, were the C.C.F. Here the Liberal and Conservative voters, threatened by their traditional socialist enemy, favoured the Socreds, the free-enterprise alternative, with their later choices. In Delta and Salmon Arm, where the Socreds rotted the Tory base, the Liberals trailed on the first count. On the second count, their supporters favoured the Conservatives before the Socreds or the C.C.F., in that order, but a large number of ballots were exhausted. Since the Liberals ran very weakly on the first count, scattered some of their votes to the Socreds, and plumped heavily, the Tories gained little from Liberal favours. On the third count, the Conservative votes heavily favoured Social Credit before the C.C.F., enough to bring the Socreds over the top. A similar process oc­ curred in Dewdney, Peace River, Similkameen, Vancouver-Burrard, and the single Point Grey seat where the Tories ran last in the first count. The Tory ballots favoured the Liberals before the Socreds or the C.C.F. on the second count. But, again, the effect of the transfer was weakened by the small initial vote, by heavy plumping and by moderate support for the Socreds. On the third count, those Liberal voters who had not exhausted their ballot, strongly supported the Socreds over the C.C.F., enough to bring the Socreds victory. A political miracle had occurred. The Socreds obtained the largest single grouping by happily combining the votes of workday socialists, Saturday Night profligates and the hordes of decent Sunday Morning people. The Liberals hated the socialists; the socialists despised the old coalition partners. Both groups, the free-enterprisers and the expropriated, the establishment and the anti-establishment, preferred the novel parvenus to their old enemies.148 But the Socred miracle was a hair-breadth thing. Just as numerous social­ ist voters aided their populist brethren, so did Social Credit voters rush to the aid of the socialists in such numbers that a C.C.F. victory was almost assured. In Alberni, Cowichan-Newcastle, Comox, Kaslo-Slocan, Macken­ zie, Prince Rupert, Revelstoke, Saanich, Vancouver-Centre and New West­

Saturday Night Government: 1950-1952 149

minster, where Boss Johnson sought the voters’ favours, the C.C.F ran 1-2 on the first count with the Liberals. In all of these constituencies, save Saanich, where a sizeable Conservative remnant remained, the Tories trailed miserably on the first count and their ineffectual second choices went Liberal, then Socred. In Saanich, the trailing Socred went C.C.F. on the first count, and in all of the other constituencies the Socreds heavily favoured the socialists on the third count before the Liberals, with a sizeable plumped vote. The Socred transfer vote was enough to take the socialists over the top.149 A similar thing occurred in Grand Forks-Greenwood where the socialists vied with the Conservatives for the first count lead. Here the Liberals trailed, and their minor fragmented and inconsequential secondary support went predominantly Conservative. The C.C.F. candidate R. Haggen, was boosted over the top on the third round by strong Socred support. Only in Atlin, Burnaby, Cranbrook, and Vancouver-East did the C.C.F. make it without Socred support. Frank Calder in Atlin and Harold Winch in Vancouver-East won on the first count. In Cranbrook, Burnaby and Vancouver-East, where the C.C.F. enjoyed a huge lead on the first count, the socialists ran 1-2 with the Socreds. All that the C.C.F needed in Van­ couver and Burnaby was a minor accretion of Liberal and Conservative support, which came. In Cranbrook, the Liberals and Conservatives, while favouring the Socreds over the C.C.F., plumped so heavily that Leo Nimsick snuck in with a 215 vote majority in the final count. It is clear that while the insurgent Socreds gained hordes of free-enterprise Liberal and Conservative voters-enough to get them the largest single representation-the C.C.F. was starved for old party choices which, had they j been forthcoming to any degree, would have ensured a socialist victory. But the Socreds, if they stole a victory from the starved socialists, at least saved their status as Official Opposition. Just as numerous C.C.F. supporters preferred the Socreds to the Victoria politicians, so did the many Socreds prefer the socialists, who were, after all, political outsiders opposed to Saturday Night government, to the coalition partners. The major election issue, after all, to the Socred leadership was not socialism. Bennett, Hansell and friends spent little time vilifying the socialists, warning of the commu­ nist threat, conjuring the red bogey. The issue was Saturday Night govern­ ment; monopoly, political and financial.They did not see cause to alienate the C.C.F. voters from Social Credit, or Socred voters from the C.C.F. They were, as Bennett repeated more than once, a social reform free-enterprise party. Their main task was to vilify the coalition, the metropolitan deca­ dents, the citified graspers, the agents of the money power, the cruel monopolists of political opportunity. The socialists, after all, were opposed as well to high finance, to Saturday Night government, to the denial of opportunity to political outsiders. Socialists and Social Crediters were, both

150 Pillars of Projit

of them, forgotten people and they huddled together sufficiently long, and in adequate numbers, to effect the demise of the old parties. How, then, did the old parties salvage their few seats? The Conservatives won in Nanaimo and the Islands, and Point Grey, and the Liberals in North Vancouver, Oak Bay, Skeena and Victoria City because their organizations were preserved intact in traditional boroughs relatively remote and in­ sulated by geography and, in some cases wealth, from the spreading Socred virus. Skeena was an old Liberal bailiwick, while the wealthy of Point Grey, Oak Bay, North Vancouver, and the favoured residents of the capital city, were not forgotten people; they were the social base of coalition and, under­ standably, resistant to deserting the traditional parties. They were charter British Columbians, the hard-core of the metropolitan establishment which the Socreds regaled. The Tories and Liberals saved themselves in these areas because the C.C.F. and Social Credit, both or separately, ran weakly and gave less mutual support than in the Interior. The Tories overtook the C.C.F., who led them on the first count in Nanaimo and the Islands, because the Social Credit transfer vote to the C.C.F. on the third count was too small, and the exhaustion rate too large, to effect a C.C.F. victory. On the fourth count, the strong Liberal vote went heavily to their old freeenterprise partners, thereby ensuring a Tory victory. In the two Point Grey seats, Conservatives narrowly headed the Socreds on the first count. C.C.F. support for the Socreds on the second count was weakened by both the small total initial socialist vote in a high-income constituency and by a high plumping rate. On the third count, the sizeable Liberal vote elected the Conservatives. A similar process worked in the Liberal seats. In Oak Bay, where Herbert Anscomb was defeated, the Liberals and Conservatives ran 1-2 on the first count. The C.C.F. trailed, but their meagre vote on the second and third count barely helped the Socreds, whose vote, in turn, on the third count, favoured the Liberals. In North Vancouver, Skeena and Victoria City, the Liberals ran 1-2 with the socialists on the first count. Socred voters, true to form, favoured the C.C.F. over the Liberals. But the initial Socred vote was either too small, or the rate of plumping too high, to get the socialists over the top. Predictably, the Conservative voters went strongly Liberal. The high exhaustion rate amongst socialist and Socred voters in the met­ ropolitan area indicated that the similarity of outlook or, at least, mutual tolerance, was not as clearly developed as in the Interior. Harold Winch’s depiction of Social Credit as a headless fascist monster was less meaningful to rural than urban socialists, who thought less about Saturday Night rule than about the evils of class domination. The Interior socialists, heavily exposed to the huge Socred propaganda, many of whom backed Independ­ ents and mavericks like Bert Herridge and Thomas Uphill, were suspect of

Saturday Night Government: 1950-1952 151

receiving directives from the central party leadership. And so it happened. If not through God’s will, then through the fickle wishes of the people. Amidst the din of excitement and the smoldering of resentment, the faint words of Boss Johnson were barely heard. The times were never better. The primary and secondary sectors boomed, employment and wages ran high, unprecedented revenues poured into the public purse and were redistributed to wanting citizens and grasping companies. But the old magic failed, the loud boom-talk fell on deaf ears, distracted minds. Boss Johnson advertised stable government to guarantee a secure legal environ­ ment for investors, to perpetuate prosperity and extend the glorious assault on the frontier. But the credibility of his formula was undermined by the unseemly dissolution of a governing partnership whose formation was dictated by considerations of class interest, rather than by patriotism or love. Grasping partisanship, fuelled by powerful sentiments oFIocalism, and by the separate interests of federal politicians, inspired the coalition’s demise. The coalition’s very success, electorally and economically, speeded its de­ struction. The socialists, weakened and demoralized, seemed ripe to be had under the new electoral arrangements. Prosperous war and post-war condi­ tions fattened the patronage barrel and sharpened the greed of junior and senior politicians in both parties who found it increasingly burdensome to share the spoils. The Liberals were steadily improving under the arrange­ ment. Why not break it altogether and replace the restrictive duopoly with a happy monopoly? The Tories found the oligopolous arrangement iniqui­ tous and to their perpetual disadvantage. Their federal and provincial re­ presentation was precarious and weakening. Independence meant the possi­ bility of rising to the head of the firm instead of remaining, in perpetuity, a humiliated junior partner. But the separation was not cleanly performed. It was prefaced by an extended period, of restiveness, factionalism, intrigue and, finally, mutual public recriminations. Boss Johnson told the voters that prosperity could be ensured only by a stable government, and the Liberals, British Columbia’s natural governing party, were suited to the task. But his claim was hollow. If the people wished for stable government, then the Liberals seemed incapable of providing it. By quarrelling and quibbling publicly with the Tories, by flaunting their dirty linen, by letting Anscomb sabotage the hospital care program and flog them publicly with impunity and, finally, by setting up a minority lame-duck caretaker regime, the Liberals destroyed their own credibility as a governing party. They were perceived not as the natural guarantors of stability and growth, but rather as the instigators of instability, as the timid and quarrelsome partners of the wrecking Anscomb. Thomas Dufferin Pattullo led the Liberals to victory in 1933 on a program of reform and stability. Boss Johnson, less energetic, less astute, less pugnacious, led the Liberals to oblivion in 1952 in a sea of

152 Pillars of Profit

wavering indecision. The Liberals were no longer the party of either stabil­ ity or reform. The unseemly spat with the Tories, their inability to contain internal factionalism, the sudden emergence of a mass movement of raucous political outsiders, and the introduction of a new and confusing electoral system, shattered their image, cultivated by the guileful Hart, as efficient governors and sponsors of private development. “You know that I sup­ ported the Hart-Maitland administration as the best government British Columbia ever had,” Bennett repeated to a campaign audience, “and you know that I became increasingly dissatisfied with the Johnson-AnscombWismer outfit-the worst we ever had.” 150 The people nodded their assent and, like Bennett, turned their coats. They deserted a premier who was politically insensible. The demise of the Weir-Pearson faction in the Liberal party, the accession and hegemony of unimaginative centrists, and the pocketing of the Premier by Anscomb, alienated reform constituents within the Liberal Party and in the C.C.F. Johnson had options. He might have broken with Anscomb earlier over hospital insurance, abolished co-insurance, reduced premiums, further amended the I.C. A. Act to suit some of labour’s specifications, and sharply increased benefits under the Workmen’s Compensation laws. Instead he did nothing except procrastinate, quarrel with Anscomb, stall. And after the break came, he persisted in doing nothing. He might have bid for C.C.F. House support during the last session by introducing a raft of reform bills, implementing some of the recommendations of the I.C.A., hospital insur­ ance and Workmen’s Compensation Boards of Enquiry, then gone to the electors as leader of a reform party, hoping to mobilize enough C.C.F. and progressive voters to take him over the top. But instead he stalled, wheeled and dealed with the discredited Anscomb, shelved the reports of the three enquiry boards, fished for the meagre remnant Tory vote and perpetuated the image of his party as ineffectual procrastinators. It was in vain that Bjorn Johnson talked of super-booms, super-budgets and super-highways. By the spring of 1952, the flow of opinion had changed its fickle course. The Liberals, floundering centrists, no longer owned the reform impulse which reappeared, in a weird, and purified form in the party of the Sunday Morn­ ing people. Procrastination was not Herbert Anscomb’s failing. If Johnson was wooden, then Herbert Anscomb was petrified, immovable, narrow. An­ scomb was possessed of an expansive voice, an expansive chest, an expansive neck, and a remarkably narrow political philosophy. He lived in Victoria, worked in Victoria, ran his party from Victoria, oblivious to the growing outback discontent. Pugnacious and stubborn, he lusted after the premier­ ship, yet was remarkably insensitive to the currents of opinion and needs of the politicized dispossessed. Since the collapse of the Tolmie government,

Saturday Night Government: 1950-1952 153

the Tories had become a remnant party with a restricted class and sectional base. They were shut out of the north, inconsequential in the Kootenays, a sad remnant in Vancouver and Victoria. And they had long lost any semblance of working class support. Their sole electoral support derived from the farmers and small businessmen in the Fraser Valley, Okanagan, Cariboo and Island constituencies. Anscomb did nothing to broaden the party base during the years of his party leadership. Instead, he cudgelled the throttled party dissidents like Bennett, clung to an outworn business ideology, rarely favoured the outback with personal visits, squabbled with the federals. By badgering and dominating Johnson, by publicly denouncing his political partners, by resisting hospital insurance, labour and welfare reforms, Anscomb hoped to discredit the Liberals and reinforce his party’s separate and unique identity. But he merely succeeded in wrecking the image of both partners at a time when his own party was being stolen from under him by Bennett and the “Calgary Stampeders.” “I let him in,” Herbert Anscomb roared to stone-cold voters about past favours to Boss Johnson, “and then he let me out. This week you’re going to let him out and me back in.” 151 But the Socreds had other ideas, similar in substance to those of General A.D. McRae, the Shaughnessy crusader, who, three decades earlier, had demanded that John Oliver be evicted and William Bowser not be allowed in. “Throw Johnson out,” was the Socreds distilled message, “and don’t let Anscomb in.” The Socreds succeeded where the Provincials, their genuine predecessors, failed, because by the 1950’s a powerful socialist party had formed which robbed the Liberals of a large segment of their labour vote. John Oliver survived the Provincials because he was flanked on the left by no socialist or labour party. The labour movement, the socialist movement, in the 1920’s, was weak and balkanized and the Liberals, however precarious their labour base, drew enough work­ ing class support to survive in office. Boss Johnson, less masterful than Oliver, was also less fortunate. Not only were numerous workingmen and reformers committed to a strong and prospering socialist party when he acceded to the leadership of the Liberal Party, but their estrangement from liberalism had grown such that many preferred the Socred parvenus to the governing parties in the critical June election. But Johnson’s failure was not total. As a partisan politician he seriously blundered. The June election decimated both the major parties. As a class politician, however, he succeeded since the new electoral system, through a weird and confused shuffling of votes, kept the C.C.F., British Columbia’s forgotten party, from office. This much was achieved. But beyond this nobody, and least of all the faceless tribe of company people, was quite certain what had happened, or what to expect. The summer of the year 1952 was a troubled time for the company men, the Shaughnessy and Capilano

154 Pillars of Profit

clubbers, the Unionists and yachtsmen, who raised bushy, troubled eye­ brows between slings of Johnny Walker at the Club. They were irked that the surly masses had rudely evicted their political pals, their men in Vic­ toria, their club mates, drinking partners and reliable agents, their saviours from socialism and all things bad. And they were suspicious of the legion of political stragglers-the Elks and Kinsmen-odd fellows and Oddfellowswho gawked and gathered in Salon C of the Hotel Vancouver on the fifteenth day of July, 1952, to choose the man who, in all likelihood, was to be the next Premier of British Columbia. Among the company men, there were few smiles, and certainly none to equal the determined grin on the face of the Kelowna merchant whose frantic pilgrimage had finally ended.

The Post Office sit-in scuffle, June 1938. ( Vancouver Public Library)

P a ttu llo m e e ts w ith sp o k e sm e n o f th e u n e m p lo y e d , J u n e 19 3 8 .

(Provincial Archives, Victoria, B.C.)

B e n n e tt a n d G u n d e rs o n o ff to N e w Y o rk .

(Vancouver

Sun J

H a r t , P a t t u l l o a n d W i s m e r ( le f t t o r i g h t ) f l a n k e d b y p o l ic e o ff ic e r s , o n t h e s t e p s o f t h e le g i s l a ti v e b u i ld i n g s .

(Provincial Archives, Victoria, B.C.)

P re m ie r B y ro n Jo h n s o n .

(Provincial Archives, Victoria, B.C.)

THE BIG GEESE LAY THE GOLDEN EGGS

P r e m ie r J o h n H a r t a n n o u n c e d (w ith f a n f a r e s ) on J u n e 16 th a t th re e e le c t r ic u t ilit y c o m p a n ie s w ill be ta k e n o v e r b y th e n ew B .C . P o w e r C o m m is s io n on A u g u s t 1. T h e y a re th e W e s t C a n a d ia n H y d ro E le c t r ic C o rp o ra tio n L td ., th e N a n a im o -D u n c a n U t ilit ie s L td ., a n d th e C o lu m b ia P o w e r C o ., L t d . E a c h a re s m a ll c o m p a n ie s , in w id e ly s e p a ra te d s e c tio n s of th e p r o v in c e .

C.C.F. News,

J u n e 2 8 , 1945.

JUST ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY

C.C.F News,

O c to b e r 4, 1945.

COLLISION WITH COALITION

News Herald, O c t o b e r 2 6 , (Provincial Archives, Victoria, B.C.)

V ancouver

1945.

B ig D a m G o v e r n m e n t a t w o r k .

(Vancouver

SunJ G a g l a r d i a t a H i g h w a y o p e n in g .

(Provincial Archives, Victoria, B. C.)

T h e B a r r e t t s ty le .

(Vancouver

SunJ

CHAPTER VI

Sunday Morning Politics: 1953

“Peoples once accustomed to masters are not in a condition to do without them.” J.J. Rousseau.

What transpired behind the closed doors of the modest salon of the Hotel Vancouver on the morning of July 15,1952, was discomforting to more than a few provincial politicians. To Byron Johnson, defeated by newcomer Rae Eddie in New Westminster, and to Herbert Anscomb, deserted by his Oak Bay constituents, the Socred meeting was the first step in the parade of the parvenus to Victoria. Worn sick by the heated campaign and its sad aftermath, Harold Winch dismissed the Socred gathering as a sinister cabal staged to seize the premiership which was rightfully his. And to the chatter­ ing, gnome-like minister of the Church of Nazarene, who packed his bags the day before and left by car for his Alberta home, the meeting presaged the beginning of the capture of a people’s movement by a dangerous oppor­ tunist. Reverend Ernest George Hansell, the father-advisor of the vibrant Socred brat, sulked and brooded all the way to distant Vulcan where, replenished by a snatch of prayer and swill of seltzer water, he soon busied himself with other pressing matters. The weird offspring had found a new, jaunty, secular father who emerged from the meeting, which extended into the late evening, beaming and bub­ bling. The caucus, numbering forty elected and defeated candidates, dis­ pensed, appropriately enough, with “Oh God Our Help In Ages Past,” the standard opener of Socred meetings, replacing it with a dubious, quavering rendering of “O Canada.” 1 And it dispensed, equally summarily, with the preference of the Alberta notables for the premiership of their neighbouring province. J.A. Reid, the Salmon Arm sawmill owner, urged by Manning’s men to contest the leadership,2 Peer Paynter, narrowly defeated in Revelstoke, Thomas Irwin, a farmer successfully returned in Delta, and P.A. Gaglardi, a Pentecostal minister from Kamloops, all threw their hats in the ring. But they were little match for the Kelownan, strongly backed by Martin, Rolston, Wicks, Kiernan and the ubiquitous J. Donald Smith and 163

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Ronald Worley. The scenario, after all, had drastically changed. The stam­ pede dust, kicked up in a frenzy in early April, had calmly settled and the caucus was faced with the sobering task of choosing not merely a party leader, but the likely Premier of British Columbia. For most of the parvenus, the choice was easy. Bennett, after all, had earned a fortune selling hardware to Okanagans and there was no reason why he could not look after that larger enterprise, the government of the Province of British Columbia, along lines similar to his own flourishing business. And Bennett, alone among them, had served for ten weary years in the Legislature, where he mastered the esoteric and mystifying ways of the House. Among the Victorians, Bennett had been an outbacker, which saved his life as a political person when the coalition disintegrated. Now, among the frightened outbackers, he was the experienced Victorian, which guaranteed his political future. Faced with the terrifying prospect of run­ ning a mammoth provincial enterprise, suspicious of the hidden snares of administrative politics, fearful of coping with a fractious legislature, the delegates naturally turned to the man they knew best. It was no contest. Fourteen of the nineteen votes on the first ballot went to Bennett,3 who jauntily pacified reporters at a late hour press conference. “Social Credit is the opposite of funny money,” he purred, “it is just common sense. . . . Our main policy is to bring stability and confidence to British Columbia. With God’s help we will do our best.” 4 He sent his heartfelt sympathies to the families of striking lumbermen, carpenters, painters and fishermen, denied that Social Credit was “the political arm of any economic group” 5 and closed with a plea for fair treatment from the media. “Go easy on the monetary stuff,” he waved his index finger. “Remember it doesn’t concern us now. The main problem now is to bring confidence throughout the province-the press can help a lot in that.” 6 Bennett spoke as if he were already Premier, which he was not. But he well knew, as did Byron Johnson and the company men, that there was no chance that Lieutenant-Governor Clarence Wallace would let socialism in the front door by designating the troublesome Harold Winch, who com­ manded one less seat than Bennett, as Premier of British Columbia. Winch felt the job was his, even though Thomas Uphill, the lone labour wolf from Fernie, expressed a preference for Bennett,7 and the majority of Liberals and Conservatives who held the balance of power, preferred the Socreds to the socialists.8- He insisted that Wallace at least postpone the choice of premier until the resolution of the intricate legal and political hassle involv­ ing a recount in Burrard, where the Socred Bert Price narrowly defeated Grant MacNeil.9 But Wallace was disinclined to perpetuate the uncer­ tainty. After lengthy consultations with the outgoing Premier, the Liberal and Conservative rumps, Sherwood Lett, Chief Justice Sloan, and federal

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Liberals including Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, Wallace concluded that there was no other choice than to call W.A.C. Bennett to the premier­ ship, which he did on the fateful day of August 1, 1952. At the swearing-in ceremony held in the traditional green-draped drawing room of Govern­ ment House, the new men of power appeared awkward and tense. Several licked their lips as they waited their turn to be sworn to the oath of secrecy, while others perceptibly started as they heard themselves called “Honoura­ ble” for the first time.10 A brief reception following alforded them the opportunity to relax and get to know one another. “What is it you are again?” one minister asked another over a cup of Ovaltine. “I haven’t yet got all this straight.” 11 Bennett, however, had straightened away things in his own mind during the previous two weeks when, after considerable mulling and shuffling, he constructed a Cabinet of the disparate persons scattered within and without the legislative group. The Education portfolio was reserved for Tilly Rolston, sixty-five years of age and a grandmother of nine, who served as a school-teacher, for two years, before her marriage in 1909.12 Lyle Wicks, the earnest bus driver who had lately become a firm Bennett man, became Minister of Labour. Eric Martin, a vintage Socred who sought elective office four times previously on the party label, and served as the party’s vicepresident in 1945 and 1951, was rewarded with the Health and Welfare portfolio. Born in Winnipeg, Martin came to British Columbia at an early age, studied in England and Victoria, rode the rails during the depression, wandered briefly in Latin America, spent several years as a physical educa­ tion instructor with the army and the British Columbia Department of Education, and worked for a bank and a broker before joining a firm of chartered accountants. As a school boy in Victoria, he consistently ranked at the bottom of his class.13 The remainder of the Cabinet were newcomers to both Social Credit and the Legislature. Wesley Black, the member for Nelson-Creston, who served as vice-principal of Creston Elementary School, became provincial secre­ tary and Minister of Municipal Affairs. He joined Social Credit in 1951, after pondering the mysteries of its monetary theory. “I first had to put aside everything I’d learned at U.B.C. I’m now convinced our theories are sound, and deserving of trial.” 14 As a school-teacher, Black was “naturally interested in preserving democracy,” and in Social Credit he “found a party that offered more democracy than any other. . . . Our entire party is geared from the bottom up, not from the top down-the dog wags its own tail. . . . ” 15 Black’s sentiments were shared by Kenneth Kiernan, the member for Chilliwack, W.R.J. (Ralph) Chetwynd of Cariboo, Robert Sommers of Rossland-Trail and the Reverend Philip Gaglardi of Kamloops, all of whom

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came up with Cabinet portfolios. A quiet-spoken, gangly garage and service station operator in Chilliwack, who emigrated from Alberta’s Peace River country, Kiernan became Minister of Agriculture. The Trade, Industry and Railways portfolio fell to Chetwynd, a native of Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, who came to Canada in 1908. Chetwynd had studied in Bristol, England and at Pullman State College in Washington, where he took a degree in Agriculture. He subsequently worked for ten years as a public relations officer for the P.G.E.16 and, later, as a rancher. He was active as director of the British Columbia Livestock Exchange Ltd. and as stockyards representative for the Cariboo Stockyards Association. In the pre-war years he authored a mediocre horse opera called “Heifer Dust Inn,” which ap­ peared, unbeknownst to the general reading public, in the year 1941.17 The critical Lands, Forests and Mines portfolio fell to Robert Sommers, whose major qualification for the job seemed to be his mania for ridding the Castlegar district of forest fires. An aspiring forest ranger, Sommers spent his holidays working for the British Columbia Forest Service in charge of fire suppression crews. Otherwise he taught school, at Michel, on the Al­ berta border, in British Columbia’s Peace River district and, laterally, in the Castlegar district, where he served as principal of three elementary schools. A confirmed Kiwanian, Sommers played poker and the trumpet, which he loudly blew at evening dances populated by legionaires. The Reverend Phillip Arthur Gaglardi, the new Minister of Public Works, was also a musician, who sang rather than played. Born into a poor Italian immigrant family in 1913 in Mission, the sixth of twelve children, Gaglardi worked as a grocery-store attendant, harvest-machinery me­ chanic, road-construction labourer, carry-all driver and bulldozer operator. Gaglardi’s entire family, Roman Catholic to begin with, was converted to the Pentecostal church through the influence of the eldest daughter, and little Phillip moved with them, attending the local church directed by Pastor Jennie Sandin, whom he eventually married. Gaglardi studied at the North West Bible College in Seattle, returned to take over his wife’s church at Langley Prairie, moved to Kamloops, then toured Europe where he preached and sang in an aggresive tenor voice which a Seattle music profes­ sor pronounced to be second in power only to the great Caruso’s. But Gigli, as he was affectionately known to his European fans, preferred preaching to singing and settled back into Kamloops where he served as pastor of the Calvary Temple, executive member of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada and director of the local Sunday-school before being called to the polity. Bennett pondered long and hard before he came up with this disparate untried roster. But no matter how hard he mulled, he could not find, from among the scattering of outbackers, suitable candidates for the posts of

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Finance and Attorney General. There were teachers, preachers, farmers and merchants galore, but no lawyers or men of wide business or govern­ mental experience to fill these crucial portfolios. So Bennett did the sensible thing. As leader of a non-partisan party he felt little compunction about going outside of the parliamentary party; not to the old professionals, discredited coalitionists like Gordon Wismer, who wished to be Attorney General, but to Liberals and Conservatives of lesser eminence who, because of a slip of the mind, forgot to join Social Credit at the proper time. Finance went to the ponderous Einar Gunderson, born of Norwegian parentage in Cooperstown, North Dakota in 1900. Gunderson moved to Canada as a boy, graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a chartered accountant’s degree, subsequently entering the government service in Al­ berta where he became, in 1930, secretary and chief accountant in the Department of Lands and Mines. He entered private practice in Edmonton in 1935, the year of Aberhart’s accession to power, and, seven years later, became comptroller of Marshall Wells’s Canadian companies. At the war’s end, Gunderson moved to Vancouver where he became a partner in Gund­ erson, Stokes, Peers, Walton & Company, which handled the accounts of the Bennett hardware stores. A personal friend of the Premier’s, Gunderson was an excellent acquisition. A prominent accountant with extensive gov­ ernment experience and wide business connections-who prominently dis­ played a signed picture of Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in his office-chairman of the taxation committees of the Vancouver Board of Trade and of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of British Columbia, he provided a needed link with the wary business community, as well as an experienced financial talent to a Cabinet sorely lacking in men of proven abilities. Of equal importance was the appointment of Robert Bonner to the Attorney General’s portfolio. An icy Tory who supported Bennett’s run at Anscomb in 1950, Bonner graduated from U.B.C. in 1942, joined the Seaforths,18 served in Africa, Sicily and Italy, and left the war with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel after suffering severe head injuries in the Italian campaign. Bonner returned to U.B.C. to take his law degree, then plunged into local Conservative politics in opposition to Anscomb. A cool, prudent lawyer, just thirty-two years of age, Bonner’s aplomb and urbane compe­ tence were excellent additions to a Cabinet populated by earnest outbackers. The keystone of this swaying and uncertain arch was William Andrew Cecil Bennett, who plunged into his new task with characteristic exuber­ ance. Bennett had come a long way, geographically as well as politically, from his place of origin, Albert County, New Brunswick, where he was born in a small farmhouse in 1900. The son of Andrew Havelock Bennett, of United Empire Loyalist pedigree, who had eked out a marginal living as a

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farmer, logger and longshoreman, Bennett had his first taste of politics in 1911 when he paraded down the main street of Hampton, New Brunswick, carrying a placard supporting Robert Borden. A high school dropout, he worked in a local hardware store, picked up the rudiments of sales, mer­ chandising and cost accounting from a correspondence course, joined the Air Force, quit, toiled again in the hardware, then headed west to Edmon­ ton, Alberta, where, in the year 1919, he joined Marshall Wells as a junior clerk. He pushed a hand truck in a warehouse, transferred to the sales division, won a company sales contest and in his mid-20’s became assistant sales manager for northern Alberta.19 Several years later, in 1927, Bennett married Annie Elizabeth May Richards, a school-teacher he met in the local United Church young peoples’ group, purchased his own hardware store in Westlock, north of Edmonton, then a second, in neighbouring Clyde. But he sold out with the depression and, on the urging of his wife who grew up in Wellington, moved to British Columbia where he bought, in Kelowna, still another hardware store, which soon grew into a chain with branches in Vernon and Penticton. By the middle of the depression, when the unemployed grumbled in relief camps, rode the rails, and tin-canned along Hastings Street, W.A.C. Ben­ nett, known alfectionately as Cece to his friends, had earned a tidy living as a retail purveyor of hardware in the Okanagan. Bennett was a clever, aspiring sort, enamoured of the Horatio Alger ethic which he gleefully imbibed through the laboured prose of Dr. Orison Swett Marsden, editor of Success and author of Pushing to the Front, a book company presidents read after they retired, to discover the secrets of their obvious success.20 Orison’s book, which warned of the paralysis of fear and the crime of the blues, and urged character-building through positive thinking, good cheer, plenty of sleep and large doses of Ovaltine, was a handbook for junior achievers and there were few around as determined and pushy as the Albert County emigre. Bennett was a demon worker and chronic busybody. He voraciously studied business, economics and accounting through numerous correspondence courses, developed his faculty for reckoning and figuring, busied himself in the Christian Endeavour Movement, the Church Young People’s Movement, the Tuxis Movement, the local Board of Trade, and not least of all, local Conservative politics. In 1937, he was narrowly beaten for the provincial Conservative nomination by Tom Norris, who was subse­ quently appointed to the British Columbia Supreme Court. Four years later, Bennett won the Tory nomination, defeating Captain Cecil Bull, a onearmed turncoat gentleman farmer, in the provincial general election of 1941. The local House afforded Bennett a further outlet for his brash vitality and ceaseless energizing. His private life was exemplary; and his public life,

j

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frantic. His mother, a good Presbyterian, taught him the evils of smoking, drinking and carousing, and young Cecil heeded her warnings, sternly avoiding the weed and bottle although, as a good businessman, he found time and money to invest in a wine-making venture in partnership with a junior Italian achiever named Pasquale Capozzi. Bennett raised three chil­ dren in the Marsden vein, his two sons entering the family business at an early age. Aside from politics and business, his passions were restricted to lemon pie, and, in a modest way, gambling. He enjoyed a jocular game of bridge or gin rummy and often bet, informally and moderately, on athletic contests. For all of his abundant political talents, Bennett was no orator. He spoke nervously, quickly, unevenly, in a rasping voice which always gave the impression that there was something stuck in his quivering throat. His prose was characteristically devoid of eloquence and frequently of clarity. He chattered and spluttered in an uneven staccato rhythm, interspersing his prosy declamations with an abundance of cliches so rapidly delivered that he startled and confused his listeners and, as if by design, rendered them hazy and defenceless. His jerky speaking vaguely suggested a slight impedi­ ment which, understandably, caused his listeners to empathize with his curious infirmity. In private political conversations, or in interview situa­ tions, he was prone to emit bursts of propaganda, again thickly laced with Okanagan homilies and jaded cliches. “Although I spent most of an after­ noon with him,” a journalist later reported, “he spoke to me as if I were a service club luncheon. . . . ” 21 High rhetoric and Churchillian eloquence were clearly not Bennett’s forte. But he could afford to do without them since he possessed other political talents in abundance. What he lacked in eloquence, he made up for in speed of delivery. He was a master of rebuttal and retort and forever jousted, successfully, with Opposition members. There were few politicians in the House as energetic, as dedicated to total politicking, as ceaselessly prone to perpetual motion, as the Okanagan. Bennett was a good organizer, in the church groups he frequented, in the local Board of Trade, in Marshall Wells, in his own flourishing business and, finally, in the local Conservative organization he came to dominate. His organizational flair was supple­ mented by a considerable bonhommie so that, among the local people with whom he traded hardware and talked politics, he quickly developed a reputation for being an honest sort, an affable fellow concerned with what was best for the local area. And Bennett had a good mind, bubbling with schemes and notions of nuisance value to his superiors, but calculated to keep his name current among the people. A firm supporter of John Hart, the grey old financial wizard, he developed a solid grasp of private and public finance through years of formal and informal preparatory work. Like

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Hart, he had a penchant for reckoning and figuring and, from his earliest days as a stock boy in the St. John hardware store of Robertson, Foster & Smith, he was enamoured of the neat symmetry and gaunt, fetching clarity of balance sheets. His mind grasped figures easily and he was not averse to spewing them forth, in unrelieved torrents, to captive listeners.22 Bennett was not burdened by any profound need to philosophize, to articulate a systematic and elaborate political philosophy. He was no theorizer, intellectual, armchair doodler or professor concerned with gaining tenure or winning merit increments. So, he never bothered writing a book, or an article for a learned journal, or otherwise. But there is little doubt where he stood. He was a moderate conservative in the North American, the British Columbian style. He respected the traditional virtues of pru­ dence, honesty and hard work, believed in the inherent rightfulness of the system which to his mind, rewarded business competence and rejected socialism and communism as oppressive systems which stifled economic growth and the free exercise of private entrepreneurial talents. Bennett was never an economic populist. He never viewed the companies, whether Mar­ shall Wells or Cominco, as oppressors of the people, as monopolies which exploited workingmen and restricted the freedom of the small entrepreneur. He worshipped development, expansion, the moving investment frontier and supposed that workingmen, businessmen and farmers benefited from the investment forays of large companies. Bennett was a town dweller and instinctively knew the needs of the outback. He was born and raised in small towns, adjacent to rural areas and spent most of his personal and business life in the outback, where he developed a firm knowledge of the ways of the small businessmen and farmers whom he daily dealt with in his business and personal relations. He was less apprised of the needs and wants of the metropolis and of the industrial working class; an infirmity which his excellent political sense, his penchant for survival, subsequently helped him to partially overcome. Bennett was more aware of the real existence of economic groups than of the artificial political entity of party. He happened to be born to the Conservative Party and therefore remained, until his desertion in 1951, a conservative in the North American, rather than in the Disraelian or British sense. Yet he spent over two decades of his life in provinces where tradi­ tional party labels meant little; in Alberta, during the 1920’s where the non-partisan government of the United Farmers of Alberta held power until 1935; and in British Columbia, throughout the forties under the coalition. He knew the primacy of economics, the lessened value of the partisan label in the far west, which stood him in excellent stead when the coalition collapsed. And he was aware, as well, of the intensely local concerns of pioneer outbackers. His maverick propensities, his marked aggressiveness

,

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which alientated him from the governing party clique during the forties, his compulsive gregariousness and sensitivity to local economic needs, served him well in the days of the coalition demise. The same abilities benefited him in subsequent years when, possessed of a wealth of government reve­ nue, he artfully pacified a host of local interests. Bennett may have been a profound reader of local opinion, but he was never enamoured of traditional populist panaceas like the initiative, referen­ dum, recall or delegate democracy. His sniping at the party oligarchs throughout the 1940’s was a pragmatic convenience, stemming less from a principled commitment to the idea of party democracy, than from a frus­ trated sense of personal ambition and from an opportunistic recognition that the Conservative Party, his personal political vehicle, was going no­ where fast. He was little concerned with the need of the mass organization to control a parliamentary party, or with the desires of some constituents to dictate to their elected representatives. In Alberta, he had seen the ideals of delegate democracy fade away as the U.F.A. oligarchy strengthened its hold over the government. An aggressive merchant, Bennett was concerned with tangible results, which could be maximized only through strong execu­ tive leadership. As a political outsider, he incessantly griped about the lack of party democracy. Now that he was inside and properly concerned with getting quick results, he was prepared to forget his earlier protestations. “True direct democracy,” he told a journalist, “is that the elected must govern, and must not be governed by the electors. Unless the elected govern, you have a dictatorship. If the electors govern, you have anarchy . . . in other words, people in a democratic way select people to do a job. Then they must have authority to do a job and they must boldly do that job, and they must not ask questions and have royal commissions all the time. They should take responsibility and bold action. . . . ” 23 It is understandable that Bennett, in the waning days of the coalition, saw Social Credit as a convenient vehicle and handy label rather than as a mass movement organized along democratic lines. He joined Social Credit late, realistically assessing the state of the political bankruptcy of the coalition and his own meagre chances of heading an independent peoples’ party dual to the Social Credit party. He entered Social Credit because he had to, although there was nothing in the infant local party abhorrent to him except the artificial Alberta influence which was speedily reduced. Social Credit was not, to Bennett, a way of life, although the sensibilities of the Socreds, who bought and sold and went to church on Sunday, he found to be perfectly acceptable, even exemplary. And Bennett was no religious fanatic although, as a sensible politician, he appreciated the value of the Christian label, especially since his major political opponents were socialists, open to the atheist stigma. “I refuse to wear religion on my sleeve,” he once told

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a reporter, “I sort of like the saying that religion is for sinners not for saints.” 24 Similar considerations applied to Bennett’s attitude towards fundamen­ talist Social Credit economic theory. Opposition politicians, whether freeenterprise or socialist, were eager to tag the Socreds with a crank label and to dismiss the Okanagan as a transparent hypocrite who adhered to a philosophy alien to everything he had professed before. And they were joined by journalists and reporters who, more charitable towards Bennett, were nonetheless intent, on account of their compulsive search for novelty and persistent inability to comprehend a new political phenomenon, on defining the movement as an assemblage of cranks and Douglasites. But Bennett knew better. He understood that the A + B theorem, funny money, and other playthings of the press, had long been exotic relics in Alberta, where Ernest Manning’s bloodless business government reigned supreme. Aberhart, he noted, “was elected when people wore gunny sacks and eggs were ten cents a dozen.” 25 In British Columbia, the old idols were jealously guarded by assorted cranks and economic amateurs with no political base. To the shopkeepers, the Rotarians, the Board of Traders and junior aidermen, the host of disenchanted Grits and Tories who sensed opportunity and a new partisan plaything, Major Douglas, his theorems, the Zionist Elder’s protocols and Green Shirts, meant precious little. “Go easy on the monetary stuff,” Bennett chided reporters on the eve of his accession. “It doesn’t concern us now.” If Social Credit was a handy political label, it was also a convenient economic receptacle, which Bennett and his colleagues vari­ ously filled with new or old wine-or Ovaltine-at their pleasure. On one occasion, Bennett defined Social Credit as the opposite of socialism.26 On another, he likened his party’s fiscal policy to automobiling on a hilly road. “It’s like a car,” he chortled, “going downhill, you don’t need much gas. On the level, you need a bit more. Going uphill you need still more and, if the hill’s very steep, you have to press down hard.” 27 On still another, he insisted that Socred monetary policies could not be applied on a provin­ cial basis and there was not much point in talking about them. And when the Archbishop of Canterbury during a visit to the province, asked the Premier to describe the essence of the Social Credit philosophy, Bennett replied solemnly, using the words of St. Paul on the meaning of Christianity: “Unto the Jews, it is a stumbling block; unto the Greeks, it is foolishness; but we know unto millions of people throughout the world it is life et­ ernal.” 28 To the mass of British Columbians who worshipped the golden calf of raw growth, eternal life meant increasing material rewards guaranteed by an expanding investment frontier. This was the Alberta message, the new face of Social Credit, transformed under the grim tutelage of the earnest

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Manning, from a movement of the dispossessed, who decried the inequities of a malfunctioning economic system, into an army of comfortable citizens, taken with the Premier’s political messianism and with the economic be­ nefits accruing from huge investments in the oil industry. The oil frontier dissipated the movement’s populist impulse, transforming Alberta Social Credit into a prosperity party. And in British Columbia, on the threshold of an unprecedented economic leap, Social Credit’s new face, mirrored in the twinkling visage of the Premier, foretold of similar future benefits. W.A.C. Bennett possessed the pugnacity and ceaseless energizing of Pattullo and Oliver, the guile and financial facility of the wily Hart, and the incurable optimism, salesmanship and bonhommie of his predecessor, Sir Richard McBride, who presided over an earlier economic expansion of immense proportions. There was no man better qualified, as the coast province plunged into the giddy fifties, to conserve a legal environment favourable to the exploitation of large companies. The company men did not wait for Bennett. They had already moved in, during the heyday of the post-war boom, in full force. The early fifties, as Professor Carlsen noted, was characterized by a “hyperactive growth of the private sector.”29 The capitalist hen had laid a golden egg and the beaming Okanagan was there to warm and hatch it. Bennett assumed the premier­ ship in the midst of a fierce injection of foreign capital, full employment, rising wages and unprecedented government revenues. On the very day of Social Credit’s accession to power, bank clearings in Vancouver city reached a record high. Investment in the base metals industry, stimulated by rising demand during the war, continued unabated. The construction industry boomed. Alcan’s one hundred and twenty million dollar project, already near completion, was complemented by a fifty million dollar expen­ diture by Shell Oil for the expansion of refinery facilities in Burnaby, one of Canada’s leading booming suburban areas.30 A trans-mountain oil pipe­ line, built to bring Alberta oil from Edmonton to the Burnaby refineries, was due to deliver 125,000 barrels of oil daily by the fall of 1953, while on the drawing boards there was a further pipeline to bring Alberta and British Columbia gas to Vancouver and cities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. “All this means new jobs and new money for B.C.,” the Province waxed ecstatic,” where above all provinces in Canada, the future beckons confidently.” 31 In no sector was there such exuberant growth as in the critical forest industry, the hub of the provincial economy. American investment in Brit­ ish Columbia’s forests drastically increased in the post-war decade. After 1942, when the United States became the major source of investment, American ownership expanded until, by the mid-fifties, more than one-half of the investment in the province’s forests and in wood-consuming mills of

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all kinds was American.32 Ten years before the war, forty-five per cent of lumber exports went to the United Kingdom and twenty-six per cent went to the United States; by 1950, the trend was reversed, eight per cent to the United Kingdom and eighty-four per cent to the United States. In 1952, sixty per cent of British Columbia’s pulp and paper were sold to the United States.33 Through a process of amalgamation and consolidation, the forest industry passed into the hands of a few huge corporate groups: MacMillan Bloedel and its subsidiaries, Alaska Pine, Canadian Western Lumber Com­ pany, Canadian Forest Products and B.C. Forest Products.34 The merger of the H.R. MacMillan Export Company with Bloedel and Stewart in 1951 made the new company, in the words of J.V. Clyne, “the largest consolida­ tion of its kind in the industry in Canada to that date,” 35 ranking in volume of production and diversity of output with giants of the world’s forest industry like Weyerhauser and Long-Bell in the United States.36 A similar explosion occurred in the pulp and paper industry. In 1951, Columbia Cellulose Company, a subsidiary of the Celanese Corporation of America, set up a mill in Prince Rupert with a licence covering 700,000 acres.37 A year later, Celgar Development Limited began exploitation of the Arrow Lakes region through the development of a sixty-five million dollar integrated forest complex centred in Castlegar, while a similar com­ plex was erected in Kitimat by the Powell River Company, working with Alcan, both American-controlled. In Quesnel, eighty miles south of Prince George, Western Plywood opened a multi-million dollar plant in 1953.38 Between 1945 and 1951, the annual production of pulp and paper in British Columbia increased from 534,000 tons to 962,000 tons.39 What occurred in British Columbia at the moment of the accession of W.A.C. Bennett to the premiership, was a great leap forward in the north­ ern and central Interior, a frontier thrust which the coalition politicians, too busy with domestic quarrels, failed to exploit politically. The post-war decade was to the northern Interior what the first decade of the century was to the Kootenays when Sir Richard McBride rode the investment wave to high acclaim.40 A veritable explosion occurred in the Prince George forest district where saw and pulp mills flew up everywhere. Prince George grew from a depression level of three thousand persons to a prosperous twelve thousand, while towns like Quesnel, Hazelton and Castlegar mushroomed overnight into important regional production and service centres. The Nechako and Prince Rupert districts were riddled with a myriad of new sawmills, while a new timber industry flourished beyond the Peace, between Dawson Creek and White River.41 Boss Johnson, the confused political goose, had laid a golden egg, and W.A.C. Bennett was there to warm and hatch it. The construction of the final leg of the northern expansion of the P.G.E. connecting the boom towns

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of Quesnel and Prince George began in 1949 under the coalition which appropriated thirteen million dollars for construction over the next three years.42 But the political credits fell to the new government which staged an extravaganza on November 1, 1952, after the first train filled with Cabinet ministers and the beaming Premier, pulled into Prince George, forty years late.43 Finding itself with an abundance of revenue, the govern­ ment launched a huge spending spree, distributing a bushel of roads, bridges, schools and promises across the province. “There is every statistical indication,” Boss Johnson informed the House during his budget speech in 1952, “that 1951 has been the top year in our economic history; payrolls, retail sales, production values, and nearly all of the other indices of eco­ nomic activity have reached new highs. . . . As industry and population grow, so do the demands for government services, for roads, for schools, for hospitals and for many dther forms. These demands are heavy on the provincial treasury but unfortunately, this industrial expansion has brought with it increased revenues which enables us to provide these services in a manner unequalled in this country.” 44 Boss Johnson spoke the truth, but missed out on the benefits. The accounting for the previous year, 1951-52, which was unavailable to the incumbent Liberal caretaker government, showed a considerable surplus in current account and a net increase in the public debt of only five million dollars.45 The Province noted on July 14, 1952, the eve of Bennett’s accession to the party leadership, that the Socreds were taking power under superb financial conditions. In 1942, the provin­ cial debt stood at $178 per person. By February 1952, despite huge public works and welfare programs during the intervening years, the per capita debt was reduced to $164.03, and since February, a further $16.46 to $147.57. The general fiscal position of the province was excellent and mar­ ket quotations for British Columbia bonds were on a level with the best of the other provinces. A Sun editorial, on February 4, 1953, noted that “no other incoming government ever had it so good.” All of this was music to the ears of W.A.C. Bennett. It was understanda­ ble that the Premier was ecstatic when he took office and he quickly availed himself of the opportunities of the new Eldorado. Overnight, Social Credit became the opportunity party, dispensing favours through Orders-in-Council to notables, big and small, who swarmed to the new party like bees to clover. Bennett’s first Order-in-Council, No. 1925, authorizing the payment of ten thousand dollars to the Nicola Grasshopper Committee to help exterminate pests, political and entomological,46 was merely the first of hundreds of gifts from Boss Johnson’s bountiful trove. Cabinet ministers fanned out across the province, addressed Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce, enquired of the locals their needs and promised to rectify through the provisions of jobs, roads, bridges and contracts, the wrongs and

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neglects of their niggardly predecessors. Workingmen were blessed with an Order declaring October 13 a holiday under the terms of the Factory Act. Hospital insurance premiums were lowered three dollars per year for both families and single persons and co-insurance was abolished in favour of a dollar-a-day-per-person hospital payment.47 The new government, Bennett informed the Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce in mid-August, stood for free enterprise but would not restrict its favours to “only a few businessmen and industrialists.” 48 He spoke of the need to guard the interests of little people, labourers, consumers and small businessmen, and closed his address with a promise to complete the Island Highway entrance to Nanaimo, a project which the Mayor, and Conservative M.L.A. Larry Giovando, now Bennett supporters, felt had long been neglected by the previous govern­ ment. A similar message was urgently carried by courier Cabinet ministers to the far corners of the province. And for those who failed to heed, it was repeated on the radio, by the new Socred provincial president John Perdue who, on December 29, 1952, lectured a C.B.C. radio audience on the functions of the Social Credit League: “If a group finds in its area need for government assistance for a road or if a small logger wants to get a piece of timber, they make representations to the local Social Credit unit. This is passed through the constituency association to the head office of the league, there checked and presented to the Cabinet minister. Then, you see, how any individual can voice his desires and they can be almost immedi­ ately passed to the government.” 49 Perdue’s accession to the presidency of the Social Credit League at a late November convention, replacing Hugh L. Shantz, who filled in briefly after Wick’s resignation, was evidence of Bennett’s increasing hold over the Socred mass organization. Anxious to facilitate that grand reshuffling of persons and positions implied by earlier advocacy of the coalition idea, Bennett pursued an open-door policy. Himself a newcomer to the Socreds, whose memories of the “Calgary Stampede” were never pleasant, Bennett effectively opposed the ideological militants who wished to slow the entry of opportunistic Grits and Tories into the new governing party. The more disaffected Tories and Liberals in the party, the greater to Bennett’s mind, would be the party’s hold over the electorate, and the weaker the strength of the troublesome militants. The gravy was now Bennett’s and the Premier was prepared to trade favours-jobs, status, contracts, concessions of every sort-for loyalty and support. It was, of course, fundamentally important that the fund-raising function, and all the power it implied, be removed from the League and its directors who were, after all, formally responsible to the mass of elected delegates. The Premier wanted an absolute personal hold over the slush funds, a valuable instrument for controlling the infant movement, so he elected

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Einar Gunderson to head an organization known as the British Columbia Free-Enterprise Educational Association, charged with collecting money, funnelled through the accounting firm of Gunderson, Stokes and Walton, to cover election expenses and finance “a certain amount of sub-rosa educa­ tional propaganda on behalf of free enterprise apart from politics.” 50 Having removed the gravy from the party, Bennett successfully mano­ euvred to control the worrisome populists. Perdue, the organizer for Kiernan, who faithfully supported the Premier, won the presidency from Shantz and Paynter, who proved a perpetual loser when the chips were down. The Province noted that the party convention was attended “by many former members of the old-line parties duly elected as delegates since the Socred election victory in June,” 51 while a separate survey by the-Sw/z revealed that a majority of the 558 registered delegates claimed they were Liberals or Conservatives or had “no particular political leanings until shortly before the summer provincial election.” 52 A resolution supporting a constitutional amendment prohibiting any Socred from being eligible for office in the League unless he had been a member for six months, or from being an election candidate until he had been a member for twelve months, was tabled and forgotten.53 Another resolution, which sought to prevent more than three federal or provincial legislative members from serving on the Board of Directors of the Association, or Cabinet ministers from member­ ship on the Board, met with a similar fate. The November convention was an excellent affair which, by bringing in new blood, throttling the avid populists, and providing a grand time for all, consolidated the Premier’s hold over the party.54 The new party may have resembled, in the memorable words of Arthur Turner, the mundane English dish of “bubble-n-squeak,” a melange of leftover cabbage and potatoes, but it was delectable to the Premier, a man of large appetite, who fairly melted when he shook the hands of Tories, old friends and old foes, who trailed him into the new House of Virtue. British Columbia’s orphaned Conserva­ tives, and not a few stray suckling Liberals had found a home, and the Social Credit Party, by a strange process of political transubstantiation, became the new coalition party, with a healthier sprinkling of Tories at the helm than in the old. It is significant that on the eve of the convention, November 28, 1952, Herbert Anscomb resigned as leader of the Conservative Party. His few parting words sounded hollow and faded to many of his old sup­ porters smugly huddled in their new abode. “Never enter a coalition with the Liberals,” he muttered to a stray reporter, “unless in advance you get a positive statement of the terms of the arrangement.” 55 The Conservatives, in fact, decided not to contest the two by-elections, arranged by the Premier for late November, to hoist Robert Bonner and Einar Gunderson into the Legislature in preparation for the first meeting

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of the new House, scheduled for early in the new year. The sacrificial lambs were R.O. Newton, a former grain dealer, who inadvertently won the Columbia riding, and the Reverend Harry Francis, the Osoyoos Pentecostal minister who held the Similkameen seat. “I’ve always felt they were the party because they are a Christian movement,” the Reverend had an­ nounced shortly after his election.56 So when Francis, like Newton, was approached by the Premier in a civil, Christian sort of way, to vacate his seat to make room for Gunderson, he nodded in the affirmative since, like Newton, he was a civilized Christian. Bennett, to put the matter bluntly, needed a few metro heavyweights in the House; so he bumped a pair of outbackers. The subsequent campaigns were sharply contested. Gunderson asked the voters to ignore Winch’s oft-repeated accusation that Health and Welfare Minister Eric Martin had described the United Nations as “a most dangerous development of modern times,” 57 which they did since, if they had any views on the subject at all, they were probably in accord with Martin’s sentiments. And he promised them a raft of tangibles, a dam at Okanagan Falls, paving of the Copper Mountain Highway, more paving, and the complete hydro-electrification of the Columbia Valley.58 Bonner, who barely stepped outside the city except to fill his lungs with occasional gusts of rustic air, awkwardly stumped among the sleepy residents of quiet mountain valleys, most of whom had barely seen the wood-panelled court­ rooms he called home. At one meeting, Bonner promised cheaper long­ distance telephone rates, oblivious to the fact that the local community had only one telephone of the cranking variety, which most of the local citizens were afraid to use for fear of being bitten.59 But it mattered little. The spirit was there, in both Similkameen and Columbia, and Bennett was prepared to face a hostile House flanked on his left and right by a pair of metro heavyweights and supported, in the rear by a battalion of earnest outback­ ers. The session was lively, unconventional and abortive. New to the august House, the hunting ground of McBride, Bowser and other venerable thieves lauded by dowager historians, the outbackers were at a loss about what to do. So they took their behavioural cues from the Premier who chattered, grinned and retorted with obvious pleasure. They did the same, chattering and retorting so forcefully that C.C.F. oppositionist Arthur Turner was moved to describe their behaviour as simian.60 And they knew when to remain silent. The Premier wished to limit the Throne Speech debate and to focus instead on the budget. So he arranged to have his back-benchers keep quiet during the ten day debate and meditate, which they did. “Deaf and dumb tailors’ dummies” a sour oppositionist observed, “controlled by Bennett in his ivory tower.” 61 Not all were silent, to be sure. Vancouver school-teachers, the British

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Columbia Teachers’ Federation and other educators raged and shook when J.A. Reid of Salmon Arm, in his maiden speech, alleged that childrens’ minds were being poisoned with rubbish from “immoral textbooks”which reflected insidious socialistic influences.62 He fairly bristled with indigna­ tion as he read from a letter from Albert John Clotworthy, a sixty-fouryear-old resident of Salmon Arm and former teacher at Telkwa Elementary School for twenty years, who charged that British Columbia schools bred teenage thieves, robbers, dope addicts and prostitutes and the “Effective Living” course, which used a handbook edited by Mrs. Muriel Mackay Score, taught children immoral details about sexuality.63 The Reid-Clot­ worthy outburst, labelled by ex-Liberal Education Minister W.T. Straith as “a most miserable, depraved slander,” was scarcely forgotten when Educa­ tion Minister Tilly Rolston confessed to the House she wished to return to the “Little Red Schoolhouse” of the robust frontier days64 and spoke of her intention to add “practical people” to the central curriculum committee in order to prevent it from expressing a “lopsided viewpoint.” “I would like to see people skilled in our fishing, mining and agriculture industries,” she lectured the House, “as well as a representative from the Department of Trade and Industry on the curriculum committee.” 65 In the event of the Minister persisting with her good intentions, the Sun predicted “a provin­ cial uproar somewhat similar to that caused by the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ held in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.” 66 The education squabble was merely one incident in a session which earned the government an instant reputation for boldness, eccentricity and innovation. Gunderson, the ponderous Norseman, brought down a bulging peoples’ budget which a Sun editorial described as “radical and revolution­ ary in many respects,” containing “some highly pleasing features.” 67 He advertised a pay-as-you-go policy made possible by the presence of $182 million in cash of which $15 million was carried over from a previous government surplus and $165 million out of current revenue, and pro­ nounced government finances to be in excellent shape. Between the last budget and the end of 1952 the net debt was cut by $21 million, to $169 million.68 “This is about the healthiest situation a British Columbia govern­ ment has ever been in,” the Sun concluded. “It’s going to enable Bennett to spend $143 million on ordinary operations as well as $31 million on ‘capital account.’ ” 69 Apprised of where the votes lay, and of the need to buttress the govern­ ment’s instant populist reputation, the Premier and Finance Minister in­ cluded several novel items which wooed the little people and, mildly and momentarily, irked the companies. Gunderson announced a cut of $5.5 million in expenditures in fulfillment of the government’s “economy and efficiency” promise. Auto licence prices were lowered and exemptions from

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the sales tax on restaurant meals raised from fifty cents to a dollar. In­ creased spending on penal institutions, mental health services and highway construction were authorized “without increasing the net debt of the prov­ ince.” 70 Natural resource taxes aimed, in the words of Gunderson, “at large operators with large profits who can well afford them,” 71 included a tenper-cent tax on logging company profits, an increase in the tax on mining companies profits from four per cent to ten per cent and a one-per-cent tax on timber land held under lease for speculation.72 The new resource taxes were not kindly received by the company men, disturbed by the Finance Minister’s Norse pique. The company men, who flocked to the legislative galleries in droves to hear the budget speech, noticeably winced when the Finance Minister announced his minor new impositions, and there soon followed a wave of indignation which almost equalled that of the school-teachers during the Reid-Clotworthy controv­ ersy. Spokesmen for the British Columbia Manufacturers’ Association and British Columbia Loggers’ Association, who held an emergency conference after the budget, pronounced the new proposal to appraise timber and pulp licences and leases and impose a land and timber tax as “most discrimina­ tory,” having no better result than the “liquidation of timber to avoid taxation.” 73 Thomas Elliott, the acting manager of the British Columbia Chamber of Mines, announced that his cohorts “anticipated some tax in­ creases but this is a bit higher than we expected,” while E.C. Roper, president of the Mining Association of British Columbia and general manager of the Britannia Mining and Smelting Company, charged that the “punitive tax legislation” would create a hardship on British Columbia mines and “discourage investment of new venture capital in British Co­ lumbia.” 74 In a written submission, the Vancouver Board of Trade declared the natural resources taxes “unnecessary” and “in every way to be regret­ ted.” 75 But the bileous company men were given a reprieve. If the government was shaky at the beginning of the session, by late March it noticeably tottered. The little Liberal rump propped up the Premier during their early weeks, but by the middle of March, when the government’s “new deal for municipalities” reached the floor, the Liberals were prepared to desert. The beginning of the end came early during the night session of March 24, when Bennett announced a second reading of Bill 79, known as the Rolston formula, which amended the Public Schools’ Act and, together with Bill 80, providing an interim system of capital grants to municipalities, and Bill 49, a long range plan for equalization of municipal assessments, comprised the new Socred package on educational finance, a program which favoured the outback over the metropolitan areas.76 The Liberals, the C.C.F., Uphill, and a lone Socred, Bert Price, who was convinced that the new formula

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discriminated against his Vancouver constituents, combined to defeat the government, twenty-eight votes to seventeen. The twenty-third legislature ended three days later, after voting interim supply-$94 million-and passing fifty-five non-controversial bills. None of the government’s major bills, including the establishment of a public authority to build toll bridges, the removal of milk price controls, liquor act amendments, and tax reforms, passed the House. This suited the Premier just fine. The session had been exhilarating; a fine opportunity for the outbackers to get their feet wet, an excellent exercise in taunting and retorting, a useful forum from which to convince voters that a peoples’ government had been stifled in its genuine desire to get things done by a disruptive opposition. The Premier beat Harold Winch to the door of the Lieutenant-Governor, but had the eager socialist arrived first, it would have made little difference. Winch may have pursued Wallace with an Uphill promise in his pocket, but he had no guarantees from the Liberals who wished a dissolution. If they held the Socreds in contempt, the Liberals were equally hostile towards the socialists. “I told His Honour that I was in a position to command more than nineteen votes before the House,” Winch later confessed, “and that I would give the guarantee that if called upon we would deal strictly with the public business and not introduce prior to an election anything that might be termed ‘socialistic policy.’ ” 77 But the Lieutenant-Governor, preferring King to Byng, heeded the advice of his Premier, and of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, and agreed to a dissolu­ tion. “The Social Credit government is not a government of the extreme right or the extreme left,” Bennett later chirped in his best luncheon-club style, “but a middle of the road free-enterprise government. The issue is whether or not British Columbia is to have a government with a working majority. In other words-Social Credit or chaos.” 78 As for Harold Winch, he shuffled sadly home. A tiger in the House and hustings for almost two decades, Winch was tired and disillusioned. He crawled home for a sleep and soon af|er announced his resignation. The Opposition parties first chose new leaders, then hotly pursued the Socreds in a long, protracted campaign. The Tory mantle fell to Deane Finlayson, a Nanaimo insurance agent who assured the voters, deaf and dumb to moribund Toryism, that the old guard had nothing to do with the campaign.79 A tantrum Tory, Finlayson was anxious to discredit the idea that Bennett had stolen his party, that the Socreds were a sane and sensible free-enterprise party. So he and his straggling rump loudly claimed that the Socreds were really socialists or fascists, or both, that Bennett led a “funda­ mentally Socialist Party” which could not “function without a dicta­ tor,”80 and that the Socreds wished to achieve a new financial structure in Canada which would control prices, wages and profits and stifle individual

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freedom and initiative. At one point, he compared Bennett to Hitler, “the same characteristics are there-a desire for control and a desire for selfglorification.” 81 To the government’s fascism, Finlayson contraposed the ideal of “sane and sensible government,” a completed P.G.E., more high­ way and bridge spending and, his ace in the hole, free milk for schoolchild­ ren.82 The new Liberal leader, Arthur Laing, a self-declared “Mackenzie King Liberal” who believed in the “supremacy of parliament and therefore of the people” conducted an equally hysterical campaign.83 Laing denounced the Socreds as a gang of radical McCarthyites masquerading under a freeenterprise label,84 “ . . . the most dangerous movement ever to strike Canada . . . a government based on prejudice.” 85 He quoted Solon Low, Hansell, J.A. Reid and other fundamentalists to prove that the new men of power were opposed to the United Nations, Jews, liberals, labour, educa­ tion, social security, free enterprise and parliament.86 When Bennett, in a speech at Salmon Arm, criticized the press’s handling of the Reid-Clot­ worthy controversy, Laing cited the Alberta Press Control Act, announcing that British Columbians were witness to an attack on the freedom of the press by a totalitarian movement. Laing was not entirely negative, to be sure. Between the two radical extremes, of fascism and socialism, he offered the voters a third, dignified way, the liberal way. For over two decades the Liberals defined the major issue in British Columbia elections as “free enterprise vs. socialism”; now that Bennett had usurped the slogan, Laing was prepared to dismiss it as phony. The real issue, he insisted, was between fascism and socialism on the one hand and democratic liberalism on the other. Laing promised to rid Victoria of men who called “each other dirty names across the aisles” and to restore “a greater measure of dignity to public life in the prov­ ince. . . . ” 87 The Liberals, who wheeled and dealed for decades, whose palms had long been greased by the company men, were overnight, sud­ denly, the party of elegant gentlemen. The new C.C.F. leader was less ferocious in his attack on the government. Winch’s job fell to Arnold Webster, the mild-mannered principal of Magee High School in Vancouver, who was unanimously recommended for the leadership by the legislative caucus and won without opposition at a subse­ quent convention. Webster, unlike Winch, was no firebrand. His style was calculated to woo rather than arouse voters. He avoided a doctrinaire message, emphasized the Christian origins of the C.C.F.’s socialism, and spoke of the need for a stable, balanced economy, a contented labour force, and increased spending in the areas of health and education. “ . . . A provincial government,” a C.C.F. ad ran, “is in no position to finance all the existing and potential development within its borders. The C.C.F.,

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therefore, welcomes new capital, new ventures and expansion. . . . Busi­ ness is moving to B.C. . . . and will continue under a C.C.F. government . . . under a C.C.F. government investors are assured of a square deal.” The good people in Summerland were informed that the C.C.F. was a “great Christian movement,” inspired by the Reverend J.S. Woodsworth. “If it be Christian to house the homeless and feed the hungry,” Webster pleaded, “then the C.C.F. is a Christian party. If it be Christian to clothe those who are in need, to give careful thought to the welfare of the community, to treat everyone fairly, to prevent one man from dominating, bullying and exploit­ ing another . . . if those be Christian purposes, then the C.C.F. is a great Christian movement and the fact that we don’t talk much about it is that we assume people should understand.” 88 The C.C.F.’s late-blooming Christianity was designed to steal some of the virtue from the Bennett party which, without abandoning its pious postur­ ing, ran an intensely secular campaign. Bennett ignored the languishing Conservatives, lashed the C.C.F. as a threat to stable government, and dismissed the Liberals as “Charlie McCarthies” of the Ottawa politicians who engineered the government’s legislative defeat.89 But the gist of the Socred appeal was for stable government, which could be guaranteed only by a grand union of electors behind the new men of power. Bennett gleefully quoted from a Maclean’s article which stated that Social Credit had one clear advantage over the other parties, “the average voters desire for a stable government. . . . ” 90 Stability meant working majority rule, an end to the asphyxiation of Parliament by destructive minorities, the freedom of an activist Premier to pursue his goals untramelled, and the continued flow of capital into a province on the threshold of a great leap forward. “Many large and small industries are awaiting the outcome of this election,” Bennett warned, “if the Social Credit government has a good working majority, new industries will be commenced with increased payrolls to all.” 91 The Premier flogged the Socreds as a responsible peoples’ movement, “not a movement of cranks . . . not a funny-money movement . . . the soundest group that ever operated a government in the Dominion of Canada.”92 The Socreds were concerned with “passing out benefits-Social Credit dividends . . . in hospital insurance, premium reductions, slashing of the public debt and . . . reductions in sales tax and car licences.” 93 But there would be no tampering with the basic structure of the economic or monetary system. And for those who doubted, the metro heavyweights were trotted out as evidence of the new orthodoxy. Gunderson, whose measured words calmed the jittery companies, dismissed the crank label with a wave of his Norse hand. “Most of the literature was written a long time ago,” he replied when queried about Major Douglas’s monetary theories, “and needs revising . . . at any rate, control of money is outside the jurisdiction

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of the province. It’s not a problem in this election.” 94 The choice, as Bennett endlessly repeated, was between an inclusive “peoples’ movement” which opposed “equally strongly the forces of monopolies and forces of socialism” and the exclusive opposition parties who spoke for no one at all (the Conservatives), for an Ottawa clique of centralizers (the Liberals) or for a small group of destructive self-seeking Marxists (the C.C.F.). Bennett was immensely gratified by the results. The Socreds gained twenty-eight seats, the C.C.F. fourteen, the Liberals four and the Conserva­ tives and Labour one each. The Socred popular vote on the first count increased to 37.75% and on the final count to 45.54%, the C.C.F. 30.85% and 29.48%, the Liberals 23.59% and 23.36%, the Tories 5.6% and 1.1%.95 The plumping rate was higher than in the past election, but this little harmed the Socreds who increased their first-count support. By wel­ coming and winning a host of repentent Liberals and Conservatives during the interim year, the Socreds were less dependent on secondary support which came nonetheless: from Conservatives who brought the Socreds over the top in Kamloops and North Okanagan and aided them with substantial second-choice support in Point Grey and Victoria; from socialists in the Columbia, Fort George, Omineca, North Vancouver, Point Grey and Vic­ toria ridings where the Socreds ran 1-2 with the Liberals on the first count; and from the Liberals, who helped them over the top in Delta, Dewdney, Esquimalt, Peace River, Rossland-Trail, Salmon Arm, Similkameen, Vancouver-Burrard and Vancouver-Centre. More keenly apprised of the Socred threat than they were a year earlier, socialist voters, and Liberals, to a lesser extent, plumped in greater number than in 1952; but not enough to prevent the determined Premier, who had only four of his men returned on the first count, from winning a working majority. The 1953 election completed the remarkable transformation of a minis­ cule sect, which commanded a mere 1.5% of the popular vote in the provincial election of 1949, into a governing party with an extended class and regional base. Bennett’s pledge that a Social Credit government would “not treat the Interior as other governments have done, like darkest Africa,” 96 was amply heeded: by residents of Delta, Dewdney and Chil­ liwack in the Fraser Valley who usually voted Conservative; by Northern­ ers, traditionally Liberal who, in Omineca, Peace River and Fort George, knew who guarded the brimming barrel; by residents of the Cariboo, the Okanagan valley, the Kootenays and southern Interior, who shed their old affiliations and flocked to support the new men of power. What was even more gratifying to the Premier was the incursion into the cities, Victoria and Vancouver, which together contributed eleven members to the new coali­ tion. The goutish Victorians, sluggish in their response to political change, wakened from their stupor, discerned the new lords of the provincial House,

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and prudently traded in their worn Liberal vehicles-Nancy Hodges, Daniel Proudfoot and William T. Straith-for new models; for Lydia Augusta Arsens, William Neelands Chant, a vintage Alberta Socred, and Walter Percival Wright, an assistant city clerk and amateur meteorologist who discerned the direction in which the new political winds, sweeping in off the Straits of Georgia, prevailed. Victoria, with adjoining Saanich, delivered four members to Bennett; Vancouver brought seven. The socialists were locked into their Vancouver-East and Burnaby stronghold while the Liber­ als salvaged a mere seat in Point Grey. Otherwise the Socreds took the city, barely winning two seats each in Vancouver-Burrard and Vancouver-Centre, one in Vancouver-Point Grey and a further seat in North Vancouver where they won by a small majority. Nor were the Socreds severely restricted in their class support.The core of the incipient movement was petit-bourgeois. The party activists and candidates were predominantly small businessmen, farmers, real-estate dealers, ministers of the church, insurance brokers, clerks and school­ teachers, traditionally more Conservative than Liberal, who feared the socialism of the C.C.F. as much as they resented the oligarchy and met­ ropolitan dominance of the older free-enterprise parties. The Socred In­ terior base rested on a primary support from the real-estate dealers, insur­ ance agents and businessmen of small towns and cities like Chilliwack, Prince George, Kamloops, Rossland-Trail and Kelowna, while the urban vote, in Victoria City and Vancouver, in constituencies like VancouverBurrard, Centre and North Vancouver, was equally dependent upon back­ ing from middle class elements.97 And the farmers were as firm as the townsmen in their loyalty to the new coalition. Rural voters in the Fraser Valley, the Cariboo, Peace and the Island, free-enterprise and predomi­ nantly Conservative in the past, used their weighted vote to good advantage in returning government candidates. But British Columbia voters do not naturally and automatically adhere to governing parties, like iron filings to a magnet. They must be bought. V Possessed of a brimming treasury, the new government purchased votes \ with a vast public works spending program. The Premier, however, needed J big, extra money with which to build an organization and buy electors during a long, protracted campaign; money which came, in ample quanti­ ties, not merely from the little ladies who dropped their dimes and quarters into the felt hat at election meetings, but from the big companies who knew v that their old political pals in Victoria were forever laid to rest, that the \ Bennett party was the new guarantor of company dominance, the vehicle for throttling the socialists, and the future dispensor of large favours. When ) Einar Gunderson and his underlings delicately requested the company men to voluntarily contribute to the cause, there were doubtless few refusals.

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Already, by June 1953, the tenacles of the companies and of the government were amicably intertwined; the octopuses had begun their long sleep together. “First they pushed us into a coalition and ruined us as a party in British Columbia,” a Conservative Member of Parliament complained in January 1953 in the House of Commons about the “thick headed tycoons” of British Columbia, “because they said that was the only way to stop the C.C.F. Then they finance this Social Credit movement because it, now, is ‘the only way to stop the C.C.F.’ Maybe Hansell will convince them, as we haven’t been able to do, that this party they’re building up is just as much their enemy as the C.C.F. ever was, and a lot stronger.98 These were bitter words, spoken by a man whose ingrate spouse had deserted him.99 But the company men moved to where the power lay. Although the Socreds were political novices, with whom they had never socialized at the Union or Terminal City clubs, whose sons and daughters did not play rugger and field hockey with their own at private schools, and who insolently grabbed power without their aid or blessing, there was, after all, very little in the new movement which gave them cause for distress. Alberta Social Credit prac­ tised sound business government in a province where the oil frontier yielded the companies great profits. And if the cabinet of the local party included a few questionable outbakers, there were present, as well, to guide and guard, metro heavyweights like Gunderson and Bonner and a Premier whose ideological, if not personal, credentials were beyond question. In short, for the company men, the Socred accession was an inconvenience rather than a calamity; a little social floss and political honey was needed to cement the momentarily ruptured span between the economic and politi­ cal elites. As for the Premier and his aides, they had no quarrel with the companies or with the system under which they flourished. The proposed new resource taxes may have momentarily irked the mining and logging interests but this little troubled the Premier who knew that the big firms had nowhere else to go, except to the Liberals and Conservatives who were fast dying, or to the C.C.F. which scarcely welcomed them. Bennett’s few anti-monopoly utterances, the proposed minor tax changes, were useful political assets when labour, organized and unorganized, and small businessmenindependent sawmill operators and loggers-feared the power of the “invisi­ ble government” behind the coalition politicians. The Premier, financially secure through the sweat of Marsden, was, in the hour of his accession, politically independent as well. The new men of power had risen by their own bootstraps. They won office with few pecuniary gifts, except from the Albertans, who received a poor return on their investment. They were beholden to nobody and could afford, in the mom of their rule, before their tentacles became closely intertwined with corporations, to parade their

I Sunday Morning Politics: 1953 187

political virginity. An excellent reckoner, the Premier knew it cost him little to play the populist game by mildly spanking the companies with minor resource tax increases, or making a few spare and vague anti-monopoly noises. The people, who had the votes, were not averse to this gentle prodding; nor, for that matter, were the companies distressed. They needed the Socreds, the new bastion of free enterprise, the instrument for cudgelling the socialists, the dispenser of contracts, leases, licences and all manner of favours. Of what harm were a few threatened impositions when the future beckoned brightly? Many workingmen, too, were not distressed at what they saw in Victoria. True, the socialists had retained their traditional base; they won almost a third of the popular vote, their customary share, retained Vancouver-East, Burnaby and Cowichan-Newcastle, where the socialist grandfather vote bulked large, and elected members in New Westminster, Alberni, Comox, Cranbrook, Grand Forks-Greenwood, Revelstoke and Skeena, where fishermen, loggers, miners and other unionists formed the core of their organization. The socialists were strong among the unionized industrial workers, but a remnant of the labour vote-older craft unionists, unorgan­ ized workers, dual unionists and chronic oppositionists-had always escaped their political grasp. Traditionally Liberal, caring less about socialism to­ morrow than jobs and wages today, resentful of labour politicians who told them how to vote, numerous workingmen, and their wives, transferred their voting allegiance to the new bread-and-butter party, the party of growth and stability. And the Socreds did nothing to discourage their new adher­ ents. In neither the 1952 nor the 1953 elections did they say or do anything to antagonize the labour interest. Their platform was suitably vague and uncontroversial on labour matters like the I.C.A. Act, which was sensibly ignored during the abortive 1953 session. In his first major speech as Minis­ ter of Labour, Wicks made noises about the need for extensive revision100 and proposed round-table conferences with management and labour to get a “semblance of unity” on amendments to the controversial act. The House standing committee on labour was convened for the first time in seven years. Throughout the 1953 campaign, Bennett was careful to remind working­ men that he headed a peoples’ movement which worked “for the good of the people as a whole, and not for any special group of people, class or lobbyists,” 101 citing the hospital insurance changes, minor amendments to the Minimum Wage Act and the establishment of a new conciliation branch and service under a chief conciliation officer, as evidence of the govern­ ment’s good intentions. And he promised more to come: new machinery and procedures to speed up the processing of union applications for certifi­ cations, “a faster and more effective service in dealing with complaints and investigation of holiday pay, overtime, minimum wages and other matters,”

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and a revision of strike-vote procedure, “in keeping with the requests of labour.” 102 More than a few workingmen were prepared to believe the Premier. In his short time in office, Bennett convinced droves of skeptical electors, who longed for strong leadership after years of petty argumentation between the coalition partners, that the new men of power could get things done, if given the opportunity. In its dying years, the coalition had suffered a paralytic stroke, weakening the public authority just when the economy surged for­ ward on a new investment wave. The people wished for strong leadership in order to secure and perpetuate the prosperity. “If all parties elected some of their members,” Bennett argued during the heat of the campaign, “then no one party will have a working majority that is so necessary if our system of responsible government is to work properly.” 103 Responsible govern­ ment, to Bennett, did not mean control of the elected representatives by the people, or the executive by the Legislature. It implied, rather, freedom of the executive to guarantee public order and a continued capital flow. Re­ sponsible government meant untramelled executive power; a power under­ mined under the coalition by a disputing Cabinet, whose factions were responsible to two separate and opposed entities, and weakened in the new legislature by the disruptive tactics of unpatriotic minorities. Bennett knew the people wished an executive despotism. In an atomized, balkanized society, unsettled by incessant waves of immigrants and threatened by industrial disorder, there developed an urgent need for a strong government authority, for a paternal leader, a secular deity, to affirm a sense of com­ munity which was inherently absent. And one arrived, in the unlikely personage of Bennett who, in the short space of a few years, convinced voters that he alone was qualified to do wonders; abolish patronage, waste, extravagance, secret orders-in-council, debt, poverty and all manner of evil. Enraged at mummified Socred back-benchers during the Throne Speech debate, Opposition politicians shrieked that the Premier was a dictator, a cynical puppeteer who cared as little for parliament as for democracy within his own party. But they misconstrued the public mood, not dissimilar from the state of mind which prevailed a half-century earlier when the chubby knight errant from New Westminster, astride his scrawny Rozinante-a reconstituted Conservative party-rode into Victoria and occupied the gov­ ernment. Bennett’s noble steed was also a reconstituted conservatism. No longer was he the irascible back-bencher shunned by his colleagues and ignored everywhere save the Okanagan. Overnight, Bennett was trans­ formed, redone into a forceful premier possessed of the elusive freedom-a working majority, necessary to calm the worried companies.

CHAPTER VII

The New Romans: 1954-1960

“ . . . A new and different time was coming, and new and different men would make it. The land behind the mountains, no longer a mystery, was ready to be used.” Roderick Haig-Brown, The Farthest Shores.

“God put the coal there for our use, so let’s dig it up.” P.A. Gaglardi.

The jubilant Socreds wasted little time in taking advantage of their favoured position. The brief session of autumn 1953, and the two succeeding sessions, in the winters of 1954 and 1955, were replete with bold spending and tax measures which buttressed the government’s incipient reputation for inno­ vation and dynamism. Minor progressive tax-relief measures shored up the government’s populist reputation, yielding political returns which far ex­ ceeded the financial relief to working people. The exemption of the five-percent tax on restaurant meals was raised in the government’s first budget in 1954 from fifty cents to a dollar,1 the exemption on the purchase of irriga­ tion equipment broadened, a ten-per-cent reduction in the licence fees on automobiles instituted, the amusements tax was reduced from seventeen and a half per cent to fifteen per cent, and later to ten per cent, the registration for automobiles cut from ten dollars to one dollar, and chil­ drens’ shoes were exempted from the sales tax.2 In all, these reductions amounted to about five million dollars per year and made no substantial impact on total government revenues which, in 1956, amounted to over $225 million. But, as Professor Carlsen shrewdly observed, the “psychologi­ cal impact was probably more impressive than the economic.” 3 Not all of the government’s revenue enactments, to be sure, involved tax reductions. During the 1954 session, the provincial sales tax, imposed in 1948 over Bennett’s violent objections to offset rising expenditures on health, welfare and municipal assistance, was increased from three per cent to five per cent, not merely to provide for additional social services but to replace premium payments of the unpopular hospital insurance program. The Socreds had long denounced the compulsory aspects of the premium 189

190 Pillars of Profit

system and promised to rectify the situation by making the insurance volun­ tary. In their first year in office, premiums were lowered and the arrears of delinquents cancelled. But the new plan, calculated to provide universal coverage, lower administrative costs, reduce the regressive features of the original scheme, eliminate compulsion and provide an elastic or self-adjust­ ing system of payments, was far more drastic, involving, as it did, cancella­ tion of the premium payments altogether and an increase in the sales tax.4 To the metropolitan press and legislative Opposition, the tax increase was unacceptable. The Province labelled it the government’s “biggest blun­ der,” 5 while the Sun dismissed it as a case of “panic financing.” 6 And if the socialist opposition saw the tax increase as another capitalist ploy, the Victoria Daily Times, ever alert to the red bogey, thought Mr. Bennett an outright socialist. “Mr. Bennett who came to office as the champion of free enterprise and the only reliable opponent of socialism has swallowed a socialist theory whole. All hospital insurance is to be socialized. The C.C.F. is entitled to credit for its largest victory in British Columbia.” 7 But the laurels of the victory, if there were any, fell to the government. The new mode of financing hospital insurance which reduced the direct burden on the lower income groups met with little profound opposition from labour or consumer groups. The Premier’s claim that the new scheme eliminated compulsion was, of course, absurd since there are as few govern­ ment measures as compelling as a sales tax. But the premium paying scheme, which already wrecked one government, was notoriously unpopu­ lar and the government lost nothing by disposing of it altogether. Nor was sales tax financing per se politically unacceptable since the people had had ample opportunity over the past six years to accommodate themselves to the new tax. The sales tax increase was the most spectacular of the new impositions; but there were others, of mixed effect, which little harmed the government’s reputation as virile boomsters concerned less with hampering people and companies with burdensome taxes than with promoting growth and ensur­ ing equity between classes. Representatives of the British Columbia Manu­ facturers’ Association loudly criticized sections of the government’s Assessment Equalization Act which proposed to tax machinery and “real property” for school purposes.8 Mining men pouted over the increased tax, from four per cent to ten per cent on the profits of “primary mining operations,” 9 while H.R. MacMillan and his confreres moaned about the ten-per-cent tax on the profits of “primary logging operations” and an annual tax of one per cent on timber held under old leases and licences.10 The 1955 annual report of MacMillan Bloedel noted that the forest indus­ tries were the most heavily taxed in the province and “more heavily taxed in British Columbia than anywhere else in Canada.” 11 Yet the new taxes

The New Romans: 1954-1960 191

had little more than a nuisance effect. The ten-per-cent tax on net income from logging operations secured revenues amounting to about three million dollars a year in subsequent years, a miniscule amount which the big companies could well afford,12 while the one-per-cent tax on forest land held for speculative purposes was even less burdensome, yielding about $500,000 a year to the government.13 Nor could Mr. MacMillan, or his company friends, like British Columbia Forest Products, which received a 270,000 acre Forest Management Licence in January 1955 on the west coast of Vancouver Island, over the objections of the Coast Small Operators’ Association,14 weep over the government’s generous disposition of invalua­ ble forest management licences to large firms. In the very hour the barons complained of the new burdens, they realized huge assets on timber hold­ ings. Barely a week after the announcement that MacMillan Bloedel had been granted a Forest Management Licence for 204,000 acres in Tofino, and was being considered for a huge disposition around Alberni, Lands and Forests Minister Sommers read to the House from a letter the repentant MacMillan had written to the Premier in which he denied a recent state­ ment, attributed to him in the press, that provincial taxation policies were “killing the goose that laid the golden egg.” 15 The goose, for all its squawk­ ing, was alive and well and living in British Columbia. And so were the thousands of workingmen and droves of contractors who benefited from the huge public works spending program. Just as the govern­ ment wooed voters with tax reductions and limited welfare transfer pay­ ments, so did it join the masses with the companies in a grand assault on the primordial frontier, that great northern and central Interior burdened with mountains of untapped resources. Bennett turned the eyes of the masses outward, towards the glittering Eldorado, the vast rolling Peace River region, barely populated, which contained the largest acreage of high quality agricultural land unsettled in Canada, as well as huge troves of oil and gas deposits; towards the entire central and northern Interior blessed with one of the world’s greatest reservoirs of softwood timber and pulp.16 During the 1954 session, Bennett revived the P.G.E. corpse and announced the immediate commencement of construction of extensions north and south; from Prince George to Fort St. John and Dawson Creek in the North, and from Squamish into North Vancouver via Howe Sound in the South, a projected expenditure involving ten million dollars.17 To handle the financing, the financial structure of the P.G.E. was sharply altered.18 Prior to 1954, funds to support deficiencies in operating revenues and provide for the railways’ capital development were obtained directly from the government in the form of advances financed either from consolidated revenue or from borrowed funds; the latter expedient resulting, of course, in an increase in the direct debt of the province. The 1954 act wiped out

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the P.G.E.’s indebtedness to the province and in its place provided for the acquisition by the government of P.G.E. stock at a par value of sixty-five million dollars. A concurrent act enabled the railway to borrow directly from the money market through the issue of its own bonds.19 The P.G.E. was thereby freed of debt and subsequent borrowing became a direct liabil­ ity of the railway, and a contingent liability of the province which guaran­ teed the railway’s bonds.20 Similar financial manoeuverings characterized the government’s grand spending programs on power, schools, highways, bridges and ferries. Amendments to the Power Act during the 1955 session increased the bor­ rowing authority, from $80 to $110 million, of the B.C. Power Commission which expanded rural electrification and commenced exploratory surveys of the huge power potential of the Peace River area. The splurge of school construction was handled by an entirely new financial arrangement. Before the passing of the Public Schools Construction Act of 1954, the provincial government assumed one half of the cost of school construction. Through a cash grant system, with revenues drawn from provincial borrowings in the money market, the school districts financed their share of costs from the sale of their own bonds or from taxes.21 The new Socred way involved the passage of legislation empowering the districts to borrow the total amounts necessary for school construction, with the government guaranteeing the issue and committing itself to bear one half of the interest and principal payments through annual grants to the districts.22 The government’s biggest spending spree was in the area of highway and bridge construction. Capital expenditure, involving departmental outlays, funds borrowed on behalf of the Toll Authority and road subsidies from the federal government in connection with the Trans-Canada Highway, in­ creased from sixteen million dollars in 1951-52 to thirty-five million dollars in 1955-56. The bulk of the borrowing for the burgeoning road program was handled through a Crown corporation, created in 1953, known as the Toll Bridges and Highways Authority, which was empowered to borrow money, build bridges, highways and ferries, collect revenues, and undertake to pay off its capital indebtedness.23 The government assumed a statutory obliga­ tion to subsidize construction at the annual rate of two and a half per cent of the total cost of the structures involved as well as the maintenance cost of each project through the newly created Department of Highways. As with hydro and school construction, a capital spending program was launched and financed under an agency separate from the government. The increased debt was attributed to the borrowing agencies, but since the government guaranteed the borrowing, it was burdened with a contingent liability.

The New Romans: 1954-1960 193

Whether the increased spending and unorthodox accounting involved direct or indirect debt, real, spurious or contingent liability— or whatever-it afforded the Premier, who specialized in political legerdemain, some excel­ lent talking material. The opposition, press and partisan, shouted that debt reduction was a farce, that contingent liabilities were liabilities nonetheless, that borrowing agencies were transparent covers for the Bennett govern­ ment’s “rapid drift into purely socialist policies.” 24 The Sun, which joined with its sister the Daily Times in a vicious assault on the Premier, main­ tained that “taxes were never higher, spending never more extravagant and wasteful.. . . ” 25 Cromie pronounced the Premier’s debt-reduction claims a hoax, asserting that the government had merely changed the name of about $185 million of its liability and deducted them from its description of the provincial debt, which had actually risen from $246 million in 1952 to $337 million by the autumn of 1956.26 But all of this barely irked the Premier who maintained that the government, despite its enormous spend­ ing, was actually reducing its debt, that spending was on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, that surpluses (which ignored the indirect borrowings) allowed for cyclical budgeting, and that the credit position of the province was im­ measurably enhanced by the limitation of the province’s direct debt. Whatever the economic logic of Bennett’s argumentation, the voters seemed to think that the Premier meant well and was getting things done in the way he knew best. A poll taken in ten ridings in the autumn of 1955, the results of which were published in the Victoria Colonist, indicated that a large majority of respondents were pleased with the government’s policies, including its handling of debt reduction and expenditure.27 By-elections in September and December of 1955 resulted in the return of two Socreds, Donald Robinson, a P.G.E. railway engineer in Lillooet where he defeated the Liberal Gordon Gibson, and in Vancouver-Centre, where lawyer Leslie Peterson was returned. After a decade of rule by a bland coalition, the people were tickled by the new unorthodoxy which invited constant quar­ relling between the beaming Premier, who spluttered torrents of statistics, and the press barons who denounced the government’s chicanery. But Bennett proved an elusive target. Through endless repetition of catchphrases, such as “pay-as-you-go” and “debt free”, he neutralized opposition propaganda that the Socreds were incontinent spendthrifts. The masses, and the companies, were pleased with the new spending, which benefited them, and were prepared to swallow the Premier’s outright salesmanship. Overnight, the Socreds became the New Romans, who moved mountains of rock and gravel in a grand splurge of road-building. The province was seized by road maniacs and littered with hard-hats, bulldozers and gravel trucks. “The greatest highway-building program, not just in British Colum­

194 Pillars of Profit

bia’s history,” Bennett announced, “but per capita in the entire western world, has been accomplished without borrowing at all . . . in fact, the Social Credit government has moved more rock and other materials and spent more on highways in the past six years-and paid for every cent of it-than all previous British Columbia governments did in the first ninetyfour years of our history.28 The Premier was incessantly lauded in epic language by back-benchers, and fawning publicity agents as a Paul Bunyan who moved mountains to build roads, roads and more roads. “He’s the type that chews nails and spits rust,” Ray Williston concluded,29 while back­ bencher Donald Robinson ventured that although Rome was not built in a day “ . . . it might have been if the Premier had been in charge.” 30 But not all of the credits fell to Bennett. At his side, a head shorter, hustling and preaching, was his Pentecostal sidekick, the Honourable Reve­ rend P.A. Gaglardi who assumed the new Highways portfolio, created in 1955, to handle the flourishing road-construction business. Gaglardi had a dual ministry; in Victoria, and Kamloops, where he flew home on weekends to preach to his flock which included several highway contracters. Initially known as “Sorry Phil,” for the “Sorry for the Inconvenience” signs which littered highway-construction projects, Gaglardi later earned the soubriquet “Flying Phil,” for his weekend airborne sorties to the Interior, favoured, five nights a week, with pre-recorded radio disquisitions on subjects ranging from prophetic interpretation to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.31 Ga­ glardi, like the Premier, was peripatetic. He soon earned a pleasing noto­ riety for reckless driving and was favoured with a host of speeding tickets, widely publicized, from R.C.M.P. traffic control officers-federal Liberal agents-one of whom he described as a punk. His endless huckstering and ceaseless motion were, like the Premier’s, gladly accepted by a political constituency increasingly enamoured of a regime wedded to results, rather than rules. The Honourable Reverend Phillip Gaglardi became the high priest of a secular religion long practised in a province fragmented into isolated re­ gional and cultural entities. The inhabitants of these islands were lonely, they wished to be connected up; so, they worshipped the highways, by-ways, and thru-ways, things of brick, mortar and asphalt, which brought them into closer communion. The demoniacal railway engine, the twisting, ser­ pentine track, centred the old theodicy, presided over by the roguish Bowser and the sunny McBride. The new revolved around roadways; and the Highways Minister was eternally present, like the Holy Ghost, at bridge and highway-opening ceremonies, the cost of which were frequently borne by the contractors.32 Gaglardi, who kept a blue and white construction helmet in his office inscribed in bold black lettering with “Flying Phil,” loved public ceremonies, whether in the pulpit, at ferry launchings, or bridge and high-

The New Romans: 1954-1960 195

way openings, where he practised his cheeky approach to God, raising his eyes upwards and thanking “The Man upstairs” for providing good weather which usually prevailed.33 His greatest spectacle was reserved for the open­ ing of his own $150,000 Calvary Temple in Kamloops in 1958, whose construction costs were borne in part by several devout builders employed on the public highways. Present were a mixed bag of secular deities: the Premier, who read from the scriptures, Lieutenant-Governor Frank Ross, who snipped the opening ribbon, and, as guests of honour, G.R. Dawson of the huge Dawson and Wade Construction Company, Ralph Pybus, president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and David Kinnear, general manager of the T. Eaton Company.34 The completion of the church was followed by a public furor when it was alleged that two men, who worked on the temple’s construction, had their wages, totalling $4,171, carried on the payroll of Bonanza Construction, a firm controlled by an acquaintance of Gaglardi’s who worshipped in his church between Septem­ ber 1956 and April 1958. When the Sun brought this, and other matters, to light, Bennett rushed to Gaglardi’s defence, labelling the article a “smear­ ing attack on Christian churches,” an attempt to “smear one of the finest men British Columbia has produced . . . this man who has buses to drive children to Sunday-school even if they aren’t members of his Church.” The splurge of spending on projects serving the resource sector created a host of new adherents to the party of progress. Workingmen were daily reminded that the Socreds were a full-employment prosperity party, and more than a few believed it. Boom towns like Prince George and Kamloops were replete with small businessmen, merchants, real-estate dealers, who traded and profited from the growing local population. The tourist industry, hoteliers, moteliers, and restauranteurs, and the truck-logging interests, were pleased with the growing network of roads. Merchants and supply firms were glad to service the many construction projects. Long lists of companies began to appear on the Legislature’s order paper, beneficiaries of contracts from the Highways Department, who included as directors defeated Socred candidates, personal friends of the minister, friends of his friends, members of his church.35 Big firms, like Dawson & Wade and Perini Pacific Ltd., did big business; but the Highways Minister, a self-made man, kept an occasional eye out for the little fellow, one of whom was Ben Ginter, a lone grizzly operator and friend of the minister, who built a huge construction empire in the Interior on government highway contracts. “Mr. Gaglardi,” Mr. Ginter assured the minister during an apocryphal interview, “I will not only do the job, but any equipment necessary I will put on the job.” 36 Gaglardi paused, then gave his word. “Mr. Ginter, you have got the job.” Ginter was soon awarded so many other contracts that political opponents began to spread a rumour that the construction business in the

196 Pillars of Projit

north and central Interior was ruled by a triumvirate-Ginter, Gaglardi and God.37 Ben Ginter, and a few other lone operators, accumulated a tidy sum from the contracts of the new regime. But the big cuts, in the critical resource sectors, were reserved for the giants: for West Coast Transmission, headed by Frank McMahon, who made a fortune from piping gas from the Peace River area to the lower mainland region and the United States Pacific Northwest; for the big mining firms who were offered a sales tax rebate on equipment purchases for exploration purposes, and other concessions;38 and for the great giants of the forest industry, favoured with huge licences, who quickly shouldered out the small independent loggers, reduced to menial jackals supping on the leftovers of the great carnivores. “In the ten years 1945 to 1955,” D.M. Carey, an assistant forester in the government service, reported to the British Columbia Natural Resources Conference, “the proportion of Crown-granted timber land held by persons each owning less than twenty thousand acres fell from more than two-thirds to less than one-third of the total.. . . ” 39 The total acreage of the timber licence group in the province in 1949 was nearly four million, of which 51.7% was held by fifty-eight persons or corporations, with the remainder held by 2,800 others. In 1954, nine persons or corporations held 68.5%, including four who held 51% of the remaining two and a half million acres.40 Carey warned of the liquidation of the small logger and his impending conversion “into just one of the many wholly dependent subsidiaries or employees of the large corporations.” 41 The Financial Post noted in 1956 that the large companies financed the Socreds who were “flush with money for electoral purposes,” 42 a supposition endorsed by Blair Fraser who wrote that despite “its radical roots,” Social Credit was “the darling of big business . . . timber men in British Columbia speak of it warmly and give generously to its campaign funds.” 43 The same could not be said of the labour interest, whose brief honeymoon with the Socreds ended during the 1954 session when the government passed a new Labour Relations Act, known as Bill 28. The Premier and his colleagues were not averse to workingmen getting their fair share, or so they said. But they were ill-pleased with the power of labour leaders who, it was alleged, not only threatened the livelihood of workingmen through the irresponsible use of the strike weapon, but slowed the majestic assault on the frontier managed by the companies. Devotees of the ideology of raw growth, the new government was prepared to limit the power of any groups which threatened the free flow of capital into the province. Under the new act, which superceded the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1948, itself never satisfactory to labour leaders, the powers of the Labour Relations Board were shifted to the Minister of Labour and the courts. The

The New Romans: 1954-1960 197

Labour Minister was invested with powers to appoint conciliation officers, conciliation boards, mediation boards, refer strikes for adjudication to the British Columbia Supreme Court, and appoint persons to conduct strike or lockout votes,44 while supreme court judges were empowered to declare null and void the collective agreement, check-off and certification of any union found to be illegally striking. Unions were required to strike within ninety days of taking a vote, or the vote became void, and give forty-eight hours notice of intent to strike. The act set out heavy fines for illegal strikes, limited sympathy-strikes and legitimated the ex-parte injunction which allowed the employers, on application, an injunction without a hearing from both parties in the dispute.45 The new act, which had the effect of moving industrial relations further into the political sphere, was badly received by labour leaders who launched a long and bitter campaign against the measure. Tom Alsbury, the moderate president of the craft-dominated Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, felt the new bill “out-Tafted the Taft-Hartley Act in its measures against unions,”46 while Lloyd Whalen, president of the rival Vancouver Labour Council, a C.C.L. affiliate, surmised that “if it had been drafted by Peron in Argentina or Hitler’s Labour Front it couldn’t be worse.” 47 One of the immediate effects of the act was to unify organized labour against the government and increase the rhetorical, if not industrial, radicalism of union officials. The general strike idea was bandied about and a joint delega­ tion of three hundred representatives from C.C.L, T.L.C. and railway un­ ions, representing 150,000 trade unionists, lobbied Victoria for amend­ ments. But this little bothered the Premier and his colleagues, who were nicely prepared to take on the labour establishment. During the post-war decade, labour’s public image was tainted by a growing number of strikes and disputes which reflected unionist attempts to keep pace with rising prices. Contrarily, the Socreds had firmly established themselves among the middle classes and many workingmen as a determined, if rambunctious, growth party. Labour leaders were relegated to their traditional role of political villains, caring as little about their constituent bread-winners, who benefited from unrestricted production, as for the investors who provided, with their capital and technology, jobs and security for all. In the words of the Labour Minister, Bill 28 was passed in order to protect those people who were “investing their capital in the resources of British Columbia,” 48 a view in accord with those of several Socred back-benchers who thought union strength was being used to perpetuate “undeserved luxury living.”49 But the labour furor over Bill 28 was mild compared to the loud, pro­ longed squabble with the Opposition over the untoward activities of Robert Sommers, the Minister of Lands, Forests and Mines who, it was discovered,

198 Pillars of Profit was himself engaged in some undeserved luxury living. As a school-teacher, trumpeter and firewarden, Sommers had earned a meagre living before being called to the ministry; and he seemed determined, soon after his accession to office, to make up for his lost income. The source of the minister’s trouble was Mr. H. Wilson Gray, a small timber and political operator who, in 1951, engaged Sommers and his fellow music-makers to play at an open house in honour of his purchase of the Big Bend Lumber Company.50 Sommers trumpeted so well that he and Gray became fast friends, a relationship which noticeably increased in value, from the view­ point of Mr. Gray, when Sommers forsook the trumpet for the leathered ministerial chair. Sommers was wanting and overdrawn at the bank when he entered the Cabinet. He needed money to pay for the modest house he purchased in Victoria, for genteel entertainment befitting a Minister of the Crown, for renovations, furniture and sundry oddments. And he had some­ thing to sell; the majestic public domain, the great stands of trees of the province, the forest management licences coveted by the grey-flannelled carnivores. H. Wilson Gray was also wanting, if only for bigger and better parties than the modest affair he had thrown the previous year in Rossland. He too had something to sell; his influence with a vulnerable, inexperienced Minister of the Crown who presided over the province’s richest domain. Both of these wanting gentlemen wasted little time in getting down to business after Sommers entered the Cabinet. Among other clients, Gray counted B.C. Forest Products Limited, a subsidiary of E.P. Taylor’s Argus Corporation, which paid him thirty thousand dollars to “investigate and suggest business deals” and “report on activities of the company’s competi­ tors.” 51 Well provided for himself, Gray was solicitous of his ministerial friend whom he showered with sundry gifts, favours and pleasantries; “loans” of over seven thousand dollars, furniture and rugs for his modest house, a free trip to Detroit to attend his daughter’s wedding, a lay-over at a plush Toronto hotel (paid for by B.C. Forest Products), a chit-chat at E.P. Taylor’s farm residence, suppers at the Terminal City Club and, not least, an exciting evening watching Sophie Tucker crooning at the Cave.52 The Socreds had long paraded themselves as a purity party, as Christian soldiers of virtue called to rid the province of the irksome demons of graft and patronage. It was little wonder, therefore, that the Premier, his Attor­ ney General, and the bedevilled Mr. Sommers, were noticeably troubled, even distraught, when several oppositionists, led by J. Gordon Gibson, the garrulous millionaire Liberal M.L.A. from Lillooet who spoke for the small logging interests, persisted with charges, first made early in 1955, that Robert Sommers, a student of the art of Sophie Tucker, had been unduly influenced in his disposition of forest management licences. Had it not been for Mr. Gray’s book-keeper, a Mr. Charles W. Eversfield, Robert Som­

The New Romans: 1954-1960 199 m e r ’s d e p a r t u r e f r o m t h e p a t h o f v i r t u e w o u l d b a r e l y h a v e c a u g h t t h e p u b l i c e y e. B u t M r. E v e rs fie ld , w h o

m ay have h ad

r e a s o n s o f h is o w n , w e n t to

V a n c o u v e r la w y e r D a v id S tu rd y , w h o r a is e d th e m a tte r w ith A tto r n e y G e n e r a l B o n n e r a n d la te r w ith C h ie f J u s tic e S lo a n , s ittin g a s a o n e m a n ro y a l c o m m is ­ sio n e n q u ir y in to t h e w h o le f ie ld o f f o r e s t m a n a g e m e n t . S o m m e r s r e s p o n d e d w ith

a s la n d e r s u it f o r th e

s ta te m e n t b e fo re

S lo a n ,

and

a

lib e l s u i t f o r

t h e d e c l a r a t i o n t o B o n n e r . P u m m e l l e d m e r c i l e s s l y in t h e H o u s e , t h e u n h a p p y m in is te r r e s ig n e d

h i s p o r t f o l i o 53

a fte r B o n n e r, w h o

re fu se d

to

a p p o in t a

ro y a l c o m m i s s i o n , h a n d e d t h e m a t t e r o v e r t o t h e R . C . M . P . in e a r ly F e b r u a r y fo r a p re lim in a ry in v e s tig a tio n .

The Opposition wasted little time in trampling the fallen angels. Inside the House, M.L.A.s of all parties jointly and severally pummelled the excited Premier, who feigned wonder and blustered his innocence, Som­ mers, who complained of a diabolic conspiracy, and the cool, bloodless Bonner who replied, in droning legalese, that he could not accept “asser­ tions, however set forth, when such assertions appear, and are said, to be inferred from a ‘body of evidence’ which, if it exists at all, has not been presented to me. . . . ” 54 Outside the House, the editorial lead was taken by the Times and Sun whose coverage of the entire affair Sommers described as “the most dirty and slanted in the history of B.C.” 55 Badgered by a raucous metro press, sensibly impressed that the Sommers propaganda would worsen for the government in the near future, the Premier an­ nounced, in the summer of 1956, an election for September 19, hardly sufficient time for the Attorney General to act on the R.C.M.P. report which he received in early summer. The Premier was a believer. He had faith: in the sound judgment of the high court of public opinion on an ethical question not yet resolved by the lower court; in the good sense of surfeited electors who, he surmised, cared less about unproven scandal charges and vague questions of morality than about wages, roads and bridges. Considering the robust state of the economy, the high employment, the record government spending, Bennett could not have chosen a better moment for a new mandate. In little more than a year, capital investment had doubled to $1,300,000,000, and builders were so busy that it was hard to get competitive bids on construction projects.56 The 1956 budget, pronounced by the Premier as “a great pros­ perity” budget, a “share the wealth” budget, provided for increased aid to pensioners and other social assistance cases, a civil servants pay boost, a cut in the amusement tax, additional grants to municipalities and a giant road­ building program, totalling eighty million dollars, twice as much as 1955-56 and designed to “increase productivity and make . . . natural resources more accessible for development.” 57 Everywhere in the province, bulldoz­ ers reeled and roared before discerning voters. The southern extension of

200 Pillars of Profit

the P.G.E. was completed and a grand opening tour coincided with the beginning of the campaign.58 The Toll Authority threw spectacular bridges across Vancouver’s harbour, over Okanagan Lake at Kelowna, the Koote­ nay River at Nelson and the Fraser, while Highways Minister Gaglardi, bubbling with enthusiasm, announced his biggest project ever: a freeway to the American border from Vancouver, and a four-lane tunnel under the Fraser River. It was in vain that the Opposition shouted ethics before economics. Hitherto convinced that the government was socialistic, Deane Finlayson lately concluded that the Premier and his associates were lackeys of the timber barons. To prove his point, he risked contempt of court charges at a North Vancouver meeting where he read a detailed list, item by item, of payments made to Robert Sommers by his friend H. Wilson Gray.59 After considerable tussling between the caucus and executive, Arnold Webster’s socialist leadership mantle fell to Robert Strachan, a Nanaimo carpenter with a “brogue as heavy as an oak plank,” 60 who fought an aggressive campaign. But the socialists, hampered by bitter squabbling between fac­ tions of the left and right, were not in prime organizational shape, and Strachan, termed by Robert Bonner in a rare moment of poetic humour as “the breeze from the Hebrides,” laboured noticeably during his “attempts to reassure capitalism that it (had) nothing to fear from the election of a C.C.F. government.” 61 The Liberals went again with Arthur Laing, who challenged Bonner to release the R.C.M.P. report on the Sturdy-Sommers case, offered the C.C.F. a united front, wooed labour by supporting the restriction of the use of the ex-parte injunction,62 paraded a team of six trade union candidates, and offered a “sane and responsible” alternative to chaos and mismanagement through “re-establishing true and conventional methods of stating the debt position and state of the nation.” 63 The Liberal Times and Sun trained their editorial guns on the government, alleging that British Columbia was gov­ erned by a “strange administration” which “threatened to plunge and blunder” the province into an “economic and ethical catastrophe.” 64 The Opposition sought to make the Sommers affair the major campaign issue. To the excited Premier who jauntily led the electors astray, it was irrelevant sideplay, a talking piece for carping opponents who wilfully misrepresented the government record. The Socred campaign slogan was “Progress-not Politics.” 65 Progress meant crude growth, highway and bridge construction, the continued infusion of investment capital, extensive benefits for all classes patriotically joined in a conquest of the northern frontier. The P.G.E. was the gravy train and the Bennett campaign began, appropriately enough, with a widely publicized opening ceremony in North

The New Romans: 1954-1960 201

Vancouver, followed by a visit by the Premier to the far north, to Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, where he favoured the people of the Peace, whose representation was doubled in a 1955 redistribution, with reams of statistics outlining the record spending on highways, bridges and rails, the wondrous debt reduction and huge exploitation of mineral resouces-timber, oil and gas proceeding under the Socred regime. The Premier spoke no ill of the companies whom he felt were patriotic partners with the government and working class in development. When Frank McMahon, the gas pipeline tycoon, who invested heavily in the Peace River area, warmly endorsed the government for aiding and developing the northern gas and oil fields, Ben­ nett was quick to add at a luncheon meeting in the Peace River, that McMahon had paid his taxes and received no special concessions. “It is nice to have this great industrialist have no fear and say what he thinks.” 66 But the Premier was careful to insist that the Socreds, beholden to no special interest, formed a peoples’s government which reduced motor licence fees, raised mothers’ allowances and old age pensions.67 To prove his continuing solicitude for the little man, the forgotten man, the residential homeowner burdened with mortgage payments and property taxes, he promised institu­ tion, during the next session of the Legislature, of a system of homeowner grants; a twenty-eight dollar tax remission for each of the 277,000 in­ dividual resident homeowners in the province.68 Variously described by the Premier as a “first dividend”, “social dividend”, or “Social Credit in ac­ tion,”69 the homeowner grant was offered as a substitute for increased direct grants to municipalities which would benefit commercial and indus­ trial property owners who alone could treat the municipal real property tax as a deductible expense in computing the income tax payable to the federal government.70 By asking the voters to endorse “Progress-not Politics,” Bennett invited them to dispense with cloying morality, to forget the new patronage politics, the road contracts, the resignations from Gaglardi’s highways department, the projected power sellout to the Kaiser interest.71 And, most of all, the Premier urged the voters to ignore the unseemly involvements of Robert Sommers, lately known among his constituents as “Honest Bob” who was nominated in Rossland-Trail by an overwhelming majority.72 There were, to the Premier, other more important, economic questions at stake. On the few occasions when he did refer to the Sommers case, Bennett solemnly promised to abide by the decision of the highest court in the land-the voting public-or else he shed a dry, appropriate tear for the hapless minister whose good name had been muddied by an unethical Opposition. “Poor Som­ mers,” the Premier wept in Kelowna, “he has to clear himself in his con­ stituency and the courts. But the people are the highest court in the land and there are hundreds of thousands here tonight hoping and praying for

202 Pillars of Profit

his acquittal.” 73 On another occasion, Bennett, in a burst of classic erudi­ tion, quoted Shakespeare’s Othello after hinting that Sommers would return to the Cabinet if re-elected and cleared by the courts-” . . . he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.” 74 The reiteration in the press and on the radio, by editorialists and partisan opponents, of the government’s ethical mis­ demeanour, was evidence to Bennett of a sinister plot, a conspiracy by the metropolitan establishment against a peoples’ government. When the Van­ couver Sun refused him equal space on its front page to answer a triple­ column editorial chronicling the government’s “deceits and slick political trickeries,” 75 Bennett purpled with agitation and announced that the issue in the election was “not between political parties, but whether Cromie, this newspaper baron, is trying to set up a super government over the public representatives. I call upon all citizens of our province to rise up and support Social Credit government candidates against this newspaper ba­ ron’s dictatorship.” 76 And they did, in record number. Under the new simple majority system the government returned thirty-nine members and gained 45.84% of the popular vote.77 Mrs. Lydia Arsens, who publicly claimed that doctors were refusing to accept cancer cures, was the sole incumbent defeated. Atlin, Comox, Revelstoke, Skeena and one of the two seats in Vancouver-East were won from the C.C.F. whose popular vote fell to 28.3%. The Liberals won 21.77% of the vote, but returned only two candidates, in Oak Bay and Victoria City. The last vestige of the traditional northern support disap­ peared with the victory of Socred William Murray in Prince Rupert. The desultory Tories, who contested less than half of the constituencies, failed to elect a candidate and gained a mere 3.1% of the popular vote. Considering the hysterics of the campaign, the rancour of the Liberal metro press,78 the potential explosiveness of the Sommer’s case, it was a remarkable victory for the Socreds who consolidated their electoral base and governing credibility. Vacant political infants in 1952, the Socreds, in the space of four years, developed a political ego and a marketable identity exemplified by their aggressive leader. Bennett’s odd flair, his huckstering and boosterism, suitably impressed the voters who thought the new regime novel, innovative and ornately reckless; a government firm enough to pre­ serve a stable legal environment yet sufficiently weird and audacious to relieve the pall of electoral boredom. Political chameleons, the Socreds were acceptable, at one and the same time, to the establishment and anti-estab­ lishment, the companies and workingmen and, above all, to the middle classes, salesmen and merchants-ordinary people all-who were pleased that Orison Swett Marsden was alive, well and living in British Columbia.79

The New Romans: 1954-1960 203

Having shed their tattered gowns of virtue, the Socreds brashly paraded their naughtiness in a province where respect for political and legal niceties were scarcely appreciated.80 Firmly anchored on the bedrock of prosperity, the government, the Premier, the wily Attorney General, even Robert Sommers-who was acquitted by his constituents, 5,097 to 2,839-could do no wrong. “We fought not only four other parties,” the Premier boasted after the results were in, “ . . . but the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the majority of the metropolitan press.” 81 And in a rare burst of modesty, he hailed the Socred sweep as the “greatest victory for the ordi­ nary people since the Magna Carta.” 82 But Bennett had less cause for elation in the months following the au­ tumn election. Sommers may have been acquitted by the highest court in the land, but the lower courts proved considerably more stubborn. After election day, the case simmered for a year, then exploded in the Premier’s face. While the Opposition buried themselves with demands for the release of the R.C.M.P. report, Robert Bonner’s resignation and a proper judicial enquiry, Sommers tenaciously fought his case in the courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada which granted Sturdy the right to peruse the minister’s bank accounts. This was too much for Sommers who, in October 1957, twenty-two months since the case first broke, pleaded illness, disap­ peared from sight, and let the matter lapse, which it did on October 28. Three days later, the haggard Premier announced the appointment of a commission of enquiry, headed by Chief Justice Gordon Sloan, which met on November 12, sat for half an hour, and then adjourned.83 After perusing evidence, secured by subpoena, and previously unavailable on account of the civil suit, Sloan concluded that a full scale criminal prosecution was warranted. Accordingly, on November 21, the Honourable Robert Som­ mers, formerly Minister of the Crown for the province of British Columbia, was arrested at his breakfast table, more than a week after he had admitted, in a public broadcast, to having accepted certain loans; and a full seven hundred and seven days since Robert Bonner first heard the allegations from Sturdy and Eversfield.84 The subsequent trial, which began May 1 and lasted through six adjourn­ ments and eighty-two days of testimony until its conclusion in mid-Novem­ ber 1958, afforded the opposition, press and partisan, a delectable feast. The entire, shabby tale was slowly and painfully unravelled before the public’s eyes: the weaseling of Gray; the machinations of B.C. Forest Products, as recounted by a former chief financial officer, Trevor Daniels; the huckster­ ing in forest management licences; the manoeuvering of Robert Bonner; and the seduction of the Crown’s minister, “ Honest Bob” Sommers, through the provision of loans, carpets, furniture, and airplane rides. For Sommers,

204 Pillars oj Profit a n d th e g o v e rn m e n t, th e s e w e re b la c k d a y s . G ra y w a s c o n v ic te d o f c o n s p i­ r a c y a n d b r i b e r y a n d s e n t e n c e d t o f i v e y e a r s i n j a i l . 85 H i s t w o f i r m s . P a c i f i c C o a s t S e r v ic e s a n d E v e r g r e e n L u m b e r C o m p a n y , a d o r m a n t o u tfit th ro u g h w h ic h m o n e y w a s s e n t to S o m m e r s , w e r e f o u n d g u ilty o f t e n c h a r g e s b e tw e e n th e m a n d fin e d tw e n ty th o u s a n d d o lla r s . B u t th e b ig c o m p a n y , B ritis h C o lu m ­ b ia F o r e s t P r o d u c ts L im ite d , w h ic h p a r a d e d a s tr e a m o f w itn e s s e s te s tify in g to t h e c o m p a n y ’s v i r t u e , w a s a c q u i t t e d . R o b e r t S o m m e r s , w h o d u lly s ta r e d , h e a d b e n t , a t t h e r a i l o f t h e p r i s o n e r s ’ d o c k in t h e V a n c o u v e r A s s i z e C o u r t , a s M r. J u s tic e p o litic a l a n d c o n s p ira c y

J .O . W ils o n la b e lle d

m o ral

and

a tm o s p h e re

s e n te n c e d

to

h im

a “ sc o u n d re l w h o

f o r y e a r s , ” 86 w a s

fiv e y e a r s

b e f o u le d th e

c o n v ic te d

im p ris o n m e n t.

o f b rib e ry ,

H is o r d e a l e n d e d

o n th e tw e n ty - s e v e n th m in u te o f th e e ig h ty - s e c o n d d a y o f th e tr ia l, w h e n a r e d - c o a t e d o f f i c e r o f t h e R . C . M . P . t a p p e d h i s s h o u l d e r l i g h t l y , t h e n le d h im , to g e th e r w ith G r a y , d o w n

th e

s te p s fro m

th e c o u rtro o m

l e a d i n g to

th e c e lls w h e r e th e y a w a ite d th e O a k a lla w a g o n .

If Sommers’s public ordeal was over, then the government’s had merely begun. No sooner was the sentence announced when demands for the resignation of Bonner and the government, and for a general election to clear the air, swept the province. The voices of Finlayson, Laing and Strachan were lost among the chorus of denunciations emanating from numer­ ous constituencies, so fervently delivered that the Vancouver Sun predicted a general election within six months.87 Not even the tanned face and good cheer of the Premier who conveniently vacationed in Phoenix, Arizona during the trial’s final days, could stem the tide of indignation. Upon arrival at the Vancouver airport, Bennett informed incredulous reporters that Som­ mers’s conviction had strengthened the government, since the people real­ ized that British Columbia had a government without fear of favour. “Once they thought there was a law for Cabinet ministers and a law for the people who sweep the streets. Now they know that Mr. Bonner, the most brilliant Attorney General who ever went through law school, has done his duty.” 88 The Premier was not very convincing, even to his own supporters, within and without the Legislature, whose loyalty was shaken by the sensational trial. The Socreds, to be sure, had long been troubled by assorted cranks who grew loud and petulant following the September election. W.B. Carter of Penticton, a past-president of the Similkameen Riding Association, who objected to high taxes, fair-employment legislation and sundry other things, attacked the government legislative program as “typical of socialistic, even communistic, administration.” 89 Vancouver-Burrard president William Sproule quit his position over an Order-in-Council exempting Catholic schools in Coquitlam from municipal taxation while Percy Young, a Daw­ son Creek sage, warned that Zionists, whom he defined as “people who call

The New Romans: 1954-1960 205

themselves Jews but who really are people from Outer Mongolia who went to Israel in 952 B.C.,” threatened “to destroy Social Credit as they have destroyed Christianity.” 90 This was, however, minor stuff compared to the disaffection which set into the legislative party. The major troublemaker was Mel Bryan, the member from North Vancouver, who strongly defended Sommers during the 1956 election. By the autumn of 1957, Bryan was less convinced of Sommers’s virtue, and of the competence and ethics of the Attorney General whose resignation he demanded. Since the Premier was unprepared to part company with Bonner whose legal talents he needed and appreciated, Bryan severed his ties with the Premier, and the entire Socred Party, in early February 1958 when he crossed the floor and sat as an Independent; an act which Bennett, forgetful of his own pirouette a few years earlier, condemned as traitorous.91 Nor was Bryan the sole troublemaker. Cyril Shelford, the drawling Omineca maverick who persist­ ently criticized the government’s agricultural policies, high gasoline prices and the Premier’s control of campaign funds through the British Columbia Free Enterprise and Educational Association, joined with back-benchers Hugh Shantz, George Massey, Stan Carnell and Irving Corbett in publicly expressing their displeasure over the Attorney General’s handling of the Sommers case. V/hen the Opposition moved a non-confidence motion against Bonner in March,92 Shelford, Sharp and Corbett absented them­ selves from the House during the vote. The Sun legislative reporter observed at the end of the 1958 session a noticeable trend towards “freer criticism” of major government policies by Socred back-benchers.93 John Tisdalle, the Saanich member, attacked the government’s appointment of Gordon Sloan as forestry advisor and the cutback in aid to the Woodlands School for Disturbed Children; Fred Sharp described government aid to VancouverEast as “peanuts,” while Alex Matthew, who sat for Vancouver-Centre, informed the House that it was not his business or intention to take orders from the Premier.94 All of this occurred at the end of a session which “presented a picture of the decay of a government, and of a party.”95 Obsessed with inner squabbling, the Socreds lost their legislative initiative. Only a half dozen of the numerous bills crammed through the House were worthy of mention, and these consisted mainly of “second-look” amend­ ments to previous legislation. Had the Sommers case been the sole cause of public disaffection, then the Premier would have had an easier time of it. But the court trial broke at an inauspicious moment when the provincial economy, white-hot during the previous decade, experienced a sudden downturn resulting in a sharp drop in production, sales, capital investment and government revenue.96 Retail sales levelled off and by 1959 were barely higher than in 1956, while private capital investment, which faltered slightly in 1954, declined seri­

206 Pillars of Profit

ously in 1957 and 1958 and by 1959 was still only three-quarters of the boom-year of 1956.97 Bennett responded with a drastic reduction in govern­ ment expenditure. In some regions the temporary highway staff was slashed by ninety-five per cent.98 In December 1957, the government failed to produce its interim grants to school boards who had to borrow $3.5 million from the banks. In furtherance of an announced “economy with efficiency” drive, more than seven hundred employees were lopped off the payrolls, including a large number from the staff of mental institutions, jails and welfare agencies.99 Between 1956 and 1958, the number of civil servants fell from 14,923 to 14,640.100 In the period 1952 to 1960, when total net expenditure per capita increased from $127 to $226, welfare expenditures increased moderately from thirteen to sixteen dollars. In 1959-1960, one out of every four social workers resigned. In 1952 there were 221 social workers; in 1959, 215. Welfare annual case loads increased in the same period from 56,333 to 77,141. The average case load per worker was 254 in 1952; by 1959, it increased to 365.101 The welfare cuts provoked a strong reaction from representatives of the British Columbia division of the Canadian Mental Health Association, who thought the entire mental health program was approaching a standstill, the British Columbia Psychological Associa­ tion who complained of a serious deterioration of services, Socred back­ benchers like Mrs. Buda Brown, and several leading magistrates, including Roderick Haig-Brown who spoke of “something approaching criminal mis­ management of public affairs.” 102 Nor was protest limited to the welfare professionals. At a raucous meet­ ing on the campus of the University of British Columbia, the Premier, who scattered a raft of Socred pamphlets into the audience, was greeted with jeering and catcalls from twenty-five hundred students protesting inade­ quate aid to higher education.103 In February 1958, three hundred and fifty members of the Vancouver Island Dairymen’s Association milked a con­ fused and reticent cow on the steps of the Legislature, then rushed past the guards and pounded on the chamber doors protesting the Milk Board’s removal of the price differential paid to Island producers to offset shipping charges.104 And they received a sympathetic hearing from Socred back­ benchers Frank Richter, John Tisdalle and Cyril Shelford who were openly dissatisfied with Newton Steacy’s occupancy of the Agriculture portfolio. But the major unrest derived from workingmen and their leaders, protesting the wage squeeze of the companies in the forestry, construction and fishing industries as well as the unemployment which accompanied the downturn. From January 1 to April 30, 1958, the time-loss due to strikes was twentytwo times higher than in the previous year, four times the total for 1956 and double the total for 1955 and 1956 combined.105 Strikes among pulp work­ ers, fishermen, teamsters, electricians, plumbers, seamen and construction

The New Romans: 1954-1960 207

workers totalled 500,000 man-days between mid-November 1957 and the end of May 1958. Shutdowns in the forestry, fishing and construction industries in 1959 resulted in a time-loss higher than in any previous year since 1952.106 Labour leaders, of the British Columbia Federation of La­ bour, the central trades and labour councils and major industrial unions, laid the blame for the high unemployment at the doorstep of the govern­ ment, organized numerous deputations and demonstrations, and reminded their workers that only a change in the government could force changes in the laws. The new wave of disaffection rattled the Premier, whose renowned affa­ bility, as the Globe and Mail observed from afar, “suddenly soured into pique.” 107 Bennett was troubled enough by the plaints and ploys of his traditional enemies; but when friends and sympathetic observers like the Province openly questioned “the competence and honesty” of his govern­ ment 108 and demanded an immediate election to resolve the public doubts, Bennett’s pique exploded into aggressive anger. The Premier perceived a diabolic plot by pressure groups-labour leaders, welfare professionals, aca­ demics, federalists and press barons-against a government which to his mind spoke not for sectional groups and selfish interests, but for the un­ differentiated people, the forgotten men whose total sum of needs and wants, as interpreted by the Premier, constituted the general will. Bennett was no frail flower prone to wilt on clouded days. During the Anscomb era he served a painful apprenticeship as an underdog, which steeled him in the art of political war. And he shared, with Oliver and Pattullo, a fierce pugnacity and gift for endless muddle. Adversity meant opportunity, for sharp manoeuvres and political war, for a crusade against the black forces of disorder. Among the many drab tomes of Orison Swett Marsden the Premier favoured most was something called A Handbook for Conquerors. And this is what Bennett, in the hour of his party’s greatest humiliation, at the very nadir of its strength, set out to do; to rout his opponents through deployment of diverse political weaponry, ranging from grand theatre to cheap burlesque, from tangible handouts to diversionary forays and, where necessary, ruthless confrontation. Not the least of Bennett’s weapons was the old growth myth which was given a new dimension at a fashionable cocktail party in London, England, one Sunday in the year 1954. Among those present were Mr. William McAdam of British Columbia House on Regent Street and Mr. Bernard Gore, a financier employed by the Swedish Wenner-Gren Interest. Mr. Gore was noticeably moved by Mr. McAdam’s tall stories about the rosy investment chances in distant British Columbia and, more particularly, about the unlimited profits to be culled from the remote wilderness teeming with softwood, copper, lead, gold and zinc-stretching north from Prince

208 Pillars of Profit

George to the Yukon border. The northern mountain trench area, known as British Columbia’s Siberia, a land of angry rivers bolting through deep canyons, of thick spruce forests distended across the flat trench floor and up the steep sides of snow-crested mountains, was not entirely virginal; for over eighty years prospectors, traders, priests, Indians, bush pilots, police and “an occasional murderer” 109 wandered through its frigid ranges, scratching the surface for whatever purpose-profit, subsistence, or escapesuited the rustic adventurer. But the trench area, for all of its huge poten­ tials and occasional visitors, remained virtually inaccessible and under­ developed; a situation which Mr. Bernard Gore and Mr. Birger Strid of Stockholm, another financial wizard in Wenner-Gren’s employ, hoped to begin to remedy-for a quick profit-when they hopped a plane to Victoria, British Columbia, in November 1956, to speak with the Premier. Bennett was in a listening vein. The impending economic downturn, the miserable Sommers affair, the post-election hangover, the growing restive­ ness of the professional and labour interests, the cussed factionalists within his own party, presaged a period of heavy fording, and Bennett was desparate for some gimmick to chase the demons away. What Gore and Strid proposed, in the wooded quiet of the Premier’s office, seemed to make excellent sense, if not economic, then certainly political. They conjured up a magical picture of mighty sawmills belching forth eddies of smoke into the frigid northern air, of great hydro-electric power units humming along­ side massive dams, of antiseptic town-sites, well-ordered schools, churches, hospitals; in short, an instant industrial satellite, brightly packaged and delivered complete by philanthropic capitalists to wanting provincials. To connect the wilderness state with the mother province, they proposed an aerial mono-railway, to be traversed by cars, teeming with the mountain riches, travelling the four hundred mile distance from Fort McLeod to the Yukon border at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour.110 The Premier liked the sound and shape of it, if only because he sensed that a lively side-show was needed to dazzle the masses and shift their gaze from pressing economic and political questions. Accordingly, on February 12, 1957, Ray Williston announced to the Legislature that a “memorandum of Intent” had been signed between the Government of British Columbia and the Wenner-Gren British Columbia Development Company providing for a five million dollar preliminary survey of an area covering forty thou­ sand square miles-almost one tenth of the land area of the province-to be followed, upon subsequent government approval of the plans, by a two billion dollar development including pulp mills, power sites, town-sites, roads, hospitals, schools, technical colleges and, a standard item in every Wenner-Gren package, the mono-railway.111 In return for a meagre under­ taking to conduct surveys and commence, but not necessarily proceed with

The New Romans: 1954-1960 209

or complete, the construction of the railway by April 1, 1960, Wenner-Gren was given a land and mineral reserve immediately along the proposed mono-rail route-from Fort McLeod to Lower Port-an area from five to fifteen miles wide and four hundred miles long, roughly fifteen per cent of the reserve-as well as a water reserve on the Peace, Parsnip and Findlay Rivers, whose power potentials were well known.112 Far from evoking the expected response of wonder and applause, the Williston announcement met with a chorus of catcalls, of shouts of sellout, typified by the double eight-inch column front-page screamer in the Socred Victoria Colonist which read: “Industrialist Wins Exclusive Rights Over One-Tenth of British Columbia.” 113 The trench area was promptly re­ named Wenner-Gren Land and when Jack Scott flew over the area in a Pacific Western airplane he pronounced himself “Alice in Wenner-Gren Land.” 114 The personal background and affiliations of several of the princi­ pals did not help the Premier’s cause. To Bennett, Axel Wenner-Gren may have been a great industrialist who had parlayed the Electrolux vacuum cleaner and the Servel fridge into a huge personal fortune which included pulp, paper and bank holdings in Sweden, canneries in the Bahamas, ha­ ciendas in Mexico and mines in South America.115 And it was doubtless true that the Swede was an occasional philanthropist, concerned, in his spare moments, with helping his fellow man. Certainly Bernard Gore seemed to believe this when he announced that the profit from the new adventure would go not into Wenner-Gren’s ample pocket but “to scientific research.” 116 But there was another, more sinister side to the Swedish gentleman, which the Premier, in the first blush of his enthusiasm, failed to appreciate. It was common knowledge that Wenner-Gren, and his finan­ cial proteges, were glib talkers who often failed to deliver what they pro­ mised. The Sun discovered that five years earlier Wenner-Gren had an­ nounced plans to spend millions to develop Southern Rhodesia with a mono-rail which was never built,117 while similar starts had been made in other countries including Mexico. More importantly, the Swede had great difficulty living down a miserable war record. Long an associate in Ger­ many’s Krupp munitions cartel and a financier of the Finns in the RussoFinnish War, he had built up a dark reputation as an Axis super-agent for his activities during the Second World War. A friend of Hermann Goering, whom he visited in February 1940 in some sort of an attempt to negotiate peace, he was blacklisted by the Allies during the war for trading with the Axis.118 Wenner-Gren’s tainted past was gladly trotted out by the metro press, and widely broadcast by the Premier’s opponents, who screamed with indignation when it was discovered that Einar Gunderson, Bennett’s Norse eminence, had become involved in the matter. Gunderson was a favourite

210 Pillars of Profit O p p o s itio n ta r g e t, a p rim e sy m b o l o f th e n e w c la s s o f in d u s tr ia l m a g n a te s w h o f lo u ris h e d u n d e r th e S o c r e d r e g im e . In th e s h o r t s p a c e o f f o u r y e a r s , h e a c c u m u la te d m u ltip le d i r e c to r s h ip s in p r iv a te c o m p a n ie s a n d g o v e r n m e n t a g e n c ie s , s e r v in g a s e x e c u tiv e v i c e - p r e s id e n t o f t h e P .G .E ., d i r e c t o r o f th e B r itis h C o l u m b i a T o l l H ig h w a y s a n d B r id g e s A u th o r ity , in a d d it i o n to h o ld in g d i r e c to r s h ip s in t h e C a n a d i a n I m p e r i a l B a n k o f C o m m e r c e , B la c k B a ll F e r r ie s L im ite d

a n d D e a k s - M c B r i d e L i m i t e d , a l a r g e c o n s t r u c t i o n f i r m . 119

H is

a p p o in tm e n t a s a d ir e c to r o f th e W e n n e r - G r e n B .C . D e v e lo p m e n t C o m p a n y L im ite d - w h ic h h e to o k u p s o o n a fte r h e w itn e s s e d th e s ig n in g o f th e M e m o ­ ra n d u m as a to th e

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P .G .E . d ir e c to r a n d w a s fin a l p r o o f t h a t th e

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In the weeks following the announcement, Bennett was loud and nervous in his defence of the Wenner-Gren deal. Gunderson, whom Gore thought “very cultured” was defended as “that great Canadian . . . there is no finer man in British Columbia tonight,” while Opposition attacks on the agree­ ment were dismissed as “smear, carping criticism, snide remarks and McCarthyism.” 120 Bennett maintained that the government made “no deals, no give-aways, no land grants, no concessions . . . no company towns,” but in the course of denying the force and extent of the agreement, he emptied it of its magical content and weakened its propaganda effect. If, as the Premier falsely claimed, Wenner-Gren had been given nothing, then it was reasonably to be expected that he would do nothing in return. The wonderland of Wenner-Gren was quickly perceived as no more than a greedy gleam in an aged Swede’s eye. By the summer of 1957, Bennett was hard-pressed to refurbish his fading northern vision. But he soon found a way, in Wenner-Gren land, at a site where the Parsnip and Findlay rivers joined with the Peace River, the great sixteen hundred mile stream traversed by Alexander Mackenzie which flowed easterly through the Rockies and joined with the Mackenzie in a furious run to the Arctic Ocean. British Columbia, the Premier perceived, was about ripe for a power play by the provincial government, which stood anxiously by for over a decade while the federal government jousted with American authorities, public and private, over the power potential of the Columbia River basin. Possessed of almost twice as much underdeveloped water power as any other Canadian province,121 British Columbia was nonetheless approaching a power famine, a state already reached by her neighbouring states to the south, who were prepared “to grind out elec­ tricity with a hand organ,” if need be.122 W.A.C. B e n n e t t w a s p r e p a r e d , b y t h e a u t u m n o f 1 9 5 7 , t o w e a n t h e th ir s tin g in f a n t a n d s te a l s o m e o f th e p o litic a l c r e d its f r o m th e fe d e ra l g o v ­ e r n m e n t, w h ic h h e n e v e r fo rg a v e fo r th e s a b o ta g e o f th e K a is e r P o w e r d e a l.

The New Romans: 1954-1960 211

At a carefully staged press conference held only moments after the official opening of West Coast Transmission’s $195 million natural gas pipeline from the Peace, he denounced the “stalled negotiations” and “pink teas” between the federal and American governments over the Columbia, then unveiled his plans for “the greatest hydro-electric project in the world” on the Peace River, a project which would be “entirely within the control of the Government of British Columbia.” 123 Flushed with excitement, Ben­ nett told a wondrous tale, of the brilliant surveys conducted by a British firm retained by the Wenner-Gren B.C. Development Company Limited, of a mighty dam, at one-third the cost of Mica, just east of the Findlay forks on the Peace, of the largest man-made lake in the world, some two hundred and fifty miles long and ten to fifteen miles wide, located in the heart of the trench, of power supplied to Vancouver at rates cheaper than those charged by the B.C.E., of a power potential even greater than that of the Columbia, and of changes to a warmer climate induced by topographical altera­ tion. 124 “What this means to the future of such centres as Prince George,” he enthused, “what it means in the opening up of a vast new world for the use and livelihood of our growing population, what it will do to weather conditions and transportation in the area affected is almost too stupendous a subject to consider.” 125 So he stopped. But the Province, which led a chorus of adulation from the outback press, dutifully concluded the rhap­ sody, “Visionary it all is, and brain-numbing it is in the sheer size of it-the power of Grand Coulee and Hoover Dam combined, perhaps the greatest man-made lake on earth . . . but listen to that gas surging into Vancouver through six hundred and fifty miles of mountains. Here, in this growing province, dreams can come true.” 126 Being a dreamer, Bennett was barely possessed of the facts before his momentous announcement. He had no guarantee of a market for the pros­ pective Peace power, no likely promise from the British Columbia Electric Company to buy Peace power, no proper estimate that Peace power would be economical. For fifteen years, I.C.R.E.B. experts had closely studied the feasibility of the Columbia River development; the Wenner-Gren people studied the Peace potential for only two years. But the Kelowna loner was determined to outdo the man from Prince Albert. Bennett seized on the Peace idea with a vengeance, and the two river policy-the simultaneous development of both the Peace and Columbia rivers, the one by private interests and the other by public-quickly became a cornerstone of govern­ ment policy and propaganda. When W.C. Mainwaring stated, in January 1960, that the Peace project would be dropped if the Columbia development proceeded first and Peace promoters were not allowed by the federal gov­ ernment to export power, Bennett replied with the assertion that “anyone who is not in favour of both is not in favour of the development of British

212 Pillars of Profit

Columbia . . . if you are not in favour of the Columbia you are holding back development of the Kootenays . . . if you are not in favour of the Peace you are holding back the development of Central and Northern British Columbia.” 127 He hailed the Peace project as a trump in the hands of the federal government negotiators-who haggled with the Americans over downstream and flood control benefits-since the power-hungry Ameri­ cans realized that British Columbia could soon meet its needs from an alternative source. And Bennett conjured up a dam boom involving con­ struction of the world’s biggest earth-filled dam, creation of a reservoir six times the size of Grand Coulee, and eventual power production of more than five million horsepower-that would economically resuscitate the entire province. Nor was he content to stop there. During a Cabinet tour of the northern and central Interior in July 1959, he announced a proposal to annex a fifth of the Northwest Territories in exchange for provincial mainte­ nance of the British Columbia section of the Alaska Highway. According to the Bennett plan, which countered Diefenbaker’s proposals to convert the Northwest Territories into an eleventh province, British Columbia’s borders would stretch from Osoyoos in the south to Beaufort Sea in the north. The vision was finally extended to the rim of the Arctic Circle. Not all of Bennett’s histrionics were wasted on the politics of grandeur. An adept circus master, the Premier peddled a number of sideshows, rang­ ing from vaudeville debt-juggling performances to vagabond Cabinet ses­ sions which delivered, all wrapped in broad smiles and friendly chuckles, sundry hardware and fixtures to needy locals. The Kelowna vaudeville show of August 1959 was preceded by a fit of bookkeeping legerdemain calculated to impress the masses with the province’s debt-free status. But in his anxiety to juggle the books, the Premier ran headlong into H. Lee Briggs, general manager of the British Columbia Power Commission, who denounced the government’s policy of demanding immediate payment of the thirty-two million dollar bond issue-so that the government could clear the books and declare itself debt-free-as a betrayal of the taxpayer, since Hydro would have to re-issue bonds at a higher interest rate.128 Briggs was perturbed and, in a series of press releases, launched a broad attack on the Premier’s integrity and intelligence, on Gunderson’s multiple directorships, on the Wenner-Gren deal which involved the give-away of natural resources “worth more than King Solomon’s Mines,” and on the British Columbia Electric Railway Company which strangled the Province’s power develop­ ment. Bennett responded with the firing of Briggs, the appointment of a royal commission headed by Gordon Shrum to look into the financial management of the public utility and, finally, the Kelowna bond-burning festival, a Socred teach-in calculated to convince the masses that the debtfree Valhalla had finally arrived.

The New Romans: 1954-1960 213

The Premier, of course, was only joking. On August 2, 1959, when the Loomis armoured truck, loaded with a raft of cancelled bonds and accom­ panied by R.C.M.P. outriders, pulled into Kelowna in preparation for the burning, scheduled for the following day, the province was hugely distant from debt-free status. The indirect debt, which the Premier insisted was no debt at all, was greater than ever, while Deputy Finance Minister, G.S. Bryson, was moved to admit that there was still some ninety-eight million dollars in bonds in the hands of the public which would not mature until 1977.129 But this failed to impress the New Romans, who spent over forty thousand dollars from the British Columbia free-enterprise educational fund in support of a Socred teach-in, the likes of which had rarely been seen in the province before. What Robert Strachan thought to be “some ancient Paganistic ritual, a sort of Roman holiday” 130 was described by the Premier-a latterday Nero, presented with a plastic stringless violin by Derek Inman at a civic luncheon in the Kelowna Athletic Club-as “the happiest day in British Columbia,” an occasion so close to the heart of Bennett that he was moved to decree the lifting of the tolls from all bridges, ferries and tunnels for eighteen hours to celebrate the end of the province’s debt.131 The Roman holiday was a shoddy emanation of the public relations mind; and a genuine expression of Socred haute kultur. It featured a garden party, replete with tea and Ovaltine, at the Premier’s house, a civic luncheon in the Kelowna Athletic Club attended by six hundred persons at which Inman introduced W.A.C. Bennett as “Winning Ways, Astute, Courageous Bennett,” a momentary loss of words by the Premier quickly followed by an unrelieved torrent of self-congratulatory expletives, the presentation of tin whistles, toy drums, cardboard accordians and stringless violins to assorted Cabinet ministers, and a hearty rendering of “Happy Birthday dear Social Credit, Happy Birthday to you.” In addition, there was a party in the park for the children, some thirty-five hundred in number, who were stuffed with ice cream, hot dogs and candies of every sort; a parade down the main street led by the smiling Premier, flanked by shapely beauty queens and trailed by the inevitable Loomis armoured car; and a water show at the Aquatic Club, which featured a swimming race contested by four youths plastered with signs Bennett, Strachan, Perrault and Finlayson. Tugged by a rope, the Bennett boy won easily. All of this was preliminary to the historic burning of the bonds which were loaded, sixty-nine boxes full, onto a raft made of logs, lashed together with cable, covered on top with auto tires, straw mill shavings and an oil preparation. As the Premier’s boat, loaded with Cabinet ministers, ap­ proached the raft, a red-coated R.C.M.P. officer mounted the doomed craft then lit the fire which began to burn as the Premier’s boat glided by. Armed with a sturdy bow and flaming arrow, Bennett took aim and

214 Pillars of Profit

misfired; his arrow hit the log and disappeared into the water. But the raft happily burned, the festival expired, and what remained of British Colum­ bia’s net direct debt sank, directly and indirectly, to the bottom of Okana­ gan Lake. “I have confidence in Mr. Bennett,” Mrs. O. McIntyre, a Kelowna housewife, testily declared. “I believe what he says is true.” 132 Similar sentiments were entertained by many Jaycees, Legionaires, junior aldermen, businessmen, contractors and homeowners-including not a few workingmen-who, in the dying years of the decade, were treated to a fit of spending by a gypsy Cabinet which littered the province with hardware during its many outings. Momentarily taken with the politics of grandeur, Bennett, an accomplished merchandiser, was never forgetful of the politics of bouts de chemin. “It’s significant,” Jack Scott later noted, “that the merchandise upon which he relies in public life is a sort of hardware window display”;133 a view endorsed by a Globe and Mail reporter who noted: “The project which his supporters admire are all of the type that hits a voter in the eye, day after day after day.” 134 In an interview with Pat Carney, Bennett admitted that “supplying the needs of the community in business” was “similar to supplying the needs of electors.” 135 It was to pacify the needs of his political consumers that Bennett, never a sedentary Victorian, converted his Cabinet into a mobile assembly. A master of offensive politics, he by-passed the pressure groups who chased him to Victoria, and took Victoria to the people. Throughout 1959 and 1960, the Cabinet met in city halls and municipal council chambers, received delegations-from boards of trade, associated chambers of commerce, road-building associations, old age pensioners, farmers’ unions, and mosquito-control boards-and attended banquets and noon luncheons sponsored by local nabobs. And every session typically concluded with an announcement that a piece of road, a bridge, or other useful implements would soon be forthcoming. Wherever the Premier and his gypsy retinue went, whether to Vancouver or Courtney, Creston or the Gulf Islands, Kitimat or New Westminster, they were trailed by photographers and public relations men who rushed to tell the public about the gifts bestowed. The north Island performance, in August of 1959, was typical. On the day the Cabinet arrived in Courtney, workmen ap­ peared to replace the worn old arterial bridge which the local people barely had time to complain about.136 And after hearing a brief from the As­ sociated Chambers of Commerce of Vancouver Island in the same town, Highways Minister Gaglardi announced the immediate construction of a road to open up north Vancouver Island. The Premier was dearly pleased with the appreciative response to his Cabinet caravan. After stiffly posing for a photographer, while clutching three cheques-for Vancouver’s Theatre under the Stars, the Vancouver Aquarium Society and the Delta Agricul­ tural Society-he reminded his audience that the mobile Cabinet proved “the

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Government doesn’t live in any ivory tower . . . it goes to the people,” 137 a sentiment endorsed by New Westminster Mayor Beth Wood, who smiled when she described a Cabinet visit to the Royal City as “taking the Govern­ ment to the people.” 138 There was one group, however, that felt the people were being taken by the government. The Socred miracle play was incomplete without a tried and proven villain and the Premier found one in the union leaders who were fiercely cudgelled in the waning years of the decade. The 1956 election was followed by a renewed consolidation and militancy by the labour movement in reaction to the spate of court injunctions, rising prices and widespread unemployment. The 1955 merger of the A.F.L. and C.I.O. in the United States paved the way for a similar consolidation in Canada the following year when the Canadian Labour Congress was born out of the union be­ tween the C.C.L. and T.L.'C.139 In British Columbia, the Trade Union Congress, the provincial legislative mouthpiece of the craft T.L.C. union since 1952, united with the C.C.L.-British Columbia Federation of Labour, to form the British Columbia Federation of Labour (C.L.C.) which held its first convention in Vancouver in November 1956. Similar mergers took place at the level of the central labour councils and paved the way for closer ties between the union movement and the C.C.F., in British Columbia as well as across the country. At the November 1956 British Columbia Federa­ tion of Labour convention, a committee was set up to consult with farm organizations, co-operatives and the C.C.F. with a view to forging a com­ mon program of political action. The 1957 convention rejected the option of independent labour political action, voting seventy-five per cent in favour of endorsing the C.C.F. A joint liaison committee was created early in 1958 to bring about an interim “working partnership” for the purpose of fighting the next provincial election and to work with the federal C.L.C.-C.C.F. Joint Political Action Committee to promote discussion of the proposed new party supported by union and C.C.F. leaders at the federal level.140 Delegates to the B.C. Federation of Labour convention of October 1959 voted three hundred and sixty to forty in favour of backing the C.C.F.described in the resolution as “a party which has consistently fought for labour’s aims”-in the next provincial election.141 The Socreds took notice of the labour intrusion and launched a holy war against the union leadership. The 1959 meeting of the Legislature, known as the Labour Session, was the occasion for the introduction of a spate of restrictive legislation which hardened the lines between the governing party and the union movement. When eleven thousand civil servants struck and picketed the government buildings in mid-March, protesting the govern­ ment’s refusal to make public a royal commission report on civil service bargaining rights, the government defined the protest as “a taking-over, a

216 Pillars of Profit

usurpation, by persons not elected or responsible to the public of the prov­ ince, of the functions of government,” took out a Supreme Court injunction which ended the strike after four hours, and passed a bill prohibiting the picketing of government buildings or operations and forbidding anyone from preventing government employees from performing their duties.142 The same session witnessed the passage of a more comprehensive restrictive union bill-known as Bill 43-which outlawed sympathy-strikes, boycotts and secondary picketing, continued to legitimate ex-parte injunctions and made unions liable for prosecution as legal entities.143 And when the Seafar­ ers International Union struck the Black Ball and C.P.R. Ferries in the spring of 1958, the Premier announced the entry of the government into the ferry business in competition with the two existing lines so that “in the future ferry connections between Vancouver Island and the mainland shall not be subject to the whim of union policy or the indifference of federal agencies.” 144 Bennett’s assault evoked a bitter response which inspired the government to further intensify its propaganda attack. From the labour side, there came a stream of denunciations, describing the new Trade Unions Act as “NaziFascist type legislation,” 145 and urging full support for the C.C.F. to turn out the Government. “There will be no freedom in this land,” I.W.A. regional president, Joe Morris, told a British Columbia Federation of La­ bour convention, “until we forge for ourselves a proper political expression based on the Trade Union Movement and the C.C.F. Party.” 146 From the government, there emerged a stream of expletives depicting union leaders as gangsters, selfish bureaucrats and misleaders of labour. “If you don’t like a management boss,” Robert Bonner lectured his constituents, “why should you like a labour boss? A labour boss who goes wrong is worse that a management boss who hasn’t the interests of his employees at heart.” 147 Phillip Gaglardi branded union leaders as “agitators” who failed to give workers a fair shake and protested to the House, “we don’t need any Hoffas or gangsterism in this province”;148 a view endorsed by Works Minister Chant who was convinced that “union leaders in some quarters have re­ placed bootlegging, gambling and the rackets as the recognized domain of the hoodlum and gangster.” Eric Martin, a sometime physical education instructor, thought the C.C.F., led by a union man, presumptuous in criti­ cizing the government. “How can they criticize us,” he queried, “when they have a carpenter for leader?” 149 Blessed with a merchandiser as leader, the Socreds balanced their attack on the union leadership with a flurry of handouts in preparation for the general election of September 12, 1960. A one billion dollar ten-year high­ way-construction program was announced at the 1959 legislative session, together with amendments to the Workmens’ Compensation Act providing

The New Romans: 1954-1960 217

for higher widow and children’s benefits and easier appeal procedures. At the following session, the homeowners’ grant was increased from twentyeight dollars to fifty dollars, educational grants were upped by ten million dollars and social welfare payments increased by twenty per cent.150 Having thus unburdened his treasury, Bennett set out to slay the socialist dragons in the closest and the most bitterly contested campaign since his accession to power. The Socred campaign began early, before the announce­ ment of the election, May 13, when Bennett announced that four firms of impeccable credentials and international repute-A.V. Roe Company, a subsidiary of Britain’s Hawker-Siddeley Group Limited, Lord Chandos’s Associated Electrical Industries Limited, Cleveland Bridge and Engineer­ ing Limited of Darlington, England, and Perini Limited, owned by Lou Perini of the Milwaukee Braves-were prepared to join with the WennerGren interests in construction of the seven hundred mile $250 million railway through northern British Columbia to the Alaska border. That the P.G.E. was not yet earning its keep or entertaining any real prospects of funding the costly endeavour, and that there was practically no industry along the prospective line from which to yield the estimated yearly fifteen million dollars return to cover costs and no prospects of approval for construction from the Public Utilities Commission,151 failed to deter Ben­ nett and his party, which included Bernard Gore, Gunderson, Williston and several public relations men, from acting out a silly charade on the after­ noon of June 29 in a dusty clearing thirty-five miles north of Prince George, where the Premier announced, after clutching a power saw which felled a yard-thick fir, the commencement of the construction of “the longest rail­ way of the century.” 152 Such histrionics were not, however, the meat and substance of a vicious fear campaign which received powerful ancillary support from the compa­ nies. The Liberal and Conservative parties were ignored and their remnant supporters urged to prevent a split in the free-enterprise vote by supporting a beleaguered “little government” whose only fault was the defence of private property against Marxian socialists and power-hungry labour bosses. “Because this little government had the nerve to put this Bill (43) through,” Bennett tremulously announced, “all these labour bosses are moving into B.C. in an invasion now . . . the issue is this: whether a government with the courage to protect not big business or big labour, but ordinary people, can last, or whether these pressure groups are going to run the country. If there is anything the workingman fears more than industry bosses it is labour bosses. If they had control of the government as well as the unions the men will have to jump every time these big labour bosses with their cigars and their hotel rooms snapped their fingers.” 153 Bennett’s lieutenants joined in a chorus of denunciation, repeating that C.C.F. plans

218 Pillars 0/ Projit

to take over the B.C.E. would not result in cheap electricity or create additional jobs, that Fidel Castro and labour politicians had much in com­ mon since both attempted “to grab established business firms whenever they can,” 154 and that the Saskatchewan government, which scared away inves­ tors, created work conditions which approximated slave-labour camps in the Soviet Union.155 The Socreds received powerful ancillary support from the Interior press incensed at the temerity of the union leaders, and from the Province which pronounced the political situation in British Columbia, “unique in Canadian political history. Never before has a highly industrialized area created by private investments (unlike Saskatchewan, which is largely a farming community) faced such a serious threat from the proponents of state ownership”;156 from the business community which complemented its direct contribution to the Socred campaign fund with sub rosa educational campaigns warning of the evils of socialism and perils of a split freeenterprise vote, conducted through front organizations like the British Columbia Federation of Trade and Industry, the British Columbia Associa­ tion of Good Government and sundry Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade. A Vancouver stock exchange report given wide publicity in late August reminded electors that investment decisions rested upon voters’ choices, and the development of the oil and gas industry, “from long experi­ ence . . . sensitive to nationalistic or socialistic attack,” 157 depended upon outside investors who duly noted “the political climate towards their indus­ try.” 158 The Federation of Trade and Industry, which included as directors W.C. Mainwaring, President of the Peace River Power Development Com­ pany and formerly with B.C. Electric, Harold Merilees, executive assistant to the president of British Columbia Electric and James Hamilton, vicepresident of B.C. Telephone, launched a huge spending campaign featuring learned disquisitions on the evils of expropriation and the failure of Saskat­ chewan socialism.159 And they were joined by Frank McMahon, president of West Coast Transmission and chairman of the Board of Pacific Pe­ troleum Limited, the big boss of the Peace River oil and gas boom, whose remarks, carefully planted in the Toronto Telegram, were dutifully repro­ duced on the front page of the Province. “I know that it is unwise for a businessman to involve himself in politics,” McMahon modestly intoned, “and probably I shouldn’t be doing it. But I consider the present political situation so potentially explosive for British Columbia and so dangerous for all of us that I feel I must speak now, not after the election.” 160 Confessing to being a “political Liberal” who came to support Social Credit because “fate has made me work under that kind of good government ever since I started out in Alberta,” 161 he pleaded with his readers to save the economy and themselves, by underwriting stable government-“I do not believe that

The New Romans: 1954-1960 219

the money for the natural gas and oil development program that is under­ way could be raised if the present stable government of British Columbia is displaced by a socialist one, or if it is weakened by a vote which will so divide the Legislature among the various parties that none has the strength to guarantee continuity of policy at Victoria . . . I give credit to the people of British Columbia for being intelligent enough to realize that the enor­ mous investments needed to fully develop the natural gas resources of this province are not found under toadstools.” Riding on the election, he con­ cluded, was a four hundred and fifty million dollar natural gas transmission system to be built over the next three years resulting, according to the tycoon’s own calculations, in the creation of about ten thousand permanent jobs. The Socreds’ scare tactics were badly received by the Liberals, now headed by former ad man Ray Perrault, who sought to prevent the polariza­ tion of opinion forced by the government. Perrault spoke for the middle way and middlemen, for the moderate small businessmen and disinterested workingmen who abhorred the unseemly class war between the companies and the Marxists. “The C.C.F. is going to save us from the octopus arms of the capitalist, Social Credit is going to save us from the cigar-chomping union bosses. I say a plague on both your houses. This is a phony class war of briefcases against lunch baskets.” 162 The hotter the rhetoric from left and right, the greater did Perrault point to the Liberals as guarantors of class unity; as the only party capable of healing the deep wounds of social disalfection-“Social Credit is incapable of calling this province to unity because organized labour hates the government and can you imagine the C.C.F. sitting down and negotiating with business and management?” 163 His views were endorsed by the Liberals’ true friend, the Sun, which denounced the Socreds for crudeness and dishonesty and C.C.F.’s union friends for exacting “false tribute” from the workers through the use of paid union officials for political purposes.164 Abjuring the class struggle slogans of left and right, the Sun supported the “honest alternative to socialism” which it found in the Liberal Party.165 The C.C.F. safely ignored the Liberals and trained their full guns on the governing party. Possessed of unprecedented labour support, the socialists fought an efficient campaign. Pro-C.C.F. unions created constituency as­ sociations of labour consisting of all interested unionists residing within a single constituency. Labour and C.C.F. constituency conferences discussed candidates and local campaign plans and their recommendations were placed before regular C.C.F. nominating conventions.166 Local campaigns were supervised and co-ordinated by campaign committees consisting of representatives of both groups. The C.C.F. program, ratified at the Party’s 1959 convention, endorsed public ownership in the production and distribu­

220 Pillars of Profit

tion of power, nationalization ofjlDHish Columbia Telephone, public medi­ cal insurance and the repeal ofmill 4 3 /Forestry and agriculture were to be left in private hands. Among the guests welcomed by the socialists in the late stages of the campaign were T.C. Douglas and Ross Thatcher who reminded voters that private capital freely entered Saskatchewan and flour­ ished alongside the Crown corporations.167 Less welcome was Tim Buck, national leader of the Communist Party, who publicly stated that sixty Communist Party members were actively working within the local labour movement in preparation for the approaching C.C.F.-C.L.C. merger con­ vention; an announcement which prompted Robert Strachan to conclude that Buck was “mentally incompetent” and “in the pay of the Premier and the Socreds,” and inspired the Province to fulminate editorially against “the ever-zealous commies who hope through the labour unions and the new C.C.F.-labour political party to finally insinuate themselves into positions of power.” 168 The government barely survived the socialist assault. In the closest elec­ tion since 1952, the Socred representation was reduced to thirty-six and their popular vote to 38.83%.169 Two Cabinet ministers were defeated; Agricultural Minister Newton Steacy in North Vancouver and Labour Minister Lyle Wicks in Dewdney, where he fell before Dave Barrett, a young social worker dismissed from his job as personnel officer at the Haney Correctional Institute in July 1959, after receiving the C.C.F. nomination. The Socreds retained their urban base in Vancouver-Centre, Burrard and Point Grey and in Victoria City, where they held all four seats. They held firm, as well, in the Okanagan, north and south, the Peace and the North with the exception of Atlin. In the Cariboo, Fraser Valley-where they yielded Dewdney and Delta to the C.C.F.-and the Island, they traded seats with the socialist opposition.170 The Socred seat majority obscured the precariousness of their victory. Had the C.C.F. collected about four thou­ sand more votes-properly redistributed in Comox, Lillooet, Nanaimo, Omineca, Prince Rupert, Salmon Arm, Vancouver-Burrard and SkeenaBritish Columbia would have had its first socialist government. But such thoughts barely intruded into the mind of Bennett, who was not given to retrospective hypothesizing. Apprised of the old wisdom that one happily placed vote was as good as a surplus hundred, the Premier beamed and muttered as usual on election night, and was pleased to receive greet­ ings from his many friends and admirers, including Frank McMahon, who thought the Socred return a certain guarantee of the present stability and future prosperity of the Province of British Columbia.

CHAPTER VIII

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963

“Our father who art in Victoria, Hydro be thy flame, Thy Kingdom Shrum, Thy Phil is done on earth-but Not in heaven! Give us this day our daily bridge And forgive us our taxes As we forget the contingent liabilities Against us.” A. Fotheringham “We are not interested in the politics of power. We want to be able to turn on a switch and see the lights on.” P.A. Gaglardi.

Francis Murray Patrick McMahon had good reason to be pleased with the underwriting of a regime which had helped him rise from a grizzly bushdriller into a manicured penthouse tycoon. A native of Moyie, a small mining town in the southern Interior, who briefly attended Gonzaga Uni­ versity before working as a four-dollars-a-day diamond-driller at the Sul­ livan Mine In Kimberley, McMahon had long been frustrated in his search for oil and gas in the sprawling Peace. When the eager driller made his way north in the mid-thirties, he found the area closed to private developers by T.D. Pattullo who had placed the high potential oil and gas fields of the Peace under a Crown reserve, a restriction which hampered private exploi­ tation for almost a decade. But McMahon was a persistent sort. When the reserve was finally lifted by the coalition one day in August 1947, the Moyie native was granted several permits after appearing first in line before the government office at an early morning hour.1 Four years later, on November 1, 1951, McMahon brought in his first discovery well, Fort St. John No. 1, a precursor to numerous others in an area, stretching from northern Alberta to the North­ 221

222 Pillars of Profit

west Territories, which contained gas reserves estimated to be greater than the entire known gas reserves of the United States.2 Henceforth, it was easy sledding for McMahon who was abetted in his promotional ventures by provincial and federal governments which shared his determination to export, at whatever price, the energy resources of British Columbia to the hungry industries of the American Pacific North­ west. In December 1954, West Coast Transmission Company Limited, incorporated by McMahon in 1949, won a contract to supply natural gas to the Americans; a sale approved by the National Energy Board of Canada and by the Premier of British Columbia, who beamed with delight when McMahon announced commencement of construction of the six-hundredand-fifty-mile pipeline from the Peace country to the American border. By the year 1957, Frank McMahon had built a pipeline to the craving industries of the American Northwest, a project which enhanced Bennett’s conception of Moyie native as a noble and patriotic tycoon.3 But the Premier was prepared to forgive and forget: that McMahon had been named by United States Attorney General William P. Rogers as a co-conspirator, though not a defendant, along with three executives of major American natural gas companies in an indictment involving the restriction of distribu­ tion competition in several American mid-western states;4 that British Columbians paid one third more for their natural gas than their southern neighbours;5 that McMahon was earning large profits which led to exces­ sive local gas rates; that a vital natural resource was being sold to the Americans at a fire sale price. Following the wisdom of Marsden, Bennett thought positively. He gladly pondered the sixty-eight new oil wells and the two hundred producing gas wells as of March 31, I960,6 the thirteen million dollars in revenue which the government treasury received during the fiscal year ending March 31, 1960, and the sudden transformation of British Columbia from a good oil and gas prospect into a major petroleum province. And, after the hair’s-breadth election of 1960, Bennett thought of new ways of fostering the province’s prosperity, which he began to do in February 1960 when he announced in the Legislature that a newly formed company-Western Pacific Products and Crude Oil Pipeline Compa­ ny-had been favoured over two other firms with government approval to construct a thirty-five million dollar pipeline to deliver Peace oil to the lower mainland via Kamloops. For Frank McMahon, it was a good deal. Since West Coast Transmission already owned a right-of-way, sixty feet wide and three hundred miles long, from Fort St. John to Kamloops, there was no need for the new firm to go outside the corporate family. Accord­ ingly, a two-hundred-foot-wide strip of the right-of-way was transferred to the Western Pacific Company, in return for which McMahon and his friends received 750,000 shares,7 and eventually gained a profit estimated

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 223

at fifteen million dollars.8 When N.D.P. M.L.A. Alex Macdonald re­ counted the latest chapter of the pipeline saga to the Legislature, P.A. Gaglardi replied that Macdonald, a lawyer by profession, was a profiteer who took the taxpayers’ money to go through law school.9 But Gaglardi’s major invective was not reserved for Macdonald. The oil pipeline announcement at the 1961 session was banished from the front pages by the bitter controversy over further amendments to the Labour Relations Act which continued the government’s frontaL assault on both organized labour and the socialist opposition. According to the Socred logic, socialist politicians like Macdonald were double exploiters who sup­ plemented their profits from the public purse-which footed their educa­ tional bills-with a forced tribute from trade unionists whose dues, guaranteed to the union through a check-off mechanism, were diverted to support dangerous political activities. The Socreds were displeased with the'' new marriage between organized labour and the old C.C.F., consummated at a late October convention in Vancouver’s Bayshore Inn at which the New Democratic Party of British Columbia was born. They thought it unfair, even downright sinister, that socialists and union leaders were conspiring together to defeat a peoples’ government which sought to protect ordinary workingmen, who rolled their own tobacco and drank beer, from their leaders, who smoked cigars and sipped whisky. So they induced conjugal strains by passing Bill 42, introduced by Labour Minister Leslie Peterson, which allowed the continuation of the check-off but decreed that no part of the money collected could be used to support any political party or candidates. The new bill, labelled by a royal commission on election ex­ penses as “one of the rare examples of a provincial law governing election expenses which was certainly effective and clearly controversial,” 10 re­ quired the unions to sign statutory declarations disavowing the transfer of check-off dues for political purposes. In the event of a failure to sign, the unions lost all of their check-off rights. The bill further enabled employers whose money was used for political purposes contrary to the provisions of the bill to take remedial action against the union. And it required every union to make available to all members once a year an audited financial statement “in sufficient detail to disclose accurately the financial condition of the union for the previous year.” 11 Bill 42 sparked a bitter debate in the Legislature between its introduction on February 21 and passage more than a month later. Outside the House, labour leaders like Joe Morris, who thought the new law was “designed to create confusion and arouse distrust of the unions’ fight,” 12 sounded mild compared to Pat O’Neal, secretary of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, who suggested a general strike was needed to bring the government to heel.13 The loose talk of a mass shutdown immensely pleased the Socreds who

224 Pillars of Profit

revived their old song about union leaders strangling orderly development. The performance during the 1961 session was typical of a regime which had long learned to reward its friends and punish its enemies. The crude yard­ stick was raw growth. Those who threatened the infusion of new capital, who sought to cut into the profits of foreign investors, who enforced de­ mands for minimum living conditions by withdrawing their labour, or threatening to do so, who spoke of public ownership and public control, were enemies of progress and prophets of doom whose just deserts were measures like Bill 42. Contrarily, the company men, the foreign investors with itchy palms, the giant firms of the resource sector who stripped and shipped the province’s raw resources, and local favourite sons like Ben Ginter and Frank McMahon, who proved that outback grizzlies could dictate memos in penthouse offices and vacation in Palm Springs, were civic patriots guaranteed a favourable legal climate for further exploitation. The Socreds, like the McBride Conservatives a half century earlier, were abettors and captives of the corporate frontiersmen who sweetened their search for high profits with calming assurances about job security and development; progenitors of a rush, not for the old elixir but for baser stuff, timber, metals and, not least, the energy resources of the eternal threshold province. What the Socreds meant by growth, which momentarily pacified the dispossessed, was really inequity, distortion and subordination. The wage increments of the workers was miniscule compared to the huge profits of the international companies. Class divisions were perpetuated and differ­ ential rewards retained. The secondary sectors of the economy remained weak and small in the wake of the hypertrophy of the capital-intensive primary extractive sector which yielded dividends far out of proportion to jobs. Workingmen remained subordinate producers in a province where companies ruled their domains like feudal lords. Bennett’s British Columbia was the same woman kept by Richard McBride; a courtesan rather than a queen, a paper empire appended to a real one. The political messianism of the Premier, his sunny northern vision, his nervous urge to men of all classes to join hands in an assault on the North, his subordination of the outback to the party machine and its exploiting partner, the large company, his war cry against the Ottawans and socialists to keep their hands off the province’s resources-so that the compa­ nies could better exploit them-bespoke a narrow provincial imperialism which disguised a real subordination to outside powers. Six decades after Sir Richard McBride waltzed into Victoria, British Columbia remained an abject hinterland whose residents hewed the wood and drew the water for faceless companies. During sixty years, only the direction and extent, not the fact of subordination, had changed. More scientifically managed, exploi­ tation proceeded apace. Control, ownership, power, lay perceptibly in the

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 225

South. The eagle soared over the sea of mountains and spied prizes endless. What the famished bird glimpsed and wanted in the months after the election of 1960, the Premier was prepared to give. Already possessed of a sizeable share of the province’s timber, base metals, and natural gas, the Americans wanted electrical power in massive quantities to drive the indus­ tries of the Pacific Northwest. To get the power, they needed storage dams on the Canadian side of the border to limit floods on the lower Columbia, which caused millions of dollars of damage and took many lives, and to control the river’s erratic flow so that water could be released during the winter low-flow season to drive the generators installed below the border. Of the various plans submitted by the I.C.R.E.B. to the International Joint Commission in 1959, which provided the basis for the subsequent treaty negotiations, the Americans least preferred the Dorr diversion scheme, favoured by the patriotic General A.G.L. McNaughton, which would have diverted the Kootenay River, a tributary of the Columbia, into its parent river on the Canadian side of the border.14 The McNaughton scheme provided for storage at the top of a watershed between one dam on the Kootenay and another on the Columbia on the Canadian side of the border, the release of water down the Canadian side of the watershed and the generation of huge extra power especially at the Mica Creek Dam, desig­ nated the primary generating site. Acceptance of the scheme by the Ameri­ cans, whose need for power far exceeded the Canadians’, would have prevented the construction of the huge Libby Dam below the border and retained Canada’s legal right to divert, which it enjoyed, as an upstream state, under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. The plan’s rejection and the subsequent construction of the Libby Dam, implied the limitation of Canada’s right to diversion and the establishment of vested interests below the border.15 Among the interested participants in the deadly power game was the government of the Province of British Columbia which, as controller of the natural resources located within its boundaries, obtained representation on the Canadian team negotiating the treaty, early in 1960, following the unanimous report of the International Joint Commission. The Premier and his representatives early discerned a commonality of interests with the Americans in opposition to the McNaughton plan. It is not clear whether they opposed the plan in part because it involved extensive flooding in the East Kootenay valleys, with the resultant diminution of valuable farm acreage,16 or because Cominco, which expected to receive a windfall gain in the order of three million dollars a year from the operation of upstream storage at Libby,17 was unhappy. What is evident, however, was Bennett’s distaste for a scheme which threatened his own mighty Peace project. Bennett desperately wanted the northern power development. “The Peace

226 Pillars of Profit

*

is an empire crying out for development,” he repeated during negotiations. “Its hydro, coal, gas, and oil make it the greatest potential energy resource area in the world.” 18 The Peace symbolized the brave, new company fron­ tier which had dutifully returned government candidates since 1952; the outer rim of development whose endless expansion would be guaranteed not merely by the immediate demand created by the dam construction, but by the provision of cheap energy attractive to firms which budgeted high on electrical consumption. The Premier needed a successful Peace scheme to give the lie to critics who thought Wenner Grenland no different from Disneyland, which the Premier had earlier visited to inspect a miniature mono-railway. Finally, the Portage Mountain Dam, by supplying the lower mainland market with power, would render Columbia power, produced at greater cost through a scheme other than the McNaughton plan, surplus to British Columbia needs. Assuming the federal government could be persuaded to agree to the export of power on a long term basis, British Columbia could sell the Columbia energy to the Americans and use the enormous cash inflow to bolster the sagging Kootenay region, the entire provincial economy, and the fortunes of the Social Credit Party. Bennett, in short, favoured a grand two-river development which in­ cluded not merely the alienation of power on a long-term basis to the Americans, but the torpedoing of the efficient McNaughton plan which threatened to pre-empt the market for Peace power, since the British Co­ lumbia Electric Company was committed to market the cheapest power. As Larratt Higgins pointed out, he was able to see early that “a de-natured Columbia was no longer a threat to the Peace.” 19 It was not surprising, therefore, to find that the British Columbia government, in the midst of the Columbia treaty negotiations following the unanimous acceptance of the I.C.R.E.B. report by the I.J.C., vetoed the plan of building reservoirs on the upper East Kootenays, the physical foundation of the Canadian plan.20 Without these dams no diversion could take place; the Americans could insist, as they did, on building Libby to provide flood protection, and on an undertaking by Canada not to divert the Kootenay. The Bennett veto gave the United States negotiators virtually complete freedom to write a draft treaty which so favoured the Americans that A.G.L. McNaughton was moved to comment that they “walked in on a house divided against itself and skinned the occupants alive.” 21 Although Bennett scuttled the McNaughton scheme, he was not yet prepared to accept a treaty involving financial proposals “regretfully unac­ ceptable to British Columbia.” 22 When John Diefenbaker, who perceived the path of immortality to lead to Washington, flew to the White House in mid-January 1961, he did not have prior provincial approval of the draft treaty, an agreement that was necessary before the House of Commons

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 227

could ratify the pact. But this failed to deter the Prime Minister, a confused crypto-nationalist whose hold over the nation had badly slipped in recent months. Diefenbaker needed some quick reflected glory which he surmised could be won through the conclusion of a treaty with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose term was to expire in a short few days. Accordingly, on January 17, 1961, the draft Columbia River Treaty, described by General McNaughton as “servitude in perpetuity of our rights and interests,” 23 was signed and awaited ratification by the respective countries.24 For Bennett, however, the battle had just begun. Diefenbaker’s signing was the signal for the prosecution of a war on two fronts. The first involved the federal government which, at the insistence of Fulton and Green, main­ tained its long standing policy of placing an embargo on the long-term export of power. The draft treaty provided for the division of downstream benefits, according to a mutually acceptable formula, with the Americans who were to return the Canadian share to the border at Oliver fordistribution. According to Justice Minister Fulton, the returned power was economical and cheaper than the Peace equivalent; a view entertained by the British Columbia Electric Railway Company, Bennett’s second nemesis, the corporate giant which monopolised the distribution and sale of power on the lower mainland. B.C. Electric, a shareholder in the Peace River Power Development Company, was committed to buy power from the cheapest possible source and as company executives, led by A.E. Grauer, repeated to Bennett more than once, since Peace power was less economical than Columbia power, the company was unwilling to lend its credit facilities to the dubious northern project. But Bennett remained unconvinced and soon determined on a course which led to the most bitter and protracted war in his political career. The first volley was fired by the Premier on December 28,1960, when he referred the matter of power costs to the newly created B.C. Energy Board with the following terms of reference “ . . . construction of two major projects involving the Columbia and Peace Rivers in British Columbia now appears feasible and conflicting views are entertained as to the cost and benefits to be derived from each project. . . . ” 25 Bennett was untroubled by the fact that his Energy Board, which had the active services of only one ex­ perienced professional, Dr. Gordon Shrum, had more of a political than a technical complexion. Nor did it disturb him that Crippen-Wright, a Van­ couver firm of consulting engineers who did most of the technical leg-work, were commissioned to attack, over the space of a few months, a problem which kept competent engineers of two nations busy for fifteen years. What he wanted and expected was a proper answer-that Peace power was at least as economical as Columbia power-a conclusion made more likely by the fact that the McNaughton scheme had been vetoed and

228 Pillars of Profit

was outside the terms of reference of the enquiry. And while the engineers busied themselves with their slide rules, Bennett began to take proper measure of the British Columbia Electric Company. During the winter and spring of 1961, the Premier was heard to make strange noises about the need to protect the forgotten consumers of elec­ tricity in the lower mainland who were serviced by a private utility heavily taxed by the federal authorities.26 As early as the federal-provincial confer­ ence of October 1959, Bennett insisted that income taxes on privately owned public utilities should be abolished or returned one hundred per cent to the province.27 And he intimated that if this did not happen, the province might have to take over British Columbia Electric to protect its consumers, a position repeated at an Ottawa conference early in 1961. At the 1961 session of the British Columbia Legislature, Bennett again criticized the federal government for stealing from local consumers and announced that the province should have received $1.7 million of the power corporation’s taxes in 1960 in lieu of the $349,500 returned.28 When the Legislature adjourned, the Premier was seen to grin intensely as he graciously accepted a C.C.F. resolution to study the possibilities of public ownership of the British Columbia Electric.29 And this is precisely what Bennett had in mind in late June when he announced a special session of the Legislature for August 1, to approve a new tax-sharing deal with Ottawa. The Premier’s opponents were suspi­ cious and expected something out of the ordinary. But they knew not what. They noted that the current five-year tax rental agreement did not run out until the end of March 1962, and there was ample time during the next regular session to ratify any new formula. And they were apprised of the fact that the Premier scheduled the extraordinary session at a very special time; to coincide with the founding convention of the C.C.F.-N.D.P. which began July 31, and with the anniversary of his swearing in as Premier.30 But their wariness in no way mitigated the astonishment which seized all when Lieutenant-Governor George Pearkes ambled into the House in the mid-aftemoon of August 1 and, in the shortest Speech from the Throne on record, announced five bills to be considered by the House, the last of which was “a bill concerning the development of electric power resources.” 31 A short while later, at the very moment when funeral services were being held in Vancouver for B.C.E. president Dal Grauer, Bennett tabled the Energy Board report and introduced Bill No. 5, The Power Development Act, 1961. The energy report told Bennett what he wanted to hear; that Peace power delivered to the lower mainland, developed under public auspices, could be as cheap as returned Columbia power.32 There was justification, therefore, in going ahead with both the economical Peace scheme and the Columbia

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 229

development providing that the Columbia power could be marketed across the border and the cash equivalent returned. “The rapid growth and size of the power loads in California,” the report read, “and the plan to con­ struct a power intertie between the Pacific Northwest and California sug­ gests that there is a good possibility that export of surplus British Columbia power to California would be feasible.” 33 What was needed was agreement by the federal government to export power on a long-term basis and a commitment from the hydro company to market Peace power on the lower mainland. Bennett took a large step in achieving both of these ends with the new power bill which converted the B.C.E. from a truculent private enterprise into a limp government appendage. British Columbia’s last re­ maining power giant, which withstood the public power assault in John Hart’s time, was suddenly a Crown corporation. Its parent body, the B.C. Power Corporation, which owned all the common shares in British Co­ lumbia Electric, was offered $ 111 million, the paid-up value of its shares.34 But, if the directors of the holding company felt that the rest of their holdings were seriously depreciated by the deal, the act allowed for the purchase of all of the power company’s shares at thirty-eight dollars-the price immediately preceding the Premier’s February warning. The newlyformed Crown corporation also assumed control of the Peace River Power Development Company for an amount the provincial Comptroller-General considered actually spent “directly and solely for the carrying out of studies and surveys. . . . ” 35 Law suits by aggrieved shareholders, without the express consent of the Cabinet, were prevented by Section 19 of the bill. The sudden take-over brought an explosive response, not from the social­ ists who had long supported expropriation, but from business elements within and without the province who turned on the government with a venom never before exhibited. The socialists were ill-prepared and dumb­ founded by an action which they had long championed, and they barely raised a peep during debate. When Bennett spoke of public power, he was greeted with “Well done comrade,” and “Hail Castro” from opponents long saddled with similar expletives by a baiting Premier.36 And when House officials prepared to record the 50-0 vote, John Squire, the C.C.F. member for Alberni, quietly requested that an apt whisper be recorded for free enterprise.37 Businessmen were less jocular. A spokesman for the Van­ couver Board of Trade protested the government’s failure to provide for an independent appraisal and right of appeal,38 while British Columbia Cham­ ber of Commerce officials insisted that the government “repudiated its election position and violated its election mandate.” 39 Howard T. Mitchell, a vice-president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, was convinced British Columbia was becoming “the most highly socialised society in Can­ ada, clearly well in the lead of socialistically back-slid Saskatchewan.” 40

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The Financial Post thought the takeover “remarkable because of the degree of apathy with which the public has witnessed the exercise of naked pow­ er.” 41 The public was numbed to government decrees “no matter how drastic, no matter how confiscatory, no matter how great an infringement of what were, until recently, generally regarded as private rights.” 42 Similar protests were entered by the Investment Dealers’ Association of Canada, the Canadian Bar Association, and by leading foreign business journals. The Economist thought the act of expropriation arbitrary and quarrelled less with the principle than with the manner of the take-over.43 It noted angry complaints in British investment circles about the arbitrari­ ness of the government’s action, the precluding of the right of appeal, the failure of the evaluation to take into account the firm’s future earning prospects, historical and replacements costs of physical assets and the prices paid for similar utility companies elsewhere.44 The financial editor of the Sunday Telegraph thought Canada was acquiring “the financial reputation of one of the most unstable South American republics” and concluded it was “doubtless too much to hope for sober second thoughts from a disciple of the late Major Douglas, for such is the Premier of British Columbia, Mr. W.A.C. Bennett, architect of expropriation. . . . ” 45 Barron’s, a leading American national business and financial weekly, devoted the entire front page of its August 21 issue to an editorial entitled “Lust for Power” attack­ ing the Bennett government for acting “with a unanimity and speed of which a so-called Peoples’ Republic might be proud . . . ” a view endorsed by the Portland Oregonian which thought Fidel Castro “no more dictatorial than Premier Bennett in the expropriation field, though to call it expropria­ tion is a courtesy for confiscation is a better word.” 46 It is hard to say whether Castro or Bennett would have taken greater offence at the comparison. Certainly, had the Cuban patriot taken time out from organizing revolution to peruse the Oregonian, he would have rejected outright any comparison with the Kelownan, whose disdain for the goals and methods of Cuban socialism more than equalled his distaste for several of its cultural additives; for cigars, khaki jackets, high proof rum and woolly faces. The sole preference Bennett and Castro shared was a fondness for baseball, which the Cuban played, with vigour and competence, and the Kelownan watched, with Lou Perini of the Milwaukee Braves. The B.C.E. take-over was not a great leap forward into socialism. By establishing public power on the lower mainland, Bennett merely completed the job begun in 1945 by John Hart who had favoured the province’s hinterland with public power. Most of the other Canadian provinces had public power, including Ontario, where it was established by Sir James Whitney’s Conservative government a half century earlier. Nor did Bennett’s sudden act represent a rejection of all he had said and

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 231

done before. A hinterland politician keenly aware of the chronic shortage of costly energy services in outlying areas, Bennett was never favourably disposed to an urban private power monopoly which neglected the rural constituency. Bennett was an Interior booster and entertained no love for the B.C.E. which stifled development through inadequate provision of ser­ vices. When the coalition government debated power in 1944, Bennett urged expropriation of the B.C.E. and full public power in urban as well as rural areas. “Let us not waste time with municipalities nor with apprais­ als of property. Let us take over the British Columbia Electric by buying up the shares of the parent company at market value overnight. . . . ” 47 A year later, he seconded the reply to the Speech from the Throne which announced the creation of the B.C. Power Commission and predicted “in time it must mean British Columbia Power Commission control of the entire hydro-electric development and output of the province.” 48 Bennett expressed a similar opinion during the power debate in March 1948;49 a view shared by populist and Interior Socred caucus members like Bert Price in Vancouver-Centre and Cyril Shelford of Omineca who more than once attacked the B.C.E. and praised public power in Manitoba.50 In the year 1961, the views of Price and Shelford on the B.C.E. were shared not only by a large Interior constituency, but by lower mainland residents as well. Despite a vast post-war public relations program, the corporate giant, whose electricity rates were higher than publicly owned systems in Ontario, Quebec and the United States Pacific Northwest, retained an unfavourable public image.51 Bennett had no love for the B.C.E. But he would never have expropriated the company had it not obstructed his grand two river design. Expropria­ tion implied not the stifling of growth and creation of an unstable invest­ ment climate. It meant the very opposite; a stimulus to development as well as an assurance of perpetual Socred rule. The take-over guaranteed the successful completion of the Peace project to which the new public agency committed itself; an enterprise geared to stimulate the booming northeast economy by its very construction, as well as supply attractive power on site to the new industries locating in the area. It would provide jobs for working­ men, power for pulp mills, profits for businessmen supplying the mammoth project and electricity transmitted four hundred and fifty miles to the starved lower mainland area. The take-over was not expropriation by confiscation. For all of their lamentations, the expropriated received generous compensation. The price set by the government, based on the current market value of B.C.E. shares, was considerably higher than the value the Public Utilities Commission of British Columbia previously put on B.C.E. assets for rate-setting pur­ poses.52 Time magazine referred to the government’s “generous purchase

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offer to stockholders” and noted that the price of thirty-eight dollars per share was six dollars more than the book value.53 The Province agreed and considered the P.U.C. evaluation “the nearest approach to an impartial judgment that the taxpayer as yet has seen.54 Professor Jamieson noted that Bennett was anxious to keep the matter out of the courts lest it be revealed that the shareholders had been overpaid. As late as March 1962, in the midst of the court fight, a group of eastern investors were so pleased with prospects of even greater compensation through direct bargaining with Bennett, that they bought into the company. Equally handsomely rewarded was the Peace River Power Development Company syndicate which re­ ceived a substantial compensation of eight million dollars for plans and surveys later found flimsy and useless.55 Nor was the take-over socialism. By ensuring the prosecution of the Peace project, the government aided the companies, big and small, which stood to gain directly and indirectly, from both the construction and pros­ pective new services. And it guaranteed further immense benefits to private enterprise by strengthening the provincial government’s hand in the power game with the Diefenbaker government, which opposed the long-term ex­ port of power, and with the Americans who knew that unless Bennett was awarded a good price for his power-he subsequently asked for five mills per kilowatt-hour, (double the market price)-he could scuttle the entire project, or wait it out, since the province now had an alternative source of power.56 By guaranteeing the successful conclusion of the Peace project through expropriation, Bennett increased the power of the faction in the federal Cabinet which sorely wished a successful treaty conclusion. The Peace project rendered the Columbia superfluous, unless the downstream benefits could be sold for a good price-which meant on a long-term basis-to the Americans. The lower mainland, serviced by the Peace, no longer needed Columbia power. If the federal government wished a treaty, then it would have to lift its export embargo. Seen in this light, the expropriation of the B.C.E. had little Cuban flavour. It was a victory for continentalism, for the long-term alienation of Canadian energy resources to fuel the Ameri­ can corporate empire. W.A.C. Bennett wanted both projects and took a long step towards assuring a dual development by forcing the federal gov­ ernment, mired in the treaty’s midst, to reconsider its embargo on power export. A Diefenbaker reversal, with a resultant sale of massive blocks of power, would resuscitate not only the flagging Kootenays, but the entire province through the infusion of a large amount of cash, estimated to equal half a billion dollars, to be expended on the construction of the huge storage dams. “We really believe in free enterprise,” P.A. Gaglardi declared in the midst of the power debate, “but we don’t let anyone stand in our way.” 57

A

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 233

For all of its brashness, the take-over was a politically palatable move which sparked a fight, described by Professor Jamieson as “downright spectacular.” 58 The Premier’s opponents, which included a few old friends, seized on the issue of “arbitrary government” and cried less about the principle of expropriation than about the procedure: the blockage of appeals to the courts by aggrieved shareholders; the failure to submit the take-over to independent evaluation; the sudden reversal after an election in which the government fervently defended private power; the summary passage of a special act at a special sitting of the Legislature; the failure to forewarn the public and Opposition about an action of tantamount importance which required intense public debate. Bennett, so his critics alleged, had received no mandate to expropriate. On the contrary, the Socreds recently fought an election in which the Premier and his Cabinet labelled the socialists as dangerous expropriators. The Premier, in short, was the irresponsible leader of an arbitrary government which degraded Parliament and deceived the public. Bennett was suddenly described as a dictator who substituted his own will for the rule of his party which was barely forewarned of the government’s actions; the rule of law denied by the prevention of proper appeals by aggrieved shareholders; the rule of Parliament used as a rubber stamp to pass a measure barely debated; the rule of the people who were cynically deceived by a regime which acted, on a matter of prime impor­ tance without public deliberation. Sometimes known as a socialist, more often as a free-enterpriser, Bennett was lately labelled as an anarchist, an arbitrary dictator who cared less about rights and rules than the satisfaction of his own petty whims. There were doubtless large items of truth in the bushel of expletives hurled at the beleaguered Premier. But Bennett had always been less con­ cerned with nice ways than with the raw reality of power retention and its prime requisite, untramelled economic growth. He rightly discerned that British Columbians, never inhabitants of a well-ordered society, were less concerned with proper rules and right procedures than with quick results and loud fanfare. If boredom was a common affliction of electors, then Bennett, who waded from controversy to controversy, whose actions were often unpredictable but rarely unacceptable, prescribed an excellent an­ tidote. Bennett’s move, however unacceptable to Liberal and Conservative political scientists, stole the thunder from the socialists who long demanded public power and claimed the government was a captive of both the B.C.E. and the Wenner-Gren interests. The take-over was a grand dissociation from dubious friends. “Our action is a complete answer to those people who try to say the government is giving the country away,” Bennett announced during the expropriation debate; “one shot killed both crows at the same time.” 59 By suddenly reversing himself, Bennett confounded the Opposi-

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tion who, in a fit of pique, transformed attacks on “personal government” into personal attacks on the Premier. Issues of substance gave way to questions of personality and in the personality market the Premier, pos­ sessed of a thousand-watt smile, held his own. Being a family man who attended church regularly and grinned incessantly, the Knight of the Beam­ ing Countenance had long proved himself a shining commodity. What was more important, Bennett knew that his aversion to genuine economic and political populism, his ingrained political realism, was widely shared by an alienated public which had long accepted the Legislature as a rubber stamp, the Cabinet as a benign and efficient dictatorship, the Socred mass party as an election-service organization ill-constructed to debate issues and dictate policies, the Opposition as droll complainants who manufactured noise and achieved nothing. And he knew, in the very mar­ row of his bones, that the electorate was prepared to support a politics of grandeur, a parochial provincial imperialism which fed on opposition to a federal government floundering in indecision. The take-over was advertised as a triumph for provincialism, for local residents inequitably taxed by a remote central authority. It was a Coast manifestation of maitre chez nous but without the clear moral purpose and the rational debate which preceded the Quebec take-over. “Because the federal government has refused to act in giving British Columbia a fair return of the taxes paid by the power corporation,” Bennett told the House on August 2, “it is this government’s policy to have basically all electric power and any that is supplied to the public under public ownership.” 60 The federal government was defined not merely as an enemy of the highly taxed consumers, but as a strangler of local development. Expropriation was less a blow against private enterprise than a victory over the socialistic enemies of growth disguised as Ottawans; a bold declaration that British Columbia, a swaggering mini-state which serviced the American empire, was not an economic colony of the federal government. To Bennett’s mind there were two kinds of government interference in the economy: the necessary and the unnecessary. The federal sort was unnecessary. “This government,” Bennett complained, “is unalterably op­ posed to unnecessary interference by government in the free-enterprise economy which has served this country well.” 61 Conversely, the B.C.E. expropriation was necessary intervention, since it rescued the Peace project which ensured the development and exploitation of the northeast by private enterprise. “I say to Mr. Fulton,” Bennett later told a Peace River audience, “British Columbia will not stand for this sell-out of our economic develop­ ment as long as I am entrusted by British Columbians to protect and fight for their interests. Ottawa will never sell out the interests of British Co­ lumbia in this callous and brutal manner.” 62 By prosecuting the fight with

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 235

Ottawa, Bennett asked the voters to join with him in a grand crusade to make themselves masters in their own house. Guardians of a realm rich in energy resources which they hoped to alienate to the Americans for a quick dollar, the Socreds were perceptibly changing from a little blacktop into a big dam government. But the transition was not easy and in the months following the take-over, the besieged government squabbled furiously with the B.C.E., the courts and the federal government. The court fight was prolonged and intricate and dragged on until the late summer of 1963. It began three months after the take-over session, when the B.C. Power Corporation sought a court declaration that the 1961 Power Development Act, under which the gov­ ernment took over the B.C.E., was invalid. In the event the courts confirmed the legality of the take-over, the firm wished a ruling on a fair price.63 The government responded with two bills at the 1962 House session which evoked huge press and Opposition criticism. Bill 85, entitled, “An act to Amend the Power Development Act of 1961,” varied the take-over arrangement by setting a fixed and final price of $172 million for the B.C.E. assets and forbade any court action, past, present or future, against the publicly-owned company or against the Attorney General without prior government consent.64 A second bill merged the B.C. Electric and the British Columbia Power Commission into a new entity, the British Co­ lumbia Hydro and Power Authority, scrambling the assets together and providing that no action could be taken against the new entity arising out of anything done by B.C.E.65 In the meanwhile, B.C.E. commenced action to invalidate the new laws and petitioned the court to appoint a receiver to guard the company’s assets. The British Columbia Supreme Court acceded and designated Dr. Harry Purdy, a former president of the B.C.E., as guardian and receiver, an action which led to further litigation by both sides in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada, where it was sustained. The legal warfare was prosecuted by Attorney General Bonner, who employed a factory of lawyers in the intricate manoeuvres which the press and Opposition cited as evidence of a slide into dictatorship. Bennett’s fight with the large company induced a queer reversal of roles, thrusting the socialists, long supporters of utility expropriation, into the position of Liber­ als defending the integrity of Parliament, the rule of law, and, of all things, the rights of the shareholders. Instead of arguing the shareholders received too much, and deserved less, that the struggle between company and gov­ ernment was sham and paper, the socialists concentrated their fire on the alleged abrogation of rights by an arbitrary government; a position which allied them with old foes like the Province. The whisking of the new power bills through the House inspired the socialists to chant “Sieg Heil” and

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Province reporter Paddy Sherman to write: “It might have come straight from the Reichstag of the early thirties, and left one with the feeling of not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or throw a bomb.” 66 In an editorial after the close of the longest session in forty-two years, the Province demanded Bennett’s resignation, pronounced him “the most arrant liar ever to occupy the highest office in this province,” and surmised that he suffered from a disease endemic to aging leaders. “Mr. W.A.C. Bennett is plainly suffering from dementia politico, a dangerous historic malady that overtook such notables as Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon and, more recently, Messrs. Peron and Duplessis.” 67 But there was method in Bennett’s madness. The court fight may have been a mere side-show to his grand war with the Ottawans, but it was a useful show nonetheless. The squabble with the company buttressed the emerging image of the government as bold, dogged, beholden to no special interest, whether company or federal authority. And it obscured the fact that the greedy B.C.E. shareholders had been handsomely rewarded by a regime prepared to give more, if the court so decreed, which it subsequently did. Monday, July 29, 1963, when Chief Justice Lett brought down his judgment on the power bills, was not, as the Province claimed in a blackbordered, front page editorial, “Black Monday for Bennett.” 68 True, the Chief Justice ruled that the power bills were ultra vires since the expro­ priated company was federally incorporated and many of its operations extended outside provincial boundaries into federal and international juris­ dictions. But the good judge left the way open for a final negotiated settle­ ment when he ventured that $192,828,125 rather than $171,700,000, which the government had settled upon in its 1962 legislation, was a fair price.69 Bennett and Bonner, the electrical twins, knew the company was ill-pre­ pared to prosecute the fight to a higher court when it had already won so much. So they traded a few threats with the firm, then jointly agreed to abide by the decision of the Chief Justice who was brought in as a final arbitrator. Lett decided on $197 million, the parties nodded, the company men smiled and sauntered to the bank, and W.A.C. Bennett announced at a tea party for P.A. Gaglardi that the flag of British Columbia at last flew over B.C. Hydro.70 “The settlement was a conspiracy,” former Justice A. M. Manson concluded. “British Columbia Power Corporation wanted money; the government wanted settlement before the election. They have conspired together to do it this way.” 71 But Bennett did not reserve all of his energies and conspiracies for the B. C.E. fight. The big battle was with the federal government over the disposal of the Canadian share of downstream power to the Americans on a long-term basis for cash. The Premier’s major opponent here was Davie Fulton, the Kamloops brahmin who attended St. Michael’s at Victoria,

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 237

studied law at Oxford’s St. John’s College, joined his father’s law firm in Kamloops, and fought overseas before entering federal Conservative polit­ ics.72 Bennett was unimpressed with Fulton’s credentials; with the fact that he rowed at U.B.C., played Britannicus in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, blinked and puffed Player’s when agitated, had rusty hair and an oversized jaw, and spoke with a modified Oxford tongue, pronouncing “clerk” as “d ark” but, oddly enough, discarding the characteristic “rawtha” for the mundane Canadian “rather.” 73 Bennett cared only that Fulton, the Justice Minister who nego­ tiated the draft treaty, led a faction, together with Howard Green, in the Tory Cabinet which virulently opposed his own plans to export power. To Bennett’s mind, Fulton was a vendu who conspired with alien Ottawans to strangle local development. Bennett rightly sensed that the Fulton faction could be isolated and defeated and that the Diefenbaker government, dissolving into a mess of factions, could be brought to heel through aggressive provincial action. The campaign began as early as February 1961, when the Winnipeg Free Press editorialized that “the tightly-knit establishment of British Columbia-the provincial government, its officialdom and big business friends,” planned “wholesale exports of Columbia and other hydro-electric power to the United States at the cost of smashing a firm national policy.” 74 A detailed paper on the export drive, given wide circulation, was issued by the Van­ couver Board of Trade, an urban pillar of the Bennett government, which dubiously argued that exported power was easily returnable and that, since the United States would soon discover a cheap nuclear power substitute, Canada should sell its power immediately while it still had the market. But the Bennett campaign gained momentum only after the August take-over which so enraged Fulton that he and others entertained the idea of disallowing the legislation. Bennett thought the Ottawans lumpennationalists and paper reactionaries intent on strangling growth in British Columbia and the United States, both of whom shared a common interest in the power sale. “If it is our policy to deny the United States growth,” Robert Bonner told the British Columbia chapter of the American Market­ ing Association, “we should then hold back on oil and gas, on lumber, on lead and zinc. But if this is not the case, then Canada’s whole attitude on power export should be re-examined.” 75 Lord of an outback principality, who dutifully kept the door ajar to outside investors, the Premier counterposed an honest continentalism to the confused and hybrid variety, border­ ing on absurdity, as advertised by the Diefenbaker Tories. The Americans were pleased with the smart strutting of the Provincial who exacerbated the quarrel with Ottawa when, in November 1961, he turned up at a Seattle testimonial banquet for Senator Warren Magnusson;

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a plush affair attended by a raft of senators, governors and other notables including the President of the United States, John Kennedy, with whom the Premier deliberated over matters of mutual interest. The President was delighted with the interest and fealty of the Premier and joined the other guests in a standing ovation when Senator Mike Mansfield introduced the Albert County native as “William Andrew Cecil Bennett, Prime Minister of the Province of British Columbia.” 76 Five days later, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall added insult to Fulton’s injury when he publicly dismissed Canada’s concern with recapturing lost power as “stuff and nonsense.” 77 Both the Kennedy-Bennett chat and the Udall mouthing brought sharp responses from the federal government and, more particularly, from Davie Fulton who invited American Ambassador Livingston Merchant to explain the breach of protocol. Fulton followed with a flying mission to Prince George where he claimed that “the Americans haven’t been offered such a windfall since they purchased Manhattan Island,” and assured the local residents, who dearly loved Bennett, that Ottawa would not “countenance the sale of our entitlement to Columbia power” to the Americans.78 Fulton concluded his address with the medical supposition that only a madman could support the power sale, “an act of such reckless and improvident philanthropy as would make this country the laughing-stock of the world.” 79 Bennett replied with a demand that Fulton cease trying to tor­ pedo the Peace Development and apologize to the Americans for statements which threatened to harm Canada’s trade with its friendly southern neigh­ bour.80 With a menacing wave of his finger, the Premier dismissed the Justice Minister’s speech as “irresponsible electioneering at the expense of a national project.” 81 But Bennett was prepared to do some special electioneering of his own against a federal government which staggered from crisis to crisis in the spring of 1962. According to the Sun, Fulton’s influence had badly slipped by February 1962 when Diefenbaker, referred to by Bennett as “my old friend, John Diefenbaker,” personally took charge of Columbia negotia­ tions.82 In April, the very same month in which Lester B. Pearson, a professed supporter of General A.G.L. McNaughton’s position, attended President Kennedy’s Nobel Prize Dinner in Washington-where he assured the President of his support for the draft Columbia Treaty 83-John Diefen­ baker fired McNaughton from the International Joint Commission and commenced negotiations with British Columbia on a formula for the sale of downstream benefits.84 But the Diefenbaker Cabinet, riven by the Bomarc and Columbia issues, was paralyzed and dissolved, together with Parliament, in preparation for the fateful election of June 1962. W.A.C. Bennett had always shown a secondary interest in federal party politics. The British Columbia Socreds, the Premier steadfastly maintained,

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 239

were strictly a provincial party and Bennett rarely actively intervened in federal contests. Suddenly, however, in the spring of 1962, W.A.C. Bennett discovered a cause which projected him at full throttle into the federal arena. The cause was unstable government. In every provincial election since his accession to office, Bennett defined the main issue as stable govern­ ment, the need for a majority free-enterprise government to preserve eco­ nomic growth. Now, in 1962, in a federal election, the Premier saw the issue as unstable government, the need for a weak minority government at the federal level in order to preserve the freedom of British Columbians to contract with the Americans. A keen dialectician, Bennett suddenly dis­ cerned that provincial stability depended upon federal instability. What clinched the case, of course, was the nature of the force for instability. The likely group to dictate to the federal minority government were Socreds rather than socialists. In short, Bennett had found a new friend, a car dealer from Rouyn, Quebec, whose sudden renown in the rural areas of Quebec, and possibly across the country, was a resource the Premier could use in his battle with the Fulton crypto-nationalists. Real Caouette, known as La Tonneur among devotees in his own province, was not entirely Bennett’s cup of tea. The Creditiste was a hothead and an economic fundamentalist whose funny ideas Bennett did not share. But he was also a shrewd and excellent campaigner with an expanding electoral base. When Caouette, a professed admirer of the economic policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini,83 unsuccessfully contested the national leadership of the Social Credit Party in the autumn of 1961 against Robert Thompson, backed by Ernest Manning, he received the enthusiastic support of Bennett, who subsequently dubbed the Chrysler dealer the new Laurier. Bennett’s enthusiasm for Real Caouette, and for the electoral morass in which the Liberals and Conservatives found themselves, grew loud and clear during the June federal campaign. The Premier had a sensitive nose which easily sniffed the rising federal rot, a pleasing odour of decay which, like a similar one in 1952 in British Columbia, promised considerable local benefits. So he entered the campaign with his usual gusto, addressing meet­ ings in Ontario and Quebec, as well as in British Columbia. Bennett did not miscalculate. The Diefenbaker government emerged from the campaign worn and scarred, a sad remnant of the robust majority returned in the 1958 election. The Tories were suddenly a minority government dependent for their survival on the Socreds-who won twenty-six of seventy-five seats in Quebec-and indirectly on W.A.C. Bennett who had a special pipeline to Real Caouette. Bennett could barely disguise his glee at the fortuitous results, which moved him to talk big. After assuring reporters that there would be “no alliance, no collusion, no coalition,” that “Social Credit will put the country

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first,” he warned the Tories that “if they don’t bring in dynamic policies there is no reason to keep them in power.” 86 He then proceeded to list what he considered the essence of dynamism: a long term subsidy for the P.G.E., inclusion of the Second Narrows Bridge in the Trans-Canada Highway system so the tolls could be removed, and ratification of the Columbia River Treaty.87 Diefenbaker got the message. In August 1962, Davie Fulton was demoted from Justice to Public Works. A month later, the Speech from the Throne which opened the first session of the twenty-fifth Parliament, on September 27, 1962, stated that “large-scale, long-term contracts for export of power surpluses . . . should now be encouraged.” 88 But the Throne Speech was merely a dying gasp. The Tories stumbled through a miserable session, met defeat, went to the people, and were again defeated by the Liberals who formed another minority government, headed by Lester B. Pearson, who quickly accommodated both John Kennedy and W.A.C. Bennett. When McNaughton was removed from his post in April 1962, Pearson made some large noises. He moved a motion to suspend the business of the House to discuss the matter and created a distinct impres­ sion, earlier and later, that a Liberal government would renegotiate the treaty to meet the objections of Canadian critics like McNaughton.89 As he fought his way to power, Pearson intimated that before any decisions were taken there would be public hearings to ventilate objections.90 But this was all public fluff. During the very month when McNaughton was removed, Lester Bowles Pearson attended President Kennedy’s Nobel Prize Dinner in Washington where he proposed a protocol to the treaty.91 Ap­ proximately a year later, on April 8, 1963, Pearson acceded to the prime ministership of Canada and immediately set to work wrapping up a treaty of paramount importance which was debated half-heartedly in Parliament between harangues during the flag debate; a performance so dismal it in­ spired one observer to conclude that the Liberal Party used “a public flogging of the moribund British lion for public entertainment while it went about the flagitious business of selling out to Uncle Sam.” 92 The two-day meeting with Kennedy at Hyannis Port in May resulted in a joint com­ munique announcing an intention to negotiate a protocol.93 A few weeks later, Pearson met with Bennett to conclude an agreement, signed on July 8, which confirmed the Hyannis Port agreement. The Columbia River Treaty, which represented “a complete strategic victory for the United States,” and “a crushing, if not humiliating defeat for Canada,” 94 was all but concluded. All that remained was a final settlement between British Columbia and the Americans on the price of the exported power; a matter which approached final settlement in the late summer of 1963.95 The Conquerer read his handbook well. Having prostrated a corporate giant, tumbled the Ottawans and outflanked the socialists, Bennett was

r \

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 241

ready, in the late summer of 1963, to go to the people for a renewed mandate. Bennett did not enter the new campaign cold. He prepared the way not merely by prosecuting a fierce provincial imperialism, but by allaying discontent within his own party and pacifying the masses with tangibles. The Socred convention of October 1961, immediately following the take-over, and the subsequent meeting in 1962, were love fests in which the party regulars dutifully swallowed the Premier’s argumentation and rewarded him with a big warm hand. Troublesome back-benchers like Bert Price, who demanded reform of the consumer credit laws, and Dudley Little, who spoke for the small truck-logging interests, were calmed with reassuring words and vague promises. When Cyril Shelford, the Ominecan troubled by high gasoline prices in outlying areas, proved less tractable and threatened to sit as an Independent unless something was done, Bennett made a public commitment to set up a royal commission to look into gas prices. The Premier was similarly successful with his Cabinet manoeuvrings. A shuffle in November 1960 relieved pressure on the Agriculture portfolio when Frank Richter, a Cawston rancher, was chosen to replace the defeated Newton Steacy, who was far from popular with the party’s rural fac­ tion.96 The directorship was similarly strengthened by the replacement of defeated Labour Minister, Lyle Wicks, a weak link, with Leslie Peterson, who held down the Education portfolio as well. And Bennett stoutly re­ sisted an Opposition attempt to reshuffle the Cabinet for him through forcing the resignation of Highways Minister Gaglardi. Fined one thousand dollars for contempt of court in October 1960 for disobeying a court order barring payment to the account of contractor Clyde Thornton, Gaglardi faced a hail of criticism at every succeeding session; an assault which peaked during the 1963 session when N.D.P. M.L.A.s Gordon Dowding and James Rhodes catalogued charges and filed affidavits relating to the awarding of contracts to government friends, defeated candidates and party activists, overpayment of contractors and falsification of estimates on road-work in the Kamloops area.97 Bennett responded with an enquiry of the House’s Public Accounts Committee, weighted with the aggrieved Minister’s col­ leagues who summarily dismissed the charges. Far from injuring the gov­ ernment, the Gaglardi affair redounded to the detriment of the Opposition who evoked responses similar to those of Sun correspondent, James Nesbitt. “The great $40,000 witch hunt is over,” Nesbitt concluded of the Highways probe, “a complete flop, with the public paying the bill. . . they have made of Gaglardi a martyr, a persecuted man, forced to waste a full month of his time when he could have been going about his public duties.” 98 However troubled Gaglardi may have been by the enquiry, he found sufficient time, and money, to mend strewn fences and lay miles of blacktop

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in preparation for the general election of September 1963. Led by an expert merchandiser who knew what tangibles the political consumers preferred, the Socreds increased and varied their hand-outs in every succeeding ses­ sion. In 1962, the Premier sweetened the electrical take-over with reduc­ tions in electricity rates for urban residents, and rural residents. The reduc­ tions, announced during the 1962 session, varied from eight per cent to sixty per cent, with the greatest savings reserved for outlying areas in the north and Interior sections of the province served by the British Columbia power Commission diesel power u n it." The 250,000 consumers in the lower mainland received an average reduction of eleven per cent. In the fifteen northern Interior and rural ridings, which included twenty-two thousand consumers, the cut was twenty-five per cent or better. In all cases, the favoured district was represented by a Social Creditor. In February 1963, Bennett announced that British Columbia hydro, natural gas and electricity rates would be cut by five million dollars each year for the next ten years; with the rate reductions to be regularly announced on March 30 of each year-the anniversary of the amalgamation of British Columbia Electric and the B.C. Hydro and Power Authority.100 The 1963 Throne Speech was laden with goodies including the removal of tolls from five bridges, abolition of the five-per-cent amusement tax, increase in the homeowner grant from fifty to seventy-five dollars, increase in municipal aid, easing of the logging tax in aid of the lumber and pulp and paper industries, and a new Universi­ ties Act which established Simon Fraser University, converted Victoria College into a provincial university and provided for the creation of a series of regional colleges.101 The 1963 budget was a boom sort which reflected the sound state of an economy whose buoyancy was only partially obscured by the smoke of political controversy. Fraser Robertson, the Globe and Mail financial editor who visited British Columbia in March 1962, wrote that nearly every indicator-labour income, retail sales, factory shipments, construction and farming-showed healthy gains in major sectors of the economy.102 A Sun poll of business at the year’s end indicated that seventy-three per cent of the correspondents reported increased sales, forty-eight per cent reported increased earnings and sixty-eight per cent boosted production during a boom which equalled 1956 in growth. Crude oil production increased eight hundred per cent, forestry production reached an all-time high of 780 million-fourteen per cent better than 1961, while retail sales were up by 8.2%. And the new boom, which strongly affected service centres like Hudson’s Hope, Castlegar, Fort Nelson, Merritt, Crofton and Prince George, was reflected in rising government revenues and expenditures on projects like the Peace River project estimated to cost between six and eight hundred million dollars. The printed version of the Premier’s 1963 budget

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 243

speech, according to the Winnipeg Free Press, put “the glossy annual re­ ports of the giant corporations in the shade.” 103 Riddled with multi­ coloured charts, tables, paintings and photos of schools, hospitals, court houses, the P.G.E. and Peace power construction projects, printed on sixtyeight pages of heavy stock paper, and bound in a heavy green cover, the speech was distributed across the province, from the great stone mansions of Shaughnessy guarded by high hedges, to the wilderness trailers of the grizzly hard-hats. The new economic surge and happy conclusion of the Columbia deal with the Pearson Liberals, were perfect preludes to the September 30 provincial election which, for the first time in over a decade, promised a genuine four-party contest. The new ingredient was the Tories, without a legislative representative since 1956, when Dr. Larry Giovando was defeated, and a leader since 1960 when Deane Finlayson sought greener fields. The pros­ trate local party came alive suddenly in the autumn of 1962 when it became known that Davie Fulton, the Minister of Public Works who lost John Diefenbaker’s favour, was interested in returning home to do battle with the wicked giant who had sold his native province down the Columbia River. Davie Fulton was a vintage Tory and pedigree British Columbian. His father, F.J. Fulton, was successively Provincial Secretary, Attorney General and Minister of Public Works in the corrupt McBride government,104 and later sat federally for the Cariboo as a Conservative unionist. His grand­ father, A.E.B. Davie, and great-uncle, Theodore Davie, were both Premi­ ers, with the latter later serving as Chief Justice of the province. Fulton had a pedigree, but he was also downwardly mobile in a federal party sliding perceptibly into the abyss. A competent parliamentarian with modest politi­ cal skills, Fulton had a dim future and a limited following in a federal party which had reversed its stand on the Columbia. His removal from the federal scene was as much an act of escape as of commitment; to set aright the strewn affairs of his homeland by fighting Bennett at close range on his own ground, rather than from afar in Ottawa, which placed the Premier, who had already administered the brahmin a severe drubbing, at a great disad­ vantage. The moribund local Tories-and the socialists-were immensely pleased at their prospective new acquisition. A twelve man committee was set up in October to sponsor and encourage his return, U.B.C.’s Y.P.C.s launched an “I.F.F.”- ‘T m For Fulton” campaign-and the grateful Tory was besieged with a blizzard of postcards, including many from socialists who surmised that a strong Fulton run might seriously split the free-enterprise vote. Fulton was touched by the response and, on November 20, announced: “The call of my native province cannot be disregarded.” 105 His subsequent election as leader, at a convention in January 1963, afforded him a further

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opportunity to practice mock eloquence, and remind voters of his lofty purpose. Overcome by delusions of grandeur, Fulton personalized and romanticized the approaching fight into a struggle between a brave, errant knight, who protected widows, orphans, maidens and the rule of Parlia­ ment, and a wicked enchanter. “British Columbia is my province, my place, the province of my destiny . . . I looked at B.C.. . . I became angry . . . I became determined to dislodge this stupid and short-sighted govern­ ment, to dislodge this arrogant man from his seat of power and to give back security and confidence to the people.106 Bennett, for his part, did not seem overly distressed at the new entry; especially since the Columbia by-election of July, won by the government, indicated that the nascent Tories were capable of taking away more votes from the Opposition than from the government. Fulton, after all, was to Bennett a defeated and humiliated vendu, with a severely limited federal and provincial base. And Bennett was aware that a pedigree of sorts was no substitute for a real organization. He knew that Fulton’s opposition to the Columbia deal, on the brink of realiza­ tion, and his distaste for the Peace Project, already underway, were scarcely saleable commodities in a province seized by a growth mania. The Socreds prosecuted a robust campaign which ignored the confused Liberals and concentrated full fire on the socialists and Tories. Their fight was a crusade; for the realization of the two river projects at last within the Premier’s grasp; for growth and prosperity, built on river developments; for a popular mandate to strengthen the hand of the Premier both in the approaching federal-provincial talks with Ottawa-which included Medi­ care on the agenda-and final negotiations with the Americans over the price of Columbia power; and against the socialists and Ottawans who jointly conspired to stifle growth. No longer a little blacktop party, the Socreds had grown into a big dam government on the brink of realizing projects so grand they rivalled the American T.V.A. and Grand Coulee.107 The new image was perfectly projected in a slick brochure entitled Timetable For Progress, a document which announced a schedule of seven years of planned growth, involving huge spending, carefully documented, department by department, on hy­ dro-electric, highways, education and welfare.108 Having tried “expropria­ tion,” which worked well enough, Bennett was prepared to dabble in “plan­ ning” which, like “expropriation” had hitherto been the exclusive province of the socialists. T.D. Patullo’s “socialized capitalism” had given way to W.A.C. Bennett’s state capitalism, a bright new concept shaped in part by Dan Ekman, Frank McMahon’s executive assistant, and Lloyd Turner, West Coast Transmission’s vice-president, who were both lent to the So­ creds for the campaign’s duration. The Socreds left none of their old weapons to rust in the armoury. The

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 245

Premier accused an old friend, the Vancouver Province, of “trying to smash this little government by destroying its confidence” 109 and accorded similar treatment to the Southam newspaper chain and the Eastern press who were accused of trying to rule British Columbia. Fulton was castigated as a federal obstructionist who stalled the Columbia negotiations for three years and endangered provincial development through opposition to the Peace scheme. “When Henry Ford built his first cars,” Bennett shouted at Quesnel, “he didn’t have customers . . . no, they didn’t even have roads . . . Fulton will never rise to public life again in this country.” 110 And the socialists were branded as misleaders of labour, pessimists, prophets of doom, enemies of employment. Because the government helped the compa­ nies to provide roads, Socreds were workingmen’s friends. “Social Credit is the party of the working people,” the Premier told the Peace River people, “the N.D.P. has been called a lot of things, but tonight I’ll name it; N.D.P.New Depression Party.” 111 The Socreds, conversely, were the prosperity party, the party of dynamic action and the campaign trail was strewn with bushels of promises, visions and tangibles. Throughout the Interior, Bennett spoke of an eight hundred and fifty mile long land-sea route stretching from northern Vancouver Island to the Alberta border-“the greatest tourist route in the whole world”-that would funnel millions and millions of American tourists into the province.112 The pampered Peace people were treated to a raft of homilies and metro slurs as the Premier’s private P.G.E. railcar rolled from station to station, greeting the residents with a glaring rendition of “Roll On Social Credit Roll On.” 113 In Fort St. John, Bennett pledged to expand the P.G.E. northward from its terminal and reminded the outbackers that his government “moved mountains and ran through the living rooms of West Vancouver homes to get the railway to the Peace River.” 114 In Vernon, Robert Bonner assured the residents that the Columbia River treaty ratification was “almost within grasp” and called on voters in Co­ lumbia, Kaslo-Slocan, Nelson, Trail and Revelstoke ridings to deliver the goods. “Its about time they were part of the construction crew and not the wrecking gang,” Bonner explained, “these five ridings hold the key of much of the future of British Columbia in the next twenty years.” 115 But the choicest words were saved for Kamloops where the beleaguered P.A. Gaglardi locked horns with Fulton in a miniature general election. After assuring voters that he did not wish to be Premier after September 30 if Gaglardi was no longer at his side, Bennett asserted that “reactionary outsiders with money” were trying to defeat the persecuted minister. “Phil, as Minister of Highways, by competitive bidding has saved the taxpayers over fifty million dollars. He doesn’t get one-tenth of what he should get for i t . . . Gaglardi can never be paid in filthy lucre, only public apprecia-

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tion can properly reward him.” Moved to the edge of tears, his voice husky with emotion, Gaglardi replied in kind. “Bennett is a kindly man, a grand­ father, if you please . . . tonight, on top of the big B.C.E. building, flies the British Columbia flag.” 116 Confronted with this incredible hailstorm, the Opposition scrambled for cover as best they could. The Liberals were the forgotten party and doubly so because the N.D.P. conveniently donned a new liberal garb. Perrault talked of a British Columbia development corporation, a productivity coun­ cil, trade missions, honesty, integrity, reason, the sensible middle way. But his willing audience did not extend much beyond the Sun editorialists who thought the Liberal party-the voice of the rational middle way-deserved both the protest vote and the referee’s role in the Legislature, curbing the excesses of left and right.117 Davie Fulton, who enlisted notables like for­ mer B.C.E. president Dr. Harry Purdy and leading Vancouver businessman H. Richardson Malkin as Tory candidates, thought the major campaign issue not public power but dictatorship and criminal mis-management which threatened the destruction of a favourable investment climate. Fulton wished a well-ordered state and thought British Columbia was descending into anarchy through the replacement of the public will and a traditional sense of order and purpose, by the sinister private will of one man, the Premier. Everywhere he spoke, he repeated the need for the restoration of “a sense of order and purpose in the management o f . . . affairs. . . . ” 118 Under a Conservative government, “everybody in the province will know where they stand and can make their plans in light of the announced plans and intentions of the province.” 119 Fulton saw his role as an inconoclast fighting a myth carefully nurtured for over a decade-“the myth of Mr. Bennett, the political wizard. The myth of Mr. Bennett, the saviour of free enterprise. The myth of Mr. Bennett, the champion of the little man. The myth of Mr. Bennett, who gets things done.. . . ” 120 Nowhere was he more insistent that in the heart of Bennett country, the Peace River district where he assured incredulous local residents that a Conservative government would immediately halt work on the Peace, a project “unsound, ill-con­ ceived and unjustified.” 121 The New Democrats, for their part, anxiously nurtured a new myth of their own. Since Bennett, or so they thought, had been transformed over­ night into a mean expropriating socialist, the socialists thought it sensible to refurbish themselves as moderate liberals, pleased with the prospect of Bennett and Fulton, the eccentric left and gentleman right, destroying one another in a bitter vendetta. Robert Strachan, a tough and able former carpenter given to radical talk, was suddenly changed by a bevy of young image-makers into a moderate statesman given to measured words and navy-blue suits, an attire which moved Bennett to facetiously comment on

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 247

the socialist Bond Street look.122 Strachan spoke of the need for a govern­ ment that could be trusted. He conjured ombudsmen, the limitation o f\ election spending, electoral redistribution, more schools and hospitals, \ Medicare and an economic development corporation to sell securities to ] raise development funds and purchase stocks in selected private companies. I But he forever sidestepped the issue of public ownership. When Alex Mac- / donald assured an audience that an N.D.P. government would take over the B.C. Telephone Company, a position as old as the socialist party itself, Strachan backed off confirmation and instead pointed out that court action like the Lett decision in the B.C.E. case precluded expropriation of federally chartered franchises. But it was all to no avail. What the socialists and Tories wished for did not happen. The Tories, who won eleven per cent of the votes, failed to win a seat and Davie Fulton who had all the impact of a fly hitting a windmill,123 ran second to Phil Gaglardi, 5,669 to 4,473. The Liberals gained their usual five seats and twenty per cent of the vote. The socialists dropped five percentage points in their popular vote since the last election to 27.8% and elected fourteen candidates, two less than their former total. Camille Mather and James Rhodes were defeated by Socred newcomers Hunter Vogel and Ernie LeCours in Delta, while Cedric Cox, the Burnaby maverick publicly castigated by the party executive for accepting an invita­ tion from Fidel Castro to visit Cuba, fell to Socred Charles MacSorley in Burnaby. The Socreds, returned for a fifth term, boosted their popular vote to 40.8%, their seat total to thirty-three and repaired most of the seven shaky seats won in the 1960 election by narrow majorities. The N.D.P. were only able to win Nanaimo, where Recreation Minister Westwood was de­ feated and, after a prolonged court fight, Yale, where Bill Hartley defeated Irving Corbett. Comox, Lillooet, Prince Rupert, Salmon Arm and Skeena were all safely retained by the Socreds who consolidated their popular vote. The election was a grand endorsement of Bennett personally and of his frantic prosecution of the two river fight; a triumph of executive will over parliamentary forms, action over deliberation, tangibles over principles, growth over equity, and grizzlies over Rhodes Scholars. It was a fierce blow for the Premier’s new state capitalism, endorsed by hard heads and hardhats alike. Mr. Robert McDonell, the chairman of the British Columbia Division of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, acknowledged on the eve of the Socred victory that Bennett was a principled anti-socialist despite the B.C.E. takeover, and thought “the free-enterprise system was given a sound pat on the back,” 124 a view endorsed by J.V. Clyne of MacMillan Bloedel and William Anderson of the Vancouver Board of Trade, who expressed their pleasure at the continuation of “stable majority govern­ ment.” 125

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The Kamloops results indicated that the hard-hats were prepared to follow suit. Kamloops was a microcosm of a fight in which all of the opposition parties agreed on the primacy of the non-economic issue of “arbitrary government.” “Kamloops is the hinge of change in this prov­ ince,” Fulton told his nominating convention, “and if it swings the province will swing with it.” 126 But the door stayed shut, unmoved by the cold wind of an abstract rhetoric about parliamentary integrity, rational deliberation, the functions of the Opposition, and other imperatives culled from the Liberal lexicon. The majority of voters preferred capitalist economics to Liberal politics and pearly prose. Columbia Cellulose’s new pulp mill in Prince Rupert, MacMillan Bloedel’s in Kitimat, the expansion of Canadian Collieries Limited in Lillooet and Comox, the newly opened Rogers Pass Highway which flooded Kamloops with tourists, the projected Yellowhead Highway to Jasper, the windfalls promised the Kootenays by the Columbia River development and the northeast by the Peace project, spoke more eloquently than Lord Bryce, Sir Ivor Jennings or Davie Fulton of Kamloops could ever do. “It was the clear tangible assets of a highway system,” Allan Fotheringham wrote of the Gaglardi-Fulton fight, “against the complicated plea of Fulton on the Peace River dispute.” 127 The voters were drawn by the pleasing visibility of the construction gang, not merely in the working class and suburban areas of North Kamloops, where Gaglardi gathered the grizzly vote to administer Fulton his first defeat in eighteen years, but in other key areas, where the N.D.P., according to Jack Scott, was overcome by “a trauma of being ashamed of what it stands for.” 128 Valuing jobs and worshipping growth, in a vulnerable economy where recessions brought immediate hardship and wide unemployment, the voters transformed what the Opposition thought a vice-Bennett’s daredevil leadership-into a virtue. “Others will vote for Mr. Bennett,” the Sun sourly predicted at the outset of the campaign, “because they consider his un­ doubted executive abilities to be of more importance in government than the abstract matter of the principles of parliamentary government, which Mr. Bennett has contemptuously brushed aside so many times in the past eleven years.” 129 The Premier thought big and brought results; and it mattered little how he went about his business. By shouting about dictator­ ship and “arbitrary government,” Bennett’s opponents perilously shifted the issue to his own beaming personality and windmill leadership style; as saleable commodities as the lamps and cutlery he sold in his flourishing stores, or the blacktop the Highways Minister auctioned off in the Interior. “It makes a person humble in his own community when people support you this way,” Bennett confessed after the results were in. “I’m no dictator. I’m a quiet family man. I live a happy, family life and a good community life.” 130 Being a man of virtue, the Premier was not alone, for good men

A Tale of Two Rivers: 1961-1963 249

are rarely abandoned. Dwelling at his side, remained P.A. Gaglardi, also a pillar of the hearth, who announced to his constituents at the very moment Fulton conceded defeat: “Tomorrow morning I’ll head for my office and let a whole bunch more highway contracts.” 131

CHAPTER IX

Big Dam Government: 1964-1969

“In this province we are not divided into parties, really. We are simply divided into two clear groups: those who believe in British Columbia and those who don’t.” W.A.C. Bennett

In the months following the 1963 general election, the Socreds advanced perceptibly beyond the politics of roads which, after all, were minor play­ things for a big dam government. For five years the Premier cudgelled giants and enchanters of every sort. At last within sight of the kingdom of power, Bennett rested a while to gather kudos and remind voters of the dividends accrued. Bennett could afford a pause, he had so disarrayed his enemies. He even needed one, so that the masses, dazed by a perpetual display of endless motion, could properly appreciate what their leader, in his weird, windmill style, had won for them. As British Columbia, propelled by a new wave of investment, roared into the mid-sixties, the politics of confrontation gave way to the politics of ritual. It began early and continued without abatement for two years. First there was the matter of wrapping up the Columbia treaty. A round of negotiations involving the federal, provincial and American governments ended with a signed agreement between Pearson and Bennett in January 1964, which Paul Martin, another old friend of Bennett, cited as an example of “co­ operative federalism.” 1 Then followed the announcement of an agreement between the Canadian and American negotiators on “all remaining points of substance,” including Article 8, “regarding the marketing of Canada’s entitlement of power generated in the United States.” 2 The Bennett govern­ ment was guaranteed by the Canadian and American governments a lump sum of $275 million for power payments-an equivalent of 4.4 mils per kilowatt-and $69.6 million for flood control benefits to be raised in part by a consortium of American Pacific Northwest power utilities in a bond issue based on contracts made to sell the Canadian share of the generated power.3 Several months later, the Columbia River treaty and protocol, a larger undertaking than the huge St. Lawrence Seaway project, a vital cog 250

Big Dam Government: 1964-1969 251

in the wheel of the growing American war machine, an object lesson in the application of the old imperialist tactic of divide and rule, was passed in the House of Commons of Canada by a vote of one hundred and eight to sixteen.4 “I believe that the concept of the Columbia River . . . ” Paul Martin windily intoned, “was a great concept.” 5 And so did W.A.C. Bennett who shared with his old friend a penchant for forgetting and ignoring: that Canada’s right to divert water from the Columbia basin had been seriously impaired; that the treaty, according to the Saskatchewan government and others, foreclosed the possibility of mov­ ing Columbia water to the Saskatchewan River; that the Canadian portion of the Columbia basin was placed under international control and the American portion remained under American control; that the federal gov­ ernment performed as an agent of the provinces, and a province of the United States;6 that the Columbia was governed by the continental resource concept of integrating Canadian resources into the economy of the United States at the price of stifling autonomous Canadian development. At what price? The federal government went so far as to admit it was not sure; “the actual benefits purchased (by the United States) are unknown.” 7 But Ben­ nett was certain of a windfall of half a billion dollars including the accrued interest, up to the year 1973 when the dams were to be completed, for power estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars, as a modest estimate.8 For Bennett, the culmination of it all was the Peace Arch ceremony in Blaine, Washington, in September 1964, attended by Lyndon Johnson and Lester B. Pearson, when the American President handed the people of Canada and British Columbia a cheque for $253,929,534.25.9 It was a happy occasion, adorned with sunny remarks about northern and southern neighbourliness, and with a wry comment from the President that “the Canadians even went for the last twenty-five cents,” which drew a chuckle from the crowd.10 Bennett, who chirped and glowed throughout, was so moved by the occasion that he never ceased talking about it in subsequent months. “Never in history has there been a day like this,” he confessed in December, “and from that day on our critics turned into supporters.” 11 He reminded his constituents that the President’s trip to the border of British Columbia was his first venture outside of his own country, that Lyndon Johnson recognized “where the power is,” 12 that payment of the $275 million cheque, which far exceeded a similar payment earlier made by W.J. Bowser to the Kitsilano Indians, “was talked about around the world.” 13 In the meanwhile, the Premier scurried around the province to attend a rash of ceremonies, widely broadcast in the press and carefully staged by several of his many adjuncts: by Lloyd Turner and Dan Ekman of West Coast Transmission; by Clarence Budd, his executive assistant; by William Clancey of William Clancey and Associates, and Gordon Root of Gordon

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Root and Associates; and by dapper A1 Williamson, A1 of the pipe, the natty dark suits and the striped ties, whose working motto, “not necessarily gregarious, but gregarious if necessary,” served him well in his handling of the nice P.G.E. account.14 Bennett’s main jaunts were to the Kootenays and the Peace where, before an audience of hundreds of construction work­ ers, businessmen and government officials, he stood on a flag-decked plat­ form in a muddy clearing and pressed a button which put in motion a ten million dollar conveyor system geared to haul a million truckloads of gravel from a glacial moraine to the site of the massive Portage Mountain struc­ ture; a dam scheduled to rise from the dry river bottom to a height of six hundred and twenty feet, plugging the Peace, creating the largest lake in British Columbia and storing more than two million kilowatts of hydro energy.15 A year later, the Premier returned for a three-day tour of the Peace country where he described Ray Williston, after whom the electrical sub-station at Pineview had been named, “in recognition of his contribution to the development of Prince George and interior of the province,” as one of the great architects of the two river policy.16 But the Resources Minister did not upstage the Premier, who received the unanimous request, subsequently granted, from the region’s seven Chambers of Commerce, and endorsed by three hundred and twenty-five attendants at a $7.50 a plate testimonial dinner, to name the Portage Moun­ tain structure, “The Bennett Dam.” 17 The Peace people wined and dined their own Paul Bunyan. “I know you’ve taken a lot of criticism in the South,” said Wally Roedzke of the Dawson Creek Chamber, “but in the eyes of the Peace River people you never stood so tall.” 18 “Mr. Premier we like you,” said Gregory Janzer of the Pouce Coupe Chamber, who went on, “we thank you, we need you, we want you, and God bless you.” 19 Other speakers likened Alexander Mackenzie, who forded raging rivers and braved the fierce inclemencies of winter in his 1793 expedition, to William Andrew Cecil Bennett who travelled north, in the autumn of 1965, in a cushioned private P.G.E. railway car. The Premier was presented with a model birchbark canoe mounted on a drill case from the Peace River dam site, and a scroll making him a member of the Order of Sir Alexander Mackenzie. “All this praise is heady wine,” twinkled Bennett, who failed to drink a drop, then took advantage of the opportunity to successively attack Lester B. Pearson for not visiting the Peace River Dam during a recent visit to central B.C., and praise a Soviet delegation of engineers who inspected the development. “While the people (in Ottawa) can’t see across the mountains,” he concluded, “the Russians found us the other day.” 20 And the Americans came as well, to ceremonies commemorating the beginning of construction of the holy Kootenay trinity: the Duncan Lake Dam, north of Nelson, the High Arrow Dam near Castlegar and the Mica

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Dam at Mica Creek, north of Revelstoke.21 The Duncan Dam performance in May 1965 was typical. A C.P.R. special train carried more than one hundred personally-invited guests of the Premier on a grand tour, financed by the Hydro Authority. Then they were joined at the spillway side of the Duncan Dam, fifty-five miles north of Nelson, by the Premier who made a few apt remarks and touched off more than two tons of dynamite which blew a giant hole in the mountainside. The Premier later bought a round of beer for a dozen patrons in the Kaslo Club, then hopped a plane to Japan. Later, during the federal election campaign of October 1965, Bennett re­ minded the Kootenay people that the Ottawans boycotted the dam opening, just as the Americans came “high in their praise of British Columbia and its great resources.” 22 According to W. Walton Butterworth, the new American Ambassador to Canada, among British Columbia’s choicest resources was the Premier himself, who Butterworth pronounced, after a lively introductory chat, “charming, delightful and very intelli­ gent. . . . ” 23 In his zestful prosecution of the politics of ritual, Bennett always sought a just and careful distribution. Since the Kootenays and the Peace, where project visibility was high and clear, were favoured with a raft of dam ceremonials, and the Okanagan had already celebrated one Roman festival, Bennett reserved his second bond-burning, staged in early August 1964 to celebrate the twelfth year of Socred rule, for the deprived citizens of Van­ couver City. Emulating neither Cupid nor Robin Hood, the Premier for­ sook the bow and arrow, which earlier had served him ill, for railway flares-twelve of them, one for each year of his reign-which he lobbed onto a barge filled with hay, oil-soaked wood chips and a pile of doomed bonds. The conflagration which followed-deemed fires of progress by Socred theoreticians-was greeted by a chorus of whistles emanating from a flotilla of tugs, pleasure craft, police fire-boats, and curios, which ringed the blazing vessel.24 Half a mile away, a barrage of rockets went off at the very moment, 9:30, when Bennett was sworn to the Premiership twelve years earlier. The blaze warmed the Premier to speechify, which caused several of his audi­ ence to blink and mutter. “Let nobody throw sand in the gears. Let us all put our shoulders to the wheel. Only with confidence, dynamic policies, government leadership, and co-operation can this province go to the heights it is intended to go.” 25 The Premier pronounced the ninety million dollar inferno “another little fire of progress in British Columbia,” and decreed the end of bridge and road tolls for ever.26 The Kitsilano showboat audience responded with a faint cheer and had it not been for a brace of troublemak­ ers, the show would have ended without incident. But one young man, in his early twenties, took it upon himself to parade with a sign “Bennett is a phony,” which caused an irate housewife to ask, “How do you know

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. . . I’ll bet you’ve never met the man.” 27 A second pooper threw an American penny onto the stage which hit Education Minister Leslie Peter­ son in the eye. Tears streaming down his face, the Minister seized and pocketed the errant coin. But these were times for cheers, not tears; especially the winter of 1965, when a host of testimonial dinners were arranged commemorating a very special occasion: February 15, the day Bennett surpassed Sir Richard McBride’s record tenure of twelve and one half years in office. It was a moving day for the Premier who sobbed in the Legislature before a gallery of Socred children trucked in for the occasion. And busier days for the Premier’s public relations adjuncts, who huddled with local committees to arrange an epidemic of testimonial dinners: in Kelowna and Cranbrook where the risen local boy was gaily toasted; in the Peace country where the Premier was hailed as the saviour of the north; in Courtenay, on Vancouver Island, where five hundred guests swore their fealty; in North Vancouver where James Sinclair pointedly referred not to Socred rule or the govern­ ment of British Columbia, but to the Bennett government;28 in the Hotel Vancouver where a Socred party banquet counted eight hundred guests including Y.C. Chan, the hotel shoeshine man invited by the Premier personally, who wore a Young Socred hat. But there was a bigger event, also in the City of Vancouver, where the skyscraper kids, the branch plant boys, the Terminal clubbers, the Capilano and Shaughnessy people, emerged from under their high hedges to pay tribute to a man who attained power without their consent. It was a sweet triumph for the former maverick outsider who until recently had never been the old establishment’s darling. But past differences and suspicions deriving from the coalition days were forgotten at the ten-dollar-a-plate testimonial dinner, arranged by a “non-political committee”-entitled the Premier Ben­ nett Testimonial Dinner Committee-headed by George T. Cunningham and Alan McGavin, and including Fred Brown, Harold Foley, and Cyrus McLean.29 The honorary chairman was Lieutenant-Governor George Pearkes and the vice-chairman, Vancouver Mayor Bill Rathie, and, two former Lieutenant-Governors, Frank Ross and Clarence Wallace.30 The dinner was a massive affair attended by 1,125 guests and headed by a table, strewn with pink carnations, of tuxedoed notables, several with red noses and white carnations in their lapels. The gentlemen dined on Kamloops beef and local wine, and heartily applauded when the Premier was presented with several gifts, including a horseshoe of roses bearing the banner “The Champ from Kelowna,” a red leather guest book, a scroll, a plaque, and a badge denoting him a freeman of the City of Vancouver.31 But the sweetest gifts of all were the words of Senator J.W. deB Farris and H.H. Stevens, the two eighty-six-year-old guest speakers, former pillars of the

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Liberal and Conservative parties respectively, who lauded Bennett’s north­ ern vision and compared him to Mackenzie King, Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Sir Robert Borden.32 These were heady days, and guaranteed so by a local economy which surged into the mid-sixties at a speed greater than any in the country and, possibly, the continent. The hub of the boom was the Interior, blessed with huge investments in the pulp and paper and mining industries. Axel Wenner-Gren died in 1961, shortly after the British Columbia government expropriated the assets of the Peace River Development Company. But his spirit, and other assets, endured in the north through the shrewd dealing of W. Mainwaring, charged with disposing of the Wenner-Gren claims and assets. Mainwaring consolidated Wenner-Gren’s assets in Alexandra Forest Industries, which joined with B.C. Forest Products and the Reed Paper Group of London, in a venture in the Prince George area where, in the memorable phrase of Ray Williston, “All hell broke loose.” 33 There was barely a month in 1964 and 1965 during which some large announcement was not made of another major industrial development. Prince George was blessed with Northwood Pulp’s fifty-million-dollar plant, and cement works by Ocean Cement and Lafarge valued at twelve million dollars.34 Kam­ loops Pulp and Paper, in concert with Weyerhauser, built a fifteen-milliondollar mill in Kamloops while Granduc announced a fifty-five-milliondollar copper project in the northeast corner of the province. Endako Mines commenced a twenty-million-dollar molybdenum venture in Fraser Lake, and at Babine Lake Granby opened its Granisle copper mine.35 By 1965, the net value of forest products climbed to a record of $980 million from $484 million in 1952.36 Companies from nearly every European nation, the United States, Japan and Canada earmarked more than a billion dollars in capital construction for eighteen pulp and paper mills. In addition, mineral production reached a record level of $280 million, pushed upward by the entry of such large American giants as Anaconda, Kennicott Copper and Phelps Dodge. The Province noted that mining companies were frantically searching for trained geologists, while more than one hundred prospectors combed the province for ore bodies.37 Total capital investment in the province in 1965 reached $2.1 billion, up nineteen per cent from 1964 and equal to about $1,100 per person in British Columbia, compared to a national average of about $654.38 Average personal income jumped nine per cent from 1964 to $2,280 a year later, as against $1,988 for all of Canada and barely second to Ontario’s $2,296. In mid-year 1966, unemployment stood at 4.2%, the lowest since 1956, despite a population increase over the decade of fourteen per cent.39 The Interior boom was echoed in Vancouver, described by a Sun colum­ nist as the “unknowing silent partner in the economic surge.” 40 The Van-

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couver Stock Exchange, registering the frantic pulse across the province, traded shares at a faster clip than 1929. The month of July 1964 witnessed the greatest trading ever, with twenty-seven million shares worth eighteen million dollars changing hands. Despite Walter Gordon’s imposition of an eleven-per-cent sales tax on building materials in the 1963 budget, there occurred a construction boom as demand for downtown office space and residential housing increased. The heavy machinery industry, headed by the firms of Dietrich-Collins and Finnerty Tractor, reaped fortunes supplying hydro-construction, logging and open-pit mining needs.41 The Interior, favoured with vast projects financed by American, Japanese and European money, and Vancouver, which hosted the branch offices, supplied the pro­ jects and shipped the raw materials, were partners in an expansion centered around Prince George, the economic hub of the province.42 The new boom did not go unnamed. When Wall Street journalist Glynn Mapes visited British Columbia in the late summer of 1966 and wrote of the wondrous growth there, he entitled his article “Bennett’s Boom,” 43 and when Time publisher Bernard M. Auer decided it was time to do a feature story, in the American and World edition on “Canada Today-The Boom No one Noticed,” he devoted the entire cover, and a good part of the story, to W.A.C. Bennett who took his place alongside Rudolph Bing, Lin Piao and Sam Yorty as guests of the Luces during the same month.44 The Time story described the coast province as super Canada, “the big sky country, where Canada’s frontier spirit is most exciting and its economic boom most startling,” and it noted that while Ottawa floundered, the provinces surged forward under “their own strong premiers, particularly Bennett.” 45 The double-sized cover featured a portrait of Bennett, who more resembled a grim General Motors executive than a cherubic premier, against a back­ ground of the two growth areas, Vancouver and the northern Interior. The harbour, the lions, mountains, totem poles, and a thunderbird, which more resembled an eagle, stood over the Premier’s right shoulder. To his left was the great north of oil rigs, saw mills and power dams which Bennett, being of a gesticulatory bent, pointed to. The Premier was overcome by his new recognition, which rivalled the knighting of Sir Richard McBride a half century earlier and his investiture with the insignia of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.46 Upon departing on a European fund-raising tour, he could barely contain his glee: “I don’t know how to express myself. It’s extremely flattering for a humble little chap from New Brunswick to get in Time, not only in Canadian and U.S. editions, but world editions as well. It’s almost embarrassing to go abroad. I wish it had come out after my trip rather than before.” 47 He paused for a moment, then continued; “This will bring tremendous results in British Columbia and western Canada. It will show the country to people who want to come and share

J

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in it. It will get millions and millions of new investment and new industries and its all bound to be on the plus side.” 48 Having thus unburdened himself, the Premier hopped a plane to Bavaria where he received a medallion of honour from the state government.49 The Time article was the ultimate sanctification of a local politician who had long sought a place in the continental sun. The resurgent civic religion, the ceremony epidemic, the pagan rituals alongside pyramidal dams, the contrived personality cult, afforded Bennett, who often behaved as an un­ derdog, great personal pleasure and renewed confidence. But the new recog­ nition rested less upon indigenous than outside opinion, on the cool judg­ ment of the company men from Japan, Europe, eastern Canada and, above all, the United States, who sent their minions scurrying, their geologists, economists and engineers, to stake out the wilderness in a grand rush for profit. The companies invested and plundered and the Premier kept the way safe and open. Bennett aspired to high statesmanship, but he remained a common doorkeeper, guardian of a strutting mini-state which thumbed its nose at the federal authority as it greedily sucked up foreign capital. British Columbia in the heyday of W.A.C. Bennett, with its facile optimism and prosperity mania, resembled the golden age of Sir Richard McBride, but with this difference: the government now played a larger role in aiding private development. The Bennett regime was activist, interventionist, state capitalist, no longer a junior partner with the companies in the frontier assault. Bennett demanded not support, but local adulation for a regime which cowed the stumbling federal government, balkanized the country, and assumed many of the forms and trappings of an independent capitalist state: a provincially-owned railroad; a navy consisting of a fleet of ferries plying their trade between the Island and mainland; an air force consisting of a squadron of eight planes used by the Highways Department, including a $650,000 Lear jet which escorted friends of the Minister, family and visiting Pentecostal ministers around the province; a public power authority engaged in the construction of a dam as big as the Aswan project in Egypt; a provincial bank, should Ottawa allow it; a nascent expansionism, border­ ing on the bizarre, advertised by the Premier who, in the month of Septem­ ber 1964, offered to buy the Yukon and Northwest Territories west of the twelfth meridian for $312 million, an amount less per acre than the United States paid for Alaska in 1867. But the Bennett mini-state was reared on a false consciousness; a strutting provincialism which mistook the form of independence from Ottawa for the substance of dependence on Washington and Tokyo,50 the form of short­ term full employment for the reality of insecurity guaranteed by a skewed resource-based economy, the form of growth for the reality of under­ development. It was a mini-state which colonized the northern sector,

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s u b m itte d w o r k in g m e n to th e ir o n d is c ip lin e o f i n d u s tr ia l l a b o u r f o r fo re ig n c a p ita lis ts , h a n d s o m e ly re w a r d e d th e f a c e le s s c o m p a n ie s a n d lo c a l n a b o b s^ th e r u d e flo w e rs o f a b u s in e s s c iv iliz a tio n w h ic h s u b o r d in a te d v a lu e s o f c o m m u n ity

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In his quest for mini-state status, Bennett never abandoned the rude art of politics-juggling, creating and resolving spurious issues-of which he was a consummate master. The Premier paused to soak up adulation, but he did not rest. The ceremonial dance failed to blind him to the fickleness of opinion and the precariousness of power. Throughout the ritual years of the mid-sixties, the Socreds maintained a steady stream of minor legislation and carefully nurtured several issues which buttressed the government’s quasisovereign status. First there were the fragments of paternal legislation geared to remind voters that the new state capitalism had a heart. At the 1964 session, the government passed a Contracts Relief Act which provided court relief for victims of transactions involving “excessive, harsh or un­ conscionable terms,” and increased legal aid somewhat.52 A year later a medicare scheme was passed, dubbed by the Opposition as mini-care, which closely followed the “Manning-care” plan in operation in Alberta for eight­ een months.53 The Bennett plan fell short of providing the universal cover­ age advocated by the Hall Commission and limited the government’s role to the provision of subsidies for low income groups. Doctor-sponsored and doctor-approved, the new plan allowed the medical insurance agencies to function intact, and earned the plaudits of Peter Banks, the president of the British Columbia Medical Association, who pronounced it “a very sane and sensible piece of legislation.” 54 Similar opinions were entertained by most government supporters about the new redistribution bill, introduced and passed at the 1966 session, following the appointment and deliberation of a three-man independent advisory commission consisting of Henry Angus, retired chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, Fred Hurley, the provincial Chief Electoral Officer, and Kenneth Morton, Deputy Registrar of Voters.55 The Premier was moved to redistribute out of political rather than constitutional consid­ erations. There was nothing in the Constitution Act which compelled a redistribution, and in the previous thirty years there were only two reappor­ tionments despite a population growth from 700,000 to 1.7 million. By the

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mid-sixties, however, the rural-urban disparity had become so acute and widely advertised by the Opposition, that the government was forced to act. Under the old system, it was possible for one party to sweep the rural areas and leave Greater Vancouver, New Westminster and Victoria with no representation on the government side of the House. There were as many voters registered in the three largest provincial ridings-Point Grey, Van­ couver-East and Delta-as there were in twenty-six non-urban ridings. The three urban districts elected only seven M.L.A.s, the twenty-six non-urban seats elected twenty-six M.L.A.s. One vote in Atlin counted as thirty in Vancouver-East. Thirty per cent of the voters in Vancouver received only nine members or 17.3% of the legislative representation. The new bill strayed noticeably from the path suggested by the Angus Commission, which recommended the addition of eight more members to the lower mainland area and the reduction of the representation of outlying areas in the Interior and north coast from twenty-eight to twenty-one.56 Northern representation was to be reduced from seven to five. The Bennett plan increased the Legislature from fifty-two to fifty-five seats and Van­ couver’s representation grew to twelve members sitting for six dual ridings; the latter provision premised on the hope that Cabinet ministers, four of whom sat for Vancouver ridings, were sufficiently illustrious to carry col­ leagues to victory on their coat-tails. The government bill further retained the representation of the sparsely populated north and carved a new con­ stituency out of the Columbia River riding held by a Socred. N.D.P. and Liberal citadels, on the other hand, were wiped out in the Kootenays where representation was reduced from seven to four. Momentarily taken with the politics of internal reapportionment, Ben­ nett was not unmindful of the larger struggle, with the Ottawans, over control of British Columbia’s economic destiny. The happy conclusion of the Columbia Treaty was merely the signal for a renewed campaign against a federal government whose flaccid wavering, the Premier supposed, sharply contrasted with the dynamism of the coastal mini-state. Bennett perceived that fighting a discredited minority federal government which floundered from crisis to crisis was excellent politics, and he never once relented in his war with the Liberals. The Premier manufactured ample issues. The proposed grant of $148 million to Prince Edward Island to build a causeway to the mainland, inspired Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Campbell to speculate about a “boondoggle to a potato patch” and demand more federal money for highways and ferries in British Columbia.57 A dispute over ownership of off-shore oil resources moved Industrial Develop­ ment Minister Ralph Loffmark to disclose that the provincial Cabinet had discussed secession and inspired Bennett to take to the campaign trail during the autumn federal election of 1965 when he demanded another

260 Pillars of Profit

minority government and assured voters that Ottawa’s claim to ownership of off-shore oil rights was a first step to plunder the province’s natural resources. But the issue closest to the heart of the Premier was the fight over the proposed Bank of British Columbia which awaited federal chartering. The provincial enabling legislation provided for government ownership of up to twenty-five per cent of the stock of a bank, and was calculated, in the Premier’s own words, to “help every little capitalist.” 58 Bennett had a special competence in financial matters and a long-standing interest in banking. A prosperous frontier businessman concerned with easy and avail­ able credit, the Premier long mistrusted the tight Bay Street and Montreal banking club which, to his mind, hindered regional development. When Bennett sought election to the Board of Directors of the new Bank of Canada in 1935, he was easily defeated and henceforth nurtured a resent­ ment of the moguls who jealously guarded the prerogatives of the Eastern financial core.59 Bennett opposed the “closed shop” in Canadian banking and reminded voters during the 1965 federal election that while Canadian chartered banks were allowed to open branches abroad, foreign banks were barred from locating in Canada. But the Premier cared less about the Bank of America than the Bank of British Columbia, an example of “free enter­ prise at its best,” 60 a purely provincial institution calculated to buttress the province’s mini-state status and graduate Vancouver City into the big finan­ cial league with Toronto and Montreal. It is understandable that Bennett seized on the bank issue with a vengeance when the Committee on Com­ merce and Banking of the Canadian Senate, representing a body of gentle­ men who held a multitude of directorships in the major Eastern banks, rejected the Bank of British Columbia Bill in December 1964 by a vote of seventeen to seven.61 The momentary set-back afforded Bennett excellent ammunition during a struggle widely advertised in the press and finally resolved in the province’s favour on December 14, 1966, when the Bank of British Columbia Bill finally passed Parliament.62 There were, however, other matters given wide media coverage during the bank debate which brought the government less credit. The first in­ volved the suspension on October 2, 1964, of Mr. George E.P. Jones from his post as head of the Provincial Purchasing Commission for allegedly taking benefits while a government employee.63 Jones stood trial in Victoria and was acquitted. After a Crown appeal was dismissed in March 1965 as “frivolous and vexatious,” the government passed a bill which occasioned an N.D.P. walkout from the Legislature, dismissing Jones outright without letting him appear before a legislative committee or giving reasons for his dismissal. In the meanwhile, Jones responded with a slander suit against Bennett, who had made several slanted remarks about his former commis­

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sioner at a Social Credit banquet in Victoria, and several public radio interviews, in which he made various allegations concerning government operations.64 The seamy funding side of Social Credit politics, with Gunderson again hopelessly entwined, was given greater prominence during the celebrated “Dear Hal” letter affair involving the machinations of A1 Williamson, the former deskman of an Auckland, New Zealand newspaper, who ranched in the Cariboo, organized for the Liberals in the southern Interior and served as assistant to Vancouver Mayor Fred Hume before entering the public relations business soon after the Socreds landed in power. Williamson was Bennett’s useful servant and elbow acquaintance. He guested at the Pre­ mier’s home, fested at his private dinner parties, attended at his son’s wedding, socialized when necessary, and hovered at the Premier’s elbow at government functions ranging from ferry launchings to Royal tours.65 Alan Williamson, in short, was a key member of a team of public relations men who, for a valuable consideration, manufactured and shaped local opinion. But the nice government account was not Williamson’s sole source of income. Among other customers he counted one Harry Stonehill, an ex­ marine who emigrated to British Columbia in 1963 from the Phillipines, where he was declared persona non grata by the political authorities. Arriving in British Columbia with a bundle of money and a minimum of influence, Harry Stonehill quickly sought out A1 Williamson who, so it appeared, had a bundle of influence and a minimum of money. So they traded, and Harry Stonehill’s name soon gained local currency, being men­ tioned in relation to a projected glass factory and the Bank of British Columbia, in which he expressed an intention to invest as proof of his local patriotism. But the gypsy millionaire wished most of all to become a Canadian, and it was in pursuit of this hope that he landed A1 Williamson and the government, indirectly, in trouble. Citizenship being a federal matter, A1 Williamson wrote on Stonehill’s behalf to an old friend, Hal Dornan, who served as assistant to the Prime Minister of Canada. Since his own name Garried less weight than the Premier’s, Williamson wrote the letter on stationery inscribed with Bennett’s signature, one of many in his possession left over from government work. The slight indiscretion would have gone unnoticed had it not been for the Dorion Inquiry into alleged corruption in the federal government’s Immi­ gration Department, involving the Minister, Rene Tremblay, and his for­ mer executive assistant, Raymond Denis. The latter, it came to light, had suggested during an Ottawa talk, attended by Williamson, that Stonehill “invest twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand dollars in the Liberal Party,” 66 a matter which was given so thorough a public airing that Dornan was moved to release the “Dear Hal” letter which Bennett quickly dis­

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missed as a forgery. The Premier was entirely correct and A1 Williamson was sentenced to six months in jail,67 but not before giving lurid details, accorded full front-page treatment, on the mechanics of Socred campaign fund-raising, documenting the activities of Einar Gunderson, his senior partner, D.E. Stokes, and the British Columbia Free-Enterprise Educa­ tional Fund, which taxed businesses independent of the government and the Social Credit mass organization. In addition to serving as director of B.C. Hydro, vice-president of the P.G.E., director of the Ferry Authority and member of the Board of Governors of the University of British Columbia, Gunderson performed other important political and educational functions. He was the Premier’s principal bagman who quietly suggested to A1 Wil­ liamson and others, at the outset of election campaigns, which firms to approach for money. And he never guessed wrong. During his many years as Gunderson’s tax collector, Williamson admitted to the court that he “never had a refusal” 68 to requests for money, subsequently handed over to Stokes, who handled the receipts and bank deposits.69 “I looked after it from then on,” Gunderson later admitted. “We have also done a certain amount of sub-rosa education propaganda on behalf of free enterprise apart from politics.” 70 But the Jones and Williamson affairs barely tarnished the image of a regime which went to the people on September 12, 1966, seeking its greatest mandate ever. To many observers, it seemed like an election of a different sort, a strange, low tension contest without an issue. The government’s recent legislative fare was meagre and no new reforms or grand policies were advanced to rally the voters. The Premier appeared uncertain about the real issue. During a House debate on a labour bill in March, Bennett cited a threatened two-day general strike in the previous autumn “as the big issue in the election.” 71 On another occasion, he confessed that he called an election “to seek the approval of the voters on the redistribution of provincial election boundaries,” 72 a view which differed somewhat from an earlier pronouncement at the Social Credit anniversary party: “Do the people want the type of chaos we have in Ottawa? Or do they want the stability and dynamic growth brought to this province by the Social Credit govemment?-that will be the issue and the only issue, I say.” 73 Of the three probes, the latter was doubtless the one the Premier meant in earnest. As the autumn campaign gathered momentum, it became in­ creasingly apparent that what W.A.C. Bennett desired was no longer a mundane working majority rule but a “great mandate,” 74 a plebiscitarian sweep, a crowning landslide to fourteen record years of dynamic govern­ ment. The Premier owned many trophies. He had outflanked the Opposi­ tion, prostrated an obstructive corporation, confounded the Ottawans, brought full employment, sated the companies, graced the cover of Time

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magazine, and converted British Columbia from a forgotten periphery into a bloated mini-state. His new appeal for “stability” against “chaos” had a special insistent ring. Since British Columbians had won the good life, since all groups-workers, companies, farmers and professionals-were content, since class conflict was eliminated and stability and dynamism co-existed happily together, since “British Columbia has won the two greatest victories of all time, the victories of the Peace and Columbia against reactionary forces of both the right and left . . . ” 75 since “the Social Credit govern­ ment is more conservative than the Conservatives in financial matters, more liberal than the Liberals in terms of providing the nation’s highest old age and social assistance benefits, and even more in favour of public ownership than the C.C.F because of our ferry system and hydro program,” 76 since all of these conditions happily prevailed, there was no longer any need for an Opposition. The politics of confrontation found a place for the Opposi­ tion which represented one or another of the economic groups the govern­ ment opposed. But since economic and social problems had been solved and the well-ordered state realized, the Opposition was a fossil, an anachronism. The politics of ritual left no room for poopers in the temple. “Chaos” within the new context of the politics of ritual took on a very special meaning. It existed, or was threatened, wherever and whenever an official partisan Opposition, no matter how large, existed; it no longer applied to the special case of a large Opposition and minority government. W.A.C. Bennett in the month of September 1966 wished for more than stable majority government; he sought a grand affirmation which several of his organizers estimated to consist of at least forty-five seats in the new fifty-five-seat Legislature.77 When a reporter suggested to Bennett that a strong Opposition did not mean chaos, he replied that the government’s strongest and most effective critics were always his own back-benchers.78 The implication was clear. There was no longer any need for an Official Opposition in a province governed by a democratic mass party. Both of the Opposition parties were exclusive class parties; the Socreds were an om­ nibus people’s party. The Liberals spoke exclusively for the waterfront rich while the New Democrats were in thrall to cigar-smoking, hotel-frequent­ ing labour bosses and to Marxists who pitted class against class. Since all of the social elements were included within a triumphant governing people’s coalition, there was no need for an official partisan legislative Opposition. Whatever opposition was needed in a well-ordered state-precious little-was already contained, albeit unofficially, within the governing party where it performed loyally and responsibly, as well as critically. But the opposition, press and partisan, did not find the Premier’s logic edifying; especially since Bennett commenced to clear his party of both deadwood and dissenters in what Sun correspondent Frank Rutter de-

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scribes as “the greatest purge in the province’s political history rivalling the antics of Stalin and Mao Tse Tung.” 79 Now Rutter overstated the case. Bennett did not wish a general house-cleaning. He valued several of his mavericks who served as a useful proof of the party’s broad base and liberal tolerance. “When everybody thinks alike, my friend,” Bennett informed a reporter, “nobody thinks at all.” 80 And Bennett knew, from his own experi­ ence, that mavericks with strong local bases were dangerous if not properly humoured. So the Premier ignored several of the prime troublemakers in his clearing operation during the Socred nomination process. Ernie LeCours in Delta, who hated police and magistrates and fought the cause of embalmers, Bert Price in Burrard, who let the Wenner-Gren cat out of the bag, and Cyril Shelford of Omineca, an opponent of the large forest firms, oil companies, private auto insurance and watered rum, had all irked the Premier at one time or another. But they were a basically loyal group, performed competently in the House, and most importantly, each had a strong local base. Others, however, fared less well. The Socred nomination process resulted in an unprecedented twenty-per-cent turnover, and the infusion of new and more professional elements into the party. The aging Health Minister, Eric Martin, the focus of Opposition criticism during past sessions, and back-bencher Don Robinson, a weak link from Lillooet, were both wiped out by redistribution. And they were joined by Jacob Huhn and Stan Carnell in North and South Peace River, the troublesome but aging Alex Matthew in Vancouver-Centre, the rebellious J. Donald Smith of Victoria, and Arvid Lundell in Revelstoke, all of whom were easily defeated at nomination conventions by newer professional candidates. No longer a beseiged little government lacking proper accreditation, the Socreds, in their long reach for a big majority, enjoyed an “embarrassment of good candidates,” 81 including five women, four doctors and several leading professionals and businessmen. “Social Credit,” the Province concluded two days before the election “has achieved a degree of respectability and public acceptance that is higher than any before in its history.” 82 The Socred campaign was slick, professional, low-keyed and devoid of the hysterical thumping of past elections. A glossy sixteen-page document entitled, “A Timetable For Progress,” outlining British Columbia’s pros­ pective growth during the next seven years, was mailed out in late August to five thousand householders. Government agencies and departments provided the usual free advertising. For months the new electoral boundar­ ies were widely announced and explained in the newspapers. The Labour Department took out big ads documenting benefits for workingmen, while a P.G.E. parity bond issue advertisement found its way into most rural and urban newpapers. But the government’s favourite blurb was a large adver­ tisement, widely redistributed and reproduced in the press, of an American

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electronics firm, which had first appeared in Time, Look and Fortune maga­ zines at a cost of two hundred thousand dollars, citing British Columbia, together with California and Florida, as one of the leading growth areas in North America. In keeping with the new plebiscitarian urge, and with the strategy of the non-campaign borrowed from a fashionable California public relations firm,83 Socred candidates kept a low profile, remained relatively silent, refused to attend all-candidate meetings, and let the Premier carry the battle. Bennett said many of the old things but with a minimum of gesticula­ tion. He spoke of Medicare, the new home-purchase grant, redistribution, and the need “to show the rest of Canada that British Columbia is a stable province worth investing in.” 84 He visited pulp mills, instant townsites, and power dams where he promised more of the same . And he warned, as usual, that socialism would mean collective farms, state-run corner grocery stores and wide-spread unemployment.85 But the Premier urged his supporters not to fight with their opponents-“laugh with them and laugh at them, but laugh.” 86 Sensitive to a possible pro-Opposition sympathy vote in the cam­ paign’s final days, Bennett asked the voters to ignore the suggestion that a government landslide would wipe out all legislative opposition-“the law of averages would insure an Opposition.” 87 The Premier’s opponents urged the voters to forget about laws and averages and preserve Parliament by resisting the government’s great man­ date demand. The Tories aiforded Bennett the least trouble since they had quickly returned to their former moribund state. Davie Fulton sniffed the prevailing easterly wind soon after the 1963 election and returned to the federal field in 1965. Devoid of funds, organization and leadership-the provincial president and acting leader, Stuart Fleming, fell ill before the campaign-the Tories decided against contesting the election and only three candidates ran under the Conservative label.88 The Liberals were livelier but ineffective. They momentarily adopted a welfare approach and drew up “an agenda for a new generation” emphasizing hospital care, school con­ struction, increased welfare payments and more secondary industry, among other things. But the overriding issue, according to Ray Perrault, was dictatorship and the need for a viable Opposition. “He wants to create one great movement under an all-powerful leader,” Perrault concluded of Ben­ nett, “a heavy-handed totalitarian system. Make no mistake.” 89 The socialists adopted a similar line. In a retreat from Bond Street, \ Strachan demanded expropriation of B.C. Telephone, government auto \ insurance, government ownership of natural gas and oil pipeline transmis- I sion systems, and the encouragement of secondary industry.90 But his f major emphasis was on the dictatorship threat, on the government’s alleged dishonesty, its failure to give “a full and honest accounting” to the people

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on the power projects and highway construction. Strachan, aided by T.C. Douglas, who emphasized the danger of “one man government,” and who described the Socreds as “the most ruthless, arrogant, well-oiled, wealthiest political machine that ever existed in British Columbia,” cited the Socred failure to renominate sitting M.L.A.s as evidence of a new determination to destroy all opposition, and concluded the government wanted to wipe out the socialists “as the conscience of the government.”91 If this was truly Bennett’s hope and intention, then the results were disappointing. The government was returned, but with a slightly reduced majority. The Liberals held steady at twenty per cent and gained a seat in Point Grey where Pat McGeer and Garde Gardom defeated Robert Bonner and Dr. L. Ranta, one of the medical-politicos now associated with a government deep in Medicare. The N.D.P. raised their popular vote from 28% to 33.6%, and their representation by two, to sixteen seats. Their major upset victory was in Vancouver-Burrard, held by the Socreds since 1952, where Tom Berger and Ray Parkinson narrowly defeated Bert Price and Tom Alsbury. But the strong socialist urban showing was offset by hinterland and Island losses in Boundary-Similkameen, Mackenzie and Alberni where a bitter jurisdictional dispute between the Pulp and Paper Workers of Canada and the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Paper workers, which landed Robert Strachan in the middle, re­ dounded to the government’s favour. The Socreds held firm in their sup­ port, retaining thirty-three seats and raising their popular vote from fortyone per cent to forty-six per cent. Their weak showing in the lower main­ land, which resisted the Premier’s mandate appeal and returned fifteen Opposition candidates out of twenty-three seats, was compensated for by a strong showing in the loyal hinterland. For the Premier, the election was sobering, but heartening nonetheless since it represented “the sixth great victory of Social Credit over socialism.”92 And if Bennett wept inside over the cruel denial of immortality, his failure to wreak McBride’s devastation of a half century earlier, he was pleased at least that the people were saved from the curse of socialism, whose advance he summarized, in a parody of Lenin, as “two steps forward and four steps back.” 93 Having routed the Bolshevikii, Bennett maintained a brisk ceremonial pace in the months following the June election. In August 1967, he grinned, muttered and dedicated the one-hundred-and-thirty-foot Duncan Lake Dam, the first of the three Columbia River Dams to be completed. Less than a month later, he showed his beaming face five hundred miles north-east of Vancouver, stumbled onto a thirty-five ton truck and dumped the last load of fill into the W.A.C. Bennett Dam-a seven-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar project-before a crowd of three thousand people, including two hundred hydro guests and a solitary workman dressed in dirty dungarees

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and a battered hard-hat who joined the crowd in a solemn salute.94 Barely a month after the christening of the Portage Mountain Dam, the Premier clambered onto a platform at a McGill University centennial ceremony at the Montreal Forum and pouted noticeably when the first Ministers of Ontario and Quebec were addressed as “Prime Minister” while he, and several lesser notables, earned a meagre “Premier.”95 Twenty-four hours after his return home, the sign on the office door of the first Minister of the Province of British Columbia was changed to read “Prime Minister.” Thus ennobled, Bennett embarked on a new round of ceremonies, including the opening of the Bank of British Columbia in July 1968-which included as table guests such company notables as H.R. MacMillan and J.R. Beattie, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada-when Bennett was presented with a gold replica of the pass books issued in the 1880’s by the original Bank of British Columbia.96 Two months later, Bennett again sped five hundred miles due north-east, then descended five hundred feet into a power house beneath the Portage Mountain Dam where he turned the handle that released the first flow of power from the generating station. A short while later, the first Peace power arrived at the Coast, to the orchestral accom­ paniment of trumpets in Prince George and loud horns in Vancouver which gave a tortured rendering of the National Anthem atop the B.C. Hydro Building. But the renewed fanfare drew a restrained response as the boom, which peaked in the phrenetic mid-years of the decade, levelled off throughout 1967 and 1968. A decline in demand for lumber and pulp and paper severely affected profits and employment in the forest industry.97 Early in 1967, most of the major pulp mills began to cut back output, claiming excess supply due to over-capacity. The value of capital construction in the pulp and paper industry underway or planned in mid-year was $644 million, down thirty-five per cent from the previous year. Steel fabricators com­ plained of a slump resulting from competition from Japanese and eastern Canadian producers. Estimated new and repair capital investment in 1968 was 2.56 billion dollars, down slightly from the 1967 record year of 2.66 billion.98 Anticipated capital construction in the forest industries, exclud­ ing the primary sector, was $199 million, well down from recent annual levels. By 1968, unemployment climbed above six per cent, the highest in four years. Not the least of the causes of the rise in unemployment was the comple­ tion of several of the hydro projects, which turned out to be considerably more expensive than the Premier had anticipated. Due to the underestima­ tion of costs of land purchase, construction material, road construction and rising interest rates, the costs of the Columbia Treaty dams rose from $411 million in 1964 to an estimated $518 million in 1968, resulting in

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an expected deficit over fund monies in excess of one hundred million dollars." The dam price-spiral created disturbances across the economy. In the summer of 1967, contractors on the Peace Project sued the provincial agency for thirty million dollars to cover increased dam construction costs.100 In the late autumn of 1966, Hydro head Gordon Shrum an­ nounced impending rate increases, necessitated by rising capital construc­ tion costs, in order to speed up Hydro’s cash flow so it could better borrow for capital expansion.101 And the increases came soon enough, on March 31, 1967, when power rates for domestic users were increased, notwith­ standing earlier assurances by the Premier,102 twenty-five per cent on the first three hundred kilowatt hours, thereby quickening Hydro’s cash flow by seven million dollars per year.103 Hydro’s expensive borrowing from provincial pension and investment funds placed added burdens on the Health and Education Departments, and on the municipalities, chronically starved for funds. An abatement in school construction, together with the introduction of a new education finance formula during the 1968 session,104 resulted in fierce opposition from the B.C. Teachers’ Federation which initiated a widespread information campaign. Nor was the skittish economy the Premier’s sole source of concern. The Supreme Court of British Columbia provided Bennett with a special irritant when, in March 1967, George E.P. Jones was awarded fifteen thousand dollars in slander damages. A short while later, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a decision on jurisdiction over offshore mineral rights in favour of the federal government. What troubled the Premier most, however, was the inauspicious debut of his Bank of British Columbia whose charter was given Royal assent on December 14, 1966, after the provincial government retreated from its earlier position demanding government par­ ticipation of up to twenty-five per cent of the share capital ownership. The subsequent share campaign proved a dismal failure, principally because the established chartered banks enjoyed a strangle-hold, through interlocking directorships, on the loyalties of the major British Columbia companies. The Premier’s personal goal of two hundred and fifty million dollars in share capital, first announced in 1964, was quickly reduced to seventy-five million and, later, to twenty-five million. But when the subscription cam­ paign closed on August 15, 1967, only twelve million dollars had been collected despite a spate of personal phone calls, subsequently leaked to the press, from the Premier to ten or twelve executives, including H.R. MacMil­ lan, Ernie Richardson of B.C. Tel, and R.G. Rogers of Crown Zellerbach, asking each to buy at least a million dollars in shares.105 A week after the close of the share offering, Frank Trebell, the bank president who had been offered a long-term contract, resigned his position and announced his return to the Yorkshire Financial Corporation.106

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The bank trouble, however, was a minor irritant compared to the renewed prosecution by an aroused Opposition of its private war with P. A. Gaglardi. The source of the Minister’s troubles were his two sons, Bill-who dabbled briefly in engineering in Texas-and Bob, who studied religious music in the United States before taking on as a “music arranger” at his father’s Pentecostal Church. But Bob and Bill soon abandoned their techni­ cal and artistic vocations for the more satisfying field of real estate. And herein lay the unfortunate Minister’s troubles, which were first brought to the attention of the House by N.D.P. deputy leader Alex Macdonald. Bob and Bill, according to Macdonald and Jes Odam, a Sun reporter who wrote a three-part series of articles on their doings, may not have been virtuosi with the slide rule and church organ, but they knew a good land deal when they saw one. Through a series of companies-Northland Investments Ltd., B and W Developments Ltd., Savemore Investment Associates Ltd., Georgefield Developments Ltd.-they bought up large chunks of land from residents in areas like Blue River, Cache Creek, Kamloops and Chase which were resold, at raised prices, to oil companies like Imperial, Shell, BA, Husky and Pacific Pete.107 The oil companies did not merely need land; they wanted it in the right location, along proposed highway routes. And they needed Highways Department approval for subdividing, development and access. Dealing with the Gaglardi boys, and paying the price asked, which was never too unreasonable, was obviously good business. For the Highways Minister, who adorned his office desk with an over­ sized leather-bound bible as well as a miniature replica of his Lear jet,108 and for the Premier, the new revelations and attendant publicity were bad business. And matters worsened when further charges, directly implicating Gaglardi, who suffered from an aching mandible, were made; that the Minister had personally supported land re-zoning for commercial develop­ ments involving his sons, before the Kamloops City Council; that land company signs were painted in the Department of Highways sign shop; that an ornamental wall had been constructed around a Department of High­ ways yard across from a motel owned by the Minister’s sons; that emer­ gency work had been done on a ranch operated by Gaglardi;109 that the Minister flew his daughter-in-law, among others, to Texas in his Lear jet at the public expense. The government responded with a burst of righteous prose, an exercise in feigned martyrdom, protestations of innocence, innuendos about bribery, screams of smear, a tepid enquiry by the House’s Public Accounts Commit­ tee and, finally, the resignation of the aggrieved Minister. Gaglardi spoke of sinister political motivations, despicable methods, rampant gangsterism, character assassination, the attempted overthrow of the government and a mysterious twenty-five thousand dollar bribe offered by someone to some-

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one in order to ruin someone. “It seems that terrible gangsterism had entered here and someone has stooped so low as to use the most despicable methods known to human beings to bring about the dishonour of individu­ als, the tearing down of integrity and the defeat of the government . . . I have always loved this province with its wild and precipitous mountains, its rolling hills and wooded territories and its open plains.” 110 The Minister spoke with such feeling that the Premier, a man of delicate constitution, broke down and wept in the House. But he soon dried his eyes, recovered his lapsed composure, scoffed at the Opposition’s suggestion of an independent judicial enquiry, handed the ranching and Lear jet matters to the Public Accounts Committee which refused to call witnesses, cleverly shifted the issue from the big land deal to the little airplane ride and, finally, accepted Gaglardi’s resignation from the Highways portfolio, but not from the Cabinet, where he remained as Minister without portfolio.111 Bennett closed with a tribute-“British Columbia’s highways will always be Gaglardi highways, even if we have twenty-two Highways Ministers. They talk about Roman roads in Europe, but they don’t compare to Gaglardi highways in British Columbia.” 112 And Gaglardi, a good Christian to the very end, appended a plea for the underprivileged.113 “Just because their father was Highways Minister,” he said of Bob and Bill, “did that mean these boys had to be second-class citizens? . . . Weren’t they entitled to do what any other private citizen could do?” 114 Gaglardi’s removal from the Highways portfolio was one of several set­ backs the Premier endured which inspired the Opposition and the metro media to entertain, in the early months of 1969, the delicious prospect of an impending electoral reversal. Two months after Gaglardi’s momentary demise, Bennett announced the resignation from the Cabinet of Attorney General Robert Bonner, long a government pillar, who was appointed senior vice-president in charge of administration at Macmillan Bloedel.115 The quitting of Bonner, long touted as the Premier’s certain successor, together with five successive by-election defeats, including the marginal Vancouver-South seat which fell to the N.D.P.’s Norm Levi in May, were hailed as certain evidence of a sinking government ship; a prospect further enhanced, according to the Premier’s opponents, during the 1969 session, by the collapse of the large Commonwealth Trust Company and heated passage of a controversial interest loan bill, aiding the afflicted firm, after evidence had been presented of lax administration by the Securities Division of the Attorney General’s Department.116 But Bennett remained unconvinced and proceeded, during the early months of 1969, to mend the government’s strewn fences; a task lightened considerably by the return of a measure of economic buoyancy in the new year when unemployment dropped below five per cent, personal income

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rose 10.5%, retail trade rose almost ten per cent, capital and repair expendi­ tures went up approximately thirty million to a record high of 2.9 billion and housing starts rose twenty-two per cent, to thirty-two thousand units.117 Firmer markets brought a ten-per-cent rise in pulp and paper production and a 13.5% increase in mineral production, to six hundred and forty million. And there were several new big projects afoot; a fifty-milliondollar P.G.E. extension into the north, a one-hundred-million-dollar expan­ sion by West Coast Transmission Limited, Alberta Natural Gas’s projected 8.8-million-dollar expansion program, new investments, estimated at two hundred million dollars, in forestry, and the huge Robert’s Bank deepsea super port near completion outside of Vancouver, geared to handle the three hundred and fifty million tons of Kootenay coal to be shipped by Kaiser Resources Ltd. over the next fifteen years at a cost of $735 million to Japan.118 The economic surge provided an excellent backdrop for Bennett’s stand­ ardized pre-election routine. First there was the war with Ottawa which Bennett heated up in November 1968 when he announced British Colum­ bia’s intention never to surrender her offshore minerals rights no matter what the courts recently ruled. And he further announced that the province would press for a constitutional amendment to the B.N.A. Act at the next federal-provincial conference, scheduled for December, redrawing the pro­ vincial boundaries so that, among other changes, more than two hundred thousand square miles of the Northwest Territories and all of the Yukon would be annexed to British Columbia, a territorial adjustment calculated to double the province’s size.119 The subsequent postponement of the con­ ference did not deter Bennett from unfurling at a December 13 press confer­ ence, a new map of Canada which halved the number of provinces, annexed the northern territories to the new entities and, of course, saved the choice Yukon morsel for British Columbia.120 Having cudgelled Ottawa, Bennett took off after the labour leaders, the hotel people, Y'ho had been granted a political reprieve, relatively speaking, during the low-keyed 1966 great mandate election. The labour pot boiled over noticeably during the 1968 session when the government ignored the major provisions of the report of Mr. Justice Nathan Nemetz on Swedish industrial relations and introduced instead the Mediation Commission Act, known as Bill 33, which established new mediation machinery, a modified form of compulsory arbitration applied at the discretion of the Cabinet, a virtual ban on all strikes in the public service, and heavy penalties for strikes in contravention of the Act. The new bill was hailed by the N.D.P. Opposi­ tion and by labour leaders as the death knell of free collective bargaining in the province. The British Columbia Federation of Labour executive declared an open war on the new measure, launched a massive information

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272 Pillars of Profit

( campaign and resolved to boycott entirely the new Mediation Commission, which the government shrewdly staffed with dissident but prominent union­ ists like Ed Simms, Canadian director of the Brewery Workers Union, president of the Vancouver Labour Council and former regional vice-presi­ dent of the C.L.C., and Pen Baskin, a federation vice-president. The effect of the new bill, like all of the government’s previous major labour law amendments, was to move industrial relations, in an inflationary period, closer into the political sphere, and to heat the quarrel with the mainstream union leadership at a time of extensive strikes involving telephone workers, meat cutters and clerks in the Vancouver district supermarkets, Air Canada machinists, bus drivers on Vancouver Island, mine workers, wood workers, and twenty-two hundred members of the Canadian Union of Public Em­ ployees employed by a number of municipalities.121 With the labour cauldron brewing nicely, the Premier proceeded to sprinkle the electorate with assorted goodies preceding the election called for August 27, 1969. The third session of the twenty-eighth legislature contained the usual pre-election fare of exuberant budget claims, glossy window-dressing items, and several tangible spending measures. The gov­ ernment passed a Human Rights Act which had as little effect and meaning as the Strip Mining Reclamation Bill which caused American law expert, David Schneider, to speculate: “It might be better to have no legislation passed at all rather than the one proposed.” 122 Amendments to the Motor Vehicle and Insurance Acts provided a no-fault insurance system that did nothing to lower rates. The province’s first billion dollar budget, pro­ nounced by the flushed and excited Premier as a Social Credit miracle, occasioned a renewed plea to the federal government to withdraw com­ pletely from the personal and corporate income tax fields, held the line on tax increases and provided for a splurge of attractive new spending; ten million dollars for amateur sports, a twenty-five-million-dollar first citizens’ fund for the depressed Indians, twenty-five million dollars on the govern­ ment’s Home Acquisition Program under which first-time buyers of new homes were entitled to an outright one thousand dollar grant or a five thousand dollar loan, a twenty-five-million-dollar major disaster fund and five million dollars to double the size of the centennial cultural fund set up in 1967.123 Ferry fares were subsequently lowered, funds were released for the construction of the government skyscraper in downtown Vancouver, and the building of new harbour facilities commenced in Prince Rupert. A roused bulldozer brigade clogged the arterial ways across the province. In its train sped the Premier, who felt out the soft spots of the electorate during a ten-thousand-mile tour in April, in which he addressed numerous booster meetings and showed bored audiences the film, The Good Life, a dull pictorial review of seventeen years of Socred rule commissioned at a

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ft A A

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cost of fifty thousand dollars by the Department of Trade and Industry. Bennett sniffed opportunity and, accordingly, on July 21, announced that an election was necessitated by the challenge of “Marxian Socialism” to British Columbia’s free-enterprise way of life. The announcement was a signal for a new paroxysm of spending. The media were saturated with government and party advertising. The Depart­ ment of Trade and Industry bought large space in newspapers, rural and urban, to advertise the government’s pollution control measures. B.C. Hy­ dro publicized its new bond issue while workingmen were reminded of the government’s munificence in expensive advertisements sponsored by the Workmen’s Compensation Board. The Socred advertising agencies bought huge advertisements in the press and saturated the air space on radio and television with party blurbs.124 All of this provided a useful backdrop to the Premier’s histrionics. Hav­ ing left behind the politics of ritual and the California ad men, Bennett ran scared and fast. It was the old rescue operation. He sought neither a great mandate nor the decimation of the Opposition. His goal was the more modest and traditional one of preserving a stable investment climate and saving British Columbia from the Marxists and labour bosses. Deflated during a time of rampant inflation, the Premier played his old role of a little government leader, beseiged by centralizers, Marxist labour bosses and slick professionals, and struggling to foster the good life. As if to prove his point, Bennett took himself to the very heart of the persecuted little man, to a humble cottage in Kamloops where Phil Gaglardi, “our Phil of the Good Life,” was overwhelmingly renominated. Gaglardi promised the local peo­ ple a multi-million dollar bypass, a vocational school, a new court house, a regional college, and a bridge across the Thompson River. Bennett pro­ mised he would never foresake his old friend and colleague and hinted at a likely new portfolio for the defrocked Minister.125 But Bennett did not save his major prose for the praise of Gaglardi. Instead, he expended it on the resurgent New Democratic Party which, he fondly repeated, was really the New Depression Party. The Premier con­ jured the old Marxist bogey and warned electors not to be deceived by moderate rhetoric since the “philosophy of socialism” was “masquerading under another name.” 126 He was careful to emphasize that the socialists were in thrall to professional union bosses as well as urban yippie elements. When Prime Minister Trudeau was jostled and heckled at the Seaforth Armouries during a speech in Vancouver, the Premier announced the so­ cialists were behind the incident. When the Vancouver transit system was shut down by wildcatting transit workers, he suggested that the N.D.P. leader had caused the trouble. Socred candidates drew similar conclusions about the strikes of meat cutters, food-store employees, and gasoline work­

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ers. The Premier liked to refer to the new N.D.P. leader, Tom Berger, the province’s leading labour lawyer who owed his election to the party leader­ ship in part to union support, as a city slicker labour lawyer. The major issue in the campaign was “take-home pay with Bennett or strike pay with Berger.” 127 It was the old choice between the construction crew and the wrecking gang led by “paid professional organizers whose entire liveli­ hood is derived directly from the people . . . its self-appointed spokes­ men . . . professionals who never lose no matter who wins or loses in the struggle between those who seek a responsible developing private-enterprise economy and those who would impose upon you the heavy hand of social­ ism.” 128 It was the old battle between free enterprise and socialism, between Social Credit and the N.D.P. The Tories, led by John de Wolfe, were in their usual moribund state and barely ran a candidate. The Liberals now led by U.B.C. neurologist Pat McGeer, a student of the mind of whales, ran their usual “stripped-down summer fun” campaign replete with barbecues, parties, corn-roasts and protestations that the Liberals were the happy mean, “the middle-of-the-road non-socialist party,” between the truculent Marxists and an aging, neurotic government. But the major challenge was from the left. Following the old precept that “if you can’t win, change leaders,” the Socialists selected Tom Berger, who sat briefly in the federal House, over Dave Barrett, at a Hotel Vancouver convention in April, attended by over eight hundred delegates. This was not Berger’s first attempt at the leader­ ship. His unsuccessful bid to unseat Robert Strachan at the 1967 socialist convention led to protracted infighting, Strachan’s eventual resignation in the spring of 1969, and a close fight at the April convention culminating in Berger’s victory by a scant thirty-six votes on the second ballot. The leadership switch instilled new hope in the N.D.P. who fought a professional grey-flannel campaign, devoid of both old rhetoric and new imagination, similar to Strachan’s laboured effort in 1963. The Bond Street campaign, which better fitted Berger, who spent many hours in the court room, was efficiently prosecuted with the aid of organizers from Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, who spread themselves in priority constituen­ cies such as Vancouver-Centre, Vancouver-South, Delta and Richmond, which party strategists were convinced could be tipped. Berger presented himself as a responsible critic and credible Premier, emphasized that there was a vital role for free enterprise in the economy, and reassured his listeners that the N.D.P. program for nationalization began and ended with the telephone company. N.D.P. candidates talked of stringent pollution measures, elections every four years, two legislative sessions per year, an end to night sittings, an effective legislative committee system, educational reforms and aid to secondary industries. Except for government auto insur­

Big Dam Government: 1964-1969 275

ance and the expropriation of B.C. Tel, there was no suggestion of expand­ ing public ownership. But enough electors heeded Bennett’s warning that socialism was really “masquerading under another name,” to ensure the government’s safe re­ turn. The Socreds raised their seat total to thirty-eight, a gain of five from the N.D.P. and one from the Liberals, an Oak Bay victory which warmed the Premier’s heart. And the Socreds gained 46.8% of the popular vote, their highest ever. The Liberals salvaged five seats at 19.4% of the popular vote, a drop of 1.2% from their previous total. The N.D.P. collected 33.9% of the vote and twelve seats. Among their defeated candidates was Tom Berger, who fell with his running mate, Dr. Ray Parkinson, in VancouverCentre; a setback which occasioned his resignation as party leader and subsequent replacement by Dave Barrett. The Premier glowed on election eve and discerned a higher purpose in a victory which not only “stopped the socialists in their tracks,” but “saved Canada from socialism.” 129 A master of preventive politics, he had safely effected another rescue operation; an accomplishment especially dear to him because it assured that British Columbia, whose great expectations were on the brink of fulfillment, would be firmly and justly ruled by a free-enterprise government on the day, July 21, 1971, of her entry into the great Dominion a century earlier. The Premier was filled with warming thoughts, of conquests past, of local and national patriotism, of bonfires and dams; intimations deep and soulful. It seemed as if history was halting, as if the dominion of Social Credit, like the rule of the companies, would endure forever.

CHAPTER X

The Good Life: 1970-1972

“It’s a product of unity, of all our people, our labour force and industry-all working together in a great dynamic society. . . . ” The Good Life.

“Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees. . . . ” Isaiah.

There seemed precious little to interfere with W.A.C. Bennett’s musings on political immortality in the days and months following the general election of June 1969. A nervous sort, the Premier was momentarily soothed by the cudgelling of the Marxists and the labour bosses, the rejection of the mas­ querading professionals, the halting of the barbarian hordes at the gates of the city. The latest saving operation had not been easy. Statesmanship, to Bennett’s mind, counted for little without salesmanship, and the Premier was warmly appreciative of the good work done by his advertising adjuncts in safeguarding the government majority. Producing a useful commodity, Bennett had long ago discerned, was not enough. It had to be skillfully packaged and marketed and the Premier was properly grateful to the Clanceys and the Kenmuirs, the Ekmans and the admen who, for valuable consideration, present and future, sold the good life to the blinking masses. But the best seemed yet to come. The new decade, the nearing centennial, promised renewed fanfare, burnings and openings, banners and blurbs, celebrating the march of progress in the new Eldorado. The official opening on June 15, 1970, of the Robert’s Bank super port, a champagne affair costing in the neighbourhood of one hundred thousand dollars,1 was the first of a round of rituals setting the centennial mood. Like all of the others, it was peppered with tycoons and notables including Edgar Kaiser Sr., head of the parent company Kaiser Steel of Oakland, California, who arrived in his luxury yacht Calliope; Edgar Jr., the subsidiary’s executive vice-presi­ dent of operations; Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the Premier himself who marvelled at the epic project. Having launched a branch plant super-project, the Premier travelled to 276

The Good Life: 1970-1972 277

the headquarters itself, to California, U.S.A., where he promoted and boosted the approaching B.C. centennial. Bennett’s three-day stay was highlighted by his presence on the dignitary’s platform at the Rose Bowl parade where he observed the prize-winning B.C. float in transit, consisting of a luxurious royal coach, drawn by eight Windsor grey horses and deco­ rated with the dogwood (the province’s floral symbol), the provincial coat of arms and the words, “A Royal Welcome to Canada.” 2 The following day, Bennett attended the Rose Bowl Game where, at intermission, flanked by a scarlet-coated R.C.M.P. constable and a platoon of sheriffs officers and plain-clothed security men, he stole up on Governor Ronald Reagan and shoved into his hand a B.C. flag, a set of cuff-links and some sort of centennial trinket. Momentarily irked by Bennett’s attentions, Reagan recovered quickly enough to assure the Premier that he welcomed British Columbia’s use of the Rose Bowl parade as a means of publicizing the centenary because “we think California is a place people can come to celebrate almost anything.” 3 Back in British Columbia, Bennett pursued the ritual course with usual zest. Vancouver residents, some five hundred strong standing in the plaza outside the Toronto Dominion bank tower on the corner of Granville and Georgia, were treated to a grand affair in late October marking the comple­ tion of the first phase of the hundred-million-dollar Pacific Centre; a project jointly partnered by Kemp Investments of Montreal, Eatons of Canada Limited and the Toronto Dominion Bank. The Pacific Centre affair featured a raft of tycoons including John Craig Eaton, chairman of Eatons of Canada, David Kinnear, president of Pacific Centre Limited and Allan Lambert, chairman and president of the Toronto Dominion Bank. And it was livened by the background sounds of the macrobiotic music of Hari Krishna monks who chanted their chants, tinkled their bells, and shook their shaven heads, while the British Columbia Boy’s Choir entertained with the Happy Wanderer and a spirited version of the Toronto Dominion Bank radio commercial. The Vancouver Police Pipe Band heralded the arrival of the official party, including the Premier, who paid his respects to the Toronto Dominion Bank, pronounced the Centre as “a visible sign of Vancouver’s future as a leader of world financial centres,” and turned a large golden key in a box on the platform which symbolically unlocked the doors to the tower; a thirty storey office building composed of 220,000 square feet of solar glass, so monstrous and insolent in appearance, so discordant with its neighbouring surroundings in scale, finish and colour, that one observer was moved to comment, not inaccurately, that the tower resembled “a giant tree trunk after a forest fire.” 4 Whatever the aesthetics of the T-D Tower, the Vancouver business com­ munity was sufficiently appreciative of Bennett’s good work in providing a

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climate suitable to the nurturing of skyscrapers that they paid warm tribute to him at a “non-partisan” testimonial dinner, sponsored by the Board of Trade and held in the Hotel Vancouver in early November. The notables, all eight hundred of them, including media celebrities like Jack Webster, and Opposition politicians like Robert Strachan, attended in full force to hear a string of eulogies so touching that the Premier pronounced the event, through a veil of tears, as “one of the great moments of my political career.” 5 Bennett was presented with a railroad hat and a toy model of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway. And he melted before the warm stream of kind words spoken by friends and old critics alike; by Cap Capozzi who recalled old days and good times in Kelowna with “Cece” during political gab sessions; by J.V. Clyne of MacMillan Bloedel who lauded, in the severe precise prose befitting a legally trained tycoon, the Premier’s statesmanship and sense of justice; by William Hamilton, the Board of Trade president and former Tory Postmaster-General who quoted Abraham Lincoln’s Gettys­ burg Address in support of his supposition that Bennett needed no eulogy since “your eulogy lies in the burgeoning forest industry, the rapidly grow­ ing mining industry, the ferry fleet and many other things.” 6 Foremost among the other projects Hamilton had in mind was, doubt­ less, Bennett’s own special centennial favourite, his pride and joy, the economic thing closest to his heart, which, the Board of Traders knew, lay not in the city of Vancouver. Instead it snaked north of the mainland city, along the steep cliffs bordering the blue waters of the Pacific, to Squamish, then north-east across magnificent terrain of mountains and rich grassland to effluent Prince George; then further north through the bleak expanse of the Peace River country to the town of Fort St. John. Above all the grand achievements of his regime, Bennett valued the completion and extension of the P.G.E., the railway which had effected the demise of several of his political predecessors. It was only fitting, therefore, that the major centen­ nial spectacular, widely attended by the media fraternity, was in the form of a northern pilgrimage, pursued in the comfort and safety of carpeted railway cars, in the month of September 1971, by a consortium of notables, political and economic, gathered and quartered at the Premier’s behest by his faithful adjuncts. The rolling stock trek was a special occasion, marking the two-hundredand-fifty-mile extension, from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson, of a railroad which had gone just about as far as it could go. Appropriately enough, a group of impeccable people-adjuncts, functionaries, politicians, and tycoons-accompanied the Premier in his ritual passage to the resource mecca. Several American railway men came along for the ride including P.J. Cullen of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad who, like a few of his colleagues, brought his own plush railway car special for the occasion.

The Good Life: 1970-1972 279

Enjoying the journey with him were the Premier’s perennial bagmen, Einar Gunderson and M J. Walton of Gunderson, Stokes and Walton, along with attentive adjuncts like Daniel Ekman, the Premier’s pipeline to the pipeline industry and Cam Kenmuir, vice-president and accounts supervisor of a large advertising firm.7 The bond houses were represented by J.E. Wiley of Salomon Brothers of New York, one of the largest bond-trading houses in the United States, while Bryn Brynelson of Brameda Resources and Ian Barclay of B.C. Forest Products were noticeable as respresentatives of the giant firms which favoured the north with huge investments and few jobs. Finally, the carpeted and panelled cars hosted the political managers of the northern spoliation; the Premier, who dozed, chatted and shared a liquidfree rear car with Ekman, Gunderson and Kenmuir; Resources Minister Ray Williston, father of the pulp explosion in the mid-sixties; Mines Minis­ ter Frank Richter, guardian of the Kaiser strip mining project in the East Kootenays; Gerald Bryson, the deputy Finance Minister; and Trades and Industries Minister Waldo Skillings, described by one Opposition member as “useless as a bathroom duck,” 8 who waddled through the cars in scarlet Canadian Pacific slippers.9 The trek provided an odd show for the few sullen northerners gathered at occasional stations, whose usual visual fare consisted of long ribbons of ore-filled freight trains interrupted by an occasional Budd car. But it was a nice occasion for the notables themselves; to rub shoulders and nod heads, to get to know each other better, to swish ice cubes in crystal glasses and relax in easy leather chairs from which they viewed, behind polished win­ dows, the grand sweep of a wilderness they called their own. The talk was easy and friendly: about dynamic resources and dynamic growth, the need for a fair representation by the press of the government’s dynamic policies; the inconvenience of the growing public outcry against pollution; the firm partnership between private and public sectors in conquering the north and bringing the good life to the people of British Columbia.10 The jollity pleased and assured the Premier who wound up the tour with a brisk ceremony before a thousand people at the railway’s end in Fort Nelson where the old creed was summoned about thresholds, forward leaps, a greater British Columbia, and neighbourliness with the people of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Bennett closed with a reminder that his audience was witnessing not an end, but a beginning, of a new thrust forward towards the limitless horizon. “When we consider the awesome potential still to be developed, we realize we can pause only briefly to mark this latest step forward before we hurry on to the next.” 11 True to his word, the Premier quickly closed the occasion with a handshake, a smile and a supplementary letters patent for Mayor Harry W. Clarke. He then drove the last spike into the ground, with a mechanical device, joined the Interna­

280 Pillars of Profit

tional Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers as an honorary member, mounted the engine and started the first ore-filled resource-train south. Their business finished, the notables sped homeward, back to their sky­ scrapers and teakwood desks, behind which they spoke of the marvels they had seen; and contemplated further frontiers. Whatever the Premier’s good intentions about onward marches, renewed thrusts, and forward leaps, the government seemed curiously stationary during the legislative sessions of 1970 and 1971. The first session of the twenty-ninth legislature was a drab affair free of both major legislative enactments and the usual histrionics of members whose theatrical proclivi­ ties were dampened by the shut-down for the duration of the session of Vancouver’s two daily newspapers. The Bennett budget recorded a sevenper-cent raise in old age pension allowances, an average of 8.5-per-cent increases in allowance to welfare recipients and a civil-service raise from six to eight per cent. M.L.A. salaries were raised twenty-five per cent, the age of majority lowered to nineteen from twenty-one and minor changes were made in landlord and tenant laws.12 The following session was equally uninspiring with most of the bills being of a repetitive, house-keeping sort. For the first time in a decade, personal taxes were raised and substantial increases imposed on the consumption of gasoline, cigarettes, and hotel rooms.13 To perennial House-watchers, the centennial miracle play closely fol­ lowed the scenario of its dreary predecessors. The Lieutenant-Governor, perched high on his chair, warbled the Speech from the Throne. Page boys scampered among the marble arches, clutching their messages. Paunchy members leaned over, whispered, guffawed, and swallowed Planter’s pea­ nuts. The speaker, protected from the rains by a Purim hat and from the dogs by a mace, thwacked his gavel. Back-benchers feigned indignation and front-benchers feigned interest. All of this took place within the shadow of an .assembly as antiquated as the marble arches which sustained it. The entire show was orchestrated by the Premier who made sure there was no real Hansard to record the daily debate or active house committees to revise and amend legislation. As punishment for their verbal sins, the members were forced to sweat through night sessions when the government legislated by exhaustion. There was no independent Auditor-General to check the government books, or daily question period to fortify an Opposition thwarted in its search for informa­ tion about a government administering one of Canada’s richest domains. In twenty years, government-spending in British Columbia had increased ten-fold.14 The Legislature itself had grown. There were more Cabinet ministers and more M.L.A.s to discuss what the ministers were, or were not, doing. The scope of government activity had widened enormously to in-

The Good Life: 1970-1972 281

elude Hydro, Medicare, public housing, pollution control and a wide range of other activities. But the assembly remained subject to an executive des­ potism as brutal as the discipline enforced at the century’s turn by Richard McBride. British Columbians lived and worked in a branch plant economy. It was only fitting that the political body which housed their elected re­ presentatives remain a dutiful subsidiary of an executive which behaved like a civilian junta. And it is perfectly understandable, in the light of the illusion of political omnipotence cast by the House’s authority structure, that new and old House watchers, in the year 1971, could easily conclude that, after almost two decades of rule, the Socreds remained unchallenged masters of the political domain. The third session of the twenty-nineth parliament, Sun journalist Marjorie Nichols observed, provided “little solace for those who yearn for political revolution in B.C. . . . if there are any loose plates in the Social Credit armour, they are not apparent to the naked eye; it is within the four walls of the marbled-columned legislative chamber that one is given a taste of the almost total powers that Bennett exercises.” 15 Her views were endorsed by the perceptive Province journalist Bob McConnell who con­ cluded that the real importance of the 1971 session lay not in the realm of legislative achievement but in the political battle where Bennett still seemed “master of the Legislature.” 16 McConnell, of course, was entirely correct. Bennett ruled the chamber like a potentate. But the charade of the House struggle mattered little for ordinary people trying to earn a living. British Columbia’s legislative assem­ bly, a century after its creation, remained a Hall of Mirrors, a den of illusion where old politicians played their tired game. What really mattered was outside, in the factories and fields, in the company towns, in school halls and universities, where there perceptibly emerged, in the days of the mecca trek, a sensibility impervious to the old song of boom. The source of the opinion was old and new; as old as the ghost towns of the Kootenays where, since the creation of the Inland Empire almost a century earlier, working­ men drew together to fight the companies which sweated their labour; as new as the mortgaged suburbs of Vancouver City where the young marrieds who fuelled the new service bureaucracies grumbled about high food prices and crushing taxes. To workingmen, the issue was the take-home pay which the Premier had offered them during the election campaign of 1969, as a substitute for the strike pay of the socialists. The trouble was that the money workingmen took home under inflated conditions was scarcely enough to buy groceries and maintain mortgage payments. The Premier, if his 1970 budget speech pronouncement was any indication, appreciated the problem. “Rapid infla­ tion continues to be the greatest threat to the free world economies today . . . ” Bennett informed the House on February 6th, “unless the rate of

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inflation is brought within more reasonable limits every citizen of British Columbia will lose.. . . ” 17 But he did little to cut the losses of workingmen who were among the worst casualties of the inflationary spiral. So the workers grumbled and cursed, and loaded their food baskets with baloney and macaroni. And they struck. “If it were possible to pile the gripes of B.C.’s industrial workers in one place,” George Dobie, the Sun labour reporter wrote, “that place would be the shopping buggy.” 18 When thei'nw despatched a team of reporters to Kitimat, Trail, Port Alberni, Harmac, Crofton and the mills around New Westminster and Vancouver, to test the mood of the workers during the hot summer of 1970, they found no deep concern over the province’s restrictive arbitration laws which the workers dismissed as “a lot of bull.” 19 Instead, what struck the reporters was “a personal anger and frustration over the cost of living” which went “deeper than militancy, as the union leaders like to call it.” 20 Increasingly disenchanted, workers in a wide range of occupational groups stung by inflation returned to the old industrial struggle, which they fought so bitterly that P.A. Gaglardi, speaking to a dinner gathering of the Industrial Accountants of British Columbia at the Bayshore Inn, was moved to speculate that British Columbia was entering a new era of “tre­ mendous greed as far as labour is concerned.” 21 The labour push for better wage settlements met with management resistance and the result was a series of heavy collisions which continued with few intermissions into the summer of 1972. The confrontation strategy of the big employers, which included the revival of the old lock-out instrument, was mapped by two newly created instruments: the Employers’ Council of British Columbia representing fifty-three of the province’s major companies and eleven trade associations whose board of governors read like a Who's who of big business in the province, and the Construction Labour Relations Association, an equally august body, which handled the bargaining work for the province’s major contractors. During 1970, the newspaper unions which tackled Pa­ cific Press in a three-month dispute, were joined on the picket line by the Canadian Merchant Service Guild, the Longshoremen, the Beverage Dis­ pensers, hotel and restaurant workers, and the various unions in the con­ struction industry, numbering thirty thousand workers and including car­ penters, plumbers and glaziers who were victimized by the new lock-out tactics.22 Major disputes in 1971 involved the transit workers in Victoria and Vancouver, and the Teamsters, three thousand strong, whose General Truck Drivers local was ordered back to work by a Cabinet order which, after a five-hour bitter House debate, referred the dispute to the Mediation Commission for binding arbitration.23 The Teamster dispute ended the honeymoon between union leader Ed Lawson and W.A.C. Bennett and later moved the Liberal Senate appointee to come out in support of the New

The Good Life: 1970-1972 283

Democratic Party. Throughout the spring and summer of 1972, steel work­ ers, civic inside workers, eighteen building trades unions, locked out again, and more than twenty thousand workers of the I.W.A., whose master contract with Forest Industrial Relations expired in early June, downed tools and walked off the job. For the thousands of unemployed who grimly wandered the streets of the towns and cities, there was no new opportunity to down the tools they had involuntarily laid to rest months and years earlier. Unemployment in Brit­ ish Columbia, throughout the months and years following the 1969 election, persistently remained among the highest in the country with only Quebec and the Maritime provinces boasting of a higher rate. The jobless rate peaked during 1970 when a general economic down-turn nationally, which was reflected in a low 7.1% growth in the gross provincial product, con­ tributed to a provincial jobless rate of over nine per cent and inspired Waldo Skillings, the Trade and Industry Minister, to admit that unemployment “has reached alarming proportions.” 24 Despite a mild economic comeback the following year, and a continuing inflation, the jobless rate continued high. In January 1971, British Columbia’s unemployment rate reached 9.4% while, during the same month a year earlier, Statistics Canada re­ ported provincial unemployment at 8.7%.25 The Premier, of course, trotted out the old demons, which ranged from the labour bosses to the strangers at the gates from other provinces trying to muscle in on the good life, to the Ottawans, who deprived the province of needed development capital. But the last place Bennett looked was in his own backyard where he failed to recognize the structural causes of the high jobless rate. “We’ve got the structure built,” Bennett informed the House in February 1970, “and now we’re going to build the superstructure . . . the Social Credit government will give the people of British Columbia the highest and best standard of living in the whole world.” 26 The base of the good life, however, was inherently deficient since it rested on an economy skewed in the direction of the capital intensive primary resource sector which employed few people and a diminshing portion of the labour force. Along with timber, ore, oil and gas, the company province exported jobs, on a vast scale, to host countries like the United States and Japan where the hewer’s and drawer’s wood and water were fashioned into finished commodities for internal sale and export. The song of boom, under W.A.C. Bennett’s aging regime of state capitalism, was the funeral dirge of the unemployed. The 1972 Financial and Economic Review published by the Department of Finance indicated that investment in primary extractive industries and construction, where few jobs were created, went up twice as fast in the previous twelve years as in manufacturing, where most of the new permanent jobs were.27 Primary industry and construction investment be­

284 Pillars of Projit

tween 1960 and 1972 rose 367% compared with a rise in manufacturing of 188% during the same period.28 The tendency was nowhere more evident than in the forest industry, the most productive in the province. Whereas output in the forest industry doubled and in some cases tripled since the writing of the Sloan Report in 1956, employment lagged behind.29 From 1954 to 1971, employment in the wood-based industries in British Columbia grew by less than thirty per cent, while total provincial employment in­ creased by eighty-five per cent. In 1954, the forest industry directly prov­ ided fourteen per cent of employment in British Columbia. By 1971, the figure stood at nine per cent.30 Perched on the periphery of Bennett’s substructure were groups, of vary­ ing age and training, which somehow had escaped the good life and seemed intent on reminding the politicians of their outcast state. The Premier had a heart for the old-age pensioners, nearly two hundred thousand strong in the province, so he sprinkled them with various supplements; a fifty-dollar increase in the homeowners’ grant, a fifty-dollar-per-year subsidy to pen­ sioner renters, a prescription-drug subsidy, and reduced transit fares.31 But the more he gave, the more they wanted. And the more aware the pension­ ers became that the government needed to be reminded through organiza­ tional muscle that crumbs were no substitutes for bread and shelter in an inflationary society. Formerly an inert recipient group in a welfare society, pensioners arrayed themselves in a series of organizations, prominent among which were the B.C. Old-Age Pensioners Association and the Pen­ sioners for Action Now, and enlisted the aid of wizened old politicians like Tom Alsbury to press their claims. “At the same time the politicians are becoming more expansive,” McConnell concluded, “the elderly are becom­ ing a more testy political force. Pensioner power is becoming a political reality. . . . ” 32 But the new political awareness among the unemployed was not re­ stricted to the aged. The jobless scourge severely affected professional groups like teachers and social workers who, after years of study and training, found themselves candidates for the welfare rolls where they joined the chronic recipients. Among the prime victims of the constricted labour market were masses of young people, students, university graduates, and drop-outs, for whom welfare, federal make-work projects and driving an occasional cab, had become a way of life. But they did not grumble silently. Protests, petitions and demonstrations were sponsored by a host of organizations, including the B.C. Federation of Labour which, in January 1971, staged a memorable affair in front of the Legislative Buildings in Victoria to remind the politicians, who were preparing to sit, of the standing problem of unemployment. To the impeccable people in attendance, tanned, manicured, and garbed in ermine and satin-faced Venetian, the invasion of

The Good Li/e: 1970-1972 285

the lunch-boxes and longhairs was a sordid affair. Some two thousand demonstrators, including a raft of branch plant yippies, were bussed in for the Legislative opening which featured chanting, obscenities, rude gestures, an invasion of the public galleries, and finally a short scuffle during Lieuten­ ant-Governor John Nicholson’s reading of the Throne Speech, resulting in several broken windows.33 The class struggle between the impeccables and peccables afforded Attorney General Leslie Peterson an opportunity to invite the N.D.P. to “forthwith and without equivocation divorce them­ selves officially from an unholy wedlock, once and for all, with the B.C. Federation of Labour who financed the demonstration today.” 34 And it provided the Sun with a banner headline about barbarians at the gates above an article in which Allan Fotheringham, noting the drained faces of the impeccables during the gallery scuffle, concluded he had “never seen so many people obviously afraid.” 35 Not all of the trouble-makers milled at the gates. A few had entered decades earlier, and were safely resident behind teakwood desks where they shuffled their files and dictated memos on sundry subjects. Foremost among them was the new Minister of Welfare and Social Rehabilitation, the Reve­ rend P.A. Gaglardi who had been charged by the Premier to minister to the poor, the wanting, the unwashed. Bennett was a man of his word. During the 1969 campaign he promised Gaglardi, who had become a Minis­ ter without Portfolio following his resignation from the Highways portfolio in October 1968, a renewed opportunity to serve the people in a senior capacity should he, and the government, be returned in the election. In October, the Premier announced that the old Welfare Department would be changed to the “Department of Social Improvement, Rehabilitation and Human Resources,” 36 and that the former Highways Minister would head it, since Gaglardi had “the biggest heart of us all.” 37 Now the Gaglardi choice was unfortunate, not merely for the unhappy welfare recipients, who had suffered enough already, but for the Social Credit Party itself, which was gradually shifting in the public estimation from a growth into a welfare party. Bennett, of course, had his reasons. Gaglardi had too strong a base among the Interior “grass roots” of the party to be denied a full Cabinet portfolio. Behind his pulpit antics was a burning ambition which, if not placated, could result in a breakaway free-enterprise movement in opposition to Social Credit. Unity imperatives dictated Gaglardi’s elevation. But the Premier probably did not want Gaglardi raised too high. The Minister, after all, was an embarassment and a nuisance whose penchant for hot water and ambition to succeed to the party leader­ ship irked the aging leader. A senior economics portfolio, like Trade and Industry, might have given Gaglardi too much leverage for his inevitable bid for leadership. The Welfare Department, a difficult holding operation

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at the best of times, was the perfect place for the Pentecostal to muddle and stew, and humbly minister to people; and atone for any political sins he may have committed. For Bennett, it was a commodious arrangment, but less so for the welfare recipients and social workers who hoped for humane initiatives in the welfare field. Gaglardi began, characteristically, with a rhetorical flourish when he bragged he was sure to be “the roughest, toughest, most effective Welfare Minister the world has ever known.” 38 He reassured non-believers by later saying: “I’m fantastic because I’m with a fantastic government and that’s fantastic,” 39 and then proclaimed “ . . . believe me, the deadbeats have got to be weeded out.” 40 Gaglardi promised to tighten up welfare requirements, relentlessly seek out welfare frauds, and shift the emphasis of the Department from welfare to rehabilitation. To facilitate his good work he brought under the Department’s umbrella his own special agency created the previous June, the Provincial Alliance of Businessmen, a need­ less duplication of the federal Department of Manpower and a haven for political henchmen like Ron Price, the son of Vancouver-Burrard M.L.A. Bert Price, who received $1,050 per month to head up the organization, and D.G. Stewart, Gaglardi’s campaign manager, who drew $730 per month.41 Gaglardi performed in his usual way. He boasted incessantly, talked of his hopes of employing 10,000 people through his Alliance by the end of 1971, spluttered figures to prove that he was finding jobs at the rate of 1,500 a month or 2,800 a year or 5,000 a year, edited the Department’s annual report so that it contained a fraction of the information of previous reports, peppered the entire document with the adjective “dynamic,” muzzled sen­ ior Department employees, and fed the Legislature a voluptuous diet of confused statistics.42 But precious little was done to help people. Day-care centres remained pathetically underfinanced. The rolls swelled. The total number of welfare recipients counted over 130,000 for most of the twelve months ending March 1971, compared to around 90,000 the year before.43 There was little change in the number of persons prosecuted for welfare fraud and no real attempt to rehabilitate people. While the number of welfare recipients rose by almost fifty per cent over the previous year, less than one thousand received vocational training in 1971 and a mere two hundred were referred to the rehabilitation co-ordinator of the public health department.44 If Bennett wished to humble Gaglardi, and raise eyebrows about govern­ ment mismanagement, he could not have made a wiser choice. The Minis­ ter’s antics provided reams of copy for the journalists, and barrels of barbs for Opposition politicians like Dave Barrett who referred to Gaglardi’s job-creating agency as the “pork-barrel alliance.” But the Welfare Minister

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was not alone in his inept dealings with groups activated by a depressed, and inflated economy, and by the mechanism of the new service state reluctantly nurtured over two decades by a rurally-based Main Street gov­ ernment. Arm in arm with him were two ministers who, as if by design, staggered from crisis to crisis; Education Minister Donald Brothers and Ralph Loffmark, the Health Minister, who preferred the mailed fist in their dealings with disaffected groups. Much to the Ministers’ discomfiture, the worry over inflation had not merely seized organized workingmen and pensioners; it afflicted sections of the professional classes like teachers and doctors and public employees who vigorously pressed their claims for bigger shares from a government which countered with a heavy-handed policy of selected wage and salary restraints. The fifteen-thousand-member B.C. gov­ ernment employees’ union protested moderate salary increases and fought vigorously for the right of recognition and collective bargaining.45 When the Health Minister announced during the 1970 session strict spending curbs on hospitals and the threat of a government take-over of any hospital not operating according to the government’s wishes, he invited collisions which continued without abatement during the next few years. His treat­ ment of the 10,500 members of the B.C. Hospital Employees’ Union was typical. When the union sponsored a demonstration protesting cutbacks in hospital staffs, the Minister responded by forcing the union to appear before the B.C. Mediation Commission where it was treated shabbily and eventu­ ally awarded an average wage increase of 6!4%, considerably less than gains made by the nurses, doctors and paramedical employees.46 The Min­ ister was equally rough in his dealings with hospitals which quarrelled over costs with the B.C. Hospital Insurance Service. The major culprit here was New Westminster’s huge Royal Columbian Hospital, an old opponent of the government, whose long battle over operating costs moved Loffmark to withhold funds for the construction of a proposed new unit.47 But Loffmark’s toughest fight was with the doctors, a pampered profes­ sional group which bargained with the government throughout 1971 over a new schedule of fees. Panicked by the prospects of a reduced federal contribution to both hospital and medical care over the next five years,48 the government provoked a bitter fight with the medical politicos by passing several orders-in-council so rudely received that medical spokesman Dr. W.G. McClure, registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, warned that doctors might opt out of the B.C. Medicare plan.49 Loffmark’s first move was a regulation that no one could practise medicine in a hospital and be appointed to its medical staff unless he held a permit issued by the hospital board of management “in accordance with any instruction received by the minister, or his representative,” who were also empowered to issue instructions to hospital boards to refuse, cancel or modify doctors’

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permits.50 A subsequent order limited doctors’ rights to use private laboratories in instances where public laboratories with equivalent facilities and services were available. The new regulations were clumsy bargaining levers in the protracted fee negotiations with the doctors who eventually won a sizeable increase, forced the withdrawal of the orders, provided journalists and politicians with good copy about dictatorship and arro­ gance; and elected as president of their association Dr. Kenneth Hill, an orthopedic surgeon who, after gaining the support of medical hard-liners at the B.C.M.A. convention in May 1972, sent a personal letter to several of his constituents during the summer urging their support for the Conser­ vative Party.51 But the government’s major casualty in the dispute was the defection of back-bencher Dr. George Scott Wallace, originally elected in Oak Bay on a medical reform program. Wallace deemed the July 26, 1971, amendment to the Hospital Act regulations the “last straw” and could think of “no worse example of government dictatorship. . . . ” 52 A fre­ quent critic of other aspects of the government’s Medicare policies, includ­ ing the absence of a comprehensive policy on hospitals and the shortage of intermediate care facilities, Wallace joined the Conservatives after the Premier labelled him an “extreme rightist” who “represented only one group-doctors. ” 53 But the tiff with the doctors was mild stuff compared to the protracted fight with the teachers, singled out by a beseiged government for very special treatment. When Pierre Trudeau lowered the boom on the F.L.Q. in October 1970, the B.C. government proved its patriotism by passing an Order-in-Council on October 22, requiring that “no person teaching or instructing our youth in any educational institution receiving public sup­ port should be in the employment of that institution if he advocates the policies of the F.L.Q. or the overthrow of democratically-elected govern­ ments by violent means.” 54 The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation Executive demanded repeal of the Order and promised support for any teacher dismissed under it, alleging that it contravened provisions of the Public Schools Act and the code of ethics of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation supporting fair presentation of controversial material to students.55 But the new Order merely exacerbated a struggle that had been long brewing over bread and butter matters. Teachers’ pensions were a standing issue, espe­ cially since the Premier insisted on subsidizing Hydro’s losses with loans from the pension funds of teachers and other public employees at preferred interest rates. At an October 1970 meeting, the Federation voted 88% in favour of strike action to back demands for higher pensions. At the 1971 legislative session, the government, remembering well the bitter opposition campaign waged by the Teachers’ Federation during the 1969 election, and relishing the possibility of a strike, assumed the offensive by introducing

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Bill 47, an amendment to the Public Schools Act which allowed individual teachers to opt out of the Federation; a closed shop union since 1946 when automatic membership was guaranteed. The new bill went further and altered the financing formula under which a school board possessed the option to go to the municipality for permission to exceed 110% of its budget. Henceforth, the boards were required to go for permission directly to the taxpayers through a referendum if more than a hundred people, or five per cent of the voters, protested the extra expenditure. Bill 47 was intended as candy to taxpayers who were expected to check the grasping egotism of the teachers. But for the teachers it was a bitter pill and a renewed opportunity to tackle a government which, in the words of Federation president Jim Killeen, “declared war on the teaching profes­ sion.” 56 Eschewing a general strike which would have propped up the government’s image as embattled champion of the taxpayer, the teachers deployed a variety of weapons including an authorization to the executive to call a strike vote, a levy of one day’s salary to be used for political education and action, a massive advertising campaign, and support for local teachers’ associations to work for the defeat of Socred candidates in the approaching provincial election.57 To the Premier and his Minister of Education, the fight with the teachers was both a matter of principle and good politics. It was proof that British Columbia was led by men who cared about ordinary taxpayers and were prepared to fight the self-appointed spokesmen of any group which placed its own selfish interest before the common weal. But had the teachers been the only interest group the government confronted, crudely and protract­ edly, then the Premier’s audience would have been more sympathetic. The trouble, however, was that the teachers were not alone in their fight for a diminishing share in an inflated economy whose growth and employment rates levelled from the dizzy heights of the mid-sixties. Bennett’s big dam government carried a service burden which it inherited from the coalition and perpetuated in response to pressures from professional and recipient groups. Just as the Socreds shared a bed with the companies, so they had to live with groups, professional as well as workingmen, whose expecta­ tions, skills and involvement with government increased remarkably during the frenzied sixties when the changing needs of ordinary people dictated greater services. Robert Bonner spoke wisely about the rising expectations, and its attendant political problems, when he quietly deserted the Socreds in the spring of 1968. “We may have oversold it,” he admitted the day after his resignation from the Attorney Generalship. “Now there is a feeling there is no limit to what can be done. Everything has to be done at once . . . there is a failure to relate our expectations with our capacities. We have deluded ourselves into believing there is some sort of magic in government financing.” 58

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During the sober seventies, the Premier, apprised of Bonner’s wisdom, applied the brakes to a host of professional groups whose wants and skills in dealing politically with the service state rose in due proportion with their involvement. The cause of the resultant collisions were twofold. On the one hand, the awareness and resources of the groups had matured over years of bargaining with a government which, following the political imperatives of its coalition predecessors, was forced to recognize the legitimacy of both the needs of recipient groups-for Medicare, welfare, pensions, etc.-and the wants of the professionals which, directly and indirectly, served the welfare state. Spawned or matured by the heady sixties, the groups expected high rewards and had learned to fight for them. But the government was less deft and certain in its resistance. The economic slowdown, the continuing infla­ tion, the chronic unemployment had shaken the Premier’s faith and induced a policy of rough resistance to group pressures which exacerbated delicate relationships evolved over decades. In fighting the groups, Bennett made serious political misjudgments in the area of Cabinet appointments; he installed in the delicate welfare portfolios, in the very days when Social Credit was being converted in the public mind from a growth into a welfare party, ministers with little feel for manoeuvering; Gaglardi in Welfare and Brothers and Lofifmark in Health and Education, who, though profession­ ally trained, operated in the same clumsy ways as their Main Street col­ leagues. British Columbia’s classic confrontation between labour and capi­ tal was complemented in the early seventies by a second struggle; between the old and new middle classes, between Sunday politicians administering a welfare state and Monday morning professionals eager to ensure its effi­ ciency and humanity. To Bennett’s mind, however, it was merely the old struggle renewed, by a few big pressure groups pitted against a little government which protected the needs of forgotten people. “These cruel labour bosses,” Bennett wept in the autumn of 1971 over the British Columbia Federation of Labour’s opposition to his fraudulent wage subsidy program; “here this little Social Credit government is trying to get out to find jobs and these labour bosses knock it and try to keep the poor people on welfare. I am amazed that some people would oppose this-I don’t know where their heart or soul is.” 59 In times of seige, the Premier liked to weep; about the plight of a little govern­ ment pursued by howling carnivores, mostly of the cigar-smoking variety. In political theatre, little government tears were calculated to evoke both sympathy-for pioneer politicians sweating to do their best in rough circumstances-and admiration-for the courage of humane leaders protecting little men from big interests. But the tears worked only where there were a few discernible and isolated goblins: not where the goblins had so multiplied,

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that they seemed indistinguishable from the little people the Premier pro­ fessedly protected. Bennett’s conquerer’s handbook placed a high value on the old tactic of divisiveness, of building a ruling coalition by pitting group against group. The difficulty, however, in the early seventies was locating support groups. Ruling by dividing implied the cultivation and mobilization of friendly against alien groups. But the Premier, by pursuing hordes of goblins in different directions, by antagonizing a spate of professional groups in addition to fomenting disputes with his old trade union enemies, was creating a discontent so general that the old coalition, built of varied fragments from different classes, was in danger of collapsing. Cigar-chewing labour leaders no longer troubled the professionals whose relationship with government resembled in many ways labour’s relationship with capital. And they little bothered the armies of jobless who laid their woes at the government’s feet; or rank-and-file unionists who burned with resentment at rising prices. The trouble, of course, was not merely a want of salesmanship, or the increased susceptibility of people to group pressures. It lay deeper, in a society hurting at its core and presided over by a government whose cumulative actions, in recent months and years, indicated that the old populist impulse had badly dissipated. In the policy realm, Bennett re­ treated from making decisions that might have neutralised the anti-govern­ ment group pressures and mobilised a wider popular sentiment against the companies. The chances were there, but the government stalled. Northern­ ers grumbled about high gasoline prices and pressed one of their own, Cyril Shelford, to do something about it. At Shelford’s insistence, a royal commis­ sion on gasoline marketing was set up which recommended that competi­ tion and fair marketing be restored in the industry. Instead of skirmishing with the giants and forcing the issue, the government backed off and called on the industry to cleanse its conscience and price fairly.60 An automotive people, British Columbians were troubled by spiralling car insurance rates. During 1969, the government passed legislation establishing a no-fault compulsory insurance scheme covering public liability and personal dam­ age which included a provision for government operation in the event private carriers maintained high rates. According to Brian Rudkin, presi­ dent of Westco Insurance Company, the companies “got together on rates.” 61 And the result was that drivers were being overcharged by fifty per cent on the compulsory no-fault part of the premium during the first two years of the scheme’s operation.62 It took that length of time for the five-man British Columbia Auto Insurance Board, populated by aging civil servants and other government appointees, to decide to hold a hearing, of sorts. When the hearings opened, it was discovered that only insurance companies objecting to the lowering of premiums would be heard. Little or

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no prpvisions were made for the public to participate even as spectators.63 The government was similarly solicitous of the big land speculators, who were aided by the imposition on October 17, 1970, of a ten per cent yearly ceiling on property assessment for school purposes.64 “The principle of this Bill,” the Premier announced, “is to protect the ordinary people of this province against the Waffle group and the sleeping hollow group.” 65 But others saw it differently. According to the Union of B.C. Municipalities, which joined in opposition with the B.C. branch of the Canadian Bar Association and the British Columbia Association of Assessors, the effect of the statutory limitation was to force the majority of homeowners to subsidize a small group of big speculators dealing in land for profit. Artifi­ cial assessment limitation produced glaring inequalities when land was rezoned to a higher use, farm land subdivided into residential lots, and where a shift in business activity from one section of the community to another occurred, resulting in higher market values in the more active area.66 The government similarly capitulated in the key areas of conservation and pollution where years of agitation by environmentalists bore fruit in the emergence of an opinion less tolerant of the frontier rape of past decades. The Socreds adorned the books with cosmetic legislation but did little to halt the old spoliation. To the hygienic Premier, it appeared that the real pollutants were protesting environmentalists rather than the companies. “You see a whole bunch of people who don’t pay too much attention to hygiene,” Bennett ventured on the subject of visual pollution, “you know, dirty feet and stuff. They are polluting the countryside even while they are carrying banners against pollution.” 67 Socred legislation and machinery in the area of pollution control was worthless. The Pollution Control Act of 1967 contained no provisions to enable the pollution-control director or anyone else to stop a polluting industrial project from going ahead.68 Since its introduction, the Act was amended several times to reduce the number of people who could object to a pollution application or appear at a public hearing. Outside groups had no representation on the Pollution Control Board which consisted of civil servants placed in a weak position by the Act’s procedures which required, in many instances, the Board to rule on permanent applications of compa­ nies which had already sunk millions in a project and committed their resources to one method of waste disposal.69 The legislation was drawn in such a way that firms had to apply for a licence to pollute, but if they were turned down, or failed to apply, no action was taken against them. “This isn’t pollution control,” the Province concluded, “it’s vaudeville. Or Gilbert and Sullivan.” 70 But the sad show continued. Of the seven thousand major polluters in

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the province, N.D.P. resource critic Bob Williams later revealed, only six hundred or seven hundred held permits from the Pollution Control Board.71 While the Premier expatiated on the good life, on visual hygienics, on substructures and superstructures, on “our trees and our flowers and so forth,” 72 on the perils of tobacco, the companies emptied their bowels and bladders with impunity across the province: at Buttle Lake where Western Mines fouled the water with its tailings; at Port Hardy where Utah Con­ struction created a few jobs and besmirched the land; in Burnaby where Shell and Imperial refineries sickened the air for suburbanites; in the instant pulp towns of the north and central Interior covered over by palls of effluent emitted by integrated mill complexes like Northwood Pulp and Weldwood; at the Harmers’ Ridge site of Kaiser’s violation in the East Kootenays where millions of yards of overburden and waste coal, pushed aside by the strip-mining operation, slid down into the creek system feeding the Elk River valley.73 When the citizens of California initiated a bill to impose stringent controls against pollution early in 1972, a consortium of firms in heavy industry, oil, chemicals and railways, supported Ronald Reagan’s opposition with a $1.2 million dollar advertising campaign. Among the largest contributors was Kaiser, the British Columbia coal operation’s par­ ent firm, which donated $50,000 to combat the popular lobby and kill the clean environment Bill.74 The government’s conservation record was equally dismal. The Fish and Wildlife branch of the Department of Recreation and Conservation ope­ rated on a shoestring budget equalling $2.9 million in 1972-1973.75 During the previous twenty years, the total budget of the provincial government soared from $118 million to $1.5 billion, while the Wildlife branch’s share of the total budget slipped from one half of one per cent to one fifth of one per cent.76 According to Sun business writer Moira Farrow, who surveyed the wildlife problem in the East Kootenays-judged by the executive director of the B.C. Wildlife Federation as British Columbia’s worst example of wildlife mismanagement-the branch of government responsible for some of British Columbia’s greatest natural resources was kept “so short of money that it is virtually useless.” 77 The havoc, real or threatened, was everywhere: in the Kootenays, blessed with an abundance of varied wildlife which, according to Farrow, was turning from “a wildlife paradise into a wildlife disaster area”;78 through­ out the North, from the coast mountains to the rocky mountain trench where mining exploration companies, immune from the lax regulations of the British Columbia Minerals Act, gouged miles of scars in the earth with bulldozers and removed the ground cover for endangered species like cari­ bou, mountain goats and grizzly bears;79 in Cypress Bowl, west of Van­ couver, where Alpine Outdoor Recreational Resources Limited, which dal­

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lied with Bahamian gambling interests and employed William Clancey as a liaison with the government, levelled acres of trees at an unusually low stumpage rate and deprived the area of its unique natural value, leaving it a danger to skiers in winter and a fire hazard in summer;80 in provincial natural parks like Tweedsmuir and Strathcona where Recreation Minister Kenneth Kiernan, labelled by an Opposition wit as “the Mad Cartogra­ pher,” redrew park boundaries for the convenience of mining companies with claims inside;81 in the beautiful Skagit Valley, subject of an agreement in 1967 between the government of British Columbia and Seattle Light, which, in return for annual payments of $34,566 for ninety-nine years, was given permission to inundate 5,200 acres in the valley by raising the Ross Dam on the U.S. side of the border.82 Among the very worst of the culprits were the pampered regional forest monopolies which reaped huge profits, yielded relatively little revenue, and failed in their obligation to replenish, through reforestation, the mass of trees cut down. The forest monopolies possessed effective rights of exclusion from public lands through control of private roads publicly subsidized by allowances of deductions for road­ building purposes from the stumpage rate. Although half of the provincial economy was based on the forest industry, the revenue directly obtained in the form of royalties and logging taxes totalled only around seven per cent of the provincial budget. Of the seven per cent or approximately $70 million yielded, thirty per cent was returned to the industry as service subsidies, leaving a net revenue of $40 million; a sum substantially less than the money gained from liquor sales.83 For all of their preferred status, the companies were remarkably lax in their reforestation policies. According to figures gathered in 1970, for every new tree planted by government and industry, seven were cut down. Gov­ ernment forester E.W. Robinson concluded in the same year that one hundred million new trees, enough to cover 200,000 acres, were needed every year to sustain the provincial yield. In 1969, 25,000,000 trees were planted-less than a fourth of the replanting needed. According to the Forestry Service inventory, 9.3 million acres of forest land, covering 15,000 square miles, were insufficiently stocked. Among the worst casualties of the cut-and-run philosophy was the majestic Douglas fir, each two hundred feet tall and a dozen or more feet in diameter, not a single stand of which was left within easy distance of any city in the province. “ . . .1 hate practically everything B.C. stands for today,” Roderick Haig-Brown, a leading natu­ ralist and writer, declared. “The shoddy, uncaring development of natural resources, the Chamber of Commerce mentality that favours short-term material gain over all other considerations, the utter contempt for human values of every kind.” 84 The Socreds, of course, disguised their contempt, not merely by weeping

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about the hearth and backyard tree. “The interests try to plant suspicion in the minds of the people against this little government,” the Premier cried. “We just want everyone to live under his own little fig tree.” They hid it in a larger way, using the same artifice as practised by Richard McBride decades earlier; by flogging the boom, celebrating the frontier assault, mys­ tifying the Western pioneer spirit, and parading as champions of depressed regions led across the growth threshold by princely leaders. Here too, however, as the niggardly seventies pulsed onwards, they ran into serious difficulties. Following their hairbreadth escape in the 1960 election, the Socreds were sustained by the opening-up of two new resource frontiers: energy-oil, gas and power-which momentarily revivified the Kootenay and Peace regions; and pulp, which infused new capital into the north central Interior. Now, in the early seventies, in the days of the Premier’s last mecca trek, the eternal boomsters were faced with a dismal prospect of frontier exhaustion. Ray Williston was a B.C. centralist. Author of the phrases “forest revolu­ tion” and “pulp explosion,” which studded the financial pages of the local press throughout the mid-sixties, Williston liked to locate the base of expan­ sion in the province during the 1960’s in the central Interior. “There were important offshoots all over B.C.,” he noted, “but a circle centred on Prince George, with a radius reaching Kamloops, Fort St. John and Prince Rupert, contained the bulk of the economic action.” 85 It is little wonder therefore, that the Lands and Forest Minister was troubled by the pause in growth at the centre, especially in the pulp industry, and the possible adverse effect on financing the welfare state. “Without the execution o f . . .an expanding plan,” he warned during a budget speech debate, “our ability to meet the demand for increased essential services in this decade will be severely curtailed.” But the source of Williston’s concern was not merely the govern­ ment’s ability to placate the pressing service groups in the lower mainland area with decreasing tax revenues. It focused more directly on the negative effects, economic and political, on the old growth boroughs themselves, which included his own constituency of Prince George, the heart of the pulp exploitation, where an oppositionist discontent was growing daily. The pulp boom, at its inception in 1962, was hailed as a saviour of sections of the north and central Interior of the province. It brought impor­ tant changes in forest practices, over a billion dollars in foreign and Canadian investment, and a score of massive new mills. A decade later, however, the picture was not nearly as roseate. Unanticipated high costs and severe conditions, a drop in the demand for pulp, a profusion of management errors, confounded the government’s policy of forced develop­ ment and resulted in huge operating losses for numerous mills, delays in the construction of new mills scared off by the debacle, the characterization of

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British Columbia by a New York investment expert as a “cemetery of company earnings,” 86 and a mass of misery and unemployment throughout / the scattered pulp towns. The casualties were everywhere; in Prince Rupert / where Columbia Cellulose hovered on the edge of bankruptcy; in Kitimat [ where Eurocan was losing badly; in Houston, where Bulkley Valley Forest Industries Limited was bailed out by Northwood Pulp after Bulkley Val­ ley’s partners effectively wrote off $60,000,000 and the concept of “a totally integrated forest complex”; in McKenzie, an antiseptic instant town where the refiner and ground wood plant of Finlay Forest Limited faced heavy losses; in Skookumchuck where Crestbrook Forest Industries Limited had great difficulty getting a craft mill working to capacity; in Prince George, where Northwood Pulp, Prince George Pulp and Paper Company and /Intercontinental Pulp lost heavily in start-ups; in Ocean Falls, where Crown f Zellerbach Canada Limited announced plans to close their pulp and paper ( mill by March 1973, thereby removing the chief source of employment for Vthe 1500 residents.87 The growth pause did not merely affect the big companies, who could afford to lose, and the workingmen, who could not. It struck at the very heart of the Socred base; the independent middle class which, squeezed on all sides, barely survived on the crumbs of boom. The 1970 annual report of the B.C. Forest Service counted 236 saw mills, a sharp drop from the over six hundred operating a decade earlier.88 A survey of the Northern Interior Lumbermen’s Association indicated that most of its members operated with losses during three of the five years between 1966 and 1970. The disaffected small businessmen and farmers in the Peace River country had their spokes­ men which included, much to the Premier’s chagrin, several back-bench members of his own party. An old nuisance was Dudley Little, the ailing Skeena member who constantly attacked the Forestry Department, de­ manded the resignation of several of its officials, wept over the demise of the small logger, charged that the government alienated the forest at fire sale prices to large companies, and labelled the policy of subsidizing non-pro­ duction as “worse than you’d find in a Commie country.” 89 Little merely complained. Don Marshall, the farmer member for South Peace River who headed the House’s Agricultural Committee and was returned with seventy per cent of the popular vote in the 1969 provincial / election, went further. He crossed the floor and joined the Conservative / Party in March 1972 in protest against Bennett’s failure to look after the V small businessmen and farmers in the central and northern Interior.90 Marshall maintained that the sickly plight of many northern farmers was worse than during the Depression; that farmers could not pay their loans; that the new capital gains tax legislation which presaged loss of revenue in the transfer of land from father to son aggravated depressed conditions; that

(

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all the farm-implement dealers in the South Peace River area were out of business; that the government had no real policy towards land use with the $25,000,000 grain-belt legislation being of a cosmetic sort since only the interest was available for land purchase.91 The Peace farmer was not alone in his beefs. According to Charles Berhardt, president of the twelve-thousand-member British Columbia Fed­ eration of Agriculture, who protested the inadequacy of the Greenbelt fund and the failure to seat Cyril Shelford on its advisory committee, Marshall’s defection was “symptomatic of the frustrations felt by the farmers of British Columbia in dealing with the provincial government.” 92 In his own con­ stituency, where a self-perpetuating welfare problem placed an estimated thirty-five per cent of the population on social assistance, Marshall was backed by former Socred activists like Frank Oberle, the mayor and re­ gional district director for Chetwynd, a former Socred League director and card-carrying member for twelve years.93 The stalled northern frontier assault, and the defection it generated, was an especially serious blow to Bennett who, two decades earlier, promised to launch a new era of prosperity for an Interior treated as “darkest Africa” by the metropolitan-based coalition. The Socred accession was a victory of the hinterland over the metropolis. The new men of power, in 1952, saw themselves as champions not merely of forgotten people but of neglected regions. So they rewarded their rural constituents-with roads, instant towns, and pulp mills, and subsidies like loans at preferred interest rates, from public pension and trust funds, to water irrigation and improvement districts. But in doing so, the government created a darker Africa, where their party base was weak at the outset: metropolitan Vancouver. In the sober seventies, the new northern restiveness was complemented by a more serious erosion, in British Columbia’s metropolitan heartland, which suff­ ered from the pangs and ills of a rapid growth. Vancouver, like Chetwynd, was a troubled place beset by problems soluble only by massive planning, spending and enlightenment. Its welfare rolls were packed and mal-administered. The public transit system was woefully inadequate and underfin­ anced. City Council was kept by greedy developers who defaced the city with monstrous towers where they herded pensioners and secretaries into shoebox apartments. Rents were inflated; so were houses and food prices. And over sections of the city, away from Shaughnessy and West Vancouver, where big money bought clean air, there sometimes hung a pall of smog which teared the eyes. The Premier, bleary-eyed and glancing north and east, to the dams and pulp mills, and the cherry orchards of the Okanagan, did not understand. “Basically I’m a product of Main Street,” Bennett admitted to a Port Alberni audience, “I’m more at home in small town centres.” 94 Bennett was

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never apprised of the needs of Vancouver and the composition of his Cabi­ net reflected his insensitivity. Victoria, barely one eighth Vancouver’s size, had as many portfolioed ministers. So did the favoured and sparselypopulated Okanagan and boundary regions, represented by Bennett, Mines and Commercial Transport Minister Frank Richter, and Pat Jordan, the Minister without Portfolio who sat for North Okanagan. Neither of the two portfolioed Vancouver Ministers, Leslie Peterson or Ralph Loffmark, held the key economic portfolios like Finance, Municipal Affairs, or Trades and Industry.95 Bennett’s lax recognition of Vancouver city did not serve him ill during the phrenetic sixties when the metropolis, like the hinterland, fell victim to the boom craze. But the host of urban problems, created by the preceding decade’s vaunted growth, was forming a new opinion sharply critical of the old direction. The opinion was reflected in the critical journalism of the metropolitan newspapers, especially the Sun; in-depth reporting by writers like Jes Odam, A. Fotheringham, Frank Rutter and Bob McConnell; in underground sheets like the Strait; in the relentless exposures by municipal politicians like Harry Rankin; in the successful agitation against the Four Seasons Hotel project at Stanley Park’s entrance and the third crossing, favoured by the impeccable people of West Vancouver; in the new organiza­ tion among tenants, students and consumer groups. So noisy was the protest that it reached the ears of Herb Capozzi, the sports and wine king from Vancouver-Centre, who defended in the House the “deadbeats” against Gaglardi,96 pressed for new landlord-and-tenant legislation, prosecuted a successful fight for an annual grant to old age pension renters, spoke in favour of a broad grant to tenants akin to the homeowners’ grant, and opposed the construction of a government skyscraper in the heart of down­ town Vancouver. Capozzi was no radical. Quite the opposite. But he was no fool and discerned the intensity and extent of the new opinion. His reward, from an aging Premier who favoured old bridge companions, was, after six years, continued absence from a Cabinet which excluded, as well, from a portfolioed ministry, Grace McCarthy, another Vancouver politi­ cian who sniffed the changing wind. If there were any question of the new- breeze’s direction, then Bennett’s activity, or inactivity, relative to British Columbia’s other frontier-energy resources-dispelled all doubts. Politically the Premier and his colleagues had banked heavily on Hydro development during the 1960’s when the “two river” policy transformed the Socreds from a little blacktop into a big dam government. Power, its production and export, stood at the base of the new state capitalism and Bennett rarely ceased talking about the benefits which accrued from the Socred wisdom. He spoke of the growth stimulated by Hydro expansion, the steady reduction of electricity rates over a decade,

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the construction of three dams without costing the people of British Co­ lumbia a single penny, and the out-smarting of the Americans whose cash outlay financed the dam construction.97 The real story, of course, was hard to get at. The Premier acted as Hydro’s fiscal agent and Cabinet ministers sat as directors on Hydro’s Executive Board. The whole course of Hydro’s development depended, for financing, on the government which invested enormous quantities of public funds in Hydro securities. The government maintained the fiction of Hydro as an independent agency and provided no opportunity for the Opposition to peruse the giant’s books in order to gain information about its general financing. “It is like searching for a needle in a haystack,” the Province reported, “blindfolded and wearing gloves.”98 But the search continued and what did eventually come to light was a sad story of miscalculation and ineptitude which dissipated any mystique remaining around Bennett’s wis­ dom on power. After eight years, the Lands and Forests Minister finally admitted to the House that the government had badly miscalculated the construction costs which escalated by $158,000,000 due to inflation.99 The total amount of money received from the Americans fell short by more than $120,000,000, with Hydro required to make up both the difference100 plus the additional sum of $330,000,000 needed to build generating facilities and transmission lines before the Mica dam could produce power for British Columbia.101 The costs of the brazen sell-out were steep and wide-ranging. Since Hydro borrowed at low interest rates from captive government trust and pension funds, other capital spending on schools, hospitals, urban transit and pollution were necessarily adversely affected. Despite Bennett’s promise in 1963 that Hydro would progressively reduce rates for the next ten years, the government accepted Hydro’s proposals in the spring of 1970, to raise electricity rates between thirteen and twenty per cent for residential, users as well as a twenty-five per cent boost in bus fares for urban residents in Victoria and Vancouver, which enjoyed one of the worst and underfi­ nanced public transit systems in the country.102 According to Hydro chair­ man Gordon Shrum, the rate rise, which had the effect of a general tax increase, was necessary because in past years Hydro had been ordered, for political rather than economic reasons, to reduce rates. “The idea of having reductions was government policy and from a political point of view proba­ bly absolutely necessary. The government could not have carried on with­ out reducing rates. Political considerations and economic considerations are not always the same, you know.” 103 Shrum further reported that rate increases would steadily be needed and, despite the “two river” develop­ ment in a province which exported, at bargain prices, more power than any country in the world, British Columbia would be “hard pressed to meet its power needs in 1973.” 104

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(

There were, of course, other energy resource needs that the Premier was hard pressed to fill. Foremost among them were the needs of the citizens of Vancouver Island for natural gas, and of a Japanese consortium of steel producers for coal to heat their ovens. The government gave priority to the second and, in doing so, only landed itself in further hot water. The Kaiser strip-mining project at Sparwood was an unmitigated tale of woe. The royalty returns on the coal extraction at Harmers Ridge was nil, since the government made no attempt to amend earlier legislation which exempted Crows Nest Industries, a United States-based firm which inherited huge surface and coal rights in the Kootenays, from royalty payments.105 When Kaiser Resources, a subsidiary of another American firm, entered the pic­ ture it merely paid Crows Nest Industries $56,000,000 for the right to take over existing mines and extract coal on one sixth of the land held under the original grant.106 Hereafter the government gave Kaiser permission to mine coal on 34,000 acres for thirty-five dollars-the price of a mining certificate. But the munificence did not stop here. At a cost of $15,000,000 the federal government, through the National Harbours Board, built the super-port of Roberts Bank; a bulk loading facility which created a mere thirty jobs.107 In 1968-69, $1,558,000 in federal mining subsidies went to Kaiser providing 424,364 tons of coal. The provincial government pitched in further with toothless strip-mining legislation which left great discretionary power in the hands of the Mines minister. When pressure developed to construct a railway line south across the border to connect up with the BurlingtonNorthern for transport of coal to the coast via the United States-an alter­ nate route to the C.P.R.’s through the Fraser Canyon-the provincial gov­ ernment hired a team of lawyers to prosecute the Kootenay-Elk case before the Canadian Transport Commission and the Supreme Court, where an earlier decision opposing the construction of the new line was reversed.108 For all of this tender nurture, the Kaiser project produced little revenue and much embarassment. Start-up costs and capital expenditure exploded beyond the initial estimate of $85,000,000 in 1969 to $127.5 million in 1971.109 Production machinery was ill-suited. The Crows Nest Pass coal­ fields became a graveyard for the careers of several top executives. Labour troubles persisted and were exacerbated by lax safety regulations which resulted in the death on June 19, 1969, of three men in a cave-in. Local residents raged at the inadvertent deposit of three million gallons of coal slurry in Michel Creek and the resultant toxic effects on the entire Elk River Valley system. Clouds of coal dust escaped the empty coal cars returning from the coast, covering the surrounding areas with black soot. On January 5, 1972, the Wall Street Journal broke the story, broadcast in the press throughout Canada, that a number of Kaiser executives had formed a dummy Nova Scotia company which they used to secretly buy some

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$758,000 worth of shares in Kaiser Resources Limited. When an issue of $2.5 million shares was floated in Canada in July 1969 under conditions that made it illegal under U.S. laws for Americans to buy any shares, the intention was to give Canadians a twenty-five per cent equity in Kaiser Resources. But the intention was flouted by the scheme, participated in by thirty-six highly-placed Kaiser executives, American and Canadian, to buy the mass of shares through K.R.L. investments; a decision, according to Vancouver Kaiser director Graham Dawson that indicated “an error in judgment.” 110 A similar weakness, doubtless, afflicted the Premier in his weird handling of the Vancouver Island gas pipeline issue which surfaced and resurfaced ever since 1960 when the Public Utility Commission gave approval to a scheme put forward by Magna Pipeline Company Limited, headed by the late Ralph K. Farris.111 The Commission’s approval was based in part on Magna’s plans to use twin flexible lines to carry the gas under Georgia Strait but no proof was demanded that such lines could be manufactured and installed. They could not, and two and a half years later Magna surrendered its certificate. With an island fuel shortage pressing in the new decade, the government revived the matter when the Premier announced in January 1972, a grand project to transmit natural gas from Williams Lake to Vic­ toria via Powell River. For the hungry Island residents, and for the sceptics who wondered whether Bennett’s capacity for the big play had totally disappeared, pipeline news was good news. But the enthusiasm rapidly dissipated when it was discovered that the Cabinet had chosen for the project a firm known as Malaspina Gas, put together and represented by Frank McMahon’s friend and employee Dan Ekman, over B.C. Hydro, which proposed a southerly route costing $45,000,000 compared to the Powell River route planned by Malaspina at an estimated cost of $95,000,000.112 Hereafter the entire matter was muddied and flubbed. The Premier responded to the antiEkman outcry by tossing the matter into the lap of the P.U.C.-labelled by one reporter as the “Public Futility Commission”-with instructions to hear proposals and recommend. When Gordon Shrum subsequently informed the P.U.C. that Hydro was already empowered under the Power Measures Act to carry on the gas utility business throughout the province without regulation by the P.U.C., and needed no certificate of convenience to do so, Bennett passed an Order-in-Council conferring on Hydro the status of an applicant.113 Faced with five proposals, the P.U.C. crawled and bumbled; behaviour reminiscent of the lax performance of several of its members on the British Columbia Auto Insurance Board, and of the Commission’s weak supervision of cemeteries and pre-paid medical plans, which moved Jes Odam to write-“a government body which cannot look after a $100 grave

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space properly is responsible for the $100,000,000 decision on who should build the natural gas pipeline to Vancouver Island.” 114 The commissioners’ backgrounds ill-suited them for the job and most were out of their depth on vital technical questions. The adversary system used only compounded their difficulties at the hearings which dragged on for months into the summer without conclusion. Instead of building a pipeline, the Premier took “enough second looks to give himself an almost permanent blink.” 115 Bennett’s grin spelt boom; his blink, confusion and weariness. Besieged on all sides by pressing groups, and suffering from a policy paralysis which belied Social Credit’s old claim of producing results, the Premier, in the year of 1972, prosecuted a fierce fight against a pair of goblins, the Ottawans and the Pushers, which, to Bennett’s mind, conspired with the regime’s enemies to undermine the moral fabric of the good life in British Columbia. The crusade came at an opportune time; when the government was reeling from setbacks. Social Credit’s economic leadership had badly failed; its political leadership faltered. What remained was the last refuge of a tired populism: moral leadership. “If a government doesn’t show moral leadership,” Ben­ nett informed the Socred convention in November 1971, “it has no right to govern.” 116 Being a hygienic sort, Bennett was concerned with pollution; not merely of the physical environment by the effluent of companies, or the visual environment by bearded demonstrators. More so, what troubled him was the corruption of the minds and bodies of people by sinful products like cigarette tobacco, liquor and bottomless dancers. After briefly skirmishing with the nudies in what Province journalist Peter McNelly described as “one of those curious bolts of puritanism which were part of the Socred fabric,” 117 the Premier and his Attorney General attacked the more serious question of tobacco and liquor advertising in a way so rough that they succeeded in antagonising both the Saturday night profligates and the Sun­ day morning people. The source of the acrimony was a Bill, introduced in the 1971 legislative session, whose purpose it was to outlaw all tobacco advertising in British Columbia and add newspapers to the long-standing ban on liquor advertis­ ing. The legislation was unenforcable and inequitable. Printed matter origi­ nating outside the province, as well as TV beamed in from the outside, were considered beyond the pale of the ban, and advertising revenue continued to support foreign radio and TV stations and external publications which remained untouched on the news-stands. The major casualties were the local weeklies and small magazines, already suffering financially from post­ rate increases, who were mildly compensated for the revenue loss, in a way threatening to their editorial freedom, when the government mercifully ran a series of purity ads in many of the sixty-four weeklies affected by the ban.

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But the government’s ad placements did little to mollify the ban’s opponents which included the British Columbia Association of Broadcasters and the B.C. Weekly Newspapers Association whose president Jim Schatz of Lang­ ley stated: “We feel his attitude of ‘well boys, we cut you off some, but here is some back,’ is like holding a big stick over our heads.” 118 When Attorney General Peterson announced the government would no longer advertise in the Victoria Colonist or Times after the papers ran cigarette ads, a number of rural weeklies, including Ma Murray’s spicy Lillooet sheet, announced that they would not accept government ads until the ban on the Victoria papers was lifted.119 But this failed to deter the Premier who, mired in a sea of opposition, pursued the moral crusade. " . . . Our government is entitled to take a stand that we don’t want the pushing of these things,” he harangued a horde of tea drinkers at the November 1971 Socred conven­ tion, “and if anyone wants to challenge that stand we’ll have an election tomorrow, my friends.” 120 The Premier was equally adamant in prosecuting the old tribal war with the Ottawans. For all of his nationalist protestations, Bennett never once relented in his fight with the federal government. At highway-opening ceremonies, he rarely neglected reminding his audience that Ottawa failed to contribute a penny to the maintenance of B.C. highways or that the B.C. ferry fleet was part of the Trans-Canada Highway system and deserved federal subsidization. During budget speeches and at federal and provincial conferences he cried the blues about iniquitous equalization payments to the have-not provinces and trotted out his usual reference to Ottawa’s treat­ ment of British Columbia as “a goblet to be drained.” But pressing eco­ nomic problems, and the new restlessness on the home front they inspired, moved the Premier to flog the old provincialism with a maniacal fervour. The large French fact in Ottawa, the prominence of Trudeau and his French-Canadian ministers, afforded Bennett an opportunity to scream that the coastal people were in thrall to Quebec; a province whose resources, as rich and plentiful as British Columbia’s, were mismanaged by incompetent French politicians. British Columbians, in short, were forced to pay for Quebec’s mistakes. “They are a negative little group down there,” he pro­ nounced at the opening of the Yellowhead Highway. “We haven’t got a Canadian government-it’s a Quebec government.” 121 According to Ben­ nett, the federal government was run by three men, “all Quebeckers”-State Secretary Gerard Pelletier, Regional Development Minister Jean Marchand and Trudeau.122 The worse the home front looked, the more Bennett took the war to the Ottawans. At the federal-provincial conference in Victoria in September 1970, he wept about the heavy financial and service load on the provincial government resulting from immigration from other provinces, complained

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that British Columbia was ignored by Marchand’s Department of Regional Economic Expansion and demanded $500,000,000 a year compensation from the federal government; a modest request that drew unabashed giggles and smirks from several of his fellow premiers.123 Ministers like Dan Campbell directed a withering fire at Marchand’s Department of Regional Economic Expansion which, they alleged, diverted incentive grants to Que­ bec and ignored depressed British Columbia regions like Prince Rupert, Prince George and northern Vancouver Island.124 When Trudeau referred publicly to Bennett as “the bigot who happens to run the government there,” 125 Attorney General Peterson labelled Trudeau’s statement “the most unprecedented and unwarranted attack by the Prime Minister of this country since Confederation” on a provincial premier126 and announced soon after that that the government of the province would take legal action to upset the payment of federal equalization grants to poorer provinces.127 In the autumn of 1971, the government rechristened British Columbia’s section of the Trans-Canada Highway as B.C.l and replaced the old signs with the new designation; “an ungracious and parochial act,” according to the Globe and Mail128 which ignored Ottawa’s contribution over a span of twenty-one years of $124,000,000 towards the construction of the highway in British Columbia. Trudeau’s insensitivity to British Columbia was not Bennett’s sole gripe. What seemed to irk him as much was the Liberals’ brief and halting nation­ alist initiatives during the trade crisis with the Americans in 1970-1971. W.A.C. Bennett was, first and foremost, a continentalist whose struggle with Ottawa over the disposition of British Columbia’s resources masked a real determination to sell out cheaply to the Americans and Japanese. It is little wonder, therefore, that Bennett, always one of America’s most loyal and patriotic defenders, bristled with indignation during the Liberals’ brief skirmishes with Washington. No mood and policy-except Quebec favourit­ ism-troubled Bennett more than anti-Americanism. “It used to be pastime to twist the British lion’s tail,” he once quipped, “now they try to pluck feathers from the American eagle.” 129 “ . . . We certainly have the right to criticise our neighbours,” he later admitted, “but when we see the warts on that country’s countenance we tend to magnify the warts out of all proportion. Somehow, we don’t see what a great country this is.” 130 By nudging Washington, Trudeau was playing into the hands of the leftists “building up this campaign of ‘hate America’ . . . .” 131 At the very mo­ ment when nationalist sentiment was rising across the country, when con­ cern over foreign control of the Canadian economy had intensified, when the federal government sought for ways to mollify the new opinion, when British Columbians scratched their heads over the extent and consequences of American ownership of the province’s land and resources, at that very

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hour, Bennett perversely rushed to the defence of the American empire advocating freer trade, a ten-per-cent-per-year reduction of tariffs for ten years and complete economic union within a decade.132 “I tell you Laurier was right in 1911,” he warned the nationalists, “and Trudeau is wrong in 1 9 7 1 133 It was concern that W.A.C. Bennett might be judged wrongly, in 1972, that inspired the Premier and his Cabinet, to undertake, in late May, a thirteen-day, 3200-mile tour to feel out opinion, and sell Social Credit, in preparation for a late summer or autumn election. The heating of the war with the Ottawans, the moral crusade against rum, tobacco, nudies and dope, and a package of 1972 sessional goodies including a fifteen-dollar homeowner-grant increase, an extra fifty dollars for pensioner homeowners, a fifty-dollar annual grant to pensioner renters, a cosmetic $25,000,000 fund for reforestation and park development, set the stage for the standardized pre-election tour which covered fifty centres from Vancouver Island through north central B.C., the Okanagan, the Kootenays and back to the lower mainland area. The tour was old fare. Scrolls, cufflinks, trinkets and ribbons scattered in the train of the Premier’s black chauffeur-driven Cadil­ lac. Salutations, tributes and groans of boredom vied with rubber chicken and vanilla custard at municipal luncheons where mayors, aldermen, re­ gional district officers and school-board officials chatted with pale Cabinet ministers who wondered why the Premier put them to all the trouble. The Premier played the old tune; about more highways, government buildings, parks, greenbelts and a British Columbia Development Corporation which would provide low interest loans to secondary manufacturing and food­ processing industries,134 and produce “at least one hundred Henry Fords I” in British Columbia.135 “It will be the most revolutionary move­ ment within the free-enterprise system that ever had been devised in North America or anywhere else.” 136 Understandably, Bennett saved his major announcement for Kelowna where, at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, his eyes gently teared while a succession of nabobs, bearing scrolls and tributes, spoke of his unflinching dedication to the people of British Co­ lumbia. 137 In his major speech of the tour, Bennett unveiled the Kelowna Charter, 1972, which included repeal of the Succession Duty and Gift-Tax Acts, increased social assistance benefits to senior citizens, students and handicapped persons, and the raising of the minimum-wage level from its existing level of $1.50 an hour.138 The Kelowna Charter, a flaccid document devoid of both substance and vision, was not the most important event of the tour. Like the plethora of tributes and trinkets, it failed to interest anybody, except the faithful of Main Street. What did bulk large was something entirely different; the numerous angry demonstrations that greeted the Cabinet during the length

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and breadth of the tour. Wherever they went-in Duncan, Prince Rupert, Kamloops, Nelson, Cranbrook, Kimberley, Revelstoke, Merritt, Lillooet, Chilliwack, White Rock, Richmond, Mission City, Maple Ridge, New Westminster-the ministers were taunted by pickets and demonstrators, numbering from a handful to five hundred, protesting a wide range of issues including pollution, the teachers’ squeeze, the threatened use of Bill 33 against construction workers, the Kootenay and Elk railway project, the pulp-mill troubles, unemployment, and the denial of collective bargaining rights to civil servants. The major reception was outside New Westminster’s Royal Towers Hotel where five hundred workers, mainly carpenters and electricians, protesting the threatened use of the Mediation Commission Act to settle their contract dispute with Construction Labour Relations Association, convinced the Premier and his frightened colleagues that the Marxist hordes meant busi­ ness. Upon arrival at the hotel, the Cabinet ministers were booed, hissed, “sieg heiled,” greeted with obscene gestures, and, finally, cudgelled. The Premier’s car was kicked. Gaglardi earned the soubriquet “Mussolini” and a prod from the butt end of a pole.139 The Attorney General was reminded of his duties by a placard on the head.140 Wesley Black’s stomach fielded a low blow while the Minister without Portfolio, Pat Jordan, had her shoulder grabbed and wrenched. When Cyril Shelford gallantly rushed to her defence, he earned for his efforts a sharp blow on the arm which later required hospital treatment. “I feel like I was hit by a freight train,” Shel­ ford complained. “Someone hit me with a two by four twice. I’ve been hit by two by fours before, but never quite so hard.” 141 But the Premier bravely finished the show which included a dinner reception at the Vancouver Golf Club, where the walking-wounded were succoured with chicken cordon bleu, strawberries and whipped cream, and a wind-up meeting in Delta, where several Cabinet ministers, nursing an assortment of welts, bruises, aches and broken bones, heard the Premier pronounce the tour a brilliant success.142 “Friendly everywhere-our reception was very friendly,” Ben­ nett beamed as he made way for Cyril Shelford, who headed for the Royal Jubilee Hospital.143 The Premier probably meant what he said. To Bennett’s mind, demon­ strators were small groups of visual polluters without any following among ordinary people tied to home, hearth and Social Credit. It was an article of the Premier’s faith that behind the din of pressure groups lay the silent fealty of the masses. The New Westminster ruckus, the noisy meetings along the way, were not seen by Bennett as portents of doom. Instead, they provided the Premier with a happy occasion; to affirm faith in the unseen loyalty of the invisible masses, weep crocodile tears about a beseiged little government, and brand the socialists as the bedmates of labour brigands.

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“This government that I lead will never yield to the force of pressure groups,” Bennett shouted at a press conference, “because a government worthy of its salt must stand opposed to pressure groups, because if the pressure groups rule the country then you’ve got the rule of the mob, you’ve got anarchy, you’ve got chaos.” 144 Several days later, sniffing an imminent election, Bennett traced the trouble to Opposition Leader Dave Barrett whom he pronounced a member of the “extremist Waffle group” and “the most radical leader of the N.D.P. since I’ve been Premier in twenty years.” 145 Bennett could barely suppress his excitation. “Certainly they’re his friends,” he said of Barrett and the brigands, “ . . . the N.D.P. arranged it. It was straight party, N.D.P., socialist politics. I consider this the price British Columbia is paying for the unholy alliance between the N.D.P. socialist party and the labour bosses of this province.. . . They’re responsi­ ble . . . for the anarchy that was shown at New Westminster.” When Barrett launched a libel and slander suit in the B.C. Supreme Court, alleging that the Premier “falsely and maliciously” stated and implied that the N.D.P. leader was responsible for and party to the union demonstration of June 7, Bennett pronounced Barrett “a cry-baby trying to muzzle the Premier.” 146 Barrett was more than a weeper. He was leader of a party which methodi­ cally allied itself with persons, groups and regions disaffected by the govern­ ment over the previous three years-since the autumn of 1969 when, follow­ ing the personal defeat of Tom Berger in the general election, the Coquitlam representative found himself House and de facto leader of the New Demo­ cratic Party. Barrett possessed good progressive credentials. Born of Jewish parents, both socialists, Barrett grew up in Vancouver’s predominantly working-class East End, graduated from Brittania High School and headed for Seattle University where he was awarded a B. A. degree in 1953.147 After marrying the former Shirley Hackman, and working at the Oakalla Prison Farm and with the Children’s Aid Society, he attended the Jesuit-run social-work school at St. Louis University, graduating with a Masters de­ gree in 1956. In conjunction with the degree, Barrett did field work with the St. Louis Family and Children’s Service and the County Juvenile Court, where he was employed as a probation officer from 1956-1957.148 The St. Louis experience was important to him. The Jesuit training, combined with the practical field experience, improved his social and administrative skills while his contacts with rough and tumble St. Louis politicians, sharpened his political awareness. After returning to Vancouver, Barrett worked as a personnel and stafftraining officer with the Haney Correctional Institution until his firing by Attorney General Robert Bonner for political activity on behalf of the C.C.F., which nominated him as their Dewdney candidate in the 1960

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election. His defeat of Lyle Wicks was a prelude to a ten-year stint in the House before his accession to the party leadership. A specialist in the welfare field, he was re-elected in Dewdney in 1963 and in the new riding of Coquitlam in 1966 which he won with one of the highest pluralities in the province, fifty-seven per cent of the popular vote. When Tom Berger first challenged incumbent Robert Strachan for the leadership, Barrett, together with most of the other M.L.A.s, rushed to their leader’s defence. But when Strachan finally threw in the towel before the 1969 election, Barrett found himself in a bitter fight with Berger, Bob Williams, and student radical John Conway for the leadership. His narrow defeat by Berger, who corralled the machine labour vote, left him out in the cold; until the fateful autumn day in 1969 when Berger failed to hold a seat and announced, soon after, his departure from the provincial political scene. In September 1969 Barrett was elected House leader by the twelve M.L.A.s. Ten months later, in June 1970, at the provincial convention in the Evergreen Hall in Chilliwack, he was elected leader of the party by acclama­ tion. 149 The N.D.P. inherited a bright and shrewd political leader. Like his predecessors, Barrett was no doctrinaire or ideologue. His secular Jewish and socialist family background, the poverty he witnessed in VancouverEast, his first-hand experiences as a social worker, convinced him of the need for a humane and equitable social system attainable through the political process. But he dismissed extensive public ownership as an imprac­ tical solution to the problems of the company province. The N.D.P.’s latest radical document, the Waffle Manifesto, he considered only as a basis of discussion and disagreed with its emphasis on the instrument of nationaliza­ tion of the means of production. “It is a romantic wish,” he stated at a press conference soon after becoming leader. “In all practical reality we will be living with a mixed economy for a long, long time.” 150 Not only was Barrett not a doctrinaire; he did not appear as one. His style was folksy and populist. He grinned easily, wise-cracked incessantly and exuded a bonhommie and joviality which belied Bennett’s depiction of him as a crazed Waffler. Chubby and garrulous, the new N.D.P. leader was sometimes referred to as a clown, at other times as a dangerous Marxist; strangely incompatible designations which proved his opponents’ confu­ sion. But beneath his smiling exterior, was a shrewdness and acumen. He possessed great energy and addressed, with barely a sign of wear, numerous meetings during his extensive speaking tours. He spoke easily, and hu­ mourously, with few notes. His speeches in the House and on the hustings were never the forum for complex ideas or intricate logical argumentation. Instead, they were opportunities to ridicule, inform, entertain, gain media coverage and appeal to ordinary people. Barrett’s strength lay in his

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ability to communicate with the rank and file in the party and the average voter whose hopes and resentments he instinctively appreciated. He was a good organizer. His own constituency was tightly organized and one of the safest in the province; a happy circumstance which freed him to travel without home worries. And wherever he moved, he spoke and joked with the rank and file who liked to call him “Dave.” Barrett was never com­ pletely acceptable to the elites, whether in his own party, the union bureauc­ racy or the professional world who preferred the stiff proficiency of Berger. His garrulousness and humour were more easily appreciated by the masses, the silent majority that W.A.C. Bennett knew in his heart of hearts, could never desert the Social Credit Party. It was Barrett’s strategy, in fact, to woo the silent people and convince them that the N.D.P. was the vehicle for the realization of their hopes. The new leader’s appeal, and strategy, was as much populist as socialist. The party was led by professionals and could count for support from disaffected professional groups like teachers and social workers. But it needed the backing of ordinary people, workers-union and non-union-Indians, and small businessmen who, once wooed by Bennett’s populism, found them­ selves, in 1972, political orphans. Barrett sold himself and his party not as potential governors, or statesmen, or labour peers, but as the people’s ombudsmen carrying an insistent local message to distant Victoria. The N.D.P.’s new leader was peripatetic and in his travels to the central Interior, the north and areas outside of Victoria on Vancouver Island discerned a vote potential which the metropolitan-based party had neglected in the past. The falling away of Socred support in the north and in other select constitutencies in the Interior and on the Island was early appreciated by Barrett who visited the sore spots himself or took with him his legislative party which invited and heard briefs from disaffected local groups. The N.D.P. already knew the city’s needs. The country forays, among the hurting toilers of the hinterland, promised a new support among voters opposed to a remote Victoria government. Organised labour, at the top, played no role in Barrett’s game plan. The N.D.P.’s new leader harboured little love for the political labour leaders, like Ray Haynes, heading up the Federation, who helped engineer his defeat at the 1969 leadership convention. Barrett did not enter the C.C.F.-N.D.P. through the union movement and never held a job as a union official. Neither of his parents were active unionists-his father was a fruit dealerand he did not work with the trade-union movement even indirectly, like Tom Berger, who, though a lawyer, did legal work for the B.C. Federation of Labour and several unions. Barrett saw labour as one group-albeit an important one-in the party. He asked for and expected financial and organizational support from the

)

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310 Pillars of Profit

unions, but played down labour’s role in the party organization and stressed individual membership before group affiliation. Organized labour’s visible ties with the N.D.P. he considered a distinct liability and went to great pains to emphasize the N.D.P. as a broadly-based people’s party rather than as a labour party. His accession to power naturally induced severe strains with the B.C. Federation of Labour union hierarchy, who, at the outset, regarded Barrett’s leadership as a calamity. The party’s provincial office was moved in the autumn of 1970 from the East Broadway building it shared with the B.C. Federation of Labour and individual unions to a new structure on East Hastings Street. Barrett, unlike previous leaders, received no invitation to the 1970 convention of the Federation which provided secretary Ray Haynes an opportunity to complain: “The trouble with Barrett is that he believes it is unpopular to be associated with the labour movement.” 151 The fight with the Federation leadership flamed and flickered thereafter, but, by the year 1972, a modus vivendi had been arrived at which removed most of the acrimony from public view. The New Democrats, in the summer of 1972, were not the only Opposi­ tion party sporting a new leader. Both the Liberals and Conservatives followed suit, with glamour boys, calculated to raise their mordant party spirits. The Conservatives, with two House members following the defec­ tion of Scott Wallace and Marshall, chose, at a November 1971 convention, Derril Warren, a gangly young lawyer who won on the fourth ballot, against incumbent John de Wolf, leader of the party since June 1969.152 Born in Saskatoon, Warren received an Arts degree at U.B.C., studied law at Dalhousie and Harvard, and articled, in 1967, in a Calgary law firm headed by Peter Lougheed, then leader of the Conservative Party of Alberta and later Premier of the province.153 Upon returning to British Columbia, Warren developed a political itch, which soon erupted into a desire to take over a dead party. So he joined forces with Peter Hyndman, whose brother-in-law was the government House leader and Minister of Education in the Lough­ eed government. They both joined the Conservatives in just enough time to capture the November convention and attract funds from the Federal party organization and, probably, the neighbouring Alberta party. David Anderson, the new Liberal leader, entered the provincial political scene even later. Born in 1937 in Victoria, he was educated at Victoria College, U.B.C. and at the University of Hong Kong before occupying several positions in the foreign service: legal advisor to the Canadian delega­ tion to the International Control Commission, Assistant Trade Commis­ sioner in Hong Kong and, finally, in 1967-68, China desk officer for the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. A keen sportsman, who once rowed on the U.B.C. Olympic rowing team, Anderson was first elected to the House of Commons for Esquimalt-Saanich in 1968 and thereafter

The Good Life: 1970-1972 311

grabbed headlines by using his chairmanship of the House of Commons Special Committee on Environmental Pollution to launch a crusade against the proposed American oil tanker route along the coast from Alaska to Washington. When Pat McGeer decided, in the spring of 1972, to throw in the towel and return to the lab, Anderson was there, at the party’s May convention in Penticton, to defeat Surrey Mayor Bill Van der Zalm for the leadership and appeal to the “neglected majority” fed up with “tactics of confrontation and polarization” practised by the Socreds and the socialists.154 The sole party to stay with the old leader was, of course, the governing party, Social Credit, which, in tattered garb and rent by dissension, stag­ gered into the campaign preceding the general election of August 30th. It was not for want of trying that the Socreds remained with their leader. For months, aspirants and heir apparents-Peterson, Gaglardi, Campbell, Williston-chafed and grumbled in the wings, wondering when or whether the man from Kelowna might decide to vacate the premiership. Several at­ tempts, beginning in 1968, to get the party conventions to consider the leadership question and create machinery to deal with succession, were easily quashed by Bennett, whose yearning for political immortality was fortified by the likely prospect of P.A. Gaglardi, possessed of a wide and faithful Interior following, succeeding him to the leadership of the party and premiership of the province. So Bennett gave it another try; but with a party seriously demoralized by resignations and dissension. Recreation Minister Kenneth Kiernan threw in the towel in Chilliwack as did the aging Works Minister, William Chant, in Victoria. Skeena’s Dudley Little declined renomination while Albemi’s Howie McDiarmid, facing an N.D.P. resurgence in his home constituency, moved over to Oak Bay to challenge George Scott Wallace. Saanich-incumbent John Tisdalle lost to Foster Isherwood in a bitterly contested nomination which split the local organization and caused Tisdalle to make noises about running as an Independent. Party Whip Hunter Vogel, an old stalwart, declined renomination while Herb Capozzi, after months of wavering, elected to run again but staged a weak and mild campaign in Vancouver-Centre. In Chilliwack, Vancouver-Burrard, and Shuswap where Leonard Galbraith barely lost the nomination to incumbent Willis Jefcoat, the Socred executives and organizations were badly split and warred pub­ licly. Bennett’s flaccid campaign did little to raise the mordant party spirits. There was little rhetoric about moving frontiers, no summoning of the Northern empire, no epic prose about forward leaps, onward thrusts, or limitless expansion; and no announcements of any grand new projects except for possible coal development in the Sukunka Valley, south of Chet-

312 Pillars of Profit

wynd, involving the mining and shipment of Sukunka coal via the B.C. Railway and Squamish; a prospect which troubled the people of Prince Rupert looking for expansion of their own port.155 Old slogans and smears were, of course, trotted out. The people in Fort St. John were reminded the issue was “private enterprise versus state social­ ism” and warned that if the N.D.P. were elected “there would be a run on government parity bonds as investors flocked to cash them.” 156 Barrett was labelled as a wild man, waffler, and bed-mate of the communists, while an overflow crowd in North Vancouver was treated to a warning that “the socialist hordes are at the gates in British Columbia.” 157 But Bennett seemed less concerned with raising the socialist scare than with reminding the voters, in a tired way, of the sound government record. The media, as usual, were saturated with blurbs about the good life while small crowds in Legion or community halls across the province were treated to larger blurbs by the Premier who travelled in his air-conditioned, black Cadillac, usually in the company of public-relations man, William Clancey. The town meetings were an old, familiar scene. The Premier arrived at 8:30, moved to the front of the hall, stood before a front table which held a jar of fruit juice, spoke nervously, then disappeared into the back seat of the Cadillac and was lost in the night. The remaining crowd were treated to a bad film about twenty years of Socred rule. Bennett’s speeches lacked bite, direction, vision. He spoke of the Kelowna Charter, the abandonment of the gift tax and succession fields, the raised minimum wage, sound financial management, a debt-free British Columbia, higher benefits for pensioners and the disabled, and increased grants to homeowners. Bennett claimed Social Credit was “the youngest government in the country where it counts, from the nose up,” 158 and professed his love for doctors and teachers, reminding his audience that his sister was a teacher, his only brother a teacher, his wife a teacher, and “our only daughter is a teacher.” 159 But what the Premier said was far less crucial than the words reputedly spoken by P.A. Gaglardi to Toronto Star Western Bureau chief Chris Dennet on August 22, when the Rehabilitation Minister referred to several of his Cabinet colleagues as square pegs in round holes, described the Premier as an old man who no longer understood young people, accused him of causing dissension as evidenced by the noisy heckling at meetings, and surmised that the only reason that Bennett stayed on as Premier after 1969 was to head-off his own bid for the leadership.160 Gaglardi’s outburst, subsequently denied by the errant minister who launched a libel suit against several principles with the Star, Vancouver Sun and Province, was accorded prime treatment by the press and electronic media. And so was the reply of the Premier who told Sun reporter Jes Odam: “As Premier, I know he did not say it. But Mr. Gaglardi has got

The Good Life: 1970-1972 313

to clear himself before the courts.” 161 While the Socreds flaunted their linen, the Opposition parties nipped at the government from all sides. The Liberals, as usual, nipped at the centre and received faithful editorial support from the Sun which thought them “a party that while dedicated to free enterprise has a broad humanitarian outlook and care for youth, the aged, the poor and the under­ privileged.” 162 The hordes from the right were led by Derril Warren, leader of a party with two M.L.A.s, who confessed he didn’t want to be Premier “for more than ten years at the most.” 163 Warren politicked in high style. He wore yachting caps and seersucker jackets in the Okanagan, blue jeans and a cowboy hat in the Peace Country and smart suits in Vancouver City. In his own constituency of North Vancouver-Seymour, he conducted an aerobic campaign, jogging eight thousand doorsteps in search of scarce votes. And television viewers were treated to a single commercial, replayed an infinitim, featuring the gaunt Conservative leader brooding along the water’s edge to the accompaniment of a choir and tune reminiscent of MacDonald Hamburger and Toronto Dominion Bank commercials. The socialist campaign was less slick, and more effective. Once again, an army of canvassers and a blizzard of signs were let loose across the province. In their wake, sped the socialist leader, smiling, joking, shaking hands, imploring voters to send a protest message to Victoria. Barrett made no effort to present himself as a credible Premier or as a confirmed advocate of expropriation and state ownership. Instead he spoke about day-care centres, rapid transit, secondary industry, government auto insurance, a raised minimum wage, guaranteed two-hundred-dollar-a-month income for pensioners, increased royalties on mining-the inequities of a system that provided welfare for the rich, and welfare for the poor. Whenever Marx came up, Barrett spoke of Harpo and Groucho. And when the Waffle reared its ugly head, the matter was promptly disposed of with references to pancakes, crepe suzettes, and other breakfast delights. The N.D.P.’s pancake strategy worked. At 10:12 p.m. on August 30, 1972, W.A.C. Bennett conceded defeat to a party which captured thirtyeight of the House’s fifty-five seats, leaving the Socreds with ten seats and the Liberals and Conservatives with five and two seats respectively. The socialist win was impressive. They defeated eleven Cabinet ministers and struck root across the province, picking up eight seats in Vancouver City, four in the lower mainland area, four on Vancouver Island and nine seats up the Coast and in the south, central and northern Interior. After two decades, they had finally brought down a government which, like its pre­ decessors, ran the province as a fief of the companies. British Columbia’s second century brought with it a new politics, and renewed hope.

Notes

CHAPTER I 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Vancouver Province, November 15, 1933. Ibid. Ibid. Victoria Times, May 10, 1935. Ibid. Ibid. Victoria Daily Colonist, September 21, 1935. Victoria Times, February 7, 1935. Financial Post, February 15, 1936. T.D. Pattullo to R.J. Cromie, June 10, 1932, Pattullo Papers, Provincial Archives of British Columbia. Victoria Daily Colonist, September 1, 1935. G.G. McGeer to Mackenzie King, November 14, 1933. Pattullo Papers, PABC. Pattullo to King, November 29, 1933, Pattullo Papers, PABC. Ibid. Vancouver Province, November 16, 1933. Vancouver Sun, March 12, 1934. Canadian Annual Review, 1934, p. 337. Ibid., p. 336. Vancouver Sun, March 12, 1934. Ibid.. March 7, 1934. Canadian Annual Review, 1934, p. 434. Vancouver Sun, February 23, 1934. Canadian Annual Review, 1934, p. 338. Vancouver Sun, March 5, 1934. Canadian Annual Review. 1934, p. 339. Canadian Annual Review, 1934, p. 337. Vancouver Sun, March 21, 1934. Vancouver Sun, March 23, 1935. Canadian Annual Review, 1935-36, p. 398. Victoria Times, May 10, 1935. Ibid. Canadian Annual Review, 1934, p. 332. As cited in Bruce Hutchison, “Storm over the Pacific,” Canadian Forum, Vol. 15> Toronto, July 1935, No. 146, p. 291. Canadian Annual Review, 1935-36, pp. 390, 400. Ibid, p. 403. Bruce Hutchison, op. cit., p. 291. Ibid. Ibid Victoria Times, May 10, 1935. Canadian Annual Review, 1935-36, p. 396. October 15, 1935.

314

Notes 315 40. July 20, 1935. The Council ceased meeting in May 1935. Carrothers announced his resignation in August 1936. The Council originally consisted of T.W. Bengay of Con­ solidated Mining and Smelting, J.B. Leyland, a municipal authority, T.E. French and J.H. Lawson, lawyers; J.O. Nichols, mining; J.G. Robson, a lumber merchant and Dr. H.C. Wrinch, the Skeena M.L.A. All but Carrothers, Nichols and Wrinch resigned by May 1936. Financial Post, May 23, 1936. The Council made useful studies of the coal industry, Japanese immigration and tariff and trade but did not perform as an effective consultative body. 41. Canadian Annual Review, 1935-36, p. 391. 42. Vancouver Province, October 23, 1935. 43. Ibid. Pattullo wrote the following to King on October 19, 1935: “Of course we all know Cromie. Like the lady of easy virtue is supposed to be, he is insatiable. He comes with a demand in one hand and a black jack in the other, and because I will not stand and deliver, he attacks me.” Pattullo Papers, PABC. 44. Ibid. 45. Victoria Times, March 19, 1935. 46. Pattullo to Mackenzie King, October 1935, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 47. Vancouver Province, February 22, 1936. 48. Victoria Times, February 13, 1936. Pattullo, it appeared, had forgotten about Herridge’s desertion and wrote Perry a letter in early 1936, in which he referred to Herridge as the First Vice-President of the Liberal party. 49. Pattullo to King, October 19, 1935, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 50. Ibid. 51. H.F. Angus, “Health Insurance in British Columbia,” Canadian Forum. Vol. XVII, No 195, 1937, p. 12. 52. Ibid., p. 13. 53. Report of the meeting of the British Columbia Liberal Association, July 24, 1936, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 54. Victoria Times, March 3, 1936. 55. Canadian Annual Review, 1935-36, p. 402. 56. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, March 27, 1936. 57. Canadian Annual Review, 1935-36, p. 402. 58. Victoria Daily Colonist, March 29, 1936. 59. Vancouver Sun, June 11, 1936. 60. T.D. Pattullo to Mackenzie King, October 19, 1935, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 61. Bruce Hutchison, op.cit., p. 291. 62. Vancouver Sun, July 29, 1935. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Victoria Colonist, September 26, 1933. 67. Ibid. 68. Victoria Times, March 3, 1936. 69. D.G. Steeves, The Compassionate Rebel, Boag Foundation, Vancouver 1960, p 92 70. Ibid., p. 107. 71. Victoria Colonist, March 14, 1936. 72. Vancouver Sun, March 14, 1936. 73. Ibid., May 19, 1936. Vancouver Province, April 8, 1936. 74. D.G. Steeves, op. cit., p. 108. 75. Vancouver Province, July 6, 1936. 76. Ibid. 77. Financial News, July 10, 1938. 78. Ibid. 79. Vancouver Province, July 30, 1936. 80. Ibid

316 Pillars of Profit 81. Ibid. 82. Victoria Daily Colonist, August 2, 1936. 83. J.S. Taylor, the C.C.F. M.P. for Nanaimo, was also expelled for supporting Connell. Vancouver Province, March 1, 1937. 84. Vancouver Sun, August 6, 1936. 85. Victoria Times, August 4, 1936. 86. Canadian Parliamentary Guide, 1937, p. 419. 87. Vancouver Province, August 19, 1936. 88. Ibid. 89. Canadian Parliamentary Guide, 1937, p. 418. 90. Canadian Annual Review, 1935-36, p. 403. 91. Ibid., p. 405. 92. Wilson’s statement was reproduced from the Halifax Herald of September 16, 1936. 93. Vancouver Province, February 19, 1937. 94. Vancouver Sun, May 21, 1937. 95. Victoria Times, April 15, 1937. 96. Vancouver Sun, May 14, 1937. 97. Ibid., May 21, 1937. 98. Ibid., May 14, 1937. 99. The two Winches and Dorothy Steeves. 100. Vancouver Province, July 2, 1936. 101. Victoria Daily Colonist, July 1, 1936. 102. Vancouver Province, April 26, 1937. 103. Ibid. 104. Victoria Times, May 8, 1937. 105. Vancouver Province, March 24, 1934. 106. Ibid., October 3, 1935. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., June 19, 1936. 109. Ibid. 110. Vancouver Province, November 5, 1936. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., November 9, 1936, December 1, 1936. 113. Ibid., November 9, 1936. 114. Ibid., March 9, 1937. 115. Ibid., March 8, 1937. 116. Ibid., December 1, 1936. 117. See Report of the Chief Electoral Officer, “Statement of Votes for General Election and Plebiscite,” June 1, 1937. 118. Toronto Globe and Mail, June 3, 1937. 119. Ibid., p. 14. 120. Victoria Times, August 27, 1938. 121. Ibid. 122. Vancouver Province, August 26, 1938. 123. Ibid., September 3, 1938. 124. Vancouver Sun, March 24, 1939.

CHAPTER II 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Vancouver Province, September 3, 1938. This was Bruce Hutchison’s designation. Canadian Annual Review, 1937-38, p. 499. Vancouver Sun. August 5, 1939. Ibid. Canadian Annual Review, 1937-38, p. 499. Vancouver Sun, December 9, 1938.

Notes 317 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Victoria Times, November 9, 1938. Canadian Annual Review, 1937-38, p. 499. Vancouver Sun, August 1, 1939, and April 23, 1940. T.D. Pattullo to S.G. Blaylock, May 13, 1940, Pattullo Papers, PABC. Ibid. Victoria Daily Colonist, May 11, 1940. Pattullo to S.G. Blaylock, May 13, 1940, Pattullo Papers, PABC. November 26, 1938. Vancouver News Herald. Vancouver Province, May 11, 1940. S.G. Blaylock to T.D. Pattullo, May 9, 1940, Pattullo Papers, PABC. This was the phrase used by George Pearson with reference to the new regulation. Victoria Colonist, May 11, 1940. T.D. Pattullo to Editor, Financial Post, November 29, 1938. “I am pleased to say that I am a great admirer of President Roosevelt, but I feel I should state that many of the policies which our British Columbia Government have been and are carrying out were enunciated by me when I was leader of the Opposition several years before Mr. Roosevelt became President.” T.D. Pattullo to J.L. Rolston, May 1, 1940, Pattullo Papers, PABC. Ibid. T.D. Pattullo to Blaylock, May 13, 1940, Pattullo Papers, PABC. Victoria Daily Colonist. May 11, 1940. Vancouver Sun, October 28, 1938. Ibid., September 26, 1938. Ibid., September 23, 1938. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Convention of the C.C.F., Maclnnis Papers, Special Collections, University of British Columbia Library. Vancouver Province, December 3, 1938. Telford insisted, to no avail, that the ruling did not apply to him since he had contested the mayoralty as an Independent and therefore had not secured two posts as a C.C.F. candidate. Vancouver Sun, June 27, 1939. Vancouver Province, June 27, 1939. Ibid. Vancouver Province, June 23, 1939. Vancouver Sun, June 27, 1939. Ibid. Canadian Annual Review, 1937-38, p. 506. Ibid., p. 507. The amendments granted the agents of unions the right to bargain for employees only if the unions were established before December, 1938, thus discriminating against newly created C.I.O. unions. Dorothy Steeves, op. cit., p. 119. Paul Phillips, No Power Greater, Boag Foundation, Vancouver, 1967, p. 116. D.G. Steeves, op. cit., p. 119. Ibid. Vancouver Province, June 25, 1938. Ibid., p. 120. British Columbia in the Canadian Confederation, Victoria, King’s Printer, 1938. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, March 16, 1938. Vancouver Province, March 22, 24, 31, 1938. Of special interest was the program ad­ vocated by H.R. MacMillan who appeared for the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Associated Boards of Trade of Eastern British Columbia, and the Associated Boards of Trade of the Fraser Valley. The MacMillan brief echoed the Kidd report and called for the abolition of provincial assemblies (if agreed to by the people in a mass referendum), preceded by a reduction of the Legislature from forty-eight to sixteen, the control of provincial and Dominion borrowings by the federal government, reduction and abolition of many government agencies and the transfer of the income tax to the federal authorities.

318 Pillars of Profit Vancouver Province, March 22, 1938. To Pattullo, of course, the MacMillan brief was a reactionary and scandalous document. 45. Laura Jamieson, “The British Columbia Legislature Sits,” Volume XX, No. 240, Canadian Forum, January 1941, p. 307. 46. Ibid. 47. Statement by Premier T.D. Pattullo in the British Columbia Legislature, November 7, 1940. Mimeographed. Pattullo Papers, PABC. 48. L. Jamieson, op. cit„ p. 307. 49. Government of Canada, Report o f the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Rela­ tions, Ottawa, Queen’s Printer, 1954, Book II. 50. Statement by the Honourable T.D. Pattullo, K.C., Ll.D., at the Dominion-Provincial Conference with Reference to the Report of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provin­ cial Relations, held at Ottawa, January 14, 1940, p. 3, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 51. Ibid., p. 6. 52. Vancouver Sun, January 31, 1941. 53. Victoria Daily Colonist, January 24, 1941. Vancouver Province, January 24, 1941. J.N. Sutherland, “T.D. Pattullo as Party Leader,” M.A. thesis, U.B.C., 1960, p. 101. 54. Vancouver Province, March 22, 1941. 55. Ibid. 56. Vancouver Sun, January 21, 1941. 57. Vancouver Province, February 20, 1941. 58. Victoria Times, March 14, 1941. 59. Ibid. 60. Vancouver Sun, February 27, 1941. 61. J.N. Sutherland, op. cit., p. 116. The Sun speculated that Hart was strongly opposed to Pattullo in his attitude to the report, January 25, 1941. Weir, in what may have been a flash of retrospective wisdom, later suggested that Pattullo should have gone into commit­ tee to discuss Plan One in order to avoid appearing “unnecessarily obstinate.” George Weir to T.D. Pattullo, March 25, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 62. Press Statement, January 31, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 63. Vancouver Province, March 29, 1941. 64. Vancouver Sun, September 3, 1941. 65. Toronto Globe and Mail, July 26, 1941. 66. Election Manifesto, July 22, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 67. The Sun waxed eloquent about Pattullo’s Yukon dream: “It is a splendid dream-British Columbia stretching from the forty-ninth parallel to the Arctic Ocean, the unknown minerals of the Yukon within our boundaries, the midnight sun blazing over a province on which, during six months of the year, it will never set.” Vancouver Sun, September 22, 1939. 68. Ibid., July 22, 1941. 69. Ibid., October 17, 1941. 70. Ibid., September 24, 1941. 71. Vancouver Province, October 4, 1941. 72. Vancouver Sun, October 1, 1941. 73. Vancouver Province, October 8, 1941. 74. Victoria Times, October 10, 1941. 75. Vancouver Province, March 24, 1941. 76. Victoria Daily Colonist, September 24, 1941. 77. Vancouver Sun, October 24, 1941. 78. Vancouver Province, September 13, 1941. 79. See Statement o f Votes o f 1942 General Election, Victoria, King’s Printer, 1942. 80. Pattullo to King, October 23, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 81. October 22, 1941. 82. George Weir to T.D. Pattullo, July 12, 1939, Pattullo Papers, PABC. J.N. Sutherland, op. cit., p. 113.

Notes 319 g3. T.D. Pattullo to I.V. Meter, November 24, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 84. T.D. Pattullo to W.L.M. King, October 23, 1941. 85. Vancouver Province, September 30, 1939. g6. Vancouver Sun, May 2, 1939. 87. Ibid., October 25, 1941. 88. Ibid., October 22, 1941. 89. Vancouver Sun, October 22, 1941. 90. Ibid., October 25, 1941. 91. Ibid. 92. Vancouver Province, October 22, 1941. 93. Victoria Times, October 22, 1941. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., October 28, 1941. 96. Vancouver Sun, October 22, 1941. 97. Ibid., October 27, 1941. 98. George Pearson to T.D. Pattullo, November 15, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 99. Press Statement, October 23, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 100. Ibid. 101. Vancouver Sun, October 24, 1941. 102. Ibid., November 5, 1941. 103. Circular to the Liberal Associations of British Columbia, by T.D. Pattullo, Victoria, September 9, 1943, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 104. Ibid. 105. Victoria Times, December 3, 1941. 106. Pattullo’s speech to the Legislature, January 1942, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 107. Circular to Liberal Associations of British Columbia, op. cit. 108. Victoria Times, November 17, 1941. 109. Ibid. 110. T.D. Pattullo to William Lyon Mackenzie King, November 22, 1941, Pattullo Papers, PABC. 111. Vancouver Sun, November 7, 1941. 112. Victoria Times, November 17, 1941. 113. Ibid., November 18, 1941. 114. Ibid., November 26, 1941. 115. Victoria Daily Colonist, December 3, 1941. 116. Victoria Times, December 3, 1941. 117. Ibid. 118. Victoria Daily Colonist, December 3, 1941. 119. Ibid. 120. Victoria Times, December 3, 1941. 121. Victoria Daily Colonist, December 3, 1941. 122. Victoria Times, December 3, 1941. Hart’s pronouncement upset the Province, which rightly condemned it as dangerous non-coalition talk. 123. Vancouver Sun, December 4, 1941.

CHAPTER III 1. C.G.D. Roberts and A.L. Tunnell, The Canadian Who’s Who, Vol. II, 1938-1939, TransCanada Press, Toronto, 1939, p. 144. 2. Vancouver Province, December 11, 1941. 3. Ibid., December 5, 1941. 4. Ibid. 5- Ibid., December 6, 1941. 6, Ibid., December 8, 1941. 2- Victoria Times, December 8, 1941.

320 Pillars of Profit 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Vancouver Province, December 8, 1941. P. Sherman, Bennett, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd. 1966, p. 41. Vancouver Province, December 3, 1941. P.W. Luce, “Honest John Hart, B.C.’s Premier-To-Be,” Saturday Night, December 13, 1941. Ibid. Hart’s budget presentation was reminiscent of Rembrandt’s “The Anatomical Lesson” which describes a gaunt surgeon, scalpel in hand, lecturing his students on the inner mysteries of the dead body opened for inspection. D.G. Steeves, op. cit., p. 162. Vancouver Province, January 14, 1942. January 13, 1942. Bruce McKelvie reported that “ . . . the C.C.F. party’s patriotism can no longer be held up for criticism.” Vancouver Province, January 10, 1942. January 8, 1942. February 11, 1942. Ibid. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, February 11, 1942. Paul Phillips, op. cit., p. 126. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid. Between 1939 and 1945 union membership in British Columbia rose from 34,397 to 83,823. In 1939, an estimated 12.7% of British Columbia’s labour force was organized; in 1945, approximately 29.8%. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 131. Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1968, p. 123. Paul Phillips, op. cit., p. 135. Gad Horowitz, op. cit., p. 123. Ibid., p. 119. Vancouver Sun, February 25, 1943. Ibid., April 19, 1943; April 17, 1944. Calgary Herald, November 10, 1943. Ibid. Toronto Globe and Mail, November 13, 1943. Ibid. This was the first time in Canadian history that a national poll indicated a greater preference for the C.C.F. than for any of the free-enterprise parties. Vancouver Province, February 19, 1943. Ibid. C.C.F. News, December 21, 1944. Vancouver Province, January 9, 1942. Ibid., January 30, 1942. Ibid., February 3, 1942; Vancouver Sun, January 17, 1942. Ibid., February 7, 1942. Vancouver Province, February 4, 1942. “It is to be hoped. . . ” the Province editorialized, “that Mr. Maitland in his answer was not also giving voice to government policy.” Ibid., February 26, 1943. Ibid., February 5, 1943. Ibid., March 19, 1943. Paul Phillips, op. cit., p. 129, Vancouver Province, February 26, 1943. Ibid. Vancouver Province, March 6, 1943.

Notes 321 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93.

Ibid. Ibid., March 12, 1943. Ibid., March 19, 1943. C.C.F. News, February 10, 1944. Vancouver Province, March 16, 1944. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, January 8, 1942. Vancouver Province, February 19, 1943. Ibid., March 3, 1943. Ibid., February 4, 1943. Vancouver Sun, March 19, 1943. Ibid., February 28, 1945. Ibid. A.E. Carlsen, “Major Developments in Public Finance in British Columbia: 1920-1960,” PhD. Thesis, Department of Political Economy, University of Toronto, 1961, p. 80. A Review o f Resources, Production and Government Finances, Victoria, 1950, p. 18. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 86. March 17, 1945. Vancouver Sun, February 12, 1945. Ibid., March 17, 1945. C.C.F. News, March 22, 1945. Judith Barbara Ward, “Federal-provincial Relations within the Liberal Party of British Columbia,” M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1966, p. 62. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid. Vancouver Province, August 1, 1944. Vancouver Sun, February 19, 1945. The Sun reported that Bennett was almost swept out of the Conservative Party for his “non-party party speech,” February 24, 1945. Vancouver Province, August 1, 1944. After returning from the Conservative leadership convention in Winnipeg in February 1943, Maitland likened the Federal War Control Boards to a socialist, C.C.F. bureaucracy. Vancouver Province February 13, 1943. Vancouver Province. August 1, 1944. Ibid., February 8, 1943. Vancouver Sun, March 3, 1943. Vancouver Province, March 3, 1943. C.C.F. News, August 30, 1945. Vancouver Province, July 27, 1945. Victoria Times, July 30, 1945. Ibid., July 27, 1945. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, September 29, 1945. Ibid., February 8, 1945. The coalition was not free of trouble in certain ridings. In Saanich, Major L.H. MacQueen ran as an Independent endorsed by the Saanich Progres­ sive Conservative Association, while in neighbouring Esquimau, a Liberal was nominated by local troublemakers against the incumbent Tory. In Nanaimo, ex-mayor C.B. Harri­ son, a prominent federal Conservative unhappy with the weak support rendered by the provincial authorities in the June federal election, took out nomination papers against George Pearson. Vancouver Sun, October 12, 1945. C.C.F. News, November 1, 1945. Ibid. The coalition campaign was aided further by a stream of propaganda emanating from two organizations anonymously backed and incorporated under the Provincial Societies Act, 1941; the Industrial Association of British Columbia and the British Columbia Federation of Trade and Industry, which performed equivalent functions to those of the infamous A.B. Trestrail and Gladstone Murray in Ontario.

322 Pillars of Profit 94. Vancouver Province, December 12, 1956. 95. By 1945, both the industrial and craft unions were actively and effectively combatting the communist factions. 96. Vancouver Sun, September 17, 1945. 97. Carr was a leading communist theoretician. 98. C.C.F. News, August 9, 1945. 99. Ibid., July 5, 1945. 100. Vancouver Sun, April 17, 1944. 101. C.C.F. News, March 15, 1945. 102. The charter of the Trail C.C.F. Club was subsequently withdrawn while the Warfield Club was suspended. Eight party members from Kootenay-West were expelled for sup­ porting Herridge in the federal campaign. C.C.F. News, July 19, 1945. 103. C.C.F. News, May 17, 1945. 104. Ibid., July 19, 1945. 105. Ibid., October 11, 1945. 106. D.G. Steeves, op. cit., p. 176. 107. Vancouver Sun, April 18, 1945. 108. British Columbia, “Statement of Votes for the Election of 1945,” p. 15. 109. Ibid., p. 13. 110. C.C.F. News, November 1, 1945. Grant MacNeil to David Lewis, October 26, 1945, Maclnnis Papers, Special Collections, University of British Columbia. The percentage of registered voters who cast their ballots dropped between 1941 and 1945 from 72.7% to 65.3%. British Columbia, “Statement of Votes . . . ” p. 15. 111. “T h eSun is especially gratified at the Hart-Maitland victory because in this newspaper was published the first suggestion of a coalition movement, following the divided result of the election of 1941,” Vancouver Sun, October 26, 1945. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Victoria Times, July 27, 1945.

CHAPTER IV 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Vancouver Sun, April 11, 1946. Ibid. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 53 Vancouver Sun, April 5, 1946. P. Sherman, op. cit., pp. 50-53. Vancouver Province, February 25, 1946. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 48. Ibid., p. 54 Ibid. Ibid. Victoria Daily Colonist, June 15, 1946. Vancouver Sun, June 17, 1946. Reflecting the growing frustration of the party’s youth was a resolution increasing the representation of the Young Conservatives from 16 to 48 at future conventions. C.C.F. News, April 18, 1946. Vancouver Province, October 24, 1947. Or so it appeared to Mac Reynolds. Blair Fraser, “British Columbia Coalition Commits Suicide,” Maclean's, February 15, 1952. Bothered by a divorce suit, Wismer lost the seat in the 1941 election but was returned in 1945.

Notes 323 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Vancouver Sun, May 11, 1945. Ibid., November 19, 1947. Ibid. A policy consistent with the utterances of Senator Farris, who warned at the October executive meeting which heard Hart’s announcement of resignation of “the enemy within our gates . . . . We must stand together; we must close our ranks; we must have faith in the future and above all we must make sure that the socialists . . . shall not rule in this nation.” Vancouver Province, October 3, 1947. Vancouver Sun, December 10, 1947. Vancouver Province, December 10, 1947. Ibid., December 11, 1947. Ibid., December 10, 1947. Vancouver Sun, October 18, 1947. They were opposed to a group of “decrepit old men always returned to executive positions.” Ibid., December 10, 1947. Ibid., December 16, 1947. Vancouver Province, December 27, 1947. Ibid., December 29, 1947. C.C.F. News, January 5, 1949. Vancouver Sun, April 2, 1947. C.C.F. News, March 27, 1947. Ibid, Ibid., May 8, 1947. Vancouver Sun, July 21, 1947. C.C.F. News, September 11, 1947. Ibid., June 12, 1947. Ibid. Ibid., April 29, 1948. Vancouver Sun, April 28, 1948. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 81. Ibid., pp. 88-90. Vancouver Sun, February 12, 1949. C.C.F. News, March 30, 1949. Vancouver Sun, February 11, 1949. Ibid., February 12, 1949. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., April 16, 1949. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., April 10, 1949. C.C.F. News, April 20, 1949. Vancouver Sun, June 13, 1949. Ibid. Ibid., May 31, 1949. Ibid. Ibid., May 31, June 1, 1949. Ibid., June 14, 1949. Alex Macdonald was certain that Clement Atlee “more than any other man . . . saved Western Europe from Communism. . . . ” Ibid. Ibid. D.G. Steeves, op. cit., p. 177. Paul Phillips, op. cit., p. 143. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 91. Mac Reynolds, “How Social Credit Took B.C.,” Maclean's, September 1, 1952, Vol. 65.

324 Pillars of Profit 68. Vancouver Province, March 14, 1952. 69. Ibid., March 4, 1949. 70. Peer Paynter, in an interview with the author, estimated about 1,000 members in 1948. The minutes of the conference of the British Columbia Social Credit League, September 24, 1949, revealed a total paid-up membership of 395. 71. Paynter interview. 72. British Columbia, “Statement of Votes . . . ” June 1949 general election, pp. 8, 9. 73. Ibid., p. 15. 74. The sole northern constituency to go socialist was Atlin where Frank Calder, an Indian fisherman and union official, was returned. The government ruthlessly bought Indian votes in key northern constituencies. On the Stoney Creek reserve, which had been denied a road for decades, graders were moved in and local Indians employed in the construction of a new road through the reservation. On the roadside of one reservation, signs were planted claiming that the C.C.F. would fire the priest, bum the churches and steal the Indians’ cattle. When a government-appointed registrar called on the Indians to put them on the voters’ list, the Indians were told to vote for their benefactors who had so kindly extended them the franchise. C.C.F. News, May 11, 1949. 75. Vancouver Province, June 16, 1949. 76. Ibid. 77. Vancouver Sun, June 16, 1949.

CHAPTER V 1. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 69. 2. Ibid., p. 56. 3. Ibid., pp. 60-61; and Bennett fo r Unity, a campaign pamphlet issued in 1950 under the auspices of the Bennett for Leader Committee. 4. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 61. 5. Ibid., p. 62. 6. Vancouver Sun, September 12, 1950. 7. Vancouver Province, September 12, 1950. 8. Ibid. 9. Bennett for Unity. 10. Ibid. What he really meant to say, he later telegrammed the Sun in response to an editorial denouncing his speech, was that a Coalition Party would have “done away with Party intrigue,” placing Liberals and Conservatives on “an equal basis and the Premiership would not necessarily stay with one political party,” Vancouver Sun, October 3, 1950. 11. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 70. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 71. 14. Vancouver Sun, October 10, 1950. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 72. 18. In some cases the Board required paid up dues and in other cases waived money pay­ ments. It was charged with long delays in handling routine requirements before certifica­ tion. C.C.F. News, September 5, 1951. 19. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 95. 20. P. Sherman, op. cit. p. 66. 21. Ibid., p. 73. 22. C.C.F. News, August 22, 1951. 23. He was replaced by Douglas Turnbull, a former manager at Consolidated Mining and Smelting. 24. Vancouver Sun, March 30, 1951.

Notes 325 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 76. Ibid. Ibid., p. 73. Vancouver Sun, April 19, 1951. Vancouver Province, March 12, 28, 1951. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 75. Vancouver Sun, March 30, 1951. Vancouver Province, March 28, 1951. Ibid. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, March 16, 1951. Ibid. Vancouver Province, March 28, 1951. Budget Speech, 1950, p. 24. As quoted in A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 94. Ibid., p. 95. Vancouver Province, April 17, 1951. Ibid. Ibid. As an example of how government could encourage business, Anscomb cited recent amendments to the Timber Act which gave special tax concessions to persons planting trees on idle land. “It will encourage many to plant trees on a farming basis with the knowledge they will not be taxed out of existence while the trees mature. That is what I mean by government helping growth of industry.” Vancouver Sun, April 14, 1951. Chief Electoral Officer, Province of British Columbia, Alternative Voting, An explanation of the Procedure of Alternative Voting as it Applies to the “Provincial Elections Act.” P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 77. In a letter to the Sun, January 30, 1951. Vancouver Sun, October 30, 1950. As Attorney General, Wismer was instrumental in drawing up the bill which made British Columbia safe for Alcan. Vancouver Sun, March 16, 1951. Ibid. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 76. Vancouver Sun, March 16, 1951. Vancouver News-Herald, March 16, 1951. Mrs. Rolston once set her large hat on fire at a civic meeting while lighting a cigarette. Mac Reynolds, “How Social Credit Took B.C.,” Maclean’s, September 1, 1952, Vol. 65, p. 54. Vancouver Sun, April 2, 1951. Ibid., March 28, 1951. Vancouver Province, March 28, 1951. Vancouver Sun, March 16, 1952. Ibid., March 28, 1951. Ibid., May 30, 1951. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, June 15, 1951. P. Sherman, op. cit., pp. 91-93; Vancouver Sun, September 6, 1951. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 93. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, October 2, 1951. Ibid. The changes were inspired by recommendations of the Sloan Commission. Chilliwack Progress, June 11, 1952. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 102. Mac Reynolds. “The Scenic and Succulent Okanagan.” Maclean’s, February 1, 1953, p. 37.

326 Pillars of Profit Vancouver Sun, March 14, 1952. In an interview with the author. Vancouver Province, December 29, 1951. The Columbian, November 3, 1951. Ibid. Vancouver Province, December 29, 1951. Ibid., August 2, 1952. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 91. The convention was a gala affair, attended by several hundred delegates, who loudly hooted and hollered when they heard Wicks announce that the party membership had increased from 700 to 3,000 in half a year. The Columbian, November 3, 1951. Alberta Agriculture Minister Ure was there to assure the throng that the Alberta debt-free miracle, performed two years before the new oil fields were discovered in 1947, could be repeated in British Columbia, while national organizer Orvis Kennedy assured the dele­ gates that a victory at Victoria would be but a prelude to an assault on Ottawa and the ultimate changing of the national currency. The platform, notably free of funny money rhetoric, was an amalgam of reform planks: repeal of compulsory contribution to the hospital scheme, provision of free public ward treatment for all to be paid out of general revenue, increased old age pensions without a means test, increased educational grants to municipalities, a new labour code to provide “equal pay for equal work,” the outlawing of company unions, aid to separate schools. 81. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 96. 82. Vancouver Province, December 7, 1951. 83. Ibid., December 11, 1951. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid 86. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 103. 87. Mac Reynolds, op. cit., p. 56; Vancouver Sun, April 26, 28, 1952. 88. A Province reporter was certain that the country delegates paid their expenses out of their own pockets. 89. Vancouver Sun, April 28, 1952. 90. Ibid. 91. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 105. 92. Vancouver Sun, April 28, 1952. 93. Ibid., April 26, 1952. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., May 7, 1952. 96. Vancouver Province, May 7, 1952. 97. Vancouver Sun, October 2, 1951. 98. Ibid., January 18, 1951. 99. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 96. 100. Vancouver Sun, January 18, 1952. This little troubled Anscomb, who charged that Johnson knew six days in advance the basic terms of the tax deal and had failed himself to report the news to the Cabinet. 101. Ibid. 102. Vancouver Province, January 19, 1952. 103. Gordon Wismer, with support from a large caucus faction, favoured a full legislative program. 104. Vancouver Sun, February 21, 1952. 105. C.C.F. News, February 20, 1952. 106. Vancouver Sun, February 23, 1952. 107. Vancouver Province, February 23, 1952. 108. Vancouver Sun, March 27, 1952, February 21, 1952. 109. C.C.F. News, June 11, 1952. 110. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 99.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

Notes 327 Ibid. Vancouver Sun, January 15, 1952. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 108. The voters were expected to vote “ 1-2. . . for free enterprise”; to list the Liberals as their first preference and the Conservatives-or the Socreds-as their second. Vancouver Sun, May 23, 1952. Wismer urged a “ 1-2 vote for free enterprise,” but his formula did not exclude the Socreds. H.F. Angus observed that all Party leaders in the campaign were reluctant to specify second choices for fear of antagonizing other potential party support­ ers. H.F. Angus, "Note on the British Columbia Election in June 1952,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4, December 1952, p. 588. 115. Vancouver Sun, June 7, 1952. 116. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 109. 117. Vancouver Sun, June 10, 1952. 118. Ibid., June 11, 1952. 119. Ibid. 120. Vancouver Sun, May 19, 1950. 121. Ibid., April 14, 1952. 122. Ibid., April 12, 1952. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., April 14, 1952. 125. Vancouver Sun, April 19, 1952. Earlier in January, Donald C. MacDonald, who toured the Fraser Valley and Interior ridings, noted that Socred spokesmen were trying to build a “sweep” complex and that many people were seriously accepting and repeating the Socred propaganda. But he called it a pipe dream since no “political vacuum” existed in British Columbia as it did in Alberta in 1935. The Socreds, moreover, lacked an exciting leader. To MacDonald, Bennett was no Aberhart. He concluded his piece with a quota­ tion from Lord Tweedsmuir, who defined the Socreds as the Tories’ idea of a revolution. C.C.F. News, January 9, 1952. 126. Vancouver Sun, June 7, 1952. 127. Ibid. 128. Vancouver Province, May 13, 1952. Orvis Kennedy confirmed in mid-May that the British Columbia party was receiving extensive campaign aid from Alberta; an admission endorsed by Bennett, who spoke of a S100,000 election fund provided by Alberta and raised from individual party supporters. Hansell heatedly denied Bennett’s statement and claimed that “not one red cent of Alberta money” came into B.C. in support of the local campaign. Vancouver Sun, May 27, 1952. 129. Vancouver Sun, May 7, 1952. 130. Vancouver Province, July 12, 1952. 131. Ibid., May 30, 1952. 132. Ibid., March 25, 1952. 133. Ibid. 134. Vancouver Province, July 12, 1952. 135. Ibid., May 30, 1952. 136. Ibid., May 3, 1952. 137. According to Mac Reynolds, when the chairman of Ernest Manning’s Forum meeting attended by 5,000 people, asked the audience how many listened to Manning’s Sunday morning broadcast, nearly every hand went up. Mac Reynolds, “How Social Credit Took B.C.,” op. cit., p. 56. The establishment was predominantly Anglican and United Church. The Socreds drew strong support from the sects and from the Catholics, a minority in British Columbia, who waxed restive over aid to separate schools. A militant Catholic rights party-The Christian Democratic Party-ran a number of candidates, mainly in metropolitan Vancouver. 138. Vancouver Province, June 6, 1952. '39. Mac Reynolds, op. cit., p. 56. '40. Vancouver Province, July 12, 1952. 111. 112. 113. 114.

328 Pillars of Profit 141. For example, Manning’s speech in Vancouver as reported in the Vancouver Sun, June 6, 1952. 142. Vancouver Sun, March 25, 1952. 143. Vancouver Province, May 30, 1952. 144. Vancouver Sun, June 13, 1952. 145. The results are taken from British Columbia, “Statement of Votes,” General Election of June 1952, Victoria, 1953. 146. H.F. Angus, op. cit., p. 588. 147. C.C.F. News, July 23, 1952. Another tragedy, from the C.C.F. point of view, was the bitter fight between the communist-led Mine Mill at Trail and the C.C.F-led Steelworkers, who carried out an unsuccessful raid before the election. Communist and miner antiC.C.F. votes in Trail, Similkameen and Mackenzie, which the C.C.F. lost narrowly, might have made the difference. 148. It is noteworthy that the Socreds drew strong secondary support from voters who supported on the first count the few candidates of the Christian Democratic Party pledged to support Catholic minority rights. The C.D.P. was sponsored by a militant group within the new British Columbia Catholic Educational Association. 149. In Saanich, the Socialists squeaked in with the aid of Socred second count support and a minority of Conservative third count votes which went predominantly Liberal or were plumped. 150. Vancouver Province, May 13, 1952. 151. Vancouver Sun, June 11, 1952.

CHAPTER VI 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

Vancouver Province, July 15, 1952. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 115. Ibid., Vancouver Sun, July 16, 1952. Vancouver Province, July 16, 1952. Ibid. Ibid. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 119. Sherman maintained that the Liberals were non-committal, while one Conservative fa­ voured the C.C.F. Johnson had earlier announced his intention to recommend the forma­ tion of a government by the largest “group” in the House, but to Wismer the word “group” meant any combination of members totalling a House majority. Vancouver Sun, July 7, 1952. Soon after the election, the Socreds rushed to stop a recount in Vancouver-Burrard on the technicality that the constituency had been improperly named in an application for a recount. The court order contained the inadvertent omission of the word Vancouver from the designation of the electoral district as “Vancouver-Burrard.” The C.C.F. ap­ pealed to the Supreme Court for a writ instructing the senior county court judge to grant an order for a recount. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered a recount which the lower court judge, J.A. McGeer, refused to carry out. A subsequent appeal by the C.C.F., under section 148 of the Elections Act to the Provincial Government, now headed by Bennett, to order a recount, was refused. C.C.F. News, August 6, 1952, Vancouver Province, August 20, 1952. It is noteworthy that 17 years before, Judge McGeer’s brother Gerry gained a recount and beat Arnold Webster, who won on the first count by a scant six votes. When Webster appealed to have the recount invalidated, it was thrown out on the grounds it was technically defective-also because the riding was referred to as “ Burrard.” Vancouver Province, July 26, 1952. Vancouver Province, August 2, 1952. Ibid. Canadian Parliamentary Guide, 1952, p. 472. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 121.

Notes 329 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 2122.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

Vancouver Province, August 2, 1952. Ibid. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 113. Vancouver Province, August 2, 1952. Ibid. Peter Loudon, “Everything He Touched Turned to Gold,” Victoria Times, February 13, 1965. P. Sherman, op. cit., p.9. Walter Stewart, “B.C.’s Wacky Bennett, Strongman of the West,” Canadian Weekly. In an interview with Norman Cribbens for a trade magazine called Hardware and Metal Appliance Dealer, Bennett emphasized that the hardware business was an excellent prep school for public life: “There is no finer experience than conducting a hardware store for you have to be many things-a good salesman and organizer, your own buyer, your own accountant, your own credit manager. . . . ” Vancouver Sun, January 31, 1963. P- Sherman, op. cit., ix. National leader Solon Low told a B.C. Socred convention, in October 1953, that the job of the delegates was to “lay down the policy which will be followed by your Government. . . . ” Bennett followed with an assurance that the Government would follow the meeting’s resolutions “with great interest,” but they would be implemented only if it was “feasible and possible” and the time was “ripe.” Vancouver Sun, October 22, 1953. Peter Loudon, op. cit. Ibid. Robert Collins, “The Remarkable Rise of Smiling Cece Bennett,” Maclean’s, Vol. 68, February 15, 1960, p. 25. Vancouver Province, May 7, 1953. Vancouver Sun, October 23, 1954. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 103. Vancouver Province, August 18, 1952. Ibid. J.C. Lawrence, “Markets and Capital; a History of the Lumber Industry in British Columbia,” Master’s Thesis, Department of History, University of British Columbia, 1957, p. 195. Ibid., p. 149. B.C. Forest Products was formed in 1946 by E.P. Taylor of the Argus Corporation. In 1951, the Alaska Pine Group formed by Walter and Leon Koemer, Czech immigrants from families which had produced and marketed timber for four generations-beginning in Franz Joseph’s empire and through the years of Masaryk and Benes-merged with B.C. Pulp and Paper Company, a subsidiary of the powerful Abitibi Pulp and Paper Company of Toronto, to form Alaska Pine and Cellulose Limited. The Canadian Western Lumber Company, incorporated in 1910 with British and American capital, was headed by General A.D. McRae. In 1953, Crown Zellerbach gained a majority interest in the company. Canadian Forest Products was bought out by the International Harvester Company of Chicago, which, in turn, ceded control to Washington interests in 1941. J.V. Clyne, What's Past is Prologue, A History o f MacMillan Bloedel and Powell River Limited, p.I3. J.C. Lawrence, op. cit., p. 162. The MacMillan Company was founded by Harvey Regi­ nald MacMillan, a product of Newmarket, Ontario, and the Ontario Agricultural College. MacMillan received his graduate training in the Yale Forestry School under Professor H.S. Graves, who later became chief of the United States Forestry Service. After gradua­ tion in 1904, MacMillan worked eight years for the forestry branch of the Department of the Interior. In 1912, when the provincial government established a forestry branch, W.R. Ross, the Minister of Lands and Forests, hired MacMillan as his chief forester. During the war, he served as a federal trade commissioner, assigned to find lumber supplies to feed the British government’s war effort. He subsequently went into the private lumber exporting business, using his connections and knowledge of markets to good

330 Pillars of Profit

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

advantage. By the thirties, the MacMillan interests in lumbering and shipping were extensive and diversified. J.C. Lawrence, op. tit., p. 158, and J.V. Clyne, op. tit., p. 13. Bloedel Stewart was launched in 1911 by J.H. Bloedel, the senior partner, a Washington State lumber merchant, and General Jack Stewart and Patrick Welch, the original ig­ nominious contractors of the P.G.E. The amalgamation with Bloedel Stewart in 1951 was the beginning of an enormous expansion period. In the next years, MacMillan Bloedel spent $160,000,000 in the largest investment program in the history of the industry in British Columbia. MacMillan Bloedel, by 1959, became the largest producer of lumber and wood products in Canada, with a daily capacity of 1,800 tons of pulp and paper products, including 700 tons of newsprint. J.V. Clyne, op. tit., p. 17. In 1959, MacMillan Bloedel and Stewart amalgamated with Powell River Paper Company Limited, formed in 1911 by the Brooks-Scanlon of Minneapolis, as British Columbia’s first manufacturers of newsprint. J.C. Lawrence, op. tit., p. 190. Ibid., p.154. Ibid., p.191. Ibid., p.54. Much of the new forest wealth in the North was discovered by engineers who constructed the Alaska Highway during the Second World War. Budget Speech, 1952, p.34. About $1,200,000 was provided by the federal government. P. Sherman, op. tit., p. 127. Budget Speech, 1952, p.41. As quoted in A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p.104. Ibid., p.104. P. Sherman, op. tit., p.126. Vancouver Province, August 8, 1952. Ibid., August 14, 1952. Vancouver Province, May 9, 1953. Vancouver Sun, June 10, 1965. The fund came into existence, according to Gunderson, “about 1952.” The name was chosen because Social Credit was “a free enterprise party.” Vancouver Province. November 29, 1952. Vancouver Sun, November 28, 1952. Vancouver Province, November 29, 1952. In the midst of that fateful convention, Delta M.L.A. Tom Irwin was reported to have received a threatening phone call, which prompted the Reverend Phil Gaglardi to lead the assemblage in prayer. “Our Heavenly Father . . . ” Gaglardi intoned in his Caruso voice, “we pray that you watch over each of us, especially over Tom Irwin in his time.” Vancouver Sun, November 28, 1952. Vancouver Sun, November 29, 1952. Vancouver Province, August 2, 1952. C.C.F. News, November 26, 1952. Ibid. P. Sherman, op. tit., p. 128. Ibid., p. 131. Vancouver Province, March 26, 1953. Vancouver Sun, February 24, 1953. Ibid., February 27, 1953. Mrs. Score was subsequently fired. Her titular job was in the Department of Educational Reference and School Service, which was abolished in the estimates of the “economy and efficiency” budget of 1953-54. She was also removed from her position as Executive Secretary of the Department of Education’s Central Curriculum Committee and Staff Assistant to the Director of Curriculum. Understandably, “Effective Living,” known to Reid as “Effective Loving,” published, in an unexpurgated edition, by the Queen’s Printer at $1.25 a copy, became a best seller soon after the Reid Statement. Bennett subsequently disavowed Reid’s claim and mildly chastised the errant back­ bencher by removing him from the Secretaryship of the Legislature’s Social Welfare and Education Committee. Vancouver Sun, February 25, 1953.

Notes 331 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

Vancouver Sto/t, March 6, 1953. Ibid. Ibid., March 7, 1953. Ibid., February 19, 1953. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 131. Vancouver, Sun, February 19, 1953. Ibid., February 4, 1953. Ibid., February 18, 1953. Ibid. Ibid., February 19, 1953. Ibid. Ibid., February 20, 1953. Ibid., March 25, 1953. Vancouver Province, March 26, 1953. Vancouver Sun, March 28, 1953. Ibid., April 1, 1953. Ibid., April 20, 1953. Vancouver Province, April 20, 1953. Vancouver Sun, May 22, 1953. Ibid, April 20, 1953. Laing, who held the federal seat of Vancouver-Centre at the time of his accession, was unanimously chosen by the provincial Liberals. E.T. Kenney had been House Leader for nine months. 84. Vancouver Sun, May 29, 1953. 85. Ibid., May 9, 1953. 86. Ibid, May 2, 9, 15, 29, 1953. 87. Ibid., April 10, 1953. 88. Ibid, May 11, 1953. 89. Ibid., April 29, 1953. 90. Ibid., June 5, 1953. 91. Ibid 92. Vancouver Province, May 9, 1953. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., May 8, 1953. 95. British Columbia, “Statement of Votes,” General Election of June 9, 1953. 96. Vancouver Province, May 9, 1953. 97. All of the successful candidates in these constituencies were small businessmen. In Vancouver-Burrard, Eric Martin was an accountant and Bert Price, a shoe service operator. In Vancouver-Centre, Alex Matthew was an insurance broker and George Maxham, an apartment operator. George Tomlinson, elected in North Vancouver, was listed in the General Statement of Votes as an owner-operator. See “List of Elected Members of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia,” June 9, 1953, and British Columbia, “State­ ment of Vdtes,” General Election of June 9, 1953, Victoria, 1953, p. 14. 98. Maclean’s, January 15, 1953. 99. During the 1953 campaign, the large financial contributors to the federal organization withdrew their support from the provincial party for fear of losing their share of govern­ ment business in the event that their names continued to be associated with the Liberal Party. 100. Vancouver Sun, March 18, 1953. 101. Ibid. June 5, 1953. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid.

CHAPTER VII 1- Budget Speech, 1953, p. 19, as quoted in A.E. Carlsen, op. cit. p. 112.

332 Pillars of Profit 2. Ibid.. 1955, p. 31, A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 113. 3. . Ibid., p. 113. 4. That the new plan achieved some of the Premier’s professed goals is beyond dispute. It provided wide coverage. Everyone in the province, including visitors and recipients of social assistance, were to contribute to the scheme, while coverage would include everyone save visitors and residents who had not established a six months’ domicile. Administrative costs were reduced through the abolition of premium collections and the use of business establishments to collect the additional 2% along with the previously paid 3%. According to Professor Carlsen, transfer of the cost from a premium basis to an increment in the sales tax reduced the regressive nature of the burden of hospital insurance since a fixed premium bears more heavily on the lower economic group recipients-especially if the exemptions from the original sales tax and its later modifications are taken into account. Ibid., pp. 120-125. Among middle and high income groups, durables, home construction, liquor and entertainment commanded a higher proportion of total expenditure while business bore a large portion of the burden of the sales tax since materials and new equipment used in commercial and industrial construction were fully taxed at the contrac­ tor level. It can be argued, however, that increases in capital cost are ultimately passed on to the consumer. 5. Vancouver Province, March 10, 1954. 6. Vancouver Sun, March 15, 1954. 7. Victoria Times, March 9, 1954. 8. Vancouver Sun, September 25, 1953. 9. Vancouver Province, September 25, 1953. 10. Ibid. 11. Vancouver Sun, February 1, 1955. 12. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 126. 13. Ibid. 14. Vancouver Sun. January 28, 1955. 15. Ibid., February 1, 1955. It appeared, so Sommers informed the House, that MacMillan had been misquoted and the real fault lay with the federal government which, through iniquitous federal sales and corporation taxes was “depriving the Provinces of the use of new capital created . . . by the liquidation of capital resources.” 16. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 153. 17. By 1959, approximately $110,000,000 had been spent. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 145. 18. Ibid., p. 165. 19. Ibid., p. 166. 20. By 1959, the net funded short-term indebtedness of the P.G.E. equalled $126,000,000. Public Accounts 1960, p. 303, Ibid. p. 166. 21. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 169. 22. Ibid. The new arrangement had two purposes: to enable school trustees to borrow cheaper on the tight money market through government guarantees and the avoidance of further direct debt by the government. 23. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 167. 24. Victoria Times, March 7, 1955. 25. Ibid., September 18, 1956. 26. Ibid. 27. Vancouver Sun, September 7, 1955. 28. Nanaimo Free Press, 1959, p.2, as quoted in A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 142. 29. Vancouver Sun, January 20, 1956. 30. Ibid. Arnold Webster was quite taken with Bennett’s construction abilities. “The Premier is indeed an amazing man. . . . Maybe he didn’t build Rome, but he built a provincial party, if not in a day, at least in a very few days.” 31. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 173. 32. Ben Metcalfe, “Let’s Face It,” Construction World, 1963, p.38. After completion of a job, the contractor received a telephone call from a government public relations man suggest­

Notes 333 ing that a celebration was in order. The “opening ceremony” form of graft was widespread and involved no transfer of cash from the contractors to political officials since the company paid the cost directly. Contractors had other political costs as well, the chief one being campaign contributions usually made after receipt of phone calls from fund­ raising party officials. 33. Vancouver Province, March 22, 1968. 34. Ibid. 35. Ben Metcalfe noted that the political grafters adapted to the public tender system by bidding ridiculously low, then dealing with the man on top to put everything in order on the final payment. The grafter received his end after the adjustment. The gap between the bid price and final payment was rarely noticed. Ben Metcalfe, ibid., p. 38. 36. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 178. 37. Ibid., p. 177. 38. Vancouver Sun, February 1, 1956. 39. D.M. Carey, “Forest Tenure in British Columbia,” Transactions of the Ninth Meeting of the British Columbia Natural Resources Conference, 1956, p. 271. 40. Ibid., p. 272. 41. Ibid. 42. Financial Post, July 14, 1956. 43. Blair Fraser, “The Prairies’ Political Preachers,” Maclean’s, June 25, 1955, p. 25. 44. Vancouver Sun, March 26, 1954. 45. Labour favoured the setting up of machinery whereby prior to application being made to the courts for an injunction both parties would have the right to be heard by the Labour Relations Board, which could then decide whether or not to grant permission to the employers to apply to the court for injunctions. “Statement of Policy of the British Columbia Federation of Labour Executive Board Regarding the Provincial Election Called for September 19, 1956,” p. 3. Maclnnis Papers, Special Collections, University of British Columbia Library. 46. Ibid. 47. Vancouver Sun, March 26, 1954. 48. “Statement of Policy of the Executive Board of the British Columbia Federation of Labour . . . ” op. cit., p. 3. 49. Paul Phillips, op. cit., p. 146. 50. Vancouver Sun, August 7, 1957. 51. Ibid., July 18, 1958. 52. Ibid., November 5, 14, July 18, 23, August 7, 9, 1958. 53. Lands and Forests went to Williston and Mines to Kiernan. 54. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 153. 55. Ibid., p. 154. “ . . . the Government’s conduct here is incredible,” the Sun inveighed. “Sommers’s resignation was accepted. Then this ex-public servant locked up the charges in a civil suit which gives his accusers no power to investigate or search for details and proof of their information. Then he defends himself and vilifies his accusers under parlia­ mentary immunity, against the Speaker’s ruling and while holding a civil court lid on his opponents.” Vancouver Sun, September 18, 1956. 56. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 159. 57. Vancouver Sun, February 1, 1956. 58. Ibid,, September 18, 1956. 59. He was subsequently cited for contempt of court, defended by John Diefenbaker, and acquitted. 60- Vancouver Sun, March 10, 1956. 61. Ibid., April 15, 1955. 62. Vancouver Province, September 4, 1956. 63. Ibid., September 15, 1956. 64. Vancouver Sun, September 18, 1956. 65. Ibid., September 7, 1956.

m

334 Pillars of Profit Vancouver Sun, September 4, 1956; Vancouver Province, September 5, 1956. Vancouver Province, September 4, 1956. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 114. Vancouver Province, August 31, 1956. Ibid. The proposed new grant, which required an application for remission to the munici­ pal authorities, who saved the provincial government administrative costs, was geared to benefit the individual homeowner as opposed to operators of commercial establishments, multi-resident owners and tenants. 71. Vancouver Province, September 14, 1956. 72. Vancouver Sun, November 14, 1958. 73. Ibid., September 5, 1956. 74. Vancouver Province, September 5, 1956. 75. Vancouver Sim, September 18, 1956. 76. Ibid., September 15, 1956. 77. British Columbia, “Statement of Votes,” for General Election of 1956. Since the Socreds in the 1953 election solidified their electoral base and established their credibility as a majority governing party, there was little point in maintaining the alternative ballot which might have favoured the opposition. It was, accordingly, abolished in 1955. 78. The Province favoured the Government and reprinted, on its front page, Bennett’s reply to the Cromie editorial. Vancouver Province, September 15, 1956. 79. “We are a movement for the small man and the large man,” Bennett announced. “We need them all.” Vancouver Sun, November 10, 1956. 80. “The people admire the boldness and even recklessness of the Government,” Arthur Laing, defeated in Point Grey, lamented, “because most British Columbians feel we have broken into the big leagues economically.” Vancouver Sun, September 20, 1956. 81. Vancouver Sun, September 20, 1956. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., November 15, 1958. 84. Ibid., November 14, 1958. 85. Ibid., November 5, 1958. 86. Ibid., November 14, 1958. 87. Ibid., November 7, 1958. 88. Vancouver Province, November 12, 1958. 89. Vancouver Sun, September 20, 1957. 90. Ibid., October 28, 1957. 91. Ibid., February 3, 1958. Two days after Bryan’s defection, Bennett announced, “He wasn’t an original Social Crediter at the start like me.” Ibid., February 5, 1958. 92. Ibid., November 14, 1958. 93. Ibid, March 21, 1958. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid 96. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., pp. 109-110. 97. Ibid 98. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 195. 99. Vancouver Sun, February 8, 1958. 100. Ibid., February 22, 1959. 101. A.E. Carlsen, op. cit., p. 138; Victoria Daily Colonist, January 27, 1961. 102. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 195. 103. Vancouver Sun, February 25, 1958. 104. Ibid., February 11, 1958. 105. Ibid., May 29, 1958. 106. Vancouver Province, September 12, 1959. 107. As quoted in the Vancouver Sun, November 24, 1958. 108. Ibid., November 17, 1958. 109. According to Jack Scott, Vancouver Sun, February 19, 1957. 110. Ibid., February 13, 1957.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Notes 335 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., February 15, 1957. Vancouver Province, February 15, 1957. The power rights were subsequently sold to the Peace River Power Development Company in which WennerGren retained a controlling interest. Vancouver Sun, November 20, 1958. 113. Vancouver Sun, February 16, 1957. 114. Ibid., February 19, 1957. 115. Ibid., February 13, 1957. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., February 19, 1957. 118. Wenner-Gren received world headlines on the day Germany declared war and the liner Athenia was sunk in the Atlantic. His luxury yacht, the Southern Cross, which was 65 miles from the scene of destruction, rescued 376 people; a merciful act which never quite dispelled the suspicions aroused by his proximity to the scene of destruction. Mrs. Wenner-Gren, prone to mysticism, subsequently described the event as entirely fortuitous. She recounted how she was preparing to leave her Swedish home for a lengthy cruise with her husband one evening, when a bitter storm knocked out the lights. When she stumbled upstairs to find a candle, she was suddenly stopped by a strange figure of a man “all cloaked in black,” holding a thild at arm’s length “wrapped in swaddling clothes like the Christ child. Only there was blood on his head.” Terrified at the sight, she prevailed on her husband to leave the house immediately-two days earlier than planned. Later, out in the Atlantic, the Southern Cross received the Athenia’s SOS message. Among the first aboard on the dark and stormy night was a man, sombre and worn, carrying a child in his outstretched arms. There was blood on the child’s head. The reader is left the task of discerning the moral of the story. Vancouver Sun,, February 13, 1957. 119. Ibid., February 14, 1957. 120. Ibid., February 14, 15, 1957. 121. “Electrical Power in British Columbia,” series from the Vancouver Sun, June 1959. 122. In 1955, the federal government blocked a provincial sellout to the Kaiser Aluminum Company through passage of the International River Improvements Act, under which a federal licence was required for works which would “increase, decrease, or alter the flow of an international river.” Larratt Higgins, “The Alienation of Canadian Resources: The Case of the Columbia River Treaty,” in Ian Lumsden, ed., Close the 49th Parallel, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1970, p. 229. Kaiser approached the British Co­ lumbia government with a proposal to build a small dam at the outlet of Arrow Lakes on the main stem of the Columbia, a short distance upstream from Trail. The dam would yield $14,000,000 annually to the United States corporation. Bennett agreed to accept an annual payment of $2,000,000 with the dam to be built at Kaiser’s expense. Major federal attention throughout the 1940’s and ’50’s was focused on the Columbia River, a widely fluctuating 1,200 mile-long stream, first explored by David Thompson in 1810, which headed northward along the Rocky Mountain trench in the south-east comer of the province, then swung southward at Big Bend, through the Arrow Lakes and across the American border, where it eventually emptied into the Pacific. Involving an interna­ tional waterway, wildly fluctuating and flood prone, the Columbia River development was long a subject of international negotiation. The initiative for joint development came from the United States when the Army Corps of Engineers concluded in 1943 that full power potential within the American borders could not be realised without the provision of storage for flood flows in Canada and for their release during the low flow season. At the request of the Americans, the two governments referred the matter of co-operative development of the Columbia basin to the International Joint Commission, which set up the International Columbia River Engineering Board (ICREB) to investigate alternative modes of development. The final report of ICREB outlined three different plans for development including the Dorr Diversion or McNaughton plan which would have diverted the Kootenay River, a tributary of the Columbia, into its parent river, thereby producing power on the Columbia and providing water for irrigation on the prairies by diversion across the Rocky Mountains. Larratt Higgins, op. cit., p. 23, and R.E. Richard­ son, Walter Rooke and George McNevin, Developing Water Resources, Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1969, pp. 60-61.

>

336 Pillars of Profit Vancouver Sun, October 10, 1957. Ibid., October 9, 1957. Ibid. Vancouver Province, October 10, 1957. Certainly, Messrs. Gore and Strid, both avocational philanthropists, thought so. Being good and true businessmen, they dreamed of profit, and the prospective Peace development, now officially endorsed by the premier who signed, on October 7, 1957, a new agreement with them-which prepared the way for further surveys and studies-yielded substantial short run gain. In November 1958, Wenner-Gren B.C. Development Company Limited sold its plans and power rights in the Rocky Mountain trench area to the Peace River Power Development Company in return for a controlling interest in the new company. According to one observer, Wenner-Gren and Gore made a cool $5,000,000 profit by selling shares to others after receiving three shares in the Power company for each dollar spent on surveys. P. Sherman, op. cit„ p. 226. 127. Vancouver Sun, January 20, 1960. 128. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 197. 129. Vancouver Province, July 31, 1959. 130. Vancouver Sun, July 28, 1959. 131. Ibid., July 28, August 3, 1959. 132. Vancouver Province, July 31, 1959. 133. Vancouver Sun, January 31, 1962. 134. Ibid 135. Vancouver Sun, September 14, 1963. 136. Vancouver Province, August 19, 1959. 137. Vancouver Sun, October 8, 1959. 138. Vancouver Province, August 19, 1959. 139. Paul Phillips, op. cit, pp. 149-50. 140. G. Horowitz, op. cit, p.201. 141. Vancouver Sun, October 8, 1959. 142. Ibid, March 19, 1959, and P. Sherman, op. cit, p. 188. 143. Paul Phillips, op. cit, p. 156; Vancouver Sun, March 20, 1959. 144. Vancouver Sun, July 18, 1958. 145. According to T.L.C. President Claude Jodoin, Vancouver Sun, October 8, 1959. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., November 19, 1959. 148. Ibid., February 4, 1959. 149. Ibid. May 24, 1960. 150. Vancouver Province, February 13, 1960. 151. P. Sherman, op. cit, pp.232-234. 152. Ibid, p.234. 153. Vancouver Province, August 30, 1960. 154. Ibid. 155. Vancouver Sun, September 10, 1960. 156. In an editorial, September 12, 1960. 157. Vancouver Sun, August 22, 1960. 158. Ibid 159. Vancouver Province, September 7, 1960. 160. Ibid., September 10, 1960. 161. Vancouver Sun, September 27, 1960. 162. Vancouver Province, September 6, 1960. 163. Ibid., September 7, 1960. 164. Vancouver Sun, August 24, 1960. 165. Ibid., August 31, 1960. 166. Gad Horowitz, op. cit, p.201. 167. Vancouver Sun, September 8, 1960.

123. 124. 125. 126.

Notes 337 168. Vancouver Province, September 2, 1960. 169. British Columbia, “Statement of Votes,” for the General Election of 1960. 170. The Liberals won four seats, in Femie, Oak Bay, and two members in North Vancouver, and gained 20.9% of the popular vote. The Tories gained 6.7% and failed to elect a candidate.

CHAPTER VIII 1. Vancouver Province, September 1, 1956, October 1, 1957. 2. Ibid., May 30, 1960. 3. As early as September 1, 1956, the Vancouver Province observed that McMahon was the first of British Columbia’s key industrialists to publicly back Bennett. McMahon com­ plained that he “tried to spend money” in the Peace since 1935 but Pattullo blocked his way. He failed, too, under Johnson, “who really had no government at all.” Linder Bennett, he declared, he was at last allowed to unclasp his purse. “We have been able to spend our money now.” 4. Vancouver Province, May 1, 1958. 5. Ibid., February 8, 1963. 6. Ibid. May 30, 1962. 7. Vancouver Sun, February 2, 1962. 8. Vancouver Province, February 2, 9, 1962. 9. Vancouver Sun, February 22, 1961. 10. “Report of Committee on Election Expenses,” Queen’s Printer, 1966, p. 327. 11. Vancouver Sun, February 22, 1961. 12. Canadian Labour, May, 1961. 13. Canadian Annual Review, 1961, p.68. 14. Larratt Higgins, “Is the Columbia River Treaty a Sellout?” Toronto Globe and Mail, January 14, 1964. 15. Ibid 16. Sherman, following the stated reasons of R. Williston and K. Kieman, implies this was the major reason. P. Sherman, op. cit., p.228. 17. Higgins suggests that Cominco’s preferences may have influenced Bennett. L. Higgins, “The Alienation of Canadian Resources. . . . ” p.231. 18. P. Sherman, op. cit., p.227. 19. Larratt Higgins, “How Chaos Came to the Columbia,” Saturday Night, Vol. 77, May 26, 1962. 20. Larratt Higgins, “Second Deal on Columbia,” Toronto Globe and Mail, January 15, 1964. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Peter Newman, “Who’s Where and Why in the Great Columbia River Debate,” Ma­ clean's, pp.2-3. 24. Diefenbaker’s abject and futile search for recognition from the Americans, and the Canadian electorate, was clearly revealed in a speech to the House of Commons: “May I say that in the signing of this tremendous treaty the course followed was one that gave emphasis to the importance of the occasion. The fact is that it was the last major official discharge of responsibility on the part of the President of the United States. That fact gave it emphasis. During the course of our stay there the Minister of Justice, myself, and several representatives from two countries were entertained at luncheon at the White House, the last function of the kind that will take place during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisen­ hower.” House of Commons Debates, January 18, 1961, p. 1159, as quoted in Larratt Higgins, “The Alienation of Canadian Resources: The Case of the Columbia River Treaty,” op. cit., p.234. The signing of the treaty by A.D.P. Heeney, in the company of Davie Fulton and Charles Ritchie, prompted McNaughton to snort, “Three Rhodes scholars-three blind mice!” Toronto Star, January 12, 1971. 25. Larratt Higgins, “Second Deal on Columbia,” Toronto Globe and Mail, January 15, 1964.

338 Pillars of Profit 26. J.A. Irving, “Bennett’s Design for B.C. Progress,” Saturday Night, Vol. 77, May 26, 1962, p.18. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Canadian Annual Review, 1961-62, p.68. 30. August 2, was traditionally looked upon as the Socred birthday. 31. P. Sherman, op. cit., p.248. 32. The report’s figures were loaded in favour of the Peace. It did not include in Columbia revenue the $64,000,000 in flood benefits, nor did it make any provision for help from Ottawa. Ibid., p.249. 33. Ibid., p.250. 34. Ibid., p.248. 35. Vancouver Province, August 2, 1961. 36. Ibid., August 5, 1961. 37. Ibid. 38. Vancouver Province, September 13, 1961. 39. Ibid., September 20, 1962. 40. Vancouver Sun, October 4, 1961. 41. As quoted in the Vancouver Province, August 25, 1961. 42. Ibid. 43. As quoted in the Vancouver Province, August 24, 1961. 44. Ibid. 45. As quoted in the Vancouver Province, August 14, 1961. 46. Vancouver Sun, September 1, 1961. 47. Ibid., March 1, 1961. 48. Vancouver Province, February 6, 1959. 49. Vancouver Sun, March 6, 1961. 50. Vancouver Province, February 6, 1959. 51. Stuart Jamieson, “Expropriation of the B.C. Electric,” Canadian Forum, March, 1962, p.272. 52. Stuart Jamieson, “Power in B.C.,” Canadian Forum, May, 1962, p.36. 53. As quoted in the Vancouver Province, September 13, 1961. 54. Ibid., March 19, 1962. 55. Ibid., August 3, 1961. Vancouver Sun, February 28, 1963. 56. Larratt Higgins, loc cit. 57. Vancouver Sun, May 11, 1962. 58. Stuart Jamieson, “Expropriation of the B.C. Electric,” Canadian Forum, March, 1962, p. 272. 59. Vancouver Province, August 3, 1961. 60. P. Sherman, op. cit., p.250. 61. Ibid., p.251. 62. Ibid., p.254. 63. S. Jamieson, op. cit., p.35; Vancouver Province, April 28, 1963. 64. Ibid. 65. P. Sherman, op. cit., p.259. 66. Ibid. 67. April 4, 1962. 68. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 267. 69. Ibid., p. 268. 70. Ibid., p. 276. 71. Ibid., p. 277. It was, in short, a pleasing conclusion for all, though a mite noisier than the government’s acquisition of Black Ball Ferries in November 1961, a bare two months after the B.C.E. takeover, for a sum of $6,700,000. At the time of the purchase, the Puget Sound Navigation Company of Seattle, Black Ball’s parent firm, had a stock market value of $3,800,000, almost one-half of what the government paid. Despite opposition criticism,

Notes 339

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

Bennett refused to submit the acquisition for appraisal to an independent tribunal. Ben­ nett defended the high price paid as taking into account the prospective stock appreciation and asserted that an independent appraisal “would have priced the takeover out of reach.” Vancouver Province, November 18, 1961. His description of the deal, which substantially increased the government’s foothold in the Mainland-Island ferry business, as “a wonder­ ful, wonderful buy, a wonderful purchase,” was doubtless endorsed by Einar Gunderson, who was a director of Black Ball. The government first went into the ferry business in 1959 in competition with Black Ball and the C.P.R. Peter Newman, “The Second Most Powerful Tory,” Maclean’s, January 4, 1958, p. 17. Ibid. Winnipeg Free Press, February 20, 1961. Vancouver Sun, November 23, 1961. Ibid., November 17, 1961. Ibid. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 258. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, December 1, 1961. Ibid. February 28, 1963. Larratt Higgins, “The Alienation of Canadian Resources . . . ” p. 240, as cited in George Bain, Toronto Globe and Mail, April 30, 1962. P. Sherman, op. cit., p. 26. Donald Fleming suddenly became Bennett’s friend and progress was being made towards arriving at a formula for the sale of downstream benefits; a development Diefenbaker facilitated by removing McNaughton. Vancouver Sun, June 19, 1962. Ibid. Ibid. Peter Newman, Renegade in Power, McClelland and Stewart, 1963, p. 120. “Diefenbaker has agreed to the long-term sale of public power from the Columbia,” Bert Herridge concluded, “in order to retain personal power for a few months.” Peter Newman, “Who’s, Where and Why . . . ” p. 3. Larratt Higgins, “The Alienation of Canadian Resources . . . ” p. 235. Ibid. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid. Larratt Higgins, “The Columbia River Treaty; A Critical View,” International Journal, Vol. 16, 1961, pp. 402-404. When Saskatchewan Premier Woodrow Lloyd expressed grave concern about the cost to the Prairies of the proposed treaty, which prevented any diversion to the water-short western provinces, Bennett warned his eastern neighbour to “keep its cotton-picking hands off our resources.” Vancouver Sun, July 10, 1963. Vancouver Sun, November 30, 1960. Vancouver Province, February 27, 1963. Vancouver Sun, April 23, 1963. Vancouver Province, March 31, 1962. Vancouver Sun, February 27, 1963. Ibid., March 28, 1963. Vancouver Province, March 12, 1962. Vancouver Sun, February 26, 1963. Vancouver Province, January 29, 1963. Peter Newman, Renegade in Power, p. 120. Vancouver Sun, January 28, 1963. Vancouver Province, September 28, 1962. Ibid.

340 Pillars of Profit Vancouver Sun, September 24, 1963. Ibid., September 17, 1963. Ibid., September 24, 1963. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., September 17, 1963. Ibid., September 28, 1963. Ibid., September 27, 1963. Vancouver Province, August 23, 1963. Vancouver Sun, September 11, 1963. Vancouver Province, August 23, 1963. Vancouver Sun, September 11, 1963. Ibid., September 14, 1963. Vancouver Province, October 2, 1963. Vancouver Sun, October 1, 1963. Ibid. Canadian Annual Review, 1963, p. 139. Vancouver Sun, October 1, 1963. Ibid, October 9, 1963. Fulton’s main support came from the farmers and ranchers west towards Cache Creek and east towards Salmon Arm. Vancouver Sun, October 1, 1963. 129. August 26, 1963. 130. Vancouver Province, October 1, 1963. 131. Vancouver Sun, October 1, 1963.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

CHAPTER IX 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Vancouver Sun, January 14, 1963. Ibid., January 14, 1964. Ibid. R.E. Richardson, W.G. Rooke, et. al., op. cit., p. 81. Ibid., June 6, 1964. Ibid. Larratt Higgins, “The Alienation of Canadian Resources. . . . ” Ibid., p. 234. As quoted from Departments of External Affairs and National Resources, “The Columbia River Treaty Protocol, A Presentation,” Ottawa, April, 1964, p. 93. Ibid., p. 36. Time, September 30, 1966, p. 42. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, December 19, 1964. Ibid. Ibid., December 19, 1964. Ibid., August 22, 1962, February 12, 1965. Ibid., July 31, 1964. Ibid., August 31, 1965. Ibid., September 2, 1965. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., September 5, 1964. Ibid., October 28, 1965. Ibid., August 12, 1964. Ibid., August 3, 1964. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Notes 341 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

Ibid., February 22, 1965. Ibid., January 15, 1965. Ibid. Ibid., February 18, 1965. Ibid. Vancouver Province, February 13, 1965; Vancouver Sun, January 27, 1965. Ibid., July 11, 1964. Ibid., February 13, 1965. Glynn Mapes, “Bennett Boom,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1966. Vancouver Province, July 11, 1964. Glynn Mapes, op. cit. Vancouver Sun, May 30, 1966. Ibid., August 27, 1964. Ibid. Ibid. Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1966. Vancouver Sun, September 26, 1966. Ibid. See the author’s The Rush fo r Spoils, The Company Province 1871-1933, McClelland and Stewart, 1972. Chapter 4. Vancouver Sun, September 29, 1966. Ibid. Ibid. A dependence so great that in the year 1965 the province exported 57% of its production to the United States and purchased 54% of its imports from the same country. Glynn Mapes, op. cit. Time, September 30, 1966. Ginter, who converted a $1,500 stake in 1949 into a $20,000,000 fortune in the construction of highways and pulp mills, lived in a $250,000 house in Prince George which included an indoor waterfall and a swimming pool fed by a diverted mountain creek. Canadian Annual Review, 1964, p. 147. Vancouver Sun, March 3, 1965. Ibid., March 2, 1965. Canadian Annual Review, 1965, p. 165. Vancouver Sun, January 28, 1966. Canadian Annual Review, 1965, p. 169. Vancouver Sun, February 29, 1964. Ibid., May 30, 1966. Ibid., February 29, 1964. Canadian Annual Review, 1964, p. 149. Ibid., 1966, p. 148. Ibid., 1965, p. 167. Vancouver Sun, March 8, 1966. Ibid., February 12, 1965. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., June 3, 1965. Ibid., January 9, 1965. Ibid. Ibid., March 17, 1966. Canadian Annual Review, 1966, p. 143. Vancouver Province, August 19, 1966. Ibid., August 22, 1966. Vancouver Sun, January 19, 1965. Ibid., May 1, 1964.

342 Pillars of Profit Vancouver Province, August 22, 1966. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, August 27, 1966. Ibid Vancouver Province, September 10, 1966. Ibid Vancouver Sun, September 10, 1966. Vancouver Province, August 17, 1966. Ibid., August 29, 1966. Vancouver Sun, August 26, 1966. Vancouver Province, September 10, 1966. Canadian Annual Review, 1966, p. 144. Vancouver Province, August 29, 1966. Ibid., August 12, 24, 1966. Ibid., September 9, 1966. Ibid., September 14, 1966. Ibid. Vancouver Sun. September 12, 1967. Vancouver Province, October 16, 1967. Which was absorbed by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce at the turn of the century. Vancouver Sun, July 19, 1968. 97. Canadian Annual Review, 1967, p. 161. 98. Ibid, 1968. 99. Ibid., p. 177. 100. Vancouver Province, July 18, 1967. 101. Vancouver Sun, April 1, 1967. 102. In February 1963, Bennett promised that power and gas rates would be cut $5,000,000 per year for the next 10 years. 103. Canadian Annual Review, 1967. 104. Ibid., 1968, p. 175. 105. Vancouver Sun, August 15, 1967. 106. Canadian Annual Review, 1967, p. 162. 107. Vancouver Sun, March 16, 1968. 108. Toronto Globe and Mail, March 23, 1968. 109. Canadian Annual Review, 1968, p. 174. 110. Vancouver Sun, February 16, 1968. 111. Ibid., March 22, 1968. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid, March 23, 1968. 114. Toronto Globe and Mail, March 23, 1968. 115. Bonner returned to the Legislature after his 1966 defeat in Point Grey by winning a by-election in the Cariboo in the same year. Bonner’s post was taken over by Labour Minister Leslie Peterson, whose second portfolio, Education, was occupied by former Mines Minister Donald Brothers. Frank Richter moved from Agriculture to Mines and Cyril Shelford graduated to Agriculture. Wesley Black moved from Health to Highways, Ralph Loffmark, from Trade and Industry to Health, and Waldo Skillings, an old gin rummy friend of the premier’s, joined the Cabinet as Minister of Trade and Industry. 116. Canadian Annual Review, 1969, p. 139. 117. Ibid., p. 146. 118. Ibid., 1968, p. 178; 1969, p. 147. 119. Vancouver Sun, November 27, 1968. 120. Canadian Annual Review, 1968, p. 173. 121. Ibid., 1969, p. 148. 122. Ibid., p. 137. 123. Ibid 124. Ibid., p. 144.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

Notes 343 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

Ibid., p. 143. Vancouver Province, July 22, 1971. Ibid.. May 5, 1969. Ibid., July 22, 1971. Ibid., August 29, 1969.

CHAPTER X 1. Ian Adams, “When They Tear Down a Mountain What Do We Get?” Globe and Mail Weekend Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 42, October 14, 1972, p. 7. 2. Vancouver Sun, January 2, 1971. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., October 29, 1971. 5. Ibid., November 5, 1971. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., September 10, 1971. 8. Vancouver Province, April 5, 1972. 9. Vancouver Sun, September 10, 11, 1971. 10. Ibid., September 11, 1971. 11. Ibid., September 10, 1971. 12. Victoria Daily Colonist, April 4, 1970. 13. Vancouver Province, April 3, 1971. 14. Ibid., April 1, 1972. 15. Vancouver Sun, April 4, 1971. 16. Vancouver Province, April 3, 1971. 17. Vancouver Sun, July 21, 1971. 18. Ibid., July 18, 1971. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., April 21, 1972. 22. Ibid., September 12, 1971. 23. Ibid., April 3, 1971. 24. Ibid., June 20, 1970. 25. Ibid., February 8, 1972. 26. Ibid., February 27, 1970. 27. Vancouver Province, July 14, 1972. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., March 19, 1971. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., June 22, 1972. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., January 22, 1971. 34. Ibid. 35. Vancouver Sun, January 22, 1971. 36. Ibid., October 28, 1969. 37. Ibid., August 15, 1970. 38. Vancouver Province, March 11, 1971. 39. Ibid., April 1, 1972. 40. Vancouver Sun, October 28, 1969. 41. Vancouver Province, May 15, 1970. 42. Ibid., April 2, 1971. 43. Ibid., March 11, 1971. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., January 29, 1971. 46. Ibid., August 10, 1972.

344 Pillars of Profit 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

Ibid., May 15, 1970. Vancouver Sun, February 10, 1972. Ibid., July 28, 1971. Ibid. Vancouver Province, August 10, 1972. Vancouver Sun, August 25, 1971. Ibid., August 18, 1971. Ibid., October 27, 1970. Ibid. Ibid., March 2, 1971. Vancouver Province, April 4, 1972. Vancouver Sun, May 28, 1968. Ibid. September 9, 1971. Vancouver Express, February 28, 1970. Vancouver Sun, January 28, 1970. Ibid., January 3, 1972. Ibid. See Hall Leirin, “How to Get a Free Ride on Bennett’s Property Tax Wagon,” Vancouver Sun, January 6, 1972. A reference to a report at a Liberal convention which described the party as a “sleeping giant.” Vancouver Sun, January 6, 1972. Ibid., August 22, 1970. Vancouver Province, January 29, 1971. Ibid. Ibid., April 7, 1971. Vancouver Sun, November 18, 1972. Ibid., August 22, 1970. Ian Adams, op. cit. Ibid., and Victoria Times, April 28, 1972. Vancouver Sun, June 24, 1972. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., November 18, 1972. Ibid., February 4, 1970. Ibid., February, 6, 1970. Ibid., November 18, 1972. Bob Williams, Timber! The Big Rip-off in British Columbia. Private manuscript, October, 1970. In an address to the Canadian Authors’ Association. Vancouver Province, February 13, 1970. See Bob McMurray, “B.C. Forest Revolution Hits Bumps,” Vancouver Province, March 15, 1972. Ibid., June 15, 1972. Bob McMurray, op. cit. Vancouver Sun, March 23, 1972. Ibid. Vancouver Province, March 24, 1972. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, March 23, 1972. Vancouver Province. May 29, 1972. Vancouver Sun, September 10, 11, 1971. Ibid., February 23, 1972. Ibid., March 27, 1972.

Notes 345 Vancouver Province, March 2, 1972. Ibid., March 24, 1972. Vancouver Sun, March 27, 1972. Vancouver Province, March 18, 1972. Ibid., May 15, 1970. Vancouver Sun, January 13, 1970. Vancouver Province, January 9, 1970. Ian Adams, op. cit., p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 7. Vancouver Province, May 29, 1971; Vancouver Sun, May 8, 1972. Ian Adams, op. cit. Ibid. Vancouver Sun, January 3, 1972. Ibid., January 8, 1972. Ibid., January 8, 1972 and January 13, 1972. Ibid., January 3, 1972. At one Vancouver area cemetery people who bought plots in advance were forced to pay again if they wanted to use them. An owner of four cemeteries in the province admitted he was able to stall the commission for five years from perusing his trust accounts which were subsequently discovered to be short by $42,000. The commissioners who heard the pipeline case were Lyle Wicks, appointed after his defeat in 1960, Findlay McKinnon, 67, a former deputy forestry minister appointed in 1972, and J.F.K. English, 71, a former Victoria school inspector appointed in 1965 after reaching retirement age as deputy minister of education. English, Wicks and McKinnon all sat on the five-man B.C. Automobile Insurance Board. 115. Ibid., May 27, 1972. 116. Ibid., November 19, 1971. 117. Vancouver Province, September 14, 1972. 118. Vancouver Sun, September 18, 1971. 119. Ibid., February 24, 1972. 120. Ibid., November 5, 1971. 121. Ibid., August 17, 1971. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., September 17, 1970. 124. Ibid., December 7, 1970. The sole regions to benefit from the D.R.E.E. Grants were southeastern British Columbia and the Okanagan, the Premier’s bailiwick which received favoured treatment from both the federal and provincial governments. 125. Ibid., February 14, 1972. 126. Ibid., February 15, 1972. 127. Ibid., February 16, 1972. 128. Ibid., November 3, 1971. 129. Ibid., June 13, 1970. 130. Ibid., November 16, 1971. 131. Ibid., November 8, 1971. 132. Ibid., November 8, 1971, November 16, 1971. 133. Ibid., November 16, 1971. 134. Vancouver Province, May 19, 1972. 135. Vancouver Sun, May 12, 1972. 136. Vancouver Province, May 29, 1972. 137. Ibid., June 2, 1972. 138. Ibid. 139. Vancouver Sun, June 10, 1972. 140. Ibid., June 9, 1972. 141. Vancouver Province, June 10, 1972. 142. Vancouver Sun, January 9, 1970. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

346 Pillars of Profit Ibid. Vancouver Province, June 10, 1972. Ibid, June 15, 1972. Ibid, June 17, 1972. See Clive Cocking, “In B.C. They Were Taught To Hate Socialists. Then How Come They Love Dave Barrett?” Saturday Night, October 1972, pp. 25-27. 148. Vancouver Sun Biography, July 20, 1960. 149. Vancouver Sun, June 6, 1970. 150. Ibid., September 26, 1969. 151. Ibid., November 5, 1970. 152. Ibid., November 22, 1970. There were, in addition, three other candidates: John Green, an Agassiz publisher, lawyer Reg Grandison and retired Urologist, Dr. Magnus Verbrugge. 153. Ibid., November 22, 1972. 154. Ibid., May 23, 1972. 155. Ibid., August 3, 1972. 156. Ibid., August 2, 1972. 157. Ibid., August 22, 1972. 158. Ibid., August 19, 1972. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid., August 25, 1972. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid., August 16, 1972. 163. Ibid, August 19, 1972. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

Index Aberhart, William, 33, 46 Alsbury, Thomas, 86, 197, 266. 284 Alward, R.W., 136 Anderson, David, 310 Anderson, William, 247 Angus, H .F., 20, 258 Anscomb, Herbert, 32, 42, 64, 66. 67, 70, 74, 75, 78, 82, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97. 99. 101, 107-20, 136-42, 150-53, 163, 167 Arsens, L.A., 185, 202 Asselstine. W .J., 60 Associated C .C.F. Clubs, 22 Bakewell, Ernest, 27 Banks, Peter, 258 Barclay, Ian. 279 Barrett, Dave, 220, 274-75, 286, 30710, 312-13; background, character and philosophy, 307-10 Barrow, E., II Baskin, Pen, 98-99, 272 Beard, Charles, 125 Bennett. R.B.. 16, 20, 31, 42 Bennett, William Andrew Cecil, 51, 81, 84, 91, 92, 110-114, 122, 123, 125-7, 130-6, 143-6, 149, 152, 153, 164-95, 199-214, 217, 220-42, 244-6, 248, 250-4, 256-60, 262-5, 267, 270-86, 288-93. 295, 297-9, 301-7, 309, 311-3; leadership convention defeat, 1946. 92 leadership convention defeat. 1950, 114 quits coalition, 122 joins Socreds, 133 becomes Premier, 165 appoints cabinet, 165-7 background, character and philosophy, 167-72 Sommers case, 198-205 Wenner-Gren affair. 207-10 torpedos McNaughton Plan, 226 B.C.E. takeover fight, 228-36 Berger, Tom, 266, 274-5, 308-9 Berhardt, Charles, 297 Bewley, Les, 112, 136 Black, Wesley, 133, 165, 306 Blackmore, J.H ., 35, 128 Blain, K..R., 129

Blaylock, S.G., 40 Bonner, George E.. 125 Bonner. Robert. 110. 112, 167, 177-8. 186, 199-200. 203-4, 216, 235. 237, 245, 266, 270. 289-90, 307 Bowser, W .J., 137, 194. 251 Bracken. John, 82. 92, 111 Bray, Mrs. H.R., 123 Briggs, H. Lee, 212 British Columbia Social Credit League, 105 Brothers, Donald. 287, 290 Brown, Mrs. Buda. 206 Brown. Fred. 254 Browne-Clayton, Robert. 112 Bruhn, R.W., 34, 36, 42. 64. 66. 74 Bryan, Mel, 205 Brynelson. B.. 279 Bryson, Gerald, 213, 279 Buck, Tim, 220 Budd, Clarence, 251 Bull, Cecil, 168 Butterworth. W. Walton, 253 Calder, Frank. 149 Cameron. Colin. 35. 44. 69. 88 Cameron, Gordon. 113 Campbell, Dan. 259, 304. 311 Caouette, Real, 239 Capozzi, Herb. 298, 311 Carey. D.M ., 196 Carlsen, A.E.. 173, 189 Carnell. Stan, 205, 264 Carney. Pat, 214 Carrothers, A.W ., 14, 39 Carter. W .B., 204 Cates, John, 138 Cassidy, Howard. 38 Chambers. E.J., 111 Chant. William. N „ 130. 133. 135. 185, 216. 311 Chetwynd, W .R.J.. 165-6 Clancey, William. 251. 294. 312 Clotworthy, A.J., 179-80 Clyne, J.V ., 174, 247, 278 Cromie, R.J., 18-9 Cruikshank. George. 117-8 Colbome, F.C., 128 Coldwell, M.J., 88. 103 Coleman, D’Alton Corry, 63-4, 66-7 Connell. Robert, 23-8, 31, 34-5 Conservative Party; defeated, 1937, 34 defeated, 1941, 51 endorses Hart formula. 83

347

348 Pillars of Profit convention, 1946, 92 convention, 1950, 113 defeated, 1952, 146 defeated, 1953, 184 defeated, 1956, 202 defeated, 1963, 247 Conway, John, 308 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; convention, 1939, 43 defeated, 1941, 51 union support for, 72-3 rejects united front with L.P.P., 85-6 defeated, 1945, 87 defeated, 1949, 106 defeated, 1952, 146 defeated, 1953, 184 defeated, 1956, 202 defeated, 1960, 220 Corbett, Irving, 205, 247 Cox, Arthur, 77 Cox, Cedric, 247 Cullen, P.J., 278 Cunningham, G .T., 254 Dalskog, Ernie, 104 Dawson, G .R., 195 Democratic Monetary Reform Organi­ zation, 84 Denis, Raymond, 261 de Wolf, John, 274, 310 Diefenbaker, John, 111, 212, 226-7, 232, 237-8, 243 Dobie, George, 282 Donaghy, Dugald, 19 Doman, Hal, 261 Douglas, Major C .H ., 32, 172, 183, 230 Douglas, T .C ., 86, 104, 220, 266 Dowding, Gordon, 241 Drew, George, 74 Eddie, Rae, 163 Ekman, Dan, 244, 251, 279, 301 Elliott, Thomas, 180 Eversfield, C.W ., 198 Eyres, L .H ., 90 Farris, J.W. de B., 40, 57, 254 Farrow, Moira, 293 Federation of Canadian Voters, 84 Finland, E.V ., 125 Finlayson, Deane, 181, 200, 204 Finnerty, Maurice, 117 Fleming, Stuart, 265 Foley, Harold, 254 Forester, J.H ., 28

Forsey, Eugene, 74, 98 Fotheringham, Allan, 248, 285, 298 Fox, Leslie, 124 Francis, Harry, 145, 178 Fraser, Blair, 144, 196 Fulton, E. Davie, 109, 111, 227, 234, 236-8, 243-4, 246, 248-9, 265 Gaglardi, P.A., 163, 165-6, 194-5, 200, 214, 216, 223, 236, 241, 245, 248-9, 269-70, 273, 282, 285-6, 290, 298, 305, 311-2 Gardom, Garde, 266 Gargrave, Herbert, 83, 232 George, Percy, 125-6 Gibson, Gordon, 193, 198 Gillard, W .G., 129 Gillis, J.J., 61, 117 Ginter, Ben, 195, 224, 258 Goode, Tom, 117-8 Gordon, King, 22 Gordon, Walter, 256 Gore, Bernard, 207-8, 210, 217 Grauer, A .E., 102, 135, 227-8 Gray, A. Wellesley, 12, 51, 64, 66 Gray, H. Wilson, 198-200. 203-4 Green, Howard, 91, 109, 111, 237 Guthrie, Sam, 24, 35 Gunderson, Einar, 167, 177-80, 183, 185-6, 209-10, 217, 261, 279 Haig-Brown, Roderick, 206, 294 Hamilton, James, 218 Hamilton, William, 278 Hansell, Ernest, 128, 134-6, 143-5, 149, 163, 186 Hart, John, 12-3, 29, 48-9, 57-8, 60-2, 64-9, 74-5, 77-80, 82-4, 88, 90, 93, 96-7, 106, 113-4, 117, 123-4, 130, 152, 169-70, 173, 229-30; elected Liberal leader, 62 forms coalition cabinet, 65-7 background and character, 67-8 devises coalition electoral formula, 83 Hartley, Bill, 247 Haynes, Ray, 310 Herridge, H.W ., 78, 86-7, 150 Higgins, Larratt, 226 Hill, Kenneth, 288 Hodges, Nancy, 61, 110, 139, 185 Hooke, A .J., 143 Hopkinson, M. Bower, 34 Hughes-Games, W .G., 124 Huhn, Jacob, 264 Hurley, Fred, 258

Index 349 Hutchison, Bruce, 9-10, 17, 22, 42, 44, 49, 54-5, 57, 75-6, 78-9, 88, 125, 144 Hyndman, Peter, 310 Inman, Derek, 213 Irwin, Thomas, 163 Isherwood, Foster, 311 Jamieson, Laura, 53, 87, 89 Jefcoat, Willis, 311 Johnson, Bjorn Ingemar (Boss), 94-7, 100-2, 117-8, 136-41, 149, 151-3, 163, 174-5 background, 94-5 elected Liberal leader, 95-6 ends coalition, 137 Johnson, Hewlett, 32 Johnson, Lyndon, 251 Jones, George E.P., 260, 268 Jones, Owen, 111 Jones, W.A., 90 Jordan, Pat, 298, 306 Jukes, Andrew Henry, 85, 105-6, 126 Kenmuir, Cam, 279 Kennedy, Orvis, 128, 143, 145 Kennedy, John F., 238, 240 Kenney, E., 138 Kieman, Kenneth, 163, 165-6, 177, 294, 311 Killeen, Jim, 289 King, Tom, 60 King, W.L. Mackenzie, 12, 16-7, 22, 47, 53, 81. 93, 182 Knox, W .J., 20. 28, 61 Labour Progressive Party, 85, 104 Laing, Arthur, 95-6, 136, 182, 204 Lawson, Ed. 282 Lebourdais, Louis, 94 LeCours, Ernie, 247, 264 Lefeaux, W.W., 73, 87, 89 Lett, Sherwood, 164, 236, 247 Lewis, David, 73 Liberal-Conservative Coalition; formation of, 64-6 elected, 1945, 87 re-elected, 1949, 106 ends. 137 Liberal Party; re-elected, 1937, 34 convention, 1938, 36 lose majority. 1941. 51 convention, 1941, 61 endorse Hart formula. 83

convention, 1947, 95-6 defeated, 1952, 146 defeated, 1953, 184 defeated, 1956, 202 defeated, 1963, 247 defeated, 1966, 266 defeated, 1969, 275 Little, Dudley. 241, 296, 311 Loffmark, Ralph, 259. 289-90, 298 Loveseth. John. 33-4 Low. Solon, 85, 104-5, 128. 134-5 Lundell, Arvid, 264 McBride, Sir Richard. 119, 137, 173-4 194, 224, 254. 256-7, 281, 295 McCarthy, Grace, 298 McClure, W .G.. 287 McConnell, Bob, 281. 284, 298 Macdonald, Alex, 148, 223, 247, 269 MacDonald, J. Vans. 84, 105-6 MacDonald, K.C., 12. 60, 64. 66. 76 MacDonald, R.C., 90 Macdonald, Malcolm Archibald, 39 MacDougall, A.R., 93, 123 McGavin, A,. 254 McGeer, Gerry, 11-2, 14, 17-8,94 McGeer, Manfred, 53 McGeer, Pat, 266, 274, 311 Maclnnis, Angus. 88 Maclnnis, Grace. 87, 89. 103 McIntyre. R.M., 138 McKelvie, Bruce, 79 McLean, Cyrus. 254 McMahon. Frank. 196, 201, 218, 220-2. 224. 301 MacMillan. H.R., 40. 190-1. 267-8 McNaughton. General A.G.L., 225-7, 238. 240 MacNeil, Grant, 44, 69. 85-7, 89, 164 McNelley, Peter. 302 MacPherson, Frank Mitchell, 12 McRae. A.D.,153 MacSorley, Charles, 247 Mainwaring. W .C., 211, 218, 255 Maitland. Royal Lethington, 42. 50-1, 56-7, 64-6. 74-9. 81-2, 84. 90. 97. 117, 123-4, 130, 152 Malkin. H. Richardson, 246 Manning, Ernest, 134-5, 142-5, 163, 172, 239 Mansfield, Mike, 238 Manson, A., 11, 236 Marchand, Jean, 303-4 Marsden. Orison Swett, 168-9, 186. 202, 207 Marshall, Don, 296-7, 310

350 Pillars of Profit Martin, Eric, 130, 133, 144, 163, 165, 178, 216, 264 Martin, Paul, 250-1 Marx, Karl, 23-4 Massey, George, 205 Mather, Barry, 146 Mather, Camille, 247 Matthew, Alex, 205, 264 Merchant, Livingston, 238 Merilees, Harold, 218 Mitchell, Frank, 126 Mitchell, Howard, 101, 229 Mix, Fred, 105 Moodie, S.F ., 19 Morris, Joe, 223 Morrow, Charles, 117 Morton, Kenneth, 258 Mott, William, 117 Murphy, Harvey, 72, 98, 104 Murray, Margaret, 85, 303 Murray, William, 202 National Dividend Association, 84 Nemetz, Nathan, 271 Nesbitt, James, 241 New Democratic Party, creation and first convention, 223 defeated, 1963, 247 defeated, 1966, 266 defeated, 1969, 275 elected, 1972, 313 Newton, R.O., 178 Nichols, Marjorie, 281 Nicholson, John, 285 Norris, T .G ., 32, 92, 107, 168 Oberle, Frank, 297 O’Brien, Daniel, 72 Odam, Jes, 269, 298, 301, 312 Oliver, John, 153 O’Neal, Pat, 223 Parkinson, Ray, 266, 275 Patterson, F.P., 28, 31, 41 Pattullo, Thomas Dufferin, 9-22. 24, 29-30, 35-7, 39-41, 43, 45-54, 56-63, 67, 69, 76, 78, 81-2, 87, 96, 151, 221; political philosophy of, 9-11 builds cabinet, 11-13 fights oil companies, 39-41 torpedos Federal-Provincial conference 1941, 46-8 opposed coalition, 58-62 quits leadership, 62

Paynter, Peer, 104-5, 126, 128, 130-1, 133, 135, 143, 145, 163, 177 Pearkes, G.R., 114, 228 Pearson, George, 12, 41, 48, 57-8, 60-2, 64, 66, 76, 79, 114, 116, 152 Pearson, Lester B., 238, 240, 250-2 Peebles, Alan, 29, 38 Pelletier, Gerard, 303 Perdue, John, 176-7 Perrault, Ray, 213, 219, 265 Perry, Harry, 28, 61, 64, 66, 69, 74, 87, 118, 124, 126, 136 Peterson, Leslie, 193, 223, 241, 254, 285, 298, 304, 311 Price, Bert, 164, 180, 231, 241, 264, 266 Price, Jack, 27 Pritchard, W .A., 31 Pritchett, Harold, 72, 98, 104 Proudfoot, Daniel, 185 Purdy, Harry, 235, 246 Purim, 280 Rankin, Harry, 298 Ranta, L., 266 Rathie, Bill, 254 Reagan, Ronald, 277, 293 Reid, J.A ., 130-1, 133, 145, 163, 179-80, 182 Reid, Tom, 117-8 Reynolds, Mac, 127 Rhodes, Jam es, 241, 247 Richardson, Ernie, 268 Richter, Frank, 206, 241, 279, 298 Robinson, Donald, 193-4, 264 Rogers, R.G., 268 Rolston, Tilly, 75-6, 97, 110, 123, 125, 130, 143-5, 147, 163, 165, 179-80 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 34, 53 Root, Gordon, 251 Rose, William, 32 Ross, Frank, 195, 254 Ross, Jack, 102-3 Rudkin, Brian, 291 Rutter, Frank, 264, 298 Score, Mrs. M., 179 Scott, Jack, 209, 214, 248 Shantz, H .L., 130-1, 143, 176-7, 205 Sharp, Fred, 205 Shelford, Cyril, 127, 205-6, 231, 241, 264, 291, 297, 306 Shrum, Gordon, 212, 227, 268, 299, 301 Simms, Ed, 272 Sinclair, Jam es, 94-6, 118

Index 351 Skillings, Waldo. 125, 279, 283 Sloan, Gordon, 12-13, 203, 205 Smith, J. Donald, 125, 129-30, 133, 163, 264 Smith, Mary Ellen, 19, 110 Social Credit Association of B.C., 84 Social Credit Association of Canada (B.C. Section), 85, 87, 104 Social Credit League of B.C., 33 Social Credit Party; defeated, 1949, 106 convention, 1952, 134-5 elected, 1952, 146 convention, 1953, 177 re-elected, 1953, 184 re-elected, 1956, 202 re-elected, 1969, 220 convention, 1961, 241 convention, 1962, 241 re-elected, 1963, 247 re-elected, 1966, 266 re-elected, 1969, 275 defeated, 1972, 313 Socialist Party of Canada, 22 Sommers, Robert, 165-6, 191, 197-201, 203-4 Squire, John, 229 St. Laurent, Louis, 165, 167, 181 Steacy, Newton, 220, 241 Steeves, Dorothy G., 21, 24, 69, 87-9, 103 Sterling, George, 74 Stevens, H .H ., 254 Stirling, Grote, 111 Stokes, D.E., 262 Stonehill, Harry, 261 Strachan, Robert, 200, 213, 220, 246-7, 266, 274, 278, 308 Straith, W .T., 61, 97, 120, 179, 185 Strid, Birger, 208 Sturdy, David, 199-200 Sutherland, William H., 11 Swailes, Robert Blatchford, 27 Tanner, W .E., 143 Taylor, E .P., 198 Telford, Lyle, 24, 26, 28, 42-3 Thatcher. Ross. 220 Thompson, Charles, 102 Thompson. Robert, 239 Tisdalle, John, 205-6, 311 Tolmie, Simon Fraser, 9 Torey, Henry, 32 Trebell, Frank, 268 Tremblay, Rene, 261 Trudeau, Pierre E ., 273, 276, 288, 303-5

Tupper, David, 110, 112 Turner, Arthur, 87. 106, 177-8 Turner, Lloyd, 107, 244, 251 Tutte, William A., 32 Union of Electors, 104-5 United Social Credit Party, 33 Uphill, Thomas, 34, 100, 150, 164, 180-1 Ure, David, 128-9, 143, 145 Vogel, Hunter, 247 Wallace, Clarence, 164-5, 254 Wallace, George Scott, 288, 310-11 Walton, M.J., 279 Warren, Derril, 310, 313 Webster, Arnold, 22, 182-3, 200 Webster, Jack, 278 Weir, George Moir, 12-13, 21, 29, 38, 41. 46, 48. 51, 53, 60, 62, 94, 97, 114. 152 Welch. Herbert, 138 Wenner-Gren, Axel, 207, 209-10 Whalen, Lloyd, 197 Whittaker, Norman. 60, 94 Wicks. Lyle, 105, 126, 131. 133-5, 143, 145, 163, 165, 220, 241, 308 Wiley, J.E ., 279 Williams, Bob, 293, 308 Williamson, Al, 252, 261-2 Williston, Ray, 194, 208-9, 217, 252. 255, 295, 311 Wilson, J.O ., 204 Wilson. Morris W., 29 Winch, Ernest, 24, 26, 106 Winch, Harold, 24-5, 42-3. 47. 53. 56, 65, 69, 73-4. 83, 86-8. 98, 100, 106, 121-2, 139, 142-3, 147, 149-50, 163-4, 178. 181-2 Wismer, Gordon, 48, 51, 90, 92, 94-6, 100, 103, 114, 118, 122, 139-40, 144, 152, 167 de Wolf. John, 274, 310 Wood. Beth, 215 Woodward, William Culham, 64 Woodsworth, J.S ., 124. 183 Worley. Ron. 125. 129-30, 133, 164 Wright. W .P., 185 Wurtele. A.C., 125-6 Young, Percy, 204