"Communists love Canada!": The Communist Party of Canada, the "people" and the Popular Front, 1933-1939

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2002 by John Manley

These internal changes coincided with a period of ideological flux in Canadian society. By 1933 many Canadians were coming to see the Great Depression as the product of systemic rather than personal failure. Mostly blaming the Conservatives, they sent them crashing to defeat in the 1935 federal election and a string of provincial contests. While the Liberal Party was the main beneficiary of Tory misfortune, the rise of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the populist Social Credit and Reconstruction parties, and Maurice Duplessis's pseudo-reformist Union Nationale all testified to the volatility of the Canadian electorate. The New Deal whetted Canadians' taste for "statist" solutions to poverty and unemployment (Cohen). So, too, did the Soviet Five Year Plans. Hundreds of western opinion formers, including the likes of William Ivens, J.S. Woodsworth, J.F. White and Sir Frederick Banting, returned from the Soviet Union in the early 1930s with positive impressions of Soviet planning (Aaron chs. vi, viii; Hollander chs. 3-4). Woodsworth told the House of Commons on 11 February 1932 that, while he was uneasy about the lack of personal freedom in the USSR and doubted whether Soviet socialism could ever take root in Canadian soil, he had certainly witnessed a successful socialist system at work. New respect for the USSR proved helpful for the CPC.

Re-Making the Party

At the November 1935 party plenum, Tim Buck disregarded the Liberal landslide in the previous month's federal election and conjured up a vision of a transformed political landscape. The 900,000 votes cast for parties other than the Liberals and Tories, he argued, revealed a potentially epochal disintegration of allegiances that promised to become the foundations of a new "progressive" social order (Buck, "General"). To capitalize on these latent possibilities, CPC leaders launched an allout assault on the party's conspiratorial and "sectarian" culture, believing it to be a serious obstacle to the recruitment and retention of a new mass membership. Even before the Seventh Congress, they were actively seeking new blood and new thinking. Early in 1935, Bill Findlay, newly appointed District One organizer, reported from Cape Breton on his attempts to promote younger cadres who would challenge the long-standing (and in his view, entirely unhealthy) local dominance of J.B. McLachlan [National Archives [NA], Comintern Fonds [CF], Reel 22, File 180]. The party quickly applied pressure on the the pro-communist ethnic associations, its main source of recruits, to open their doors to less politically advanced compatriots, become the staunchest defenders of national cultures, and integrate with the wider labour and working-class community. "Away From Sectarianism! Out Among the People!" exhorted the Finnish Organization of Canada's 1935 convention (NA, FOC Collection, vol. 6, file 16). Several language groups reconstituted themselves to stress national rather than class identities. The Polish Labor Farmer Temple Association, for example, became the Polish People's Association and the Jugoslav Workers' Clubs were reborn as the Serbian People's Movement and the Croatian Cultural Association (Kolasky 10, 12, 19; Patrias 226; Saarinen 153).