by Conrad Black
The long-time labour agitator Arthur “Slim” Evans, formerly of the notorious International Workers of the World, most recently of the Drumheller, Alberta, correctional facility after being convicted of embezzling union funds, was the principal leader of the unrest.
On release, he was engaged by the Communist Party of Canada in its front organization, the National Unemployed Workers Association, and on December 7, 1934, he organized a demonstration of five hundred unemployed at the provincial Parliament building in Victoria. The premier of British Columbia, Thomas Dufferin Pattullo, was almost panicked by this agitation and became a rather limp lightning rod between the extreme unemployed organizations and the federal prime minister.
The Canadian media tended to be either gullibly submissive to this sort of agitprop or maliciously biased against the Bennett government, and the federal government had no idea how to parry this sort of insidious smear campaign without seeming to smash the most disadvantaged and meritorious petitioners for a better break. It was a snowballing, no-win, public relations disaster for Bennett. In August 1931, Bennett had had Tim Buck and seven other leaders of the Communist Party of Canada arrested and charged with unlawful association and seditious conspiracy, offences that were practically impossible to prove, and Bennett, with his booming voice and swallow-tail coats and striped trousers, staring unsmilingly at the country, became a sitting duck for his opponents, not only on the far left, but even for the followers and image-makers of that comfortable old shoe Mackenzie King. The Liberal leader may have been odd and ungalvanizing, but he could not be refashioned into a fright figure by the mothers of Canada to terrorize their children into eating their porridge and taking their castor oil. Buck was finally released in November 1934, and his liberation was celebrated by seventeen thousand people in Toronto’s new and impressive Maple Leaf Gardens. Seated on the stage during Buck’s powerful address was the new premier of Ontario, populist Liberal Mitchell Hepburn.
There was a long sequence of violent strikes around the country that contributed to the deterioration of the public discourse: coal miners in Estevan, Saskatchewan, in September 1931 (three miners killed by gunshot wounds); miners in Corbin, British Columbia, in June 1934 (many injured); rioting farmers at Innisfail, Alberta, in November 1934 (the strike leader, George Palmer, beaten and tarred and feathered and abandoned in a field by the RCMP); Toronto Garment Workers; Halifax Sewer Workers; the Vancouver general strike of April and May 1935, where Slim Evans ran an illegal tag day, then attacked a police station in New Westminster, forced the release of union members who had been arrested, and then loudly boasted across the country of having intimidated the police. With this, the tide of public opinion began to turn.
In the last act of the Bennett administration, a leading role was played by Bennett’s brother-in-law William Duncan Herridge, who had been Bennett’s principal speechwriter in 1930 and who Bennett appointed to succeed Vincent Massey as minister to Washington. (Herridge was married to Bennett’s sister Mildred.) From this vantage point, Herridge wrote Bennett lengthy summaries of the latter Hoover and early Roosevelt years, and is generally credited with persuading Bennett to launch his own New Deal, rather imitative of Roosevelt’s in its radicalism and the use of radio broadcasts to launch it, and designed to inspirit the country as Roosevelt had done in America, but apparently more psychological than substantive. John Boyko and others have made a commendable effort to improvise an explanation that contradicts Mackenzie King’s rather humorous and persuasive charges that Bennett had undergone “a death-bed conversion.” The argument that Bennett acted spontaneously and that the logical time for the call to radical change, which the prime minister made in five radio addresses, starting on January 2, 1935, is based on the theory that the time had come then, and not for any coherently explained reason earlier, for radical change. Herridge did recommend a call to a radical program without specifics, to emphasize that Bennett was the person to promulgate such a program, and that the time for it had come then and not before. And he did write that to Bennett,51 but it is inconceivable that either of them believed a word of it, or indeed that any serious historian would. Roosevelt was the only democratic leader in the world who had been successful in rolling back the depression; he was overwhelmingly well-known and popular in Canada, and everything else Bennett had tried had failed. He didn’t “blast [his] way into” anything except a stone wall of deepening depression. Urban unemployment afflicted almost half the wage earners of Canada from 1933 to 1935.52 Even after the United States had begun to recover under Roosevelt, there was little sign of it in Canada. Bennett’s term was almost at an end, and how Herridge imagined that his brother-in-law could persuade anyone that he was the man to do a 180-degree turn and produce a dramatic legislative program based on the theory that capitalism was broken and big business had failed the country, and be believed without providing any specifics, escapes comprehension.
The new program was revealed in a series of five half-hour speeches called “The Premier Speaks,” in which Bennett claimed to be laying out his election program and giving the country time to discuss it. He staked out the logical tactical position: he was saving capitalism, not assaulting it, and thus tried to steal the clothes of the left to shelter the right from the political and economic tempest, as Roosevelt was rather artfully doing. Stephen Leacock, head of McGill’s department of political economy and a frequent critic of Bennett, wrote approving of the first speech in the series. King wrote in his diary of Bennett’s “nauseating egotism.” In his second address, on January 9, Bennett proposed unemployment insurance and comprehensive pensions. The third speech laboriously exalted the virtues of fairness and spun certain recent and pending legislation and declared, completely implausibly, that it would have been a mistake to think in such comprehensive terms earlier in his term when the need of the improvident and the dispossessed was so dire that direct relief was what was necessary (which he had not, in general, provided). The fourth speech was about finance, and Bennett referred to his Bank of Canada as “an instrument of social justice.” And he denounced “selfish men, and this country is not without them,” whose greed “looms larger than your happiness.”
Bennett charged out of the political gate with the last of his speeches resplendent in the shining armour of the reformer and the man of benign action, while the Liberals were the party of inertia, the status quo, and the depression: “If you are satisfied with conditions as they are, support Liberalism.” It was so audacious, it was magnificent, in a way, but he cannot have imagined that it would work. The legislative product of the series of speeches was the Employment and Social Insurance Act, which applied only for those who were already working and hardly justified the stentorian fanfare Bennett had given it. When it was presented in the House of Commons, Lapointe and King zeroed in on its constitutionality very quickly: Lapointe elicited that Bennett had broached it with the provinces but then broken off discussions because of lack of likely agreement. King asked if the prime minister had considered asking the Supreme Court for a constitutional opinion. Bennett said that he had not, because he was confident of his bill’s constitutionality. As on so many other matters, it was difficult to imagine the source of Bennett’s confidence.
After this one, King wrote in his diary that he “felt humiliated to think of the country being in the hands of such a man.… I uttered spontaneously the words ‘What a buffoon.’ It was really pathetic, the absolute rot and gush as he talked – platitudes – unction and what not, a mountebank and hypocrite, full of bombast and egotism … sickening and disgusting.”53 Even allowing for King’s inevitable partisanship, it was a very strange initiative that had all the characteristics of a desperation play by a government almost out of time and a leader at the last extremity of his endurance. Bennett suffered a heart attack on March 7, but he fought uncompromisingly on from his hospital bed. He roused himself from it to go to Britain in April to observe George v’s silver jubilee (taking Mildred Bennett Herridge and the young foreig
n policy adviser Lester Pearson with him). Bennett vastly enjoyed himself, especially his visits with the royal family. The continuing good health of Canadian fealty to the British (and Canadian) Crown was well-expressed in Bennett’s letter to the king after his private audience. The terms of it are hard to comprehend from a perspective three generations later, but it illustrates the difficulty that remained in instilling a suitable sense of nationality even in the most highly placed Canadians: “I state the simple truth when I state that I came away from the Castle with even deeper feeling of affection and devotion for my king and queen, and I shall continue to aspire more earnestly to serve the Crown to the best of my ability, sustained by the conviction that my Royal Master expects His servants to do the best within them.”54
On April 26, 1935, Evans’s Vancouver militants sacked the city’s main Hudson’s Bay Company store and Vancouver mayor Gerry McGeer read the Riot Act from the war memorial in Victory Square: “Our Sovereign Lord the King enjoins and commands to all who are here present to disperse immediately and return peacefully to their homes and legitimate occupations under threat of being found guilty of an infraction that may be punished by life imprisonment. God Save the King.” The next day, the strikers divided into three columns, befuddled the police (whose crowd control tactics were amateurish), and occupied the Vancouver City Museum. McGeer offered to give them three days’ worth of food rations if they left the museum undamaged, and this was agreed. The unions and demonstrators lost many sympathizers, but Bennett didn’t play his cards as well as he might have. Instead of bargaining earnestly and allowing the extremism of Evans and others to be obvious and thus alienate moderate opinion, or remaining silent and waiting for bourgeois concern to escalate, he tried at every stage to face down and overpower his opponents as the personification of authority. In the desperate economic times, he alienated as many people as he impressed. But he fought his corner in the only way he knew, and with a singular, if somewhat misguided, integrity. On May 20, Bennett replied to Mayor McGeer – who had cracked and was beseeching the prime minister to buy off the rioters and demonstrators – that those who left the camps were a provincial responsibility and that he was paying no Danegeld; it was McGeer’s and Premier Pattullo’s responsibility to maintain order. On May 30, Evans convened a public meeting where 70 per cent of his now shrinking following voted to leave Vancouver and entrain for Ottawa.
A progress followed across the country, where Evans’s officials showed a deft hand at advance work. The star advance man, Matt Shaw, had even arranged to encounter Governor General Lord Bessborough on a railway platform in Vancouver; he politely expressed his grievances for ten minutes and then moved on amicably after a hearty handshake with His Excellency. At each stop on the way east, there were large receptions and groups to assist the strikers and feed and shelter them, while Bennett gamely returned to the House of Commons from hospital and lamented that so much of Canada’s youth had been misled by communists.55 In June, the cabinet decided to stop the On to Ottawa Trek, as it was now known, presumably in imitation of the South African Boer objectors to the abolition of slavery of a century before. To the irritation of Saskatchewan’s tough and capable Liberal premier, James Gardiner, it was determined to stop the trek at Regina, headquarters of the RCMP. Just as the showdown was at hand, Bennett sent railways and canals minister Robert Manion and well-respected local MP and agriculture minister Robert Weir to meet the trek leaders. They met at length on June 17, and the complainants had six demands: fifty cents an hour, specified hours, accessible first aid in the camps, workers’ committees in the camps, removal of the camps from the jurisdiction of the Department of National Defence, and a national system of unemployment insurance, and they wanted to speak directly with Bennett. Bennett approved first-class fares for the leaders to come to meet him, good treatment for the rest who waited, and free passage home for those who wished it. Manion had negotiated well and Bennett responded sensibly.
The two groups met in the Cabinet Room in the Parliament Buildings on June 22, 1935. Evans and Bennett faced each other. Bennett allowed Evans to speak at length and then ascertained that of his eleven visitors only one was a Canadian and he accused them of being lawbreakers. He particularly focused on Evans for his embezzlement conviction, and Evans exploded and called Bennett a liar. Bennett showed his barristerial talents as he outwitted and infuriated several of the visitors while remaining glacially calm himself. He made the now customary offers about the return to the camps or to the homes of the strikers, and warned the group that continued illegalities would not be tolerated. Evans accused him of raising “the red bogey,” and Bennett arranged for their return to Regina for the showdown. He explained the entire proceedings in the House on June 24 and said that the RCMP had been ordered to stop the trek.
The reckoning came at last on July 1 in Regina. After about five hundred trekkers and sympathizers gathered in Market Square and Evans was well-launched in an address to his faithful, bat- and club-swinging police debouched from Mountie vans and dispersed the crowd in gratuitously bloody fashion. Attempts to regroup were overridden by mounted police. Some store windows were smashed and cars overturned, but the federal police ran down the scattered demonstrators, who improvised barricades and pelted the police with rocks and bottles. The police replied with tear gas and then gunfire. One policeman was killed, thirty people were hospitalized, and a hundred trekkers were arrested, including Evans and Shaw. The trekkers’ campgrounds were surrounded by machine-gun emplacements and Premier James “Jimmy” Garfield Gardiner arranged for rail transport out of Saskatchewan east and west. On the westward train, an effigy of the prime minister was hanged and the “body” hung off the side of the train for passers-by to see. In the following days, King and Woodsworth attacked Bennett, who again, as he had so often, made a good legal defence of the government, pointing out that conditions in the camps were better than in lumber camps and that continuing education through Frontier College was available. Bennett overlooked the fact that the latest violence had been entirely initiated by the RCMP and compared himself, with his usual cloth ear in public and political relations matters, with President Grover Cleveland and his suppression of the Pullman Strike in 1894, an incident few Canadians would recall and very few with favour.
Evans continued to be an active communist and raised money for the communist side in the Spanish Civil War, which began the next year. Two of the eleven with whom Bennett met in the Cabinet Room in Ottawa died on the communist side in that war. King and Lapointe elected to allow Woodsworth to lead the debate in the House of Commons and not to run any risk of seeming to be mollycoddlers of communists. Two commissions were established to inquire into these events, one in British Columbia and one in Saskatchewan. Though the B.C. commission criticized Bennett for not paying adequately for the campers’ work, both sustained his version of events, said the camps functioned well and as advertised, and held that the residents had been exploited by communist agitators. Few people agreed with the trek organizers, but most Canadians found all these incidents embarrassing and un-Canadian and thought Bennett responsible for an unjustified and regrettably public use of force.
On July 2, 1935, the day after the riot in Regina, Bennett’s former close colleague Henry Herbert Stevens had risen in the House and said that Bennett, while being technically correct in his handling of events, had become, by his pigheaded severity, the greatest promoter of communism in Canada. Stevens and Bennett had been close friends going back to their first election to Parliament in 1911, but on January 15, 1934, when at Bennett’s request Stevens took his place as the main speaker at the National Shoe Retailers’ Association convention, Stevens had condemned predatory pricing in the retail industry and especially blamed the big department stores. Then he went a step further and announced that the government would attack on this front. Response to the speech was quite positive, but Bennett was outraged that Stevens had spoken for the government in enunciating policy and told him so, whereupon Stevens resigned
. Bennett moved to prevent a party schism, and had Manion speak with Stevens and propose a parliamentary committee with Stevens as chairman to look into it. Stevens was happy with this, but the working of his Price Spreads Committee split the cabinet between the friends of big business, especially the large retailers Eaton’s and Simpson’s, and the more populist of the cabinet members. Stevens asked that his committee be converted into a Royal Commission to survive the current Parliament, and so popular were its hearings and findings that Bennett agreed, and Stevens continued as chair of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying. Stevens next launched a vituperative attack on Sir Joseph Flavelle for price gouging in his capacity as proprietor of Simpson’s and produced a pamphlet that accused Flavelle of criminal practices. These were fighting words.
Bennett was in Britain during the summer of 1934, but at the October 25, 1934, cabinet meeting, he disapproved the attack on Flavelle and concluded that Stevens’s remarks were defamatory. This quickly degenerated over the next couple of days to Stevens’s resignation and a blinding public dispute between the two men. The Royal Commission continued with William Kennedy of Winnipeg as chairman, and Richard Hanson of New Brunswick became the new minister of trade and commerce. Stevens stormed out of the Conservative caucus, and Bennett had a full-scale schism to add to his other problems. The schism yawned further when Sir Herbert Holt and Sir Edward Beatty, probably Canada’s two most prominent businessmen, offered Stevens three million dollars to set up his own party and split the Conservatives at the polls. It is hard not to imagine Mackenzie King playing a role in this. On May 23, the government proposed Criminal Code amendments to enact some of the Price Spreads Commission recommendations. On June 10, 1935, Bennett and Stevens had a full exchange in Parliament, slugging it out over the differences between them. They were both powerful speakers, their fluency reinforced by righteousness. Bennett liked the hard-hitting report eventually produced by the Price Spreads Commission under Kennedy, but his party was tainted by the general sense of severity over the On to Ottawa trekkers, and split between the Conservatives and Progressives. Mackenzie King quietly rubbed his hands in anticipation of the election. It would not be long now.