“Telford Time” and the Populist Origins of the CCF in British Columbia

In the November 1933 provincial election in British Columbia (BC) the newly formed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) captured almost one-third of the popular vote, a sharp increase in left-of-centre support from previous elections when a variety of labour and socialist parties had spread many fewer votes over several organizations. Since then the ccf and its successor, the New Democratic Party (ndp), have formed the largest or second largest group in the BC legislature in every election but one since 1933. The persistence in the political culture of a substantial party of the left in turn has structured BC politics into a pattern of polarization marked by the ccf or ndp on the left and a series of coalitions – four different ones from the early 1940s to the present – on the right.¹ Yet the 1933 election has received only the most cursory attention from historians, with analysts drawn either to the disintegration of the preceding Simon Fraser Tolmie-led Conservative government – this was the last time in BC history that the Conservative Party formed a majority government – or to the rise of the Thomas Duff Pattullo-led Liberal Party and the implementation of Pattullo’s “Little New Deal.” To the extent that the election marked the emergence of a province-wide party of the left in British Columbia scholars have mostly emphasized the fact that the ccf in BC was more radical than elsewhere in Canada. Thus, in his recently published book Militant Minority, Ben Isitt talks of the “explicitly socialist doctrine” of the British Columbia ccf in the 1930s.² While this contention recognizes an important fact about the rise of the political left, a closer look at the election of 1933 suggests that the provincial movement’s “socialist” character at its inception has been exaggerated, thus obscuring the more complex nature of the province’s political transformation in the early 1930s. In particular, I am suggesting that the rise of the ccf can be explained as much by populism as it can by socialism, a perspective that is easier to see if we shift our attention from the movement’s socialist leaders, and from core areas of radical left voter strength in BC’s coal towns and dominant city, to the explosion of support for the ccf across the province as a whole. Political history, in other words, looks different when viewed from the streets of Grand Forks or Prince George than it does from the socialist reading rooms of downtown Vancouver.³

The standard narrative for the emergence of the ccf in British Columbia starts with the observation of Dorothy Steeves – a ccf member of the Legislative Assembly (mla) from 1934 to 1945 and the biographer of socialist mla Ernest Winch – that the decade following the Winnipeg General Strike was marked by “a decline of radical thinking in British Columbia.”⁴ After the newly created Federated Labour Party (flp) had won three seats in the 1920 provincial election, support across the province for left-oriented candidates dropped modestly between 1920 and 1924 (from 15.8 per cent to 12.7 per cent) and precipitously in 1928 (to five per cent). Indeed, by 1928 the political left in BC seemed barely to register a pulse. Characterized by an unstable organizational structure of small labour and socialist parties, the political left functioned mainly at the local constituency level through institutions that were relatively shortlived. In this environment Angus MacInnis, the Canadian-born socialist from South Vancouver, undertook to unify “the various existing political labour groups” in British Columbia into an organization “that would appeal to the great mass of the workers.” From this 1925 initiative the Independent Labour Party (ilp) emerged, drawing in “all the major radical groups…except the Socialist Party of Canada.”⁵ Notwithstanding MacInnis’ electoral victories for school trustee and then alderman at the civic level, electoral success for the party did not follow. The ilp reached its lowest ebb in late 1929 and early 1930, but as political scientist Walter Young noted, it did survive to...