The Great Depression (43 page)

Many of these practices had come to a sudden end after the formation of the Stevens committee was announced in February 1934. Eaton’s quietly stopped laying off the poorest producers and threatening them with unemployment. By that March, the company had also decided to place all its women employees under the Minimum Wage Act and raise the piecework rates.

But it had no intention of letting the women organize a union. Nonetheless, some of them formed a committee in the factory and joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Then, on July 11, 1934, a new and more intricate dress pattern was introduced, one that required fifteen separate operations to make. Twenty-eight union members stopped work that afternoon on the grounds that the dress was so complicated no seamstress could earn the minimum wage producing it. They asked permission to consult their union headquarters on Spadina Avenue before resuming work. Eaton’s gave them permission to leave the building but warned them they must be back at work before 5:30 that afternoon. It proved impossible for them to walk to the union
office and back before the deadline. The following morning, Eaton’s locked them out.

Had the company been less hasty in its actions, had the women not lost their jobs in such a brutal fashion, the commission would not have had their testimony and the company’s treatment of its piecework employees in the early Depression years might never have come to light. But the record is there, to be quoted and requoted and to haunt the T. Eaton Company down through the years. Today, a work stoppage at Eaton’s and a subsequent lockout could not be kept from the media. In 1934, the women did attempt to distribute handbills and carry sandwich boards to publicize their grievances, but the press paid no attention. Not a word of the trouble appeared in any of the four Toronto dailies, all of which treated both Eaton’s and Simpson’s as sacrosanct because of their pages of advertising.

This was a story perfect for the age of television: young women being exploited by a powerful corporation, carrying placards and picketing the biggest store in town. But in those days, even radio (which was less beholden than the papers to department store advertising) didn’t have the facilities to cover this kind of news. No reporter ventured out into the streets with a microphone. Tape recording hadn’t been invented. The tough, probing interview belonged to the future. And so the story went unreported until the following January, when the commission heard it from some of the union members, and even then newspaper readers in Toronto had to look hard to find it.

The Toronto papers handled the testimony very gingerly. On the day that Annie Wells and Jean Chambers testified, the
Star’s
front-page headline reassured its readers: “
EATON F
-8
PLANT PAID FAIR WAGE AUDITOR REVEALS
.” The story failed to make it clear that Eaton’s had not changed its policies until after hearings were announced. That day the paper carried three and a half pages of Eaton’s advertisements. Throughout the session, the
Star
gave far more prominence to Eaton’s side of the story than to that of its employees: “
HOUNDING DID NOT EXIST EATON OFFICIAL TESTIFIES”; “FACTORY WAGES ARE FAIR EATON ESTIMATOR INSISTS.”

The
Star
at least put its coverage on the front page. The other three newspapers rarely did. Again, Eaton’s got kid-glove treatment. Of nine stories in the
Telegram
between January 16 and 23, only one headlined testimony from an ex-employee; the others
favoured Eaton’s. The
Mail and Empire
ran six stories; the Eaton’s position was headlined in all but one. The
Globe
was fairer to the employees’ testimony but went out of its way to mollify the store by printing a bold-face introduction to its opening report, quoting an Eaton official as saying, “We have every assurance of the loyal understanding of the vast majority of our employees during the difficult depression period.”

The local coverage of the testimony contrasts sharply with that of the Winnipeg
Free Press
, which treated the Toronto story as a major scandal: “
SAYS DRIVING IN FACTORIES MADE WRECKS OF GIRLS”; “SAYS FACTORY GIRLS DRIVEN NEARLY INSANE”; “TELLS PROBE MINIMUM WAGE ACT BROKEN”; “TELLS PROBE OF WORKING BY STOP WATCHES.”

By the time the commission completed its hearings, Harry Stevens was again the man of the hour. He had continued to dominate the inquiry. When the hearings ended in February, he lobbied the other ten members of the commission to prepare the toughest report possible and also urged the general public to force acceptance of its recommendations. He took to the platform and to the microphone to hammer home his ideas and was not above leaking the recommendations to the press. In a nation-wide broadcast, sponsored by the Canadian Federation of Youth, Stevens urged “common sense amendments to existing laws and then a fearless law enforcement.” The law as it stood, he said, had “holes big enough for millionaires to crawl through and company laws that permitted the fleecing of the public on the one hand and the sweatshops on the other.”

The Stevens-for-Party-Leader movement was growing, endorsed by Stevens’s old sponsor, Warren K. Cook, and others who recognized that the country was in the mood for reform. One wing of the Conservative party thought that the former minister of Trade and Commerce was just the man to seize the opportunity and lead the party to victory. Indeed, though the chance of hanging on to power was slim, the two leading Tories – Bennett with his New Deal and Stevens with his reputation as a dragon-slayer – might have pulled it off if they had worked in tandem, with the support of a united party. But that was clearly impossible. The right wing of the party, led by Stevens’s old adversary the white-goateed Cahan (known to some colleagues as “Dino,” for “Dinosaur”), was bitterly opposed. Stevens himself at that point
had no desire for the leadership. And Bennett adamantly refused all attempts at reconciliation with a man he saw as his rival. Besides, after the effort of proposing his New Deal, the Prime Minister seemed to have run out of steam. Confined to his suite in the Chateau Laurier between February 27 and April 18 with first a respiratory infection and later a heart attack, he seemed like a forgotten hero sulking in his tent. “The colour has faded for the reform picture,” Herridge wrote to Manion in March. “The promise of performance is gone.” In fact, Bennett longed for retirement but clung stubbornly to power only to prevent Stevens from taking over.

The ideological rupture could not be concealed from the public – not with the Opposition leader goading both Cahan and Stevens almost daily in the House. On April 12, the machiavellian King got what he wanted – a major blow-up between the two men following the tabling of the report of the Price Spreads Commission. (Indeed, the scenes the report provoked in Parliament all but overshadowed its recommendations.) King had manoeuvred Stevens into defending, once again, the pamphlet that had resulted from his speech to the Conservative Study Club the previous year – the one that had led to his resignation as chairman of the commission. That opened old wounds and brought a tough rejoinder from “Dino” Cahan. But it was not Cahan the members cheered; it was Stevens.

The report, which contained five hundred pages of recommendations alone, was then the most important and exhaustive study of economic and social problems ever made by an official body in Canada. Its chief recommendation, which called for a federal trade and industry commission with wide powers of law enforcement, heralded the growing involvement of government in private business.

Other recommendations included a tightening and tough enforcement of the Combines Investigation Act, the regulation of industrial monopolies, the prohibition of unfair business practices, and more protection for investors and consumers. The report represented a victory for the Retail Merchants Association, which had enlisted Stevens in its fight with the big merchandisers and now saw its long struggle for retail price maintenance and the banning of loss-leader selling reflected in the commission’s recommendations.

The government quickly established a three-man commission to oversee enforcement of the Combines Investigation Act and to prevent cut-throat competition among retailers. Within two years, Ontario, the most heavily industrialized province, accepted the principle, at least, of a minimum wage for men – only a tiny step forward, since the practice wasn’t effected until 1963. The recommendations of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads were accepted piecemeal or sometimes not at all. But its lasting effect has been incalculable. It helped convince ordinary Canadians that business enterprise could never again be entirely unfettered and that the state had not only a role but also a duty in regulation of the marketplace. That, too, was a form of revolution, as influential in its own way as the one advocated by the radical Left. The irony is that it was initiated by the one party to whom state control of any kind was anathema.

It was also Harry Stevens’s monument. When his successor in the Department of Trade and Commerce, R.B. Hanson, tabled the report in the House, it was Stevens, only a private member, and not W.W. Kennedy, the commission chairman, who leaped to his feet to move its adoption, another breach of the unwritten rules quite in keeping with Stevens’s style. By this time, the Stevens-for-Party-Leader campaign was beginning to be overshadowed by the Stevens-for-Leader-of-a-New-Party campaign. Stevens, the closest thing to a knight in shining armour that the Conservative party could muster, was about to tilt his lance at the Prime Minister himself.

The purblindness of Andy McNaughton and R.B. Bennett on the matter of the unemployment relief camps passes all comprehension. Throughout that winter, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they had continued to insist that all was well and that the camps were fulfilling their promise.

Duff Pattullo, British Columbia’s premier, and Gerald McGeer, Vancouver’s ebullient new mayor, deluged Ottawa with lengthy telegrams and letters that became increasingly peevish – as, indeed, were the replies from the ailing, reclusive prime minister and his deputy, Sir George Perley. Over and over again, Pattuito
and McGeer urged a full-scale investigation of the camps plus a federal program of public works to give real jobs to the camp workers. Over and over again, Bennett and his deputy continued to insist that there was nothing wrong and that the Premier himself should visit the camps to “reassure” a public that was clearly on the side of the workers.

With seven hundred former camp workers congregated in Vancouver, British Columbia was demanding help from Ottawa. But Bennett insisted that it was the province’s responsibility under the constitution to maintain law and order. McNaughton’s solution was simple – and also simple-minded. Jail them all as vagrants, he urged.

By March, after three months of resisting the appeals of the province, the city, prominent citizens, and various organizations, Bennett realized he could no longer ignore their demands for a commission of inquiry. But again he dawdled and, typically, blamed someone else. On March 6 he wrote a testy letter to his Minister of National Defence, Grote Stirling, charging “a complete failure on the part of the Department to properly discharge its duties” regarding the relief camps. He wanted an immediate report, he said, because it was now clear that a royal commission or a parliamentary committee would be needed to reassure the public about the camps. The following day the Prime Minister suffered his heart seizure. Incredibly, a month elapsed before a commission went to work, and by then the relief camp workers, organized by the Communist party, were on the move.

On March 9, sixty delegates from the various camps in British Columbia and Alberta met secretly in an old store in Kamloops to plan a massive walk-out the following month. Most were members of the communist-controlled Relief Camp Workers’ Union. The parent body, the Workers’ Unity League, which had organized the two-day meeting, sent only one representative, its district organizer, Arthur Herbert Evans, but he was the one who counted. Although he kept quietly in the background, he was the guiding force behind the conference and the events that followed.

Evans is one of the great figures thrown up by the Depression – a dedicated communist, a brilliant organizer and stump speaker, “persistent and forceful,” in the words of a royal commission that heard his testimony later that year in Regina. But it also described him as “suspicious and intolerant of anyone who does not
agree with him” and “reckless and indifferent as to the truth of his utterances.”

Ron Liversedge, the chief chronicler of the events that followed, knew Evans well. He was so dedicated to communism, Liversedge recalled, “that he was like the absent-minded professor. Nothing outside the working class struggle held any interest for him. [He] had experienced police clubs and prison, and to him it was just a nuisance, in that it took him away from his work.”

Evans was long and lean – his nickname was Slim – with red-brown hair parted soberly in the middle. His strongest feature was a square, pugnacious jaw. He habitually wore overalls and his face, in his photographs at least, was dominated by a scowl: his eyes burn out of the newspaper cuts as if to challenge the viewer.

He might have been created by Steinbeck or Dos Passos, for he was a member of that vanished breed, the itinerant labour organizer. In 1935, at the age of forty-two, he had a long history of left-wing radicalism behind him. He had known and worked with some of the mythic figures of the radical Left – men like Big Bill Haywood and Joe Hill. He walked with a limp sustained when two machine-gun bullets struck his leg during the bloody miners’ strike in Ludlow, Colorado – the same one that brought Mackenzie King into the embrace of the Rockefeller family.

Evans’s father was an English house-painter, his mother an Irish housemaid; both had been enticed to Toronto, where Evans was born, during the pre-war immigration boom. Young Arthur quit school at thirteen and eventually became a union carpenter. Five years in the United States, working on and off for the Industrial Workers of the World – the doomed “Wobblies” – moulded and shaped his radicalism. In 1912 he was jailed for his part in a free-speech demonstration on a Kansas City street corner, a role that involved nothing more than reading the Declaration of Independence. When he returned to Canada, he became an organizer for another lost cause, the One Big Union, which lost its battle with the United Mine Workers of America. He was a rebel through and through, within the union movement as well as outside it. Blacklisted for a year by the UMWA, he returned to that fold as a business agent for the Drumheller local, only to find himself in trouble with the international headquarters in the United States for calling a strike. When the Americans refused to issue strike pay, Evans supported the strikers’ families by using
funds that were supposed to go to the international. The parent union brought suit against him for “conversion” of funds, and, in 1924, Evans was sentenced to three years in the Prince Albert penitentiary.