The Great Depression (60 page)

That same day, the federal Minister of Labour, Norman Rogers, had wired to Mayor Hall offering his services as a mediator, as Hall had requested. This infuriated Hepburn, who sent a telegram to Mackenzie King charging “treachery” and “unwarranted
interference.” He could not resist adding that the action was “quite in common with the treatment this government has received from most of your ministers,” a gratuitous slur that underlined the widening breach between the provincial and the federal Liberals.

King, who wanted to keep the federal government out of the controversy, was astounded by this insult and even more affronted when he learned that Hepburn had asked Lapointe for another hundred policemen because “the situation was becoming more intense.” His indignation was justified; the Premier’s own undercover agents had reported from Oshawa that “the strike is proceeding smoothly … with no threat of violence in sight.” Nonetheless Hepburn, ignoring the mayor’s invitation to see for himself how peaceful the city was, added a new dimension to the struggle when he told the press that “it appears that the Communists are anxious to take an active part in case of disturbance.”

Mackenzie King prevented an over-eager Ernest Lapointe from dispatching more police to Oshawa. He was alarmed at the Premier’s “deliberate effort to identify the Ontario government’s action … with an effort to suppress Communism.… In this he has gone out of his way to raise a great issue in this Country, the frightful possibilities of which no one can foresee.” Hepburn’s actions, he feared, would “cut the Liberal party in two.”

King put his finger on the crux of the matter. “The truth … is he is in the hands of McCullagh of the Globe and the Globe and McCullagh, in the hands of financial mining interests that want to crush the C.I.O. and their organization in Canada. The situation … has all the elements … that are to be found in the present appalling situation in Spain. Hepburn has become a Fascist leader and has sought to have labour in its struggle against organized capital put into the position of being under Communist direction and control. Action of the kind is little short of criminal.”

With Lapointe reined in, Hepburn decided to get rid of the RCMP and form his own private army – a force that quickly became known as “Hepburn’s Hussars,” or, more irreverently, the “Sons of Mitches.” He already had seventy-five provincial police at Queen’s Park on constant alert, which meant lounging about playing cards or working out with dumbbells. Now he announced that he would add a minimum of two hundred volunteers to their
ranks. It was necessary, he said, because he had received a secret report that the CIO was working “hand in glove” with international communism.

Students from the nearby University of Toronto rushed to Queen’s Park to join the new force. Hepburn promised them OPP uniforms, military training, and – even more enticing – a generous twenty-five dollars a week. The Eglinton Hunt Club also responded with an offer of sixty horses, apparently in the belief that a cavalry charge might be needed to stem the revolution, while the 133rd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force volunteered to swell the ranks of the new army.

The government was now ready for armed conflict. Hepburn was already in touch with the Lake Erie Chemical Company of New Haven, Connecticut, which advertised that it could supply “everything in police equipment except the uniforms.” It sent along a brochure that trumpeted the advantages of its Jumper-Repeater Instantaneous Gas Candle, complete with a photograph of milk strikers in Wisconsin being ineffectively gassed by an inferior rival product. The New Haven company emphasized that
its
gas candle was “far more effective because it exploded so quickly the mob couldn’t throw it back at their pursuers.” In Oshawa, meanwhile, the situation was so quiet that an American movie cameraman, unable to capture any scenes of violence, tried unsuccessfully to bribe two strikers to stage a mock battle to enliven his newsreel footage.

Hepburn demanded total loyalty from his followers. He wanted more than passive acquiescence in his policies; he wanted full-throated support. When he didn’t get it from two of his most prominent Cabinet members, Attorney General Arthur Roebuck and Minister of Public Welfare, Municipal Affairs and Labour David Croll, he fired them on April 14. Both represented the left wing of the Liberal party and both were anathema to George McCullagh.

Croll had just returned from a southern holiday in the belief that the negotiations, under way when he departed, had proved fruitful. He was nettled to discover that his chief had not only forced a strike but had also scuttled his promise to provide relief for the strikers, and he was equally indignant at Hepburn’s attempts to link the union with the communists.

He and Roebuck held their tongues in Cabinet, but that wasn’t good enough for the Premier. “It is quite clear to me …” he wrote to Croll, “that you are not in accord with the policy of the Government in fighting the inroads of the Lewis organization and Communism in general.… Ontario is facing one of its greatest economic crises … there must be solidarity and unanimity within our ranks.” Croll’s famous reply made him a hero to the labour movement. His place, he told Hepburn, was “marching with the workers rather than riding with General Motors.”

McCullagh’s newspaper, meanwhile, continued to predict bloodshed and lawlessness in Oshawa while hailing Hepburn on its front page as “Canada’s Man of the Hour.” These front-page editorials, which appeared almost daily, were masterpieces of venom. The titles alone give an idea of their quality: “
DOUBLE CROSSING TREACHERY …”; “LEWIS BANDITRY SPREADS …”; “FIGHTING LEWIS FASCISM
.” In McCullagh’s editorial view, the workers were “dupes of self serving and self seeking union agitators” while the CIO was “a gigantic dictatorship scheme.”

“Is there a red-blooded Canadian,” the
Globe
asked on April 17, “whose anger does not boil over at the story of intrigue, duplicity, and double crossing, which has run through events of the past ten days in the motor city?” These were pure figments of George McCullagh’s overheated imagination, but they would have their effect on the voters in the fall provincial election.

With Croll and Roebuck out of the picture, Hepburn announced that “there is no turning back now … this is a fight to the finish.” The mines, he said, would be next; industry would be demoralized; stock prices would tumble.

Hepburn was prepared to use any pretext to keep the strike going. On April 17, he personally took over negotiations with Charles Millard and the union’s lawyer, J.L. Cohen. The meeting was genial enough until Hepburn discovered that Cohen was using the phone in his private vault, apparently to report to Homer Martin. Hepburn flew into a rage. “What!” he cried, “another long distance call?” With that he broke off negotiations, charging that the local had double-crossed him and the union was being run by remote control. He strode back into his office, clapped his hat on his head, pushed his way through a crowd of reporters, and headed for the elevator.

Homer Martin, however, was quite prepared to allow the local to negotiate with GM without interference from or apparent connection with the CIO. He wanted a Canadian contract – one that would run concurrently with the GM contracts in the United States so that all could eventually be negotiated at the same time on both sides of the border. To achieve that he was content to keep the congress out of the picture.

Hepburn was ecstatic at what he called Martin’s “surrender.” He had been vindicated, he declared, in his attempts “to root communism out of the Canadian labour movement.” Negotiations resumed at once and it looked as if the strike would be settled quickly. Then, inexplicably, Hepburn again broke them off.

He had learned from his informants in Oshawa that Martin’s strategic withdrawal was causing dissension among the rank and file. Now he saw a chance to break the union and stave off the threat to the mining industry – a threat that concerned him more than any menace to the automobile industry. “Let me tell Lewis here and now,” he said, “that he and his gang will never get their greedy paws on the mines of northern Ontario as long as I am prime minister.” The financial world was sceptical. On April 19, gold shares plunged on the Toronto market.

The Oshawa local
was
in trouble. Homer Martin had promised financial support from the United States, but none came. The union’s funds were almost gone; it could no longer afford to pay its own pickets. The strike would have to be settled quickly or the local would be destroyed. This was a closely guarded secret; neither the press and general public nor the Premier realized that the union was broke. Instead, Hugh Thompson announced that the UAW in Detroit had unanimously voted funds to keep the strike going. It had done nothing of the sort.

Both sides were now desperate to end the strike; only Hepburn was desperate to keep it going. The union was facing bankruptcy. GM wanted to get back to making cars before its rivals stole a march on it. Hepburn pleaded (in vain) by wire with the vacationing GM president, Colonel R.S. McLaughlin, to break off negotiations. But GM feared Ford and Chrysler more than it feared the union. All that Hepburn was able to achieve in the parley that followed on April 22 was to force a statement from Charles Millard and J.L. Cohen that they did not represent the CIO.

Hepburn exulted over this paper victory. “The CIO is repudiated,” the
Globe and Mail
reported triumphantly. But even George McCullagh admitted that it was not a decisive win. The CIO was in Canada for good – in fact if not in name. The strike ended on April 23, fifteen days after it had begun, and both sides, as usual, claimed to have won. The union got wage increases and a seniority system and compromised on a forty-four-hour week – almost everything it wanted except official recognition for the CIO. But once the strike was settled, the workers on their own boldly passed a resolution affirming their local’s alliance with both the United Automobile Workers union and the parent congress.

Industrial unionism had arrived in Canada in spite of Mitchell Hepburn. Ironically, the CIO’s role in the strike had been very slight. It had been reluctant to enter Canada, it hadn’t contributed a nickel in funds, it hadn’t called a sympathy strike in the United States to support the Canadian workers, and the final settlement had been negotiated by Canadians without its help. By overemphasizing the role of the CIO in the walk-out, Hepburn had managed to give it a status it wouldn’t otherwise have enjoyed. As it was, the Oshawa strike opened the door for a massive CIO organizing campaign that changed the nature of Canadian labour.

The strike also demonstrated the extent to which Hepburn was a creature of the Ontario mining industry. The most extraordinary postscript to this extraordinary affair was George McCullagh’s manipulation of the Premier after the strike ended. McCullagh, on behalf of the mining fraternity, actually proposed that Hepburn’s Liberals, who held seventy-three seats in the legislature, form a coalition with Earl Rowe’s Conservatives, numbering seventeen.

Only a strong and united government, McCullagh felt, could keep the CIO out of the mines, and Hepburn apparently agreed. He had already informed Herbert Bruce, the lieutenant-governor, that a coalition government might be in the offing. Then he visited Rowe and offered the startled Tory leader not only the premiership but also the chance to choose half the Cabinet. Rowe turned him down, an action that caused his second-in-command, George Drew, to resign in protest. “The time had come,” Drew insisted, “to end the two-party system in Ontario since only a
strong government could destroy communism.” Those words had a familiar ring. Democracy was on shaky ground in Ontario, as it was elsewhere in the world, where other voices were calling for strong one-party government to destroy the spectre that was haunting Europe.

Even though it posited the end of the Liberal party in Ontario, the plan appealed to Hepburn because it would, in his view, strike the CIO a death blow and be a slap in the face to his enemy, the Prime Minister. The Oshawa strike had widened a breach with Mackenzie King – and between the federal and provincial Liberals – that would not be healed until Hepburn left office. In short, the Premier of Ontario was prepared to circumvent the democratic political system in order to pursue a paranoid vendetta with all the power of an authoritarian state. And in this he had the enthusiastic backing of the financial giants of Bay Street. Fortunately, the Toronto
Star
got wind of the plan, and Hepburn was forced to deny it publicly. That ended the idea of coalition.

In spite of this, the small-c conservative voters, who formed the majority of the Ontario electorate, were solidly behind Hepburn in his anti-CIO, anti-communist campaign. His repeated declarations that he would never tolerate “CIO lawlessness” reassured them. They had read about industrial strife south of the border. Both Hepburn and the press had made the most of those incidents. The last thing the voters wanted was to see it explode in their peaceful province. Hepburn’s public announcement, “I am a Reformer but I am not a Mackenzie King liberal any longer,” reinforced their traditional suspicion of Ottawa.

In the fall election campaign, Hepburn stumped the province with what was, in effect, a law-and-order platform. As others had before him, he conjured up the spectre of revolution – always an effective vote-getter in a nation historically sensitive to the very thought of violent revolt. Hepburn explained that he had needed extra police at the time of the strike because he had “confidential reports that 15,000 Communists were ready to take part in any uprising whether it took place in Toronto or elsewhere.” In short, not only Oshawa but the entire province had been threatened.

The Oshawa strike became one of the major issues in the campaign. With his attacks on the American labour body, Hepburn scored a stunning victory, retaining sixty-three seats to his opponents’ twenty-three and keeping the northern Ontario mining
country safe for capitalism. It was, according to one American mining entrepreneur interviewed by the New York
Post
, the one spot on the continent “where if a union organizer is ordered out of the district by the company police or a piece of rock drops down a 1,000-foot shaft on his head, there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it.”