The Great Depression (66 page)

In several cases the police enforced a deadline. On December 20, for example, a Provincial Police inspector named Beauregard visited Nathan Dubrinksky, a tailor, at his home on Laval Avenue and told him that he must evict his tenant, one D. Ship, by January 4, 1939, or have his premises padlocked. Three days later, the same inspector and another officer visited an unemployed tailor named Louis Fineberg, also on Laval Avenue, and ordered him to turn his son-in-law, Muni Taub, into the street. The eviction must be carried out by January 8, Fineberg was warned, or the premises would be padlocked.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Union persuaded Taub and his father-in-law to test the validity of the Padlock Law in civil court. Fineberg would ask Taub to leave; Taub would refuse. Fineberg would then sue Taub for cancellation of the lease and for $285 in damages on the ground that Taub was using the premises for the propagation of communism. Taub’s defence, conducted by Calder of the CCLU, would be that the Padlock
Law was unconstitutional and therefore Fineberg’s action was unfounded. The Quebec Superior Court, however, upheld the law, and Taub lost his case.

The Taubs, however, did not move out. The police threats were just that – attempts to scare people into taking action that the authorities themselves were reluctant to take. The Duplessis government was wary of test cases. None of the threatened premises was ever padlocked.

Although the police seized close to 140,000 papers, reviews, books, pamphlets, circulars, buttons, and badges (and once a child’s doll and a pair of trousers), the total number of buildings padlocked in 1938 amounted to no more than ten. No one was charged or arrested under the Act so that none of the victims had the opportunity to defend themselves in open court – a fact that Duplessis and his police used to boast of brazenly as proof of their clemency.

The year was scarcely over before the Premier, in an address to the Montreal Canadian Club, openly challenged anyone to point to one abuse committed under the Act. The CCLU had for more than twelve months been pointing to dozens of abuses, but that was lost on both the Premier and the press. “What do we do when there is smallpox?” Duplessis asked his listeners. “We quarantine a person or a house where there is an epidemic and nobody kicks.… Communism is something affecting the heart and the brain. Don’t you think that house should be quarantined too? … We don’t arrest the man; we padlock the house; we keep the liberty of the man.…”

Duplessis claimed that the government had had “positive proof that the danger was real and imminent.” Now, he said, the danger was over. Quebec had been the one province to “show the light and be the bulwark of law and order and common sense.”

For those words he earned the plaudits of the English-language press. The Montreal
Gazette
rushed to congratulate the Premier on the success of his padlock campaign. “Quebec does not want Communism,” it declared. “The Quebec government will not tolerate it.” The
Montreal Star
described Duplessis’s defence of the act as “a logical, forceful, and in more ways than one, an unanswerable argument.… We … accept – and the public of Quebec will do so with genuine relief and satisfaction – the Premier’s declaration that the danger is now over. He attributes
this to the application of the Padlock Law, and he is in the best position … to know the actual facts.… The citizens of Quebec will feel the safer in the knowledge that the Premier is as resolute as ever to fight against such a danger with all the energy and vigilance at his command.”

Duplessis’s war on the bogey of communism had its parallel in Hepburn’s war on the bogey of the CIO. The two powerful premiers had a good deal in common and had, indeed, formed a loose alliance against the federal Liberal government in general and Mackenzie King in particular. Both were bon vivants who enjoyed hard drink, loose women, and lively parties. Both knew how to invent a scapegoat (godless radical; outside agitator) whom they could set up as a dangerous threat to society. Both had presented themselves as reformers; each had ended up in the pocket of the business establishment.

Hepburn’s highly publicized war against the CIO had not squelched the American union group any more than Duplessis’s trumpeted victory over the forces of evil in Quebec had wiped out communism. At the time of the passage of the Padlock Law, one of the leading red-baiters in the province, Father Bryan, had estimated there were nine hundred Communists in the city of Montreal. More than a year later, Eugene Forsey wrote in the
Canadian Forum
that “reliable information now indicates … there are several hundred more Communists in Montreal than there were in 1937.”

But whether Duplessis’s campaign was successful or not, the Act remained on the books. Nor did the threats and seizures cease just because the Premier had proclaimed victory.

By May, British Columbia was ripe for another explosion. Mackenzie King had lit the fuse when he reduced grants-in-aid to the provinces by a third and then stubbornly refused to restore the cuts after the recession hit. It was this parsimony that led to the famous post office sit-down in late May and the events of Bloody Sunday in Vancouver on June 19.

When the federal government closed the relief camps in 1936, it had instituted a program of farm placement in which single
men were to be paid five dollars a month for agricultural labour. That was no more than the so-called “slave camps” paid, but for the government – if not for the men – there was an advantage. The transients were not only out of the cities, they were also isolated from one another. It would be almost impossible to organize them as Slim Evans had done in 1935.

The farm employment scheme ended with each harvest, after which the men were left to fend for themselves. The government justified this callous policy by pretending that they could exist all winter on their summer savings. That was patently absurd. Thousands began to move west – to Alberta, in the vain hope of getting Aberhart’s promised dividend, and to British Columbia, where the provincial forestry camps were paying more than three times as much as the farm placement scheme. Ottawa paid half the cost of these camps (also set up in the fall of 1936 to replace the maligned relief camps). British Columbia had to shoulder the rest. With more and more transients reaching the coast, the cost soared. In 1938, the number of non-residents in the B.C. camps had increased by 50 per cent over 1937.

The province couldn’t afford to keep them open alone. Faced with the federal cuts, the B.C. government closed them six weeks early, in April. Premier Pattullo cut all single men off relief and, as a result, hundreds of destitute men gravitated to the city of Vancouver. There they were organized by the Communist-led Single Unemployed Protective Association and its ally, the Relief Project Workers’ Union, with headquarters on Cordova Street near Vancouver’s skid row. Once again the city was faced with the spectacle of ragged men with tin cans begging for money on the street corners.

As before, the single unemployed were organized into four divisions, each division further divided into bunkhouse units of ten with the usual subcommittees. The leader of No. 1 Division, the so-called “youth division,” was Steve Brodie, a veteran of both the On-to-Ottawa trek and the Regina Riot. He was now twenty-six, a medium-sized man with aquiline features, still very much a maverick. His father had been a blacksmith and lay preacher in Scotland; both his parents had died in 1919 of influenza. Brodie had come to Canada in 1925, one of a shipload of orphans sponsored by the Salvation Army. He worked on prairie farms until the Depression and then joined the army of boxcar
cowboys until he was shunted into the relief camps. The Regina Riot turned him into a Communist.

Brodie had lost a job at Bridge River that spring for union activity. Now in Vancouver with his division, begging on the streets, he felt a sense of frustration. He was too independent to be a good Communist. He didn’t agree with his party’s policy of continuing the tin-canning, which he found demeaning. And he didn’t have much sympathy with those hidebound members of the party who sat around mouthing Marxist jargon – all talk and no action. It was ironic. The so-called wild-eyed radicals who led the party were, in their own way, as cautious as the politicians. As Brodie put it, “the image of Communist plots and rioting were [
sic
] only the product of wishful thinking on the part of the federal and provincial governments. That would have been the excuse for iron heel tactics which they were only too willing to invoke. And far from inciting the men, Communist Party organizers warned against provoking confrontation.”

What Brodie wanted
was
confrontation – the kind his hero, Arthur Evans, had provoked three years before, to the dismay of Tim Buck and Joseph Salsberg. Brodie wanted to shake up the Vancouver business community to the point where it would pressure Ottawa to do something for the single unemployed. Some new strategy was required, and Brodie soon hit on one.

Long before the sit-in became the recognized weapon of American civil rights movements it had been used by the Relief Camp Workers when they occupied the Vancouver Public Library and Museum in 1935. Brodie had been chairman of a division during that brief but effective tactic. Now he realized that this was the way to strike at all three levels of government as well as the private sector. In one sudden move, he and his followers would occupy the federal post office, the city-owned art gallery, and one of the hotels. Then they would demand that the police arrest them for trespassing.

Brodie first paced off the distance to all three buildings, timing the length of each walk so that they could be invaded simultaneously. He chose the Hotel Georgia rather than the larger Hotel Vancouver because it was easier to enter. On May 19, he called a meeting of his division and told the men: “You’ve been howling for action and I think I have got something now.” But first, he needed their support. Brodie always made sure that these meetings
were scrupulously democratic, with parliamentary procedure followed to the letter. He asked for a vote of confidence and got one. “Go get ’em, Steve!” the men shouted, cheering and stamping.

Brodie, with the agreement of his division, wanted to create a four-man action committee composed of himself and the three other divisional leaders. Only in that way could he ensure tight security. But he had to argue with the other three until four in the morning before they agreed to his plan. After he brought them round, he wasted no time. Zero hour would be at two that afternoon.

He had already laid the groundwork by staging random marches about the city so that people would become used to long lines of men moving through the streets. The men, starting from four different halls in the East End, were not privy to Brodie’s plan. They thought they were marching to Stanley Park. Only when his division reached the corner of Granville and Hastings did they realize that their objective was the newly redecorated federal post office with its granite façade, its copper dormer roof, and its English tower.

By two o’clock on the afternoon of May 20, seven hundred men were inside the post office. The police sergeant on the corner immediately called for help from the Granville and Georgia intersection, three blocks away. That left Georgia Street wide open for the two other divisions to march on the hotel and art gallery. At 2:15, three hundred men were crowded into the cramped lobby of the Hotel Georgia. Five minutes later, two hundred more poured into the art gallery, four blocks farther along Georgia. A fourth division acted as a decoy, marching aimlessly about town, confusing the authorities and allowing Brodie time to consolidate his position.

The post office closed for five minutes while Brodie polled his followers. Were they willing to stay until arrested? They gave him a unanimous yes. Nobody realized that the siege would last thirty days. For all that period the post office would keep regular hours, customers would come and go, and clerks would transact business while the jobless men hugged the edges of the L-shaped lobby. Brazenly, Brodie had tweaked the noses of the federal police force, whose headquarters were, in effect, part of the same building.

At eight that evening, Vancouver’s police chief, Col. W.W. Foster, arrived to confer with the strikers. He had done so three
years before when the museum was occupied, and now he showed the same reasonable attitude that had distinguished his actions then. He congratulated the men, praised their discipline, applauded their behaviour, and declared that the incident would certainly have its effect on the authorities. Then he asked them to go home.

Brodie had the answer to that. “If we had homes,” he said, “we would not be here.”

Then he issued a challenge that he would continue to use for the month that followed. If his comrades were breaking the law, he said, the police must arrest them. Brodie knew, of course, that the authorities had no intention of maintaining some twelve hundred men in jail; that would cost even more than relief. Foster left after arranging for toilet facilities at the CPR depot a block away. The men slept that night on the marble floors of the post office and art gallery and the more comfortable carpets of the hotel.