Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Ontario Section)
The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation – The Farmer–Labor Party of Ontario, more commonly known as the Ontario CCF, was a democratic socialist provincial political party in Ontario that existed from 1932 to 1961. It was the provincial wing of the federal Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. The party had no leader in the beginning, and was governed by a provincial council and executive. The party's first Member of the Legislative Assembly was elected by voters in the 1934 Ontario general election. In the 1937 general election, no CCF members were elected to the Ontario Legislature. In 1942, the party elected Toronto lawyer Ted Jolliffe as its first leader. He led the party to within a few seats of forming the government in the 1943 general election; instead, it formed the Official Opposition. In that election, the first two women were elected to the Ontario Legislature as CCFers: Agnes Macphail and Rae Luckock. The 1945 election was a setback, as the party lost most of its seats in the Legislature, including Jolliffe's seat. The party again became the Official Opposition after the 1948 general election, and defeated the Conservative premier George Drew in his seat, when Bill Temple unexpectedly won in the High Park constituency. The middle and late 1940s were the peak years for the Ontario CCF. After that time, its electoral performances were dismal, as it was reduced to a rump of two seats in the 1951 election, three seats in the 1955 election, and five seats in the 1959 election. Jolliffe stepped down as leader in 1953, and was replaced by Donald C. MacDonald.
The period between the 1951 defeat and the founding of the Ontario New Democratic Party was one of much internal strife; nonetheless, MacDonald managed to keep the party together, despite the constant electoral defeats. In October 1961, the party dissolved itself and became part of the New Democratic Party.
History
Origins
The Ontario CCF was indirectly the successor to the 1919–23 United Farmers of Ontario–Labour coalition that formed the government in Ontario under Ernest C. Drury. While in 1934 several former United Farmer Members of the Legislative Assembly became Liberal-Progressives aligned with the Ontario Liberal Party, the United Farmers of Ontario, as an organization, participated in the formation of the Ontario CCF, and was briefly affiliated with the party.After a meeting in Ottawa on May 26, 1932, that brought together all the Members of Parliament that belonged to the Ginger Group, and some members of the League for Social Reconstruction, the CCF was formed, making J. S. Woodsworth the de facto leader, and giving responsibility for organizing Ontario to Agnes Macphail of the UFO. Macphail, as president of the Ontario Provincial Council, persuaded her fellow delegates at the December 1932 UFO convention to affiliate with the CCF provincial council. After the 1933 Regina convention, the name of the party was introduced as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation – The Farmer–Labor Party, though the shorter Ontario CCF was the most commonly used name.
Macphail served as the first chairman of the Ontario CCF from 1932 until 1934. As a UFO Member of Parliament in the Canadian House of Commons, she was forced to resign from the CCF after the UFO withdrew from the party after alleging communist influence in it. Consequently, the UFO's two candidates in the 1934 provincial election, longtime incumbent MLA Farquhar Oliver and former MLA Leslie Warner Oke under the UFO banner rather than with the CCF. Oliver was elected and would caucus with the Liberals before joining the party several years later. Macphail later served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as the CCF Member of Provincial Parliament for York East from 1943 to 1945 and again from 1948 to 1951.
Samuel Lawrence, an Independent Labour Party member of Hamilton City Council, was elected to the Ontario legislature as a CCF MPP in the 1934 provincial election, the first Ontario election contested by the CCF. The party received 7.1 percent of the vote and, with Lawrence's election in Hamilton East, won its first seat in the Ontario Legislature. The Ontario CCF failed to win any seats in the 1937 election. He was elected Ontario CCF president in 1941. and served as Mayor of Hamilton from 1944 to 1949 leading a CCF slate in that city.
Alderman John Mitchell of Hamilton was elected the first Ontario CCF president in 1934 as part of a reorganization of the party after its provincial council had been suspended by federal leader J. S. Woodsworth for suspected communist infiltration. The reorganization created a new provincial council and central party executive and centralized what had been a loose structure of affiliate organizations and riding clubs. It was accompanied by a purge of party clubs and affiliates suspected of having been infiltrated by Communists and the removal of suspected Communists from senior party positions. The reorganization was prompted by complaints of Communist infiltration, due to the party's previously loose structure. In reaction to alleged Communist involvement, the United Farmers of Ontario disaffiliated from the CCF. Mitchell unofficially led the Ontario CCF during the 1934 Ontario general election and conducted a province-wide tour during the 1937 election campaign but failed to win a seat in the Legislature. He continued as party president until 1941.
Graham Spry, a publisher and broadcaster who was also a member of the LSR, served as the Ontario CCF's vice-president of its provincial council from 1934 to 1936. He was the first federal CCF candidate in Ontario, running in the September 24, 1934 by-election in Toronto East. Other prominent members were Elmore Philpott, a former Liberal. Philpott joined the CCF in 1933 and became president of the Ontario Association of CCF Clubs but resigned in March 1934 over the A. E. Smith affair that had caused the UFO to leave as well. Philpott rejoined the Liberal Party in 1935. The disagreement was in regards to how much support the fledgling CCF should give Smith, leader of the Canadian Labour Defence League, who had been charged with sedition for claiming that the state had attempted to assassinate imprisoned Communist Party of Canada leader Tim Buck. The CLDC was a communist front group. Woodsworth, and the Ontario CCF provincial council, opposed the CCF having any formal links with it or any other communist group. Some individual CCFers ignored this policy as did one section of the Ontario CCF, which was expelled. Nevertheless, Philpott and the UFO saw the Smith affair as evidence that the CCF had been infiltrated by Communists and left. The issue of what relationship the CCF should have with the Communist Party came to the fore again in 1936 when the party voted to ban any united front with Communists, over the objections of prominent CCFers such as East York reeve Arthur Henry Williams.
Electoral breakthrough
At the Ontario CCF's tenth annual convention in Toronto, the first leadership election was held. Two candidates came forward: Toronto lawyer and Ontario CCF vice-president Ted Jolliffe, and union activist and former Ontario CCF Youth Movement organizer Murray Cotterill. On April 4, 1942, Jolliffe won the election, but the voting results were not announced. The newly created Leader position's role was political and legislative, while internal CCF affairs and administration would remain the president's domain.The party achieved a major breakthrough under Jolliffe, in the 1943 general election, when it formed the Official Opposition with 32 percent of the vote and 34 seats. The CCF was just four seats short of George Drew's Progressive Conservatives, who formed a minority government that was the beginning of what became a 42-year political dynasty.
1945 "Gestapo" campaign
In the 1945 election, Premier Drew ran an anti-Semitic, union bashing, Red-baiting campaign. The previous two years of anti-socialist attacks by the Conservatives and their supporters, like Gladstone Murray and Montague A. Sanderson, were devastatingly effective against the previously popular CCF. Much of the source material for the anti-CCF campaign came from the Ontario Provincial Police 's Special Investigation Branch's agent D-208: Captain William J. Osbourne-Dempster. His office was supposed to be investigating war-time 5th column saboteurs. Instead, starting in November 1943, he was investigating, almost exclusively, Ontario opposition MPPs, mainly focusing on the CCF caucus. The fact that Jolliffe knew about these 'secret' investigations as early as February 1944 led to one of the most infamous incidents in 20th-century Canadian politics.May 24, 1945 radio speech
The 1945 campaign was anything but genteel and polite. Jolliffe replied by giving a radio speech – written with the assistance of Lister Sinclair – that accused Drew of running a political Gestapo in Ontario. In the speech excerpt below, Jolliffe alleged that a secret department of the Ontario Provincial Police was acting as a political police – spying on the opposition and the media.Jolliffe's inflammatory speech became the main issue of the campaign, and dominated coverage in the media for the rest of the election. Drew, and his Attorney-General Leslie Blackwell vehemently denied Jolliffe's accusations, but the public outcry was too much for them to abate. On May 26, 1945, during his own radio speech, Drew announced that he would be appointing a Royal Commission to investigate these charges. Jolliffe's CCF and Mitchell Hepburn's Ontario Liberal Party wanted the election suspended until the commission tabled its report. Hepburn sent Drew a personal telegram stating he would stop campaigning if the commission were held immediately. Drew ignored these requests and continued to hold the election on its original date, despite it being many months before the commission's findings would be made available.