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Ted Jolliffe

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Ted Jolliffe
Jolliffe, c. 1945
Leader of the Ontario CCF
In office
1942–1953
Preceded bySamuel Lawrence
(as CCF president)
Succeeded byDonald C. MacDonald
ConstituencyOntario
Member of Provincial Parliament
In office
1943–1945
Preceded byLeopold Macaulay
Succeeded byHoward Julian Sale
ConstituencyYork South
In office
1948–1951
Preceded byHoward Julian Sale
Succeeded byWilliam George Beech
ConstituencyYork South
Personal details
Born
Edward Bigelow Jolliffe

March 2, 1909
Luchow, China
DiedMarch 18, 1998(1998-03-18) (aged 89)
Salt Spring Island, British Columbia
Political partyCo-operative Commonwealth Federation
SpouseRuth Conger Jolliffe (née Moore)
ChildrenNaomi, John, Nancy and Thomas[1]
Residence(s)Toronto, Ontario
OccupationLawyer

Edward Bigelow Jolliffe[2] QC (March 2, 1909 – March 18, 1998) was a Canadian social democratic politician and lawyer from Ontario. He was the first leader of the Ontario section of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and leader of the Official Opposition in the Ontario Legislature during the 1940s and 1950s. He was a Rhodes Scholar in the mid-1930s, and came back to Canada to help the CCF, after his studies were complete and being called to the bar in England and Ontario. After politics, he practised labour law in Toronto and would eventually become a labour adjudicator. In retirement, he moved to British Columbia, where he died in 1998.

Early life and education

[edit]

His family had lived in Ontario for generations.[3] His parents, the Reverend Charles and Gertrude Jolliffe, were missionaries for the Methodist Church of Canada, and were living near what was then known as Luchow, China.[1] He was born at the Canadian Missionary hospital in Luchow, near Chunking on March 2, 1909.[3][4] He was home-schooled in China by his mother until his early teens.[1] When his family returned to Ontario, he attend Rockwood Public School and then went to high school at Guelph Collegiate Institute.[3] He was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto's Victoria College, the United Church College.[3] He became the head of the Victoria Student Council, and was a member of the Hart House Debates Committee.[3] In 1930, he won the Maurice Cody scholarship, and then became one of Ontario's Rhodes Scholars that same year.[3] He attended Christ Church, Oxford University for three years.[1] As a member of Oxford's Labour Club, he met David Lewis, the club's leader and a fellow Canadian.[2] Together they fought the Communist Red October club and fascists such as Lord Haw-HawWilliam Joyce.[2] Both he and Lewis planned a 'silent' protest at Joyce's February 1934 speech at Oxford. They carefully made sure that enough members from the Labour Club attended the meeting, and then in groups of two or three, strategically walked out of the speech, across the creaking wooden floors, effectively blotting out Joyce's speech.[2] The Blackshirts in the audience then caused riots in the street after the meeting and Jolliffe and Lewis were in the thick of it.[2]

His Oxford experiences made him a socialist and he joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation shortly after it was formed in 1932 during his summer vacation.[3] He helped form an overseas branch of the CCF at Oxford that year.[3] He was called to the bar in England, and was the first Canadian to win the Arden scholarship.[3] When Jolliffe permanently returned from Oxford, he worked as the CCF's Ontario organizer[5] and was called to the bar in Ontario and practised law in Toronto from 1938 onwards.[3]

He was a candidate in the 1935 Canadian election in the Toronto riding of St. Paul's, placing fourth.[6] He ran again in the 1940 federal election, this time in the York East electoral district. He was noted for calling out the former federal Conservative government for neglecting World War I soldiers on their return home, and that this time, "proper measures be taken to protect the future of Canadian soldiers and their dependents."[7] He countered that a C.C.F. government would stop war profiteering and the protect the interests of the country's soldiers and "small taxpayers."[7] He was soundly defeated, like every other Ontario CCF candidate, placing a distant third.[8][9]

Leader and 1943 election

[edit]

He became the first leader of the Ontario CCF in 1942. The following year, he led the party to within five seats of victory with 34 seats and 32% of the vote in the election of 1943 that elected a Conservative minority government under George Drew. He won the York South seat, and became its Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP).

Elections to the 21st Parliament of Ontario (1943)[a 1]
Political party Party leader MPPs Votes
Candidates 1937 Dissol. 1943 ± # % ± (pp)
Progressive Conservative George Drew 90 23 19 38 15Increase 469,672 35.75% 3.69Decrease
Co-operative Commonwealth Ted Jolliffe 86 34 34Increase 415,441 31.62% 26.30Increase
Liberal Harry Nixon 89 62 59 15 51Decrease 399,185 30.38% 20.65Decrease
Liberal–Progressive[a 2] 3 2
United Farmers[a 3] 1
Labour[a 4] 2 2 2Increase 11,888 0.90% 0.15Increase
Independent Liberal[a 5] 4 1 1 Steady 10,123 0.77% 0.55Decrease
Independent Labour 2 2,215 0.17% 0.16Increase
Independent 3 2,540 0.19% 0.06Decrease
Independent-CCF 1 1,566 0.12% New
Socialist Labour 3 740 0.06% 0.08Decrease
Soldier 2 569 0.04% New
Vacant 10
Total 282 90 90 90 1,313,939 100.00%
Blank and invalid ballots 10,746
Registered voters / turnout 2,269,895 58.36% 12.93Decrease
  1. ^ "1943 General Election (Summary)". elections.on.ca. Elections Ontario. Retrieved August 21, 2023.
  2. ^ Roland Patterson (Grey North), Thomas Aston Blakelock (Halton) and Douglas Munro Campbell (Kent East) ran as Liberal candidates in 1943.
  3. ^ Farquhar Oliver (Grey South) became a Liberal on February 24, 1941, upon joining the Cabinet.
  4. ^ A. A. MacLeod (Bellwoods) and J. B. Salsberg (St. Andrew) were elected under the Labour ticket, but switched to the new Labor-Progressive Party on its formation shortly after the election.
  5. ^ Morrison Mann MacBride (Brantford) died in June 1938. Mitchell Hepburn (Elgin) opted not to run as a Liberal candidate in 1943.
Seats and popular vote by party
Party Seats Votes Change (pp)
 Progressive Conservative
38 / 90
35.75%
-3.69
 
 Co-operative Commonwealth
34 / 90
31.62%
26.30 26.3
 
 Liberal/Lib-Prog/UFO
15 / 90
30.38%
-20.65
 
 Other
3 / 90
2.41%
-1.96
 


1945 "Gestapo" campaign

[edit]

In the 1945 Ontario election, Drew ran an anti-Semitic, union bashing, Red-baiting campaign.[10] 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.[11] Much of the source material for the anti-CCF campaign came from the Ontario Provincial Police(OPP)'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.[12] 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.[13]

May 24, 1945 radio speech

[edit]

As can be discerned from the previous description, the 1945 campaign was anything but genteel and polite. Jolliffe replied by giving a radio speech (written with the assistance of Lister Sinclair)[14] that accused Drew of running a political Gestapo in Ontario.[10] 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.[10]

It is my duty to tell you that Colonel Drew is maintaining in Ontario, at this very minute, a secret political police, a paid government spy organization, a Gestapo to try and keep himself in power. And Col[onel] Drew maintains his secret political police at the expense of the taxpayers of Ontario – paid out of the Public Funds... Now all through this election campaign, you've been hearing that the real issue is freedom versus dictatorship.... And I quite agree; there certainly is a very grave danger; and when you've heard all the facts, true facts, supported by affidavits, about Col[onel] Drew's Ontario Gestapo – Well, I'll let you decide for yourselves where the danger of dictatorship is coming from.[13]

The dramatic tone of the speech is Sinclair's, as at the time, he was a dramatist, mostly writing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).[14] At the time, there was speculation among CCF supporters as to whether or not the speech damaged the party's reputation. But as Gerald Caplan maintains in his book The Dilemma of Canadian Socialism, the CCF was already at 21 percent in popular support in the Gallop poll just prior to the speech.[15] On election day, they received 22 percent of the popular vote, so at best it added an extra percentage point of support. At worst, it didn't have an effect, which is highly unlikely.

Jolliffe's inflammatory speech became the main issue of the campaign, and dominated coverage in the media for the rest of the election.[16] 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 28, 1945, they appointed a Royal Commission to investigate these charges.[16] Jolliffe's CCF and the Ontario Liberal party wanted the election suspended until the Commission tabled its report. Drew ignored these requests and continued to hold the election on its original date, despite it being many months before the Commission's findings could be made available.[17]

Election Day, June 4, 1945

[edit]

Jolliffe's CCF went from 34 seats to 8, but almost garnering the same number of actual votes cast, though their percentage of the popular vote dropped from 32 to 22 percent.[18] Drew, with his attack campaign, successfully drove the voter turn-out up, thereby driving the CCF's percentage and seat totals down.

Monday, June 4, 1945, was one of Ontario's most important elections in the 20th century according to Caplan and David Lewis. It shaped the province for the next 40 years, as the Conservatives won a massive majority in the Legislature, and would remain in government for the next 40 consecutive years.

After going from 34 seats to 8, as Caplan puts it, "June 4 and June 11 [federal election], 1945, proved to be black days in CCF annuals: Socialism was effectively removed from the Canadian political agenda."[19] The CCF would never fully recover from this defeat and would eventually cease as a party and morph into the Ontario New Democratic Party. Only then, and in the 1970s, did a social democratic party attain the popularity it had under Jolliffe in 1943.

For Ted Jolliffe, another election consequence was his tenure as the MPP from York South ended, at least for the time being. He lost the election but did better than any other CCF candidate in Toronto or in the outlying Yorks.[18]

  Party Leader 1943 Elected % change Popular vote
% change
Progressive Conservative George Drew 38 66 +73.7% 44.3% +8.6%
Liberal Mitchell Hepburn 15 11 -26.7% 29.8% -1.4%
  Liberal-Labour - 3  
Co-operative Commonwealth Ted Jolliffe 34 8 -76.5% 22.4% -9.3%
Labor–Progressive Leslie Morris 2 2 - 2.4%  
  Liberal Independent   1 - -    
Total Seats 90 90 - 100%  

LeBel Royal Commission

[edit]

Drew appointed Justice A.M. LeBel as the Royal Commissioner. His terms of reference were restricted to the question of whether Drew was personally responsible for the establishment of "a secret political police organization, for the purpose of collecting, by secret spying, material to be used in attempt to keep him in power.[20]" Wider questions like why the OPP, Ontario Civil Servants, were keeping files on MPPs were not allowed.

Jolliffe would act as his own counsel throughout the commission, but was assisted by fellow CCF lawyer, Andrew Brewin. Both he and Brewin were able to establish, from several eyewitnesses, that agent D-208, Dempster, was spying on the CCF. What they could not prove, because they did not have access to the information in 1945,[21] were the letters that Drew wrote to his supporter M.A. (Bugsy) Sanderson suggesting that he would finance any lawsuits or other charges stemming from the information provided by Dempster in his advertisements.[22] Sanderson was, in late 1943 to 1945, along with Gladstone Murray, leading the libelous advertisement campaigns against the CCF in newspapers and bill-boards, with information gleaned from Dempster's briefings.[23] Jolliffe presented several witnesses that claimed to have seen these documents. But Jolliffe could not produce the actual letter, and Drew would deny ever writing it.[23]

On October 11, 1945, Justice LeBel issued his report that essentially exonerated Drew and Blackwell.[24] Due to Jolliffe presenting only circumstantial evidence that linked Drew to Dempster, Murray and Sanderson, the Commissioner found the information unconvincing, even though LeBel believed Dempster's interaction with Sanderson and Murray was inappropriate.[25]

Jolliffe's motives regarding his accusations, as well as his choice of words, would be questioned for many years afterwards. That would change. In the late 1970s, when David Lewis was doing research for his Memoirs he came across archival evidence proving the charge.[26] Due to Lewis's discovery, Drew's son Edward, placed extremely restrictive conditions on his father's papers housed in the Public Archives of Canada that continue as of 2010.[27][28]

As Lewis pointed out in his memoirs, "We found that Premier Drew and Gladstone Murray did not disclose all information to the Lebel Commission; indeed, they deliberately prevaricated throughout. The head of the Government of Ontario had given false witness under testimony.... The perpetrator of Ontario's Watergate got away with it."[29]

Jolliffe faced a leadership challenge in 1946, but was re-elected CCF leader.

1948 re-elected MPP

[edit]

As a result of the 1948 Ontario election, the CCF recovered, winning 21 seats. Jolliffe again became Leader of the Opposition in Ontario and Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for York South. In 1951, however, as a result of the Cold War and the "red scare", the CCF and labour movement acted to purge individuals (including CCF MPP Robert Carlin) suspected of being under Communist influence. Among the general public, support for socialism suffered: the CCF was reduced to only two seats in the 1951 election. Jolliffe lost his own seat and resigned as party leader in August 1953 in order to focus on his law practice.[30]

Post MPP career

[edit]

He returned to his previous career as a labour lawyer, founding the firm Jolliffe, Lewis and Osler with fellow CCF activist and future New Democratic Party leader, David Lewis in 1945.[1] In the 1950s and 1960s, the firm assisted the United Steelworkers union in their fight with the Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers union in Sudbury, Ontario. In 1968, he was appointed Chief Adjudicator under the (federal) Public Service Staff Relations Act, a position he held until 1978.[1] He then became active as a labour arbitrator until his retirement. In 1972, an historical novel he wrote, entitled The First Hundred, was published by McClelland and Stewart Limited.

Ted Jolliffe was the first social democratic leader of the opposition in Ontario's Legislature in 1943. He lived long enough to see Bob Rae and the NDP form the Ontario government in September 1990. He died on March 18, 1998, in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.[1]

Electoral record

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1940 Canadian federal election: York East
Party Candidate Votes
  National Government Robert Henry McGregor 16,741
  Liberal Robert Allan Irwin 12,429
  Co-operative Commonwealth Edward Bigelow (Ted) Jolliffe 4,931

Notes

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References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b c d e f g "Jolliffe, Edward Bigelow". The Toronto Star. Toronto: Torstar. 1998-03-24. p. E6.
  2. ^ a b c d e Smith, p. 195
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Star Staff (1945-06-02). "The Man Who Makes the Charges". The Toronto Daily Star. Toronto. p. 4.
  4. ^ Nicol, James Y. (1952-04-15). "Convert Every Worker, Every Farmer, Jolliffe sure CCF to Win Out". The Toronto Daily Star. pp. 1, 9.
  5. ^ "C.C.F. Candidates Brand Philpott's Charges as False: No Link Between C.C.F. and Tim Buck's Group, Says Official Denial--"Low," "Debasing," "Deliberate," Whips Teskey at Liberal". The Globe. 28 September 1935.
  6. ^ "WITH OPPOSITION VOTE SPLIT CONSERVATIVES WIN LOCALLY". The Toronto Daily Star. 1935-10-15. p. 7.
  7. ^ a b "York East Riding: SAYS CONSERVATIVES NEGLECTED SOLDIERS". The Toronto Daily Star. 1940-03-25. p. 8.
  8. ^ "York East Riding: IRWIN BEATEN BUT GLAD LIBERAL VOTE INCREASED". The Toronto Daily Star. 1940-03-27. p. 8.
  9. ^ "Complete Vote Results In Toronto and Yorks". The Toronto Daily Star. 1940-03-27. p. 11.
  10. ^ a b c MacDonald, p.291-297
  11. ^ Caplan, p. 157
  12. ^ Caplan, 182-184,187
  13. ^ a b Caplan, p. 168
  14. ^ a b Caplan, p.179
  15. ^ Caplan, 171
  16. ^ a b Caplan, 170
  17. ^ Caplan, pp.170-171
  18. ^ a b Caplan, p. 191
  19. ^ Caplan, 191
  20. ^ Caplan, p. 171-172
  21. ^ Lewis, p. 276
  22. ^ Caplan, 173
  23. ^ a b Caplan,pp.172-188
  24. ^ The Canadian Press (1945-10-12). "Premier Drew and his government absolved of forming "Gestapo"". The Evening Citizen. Ottawa. p. 13. Retrieved 2011-08-21.
  25. ^ Caplan,pp.181-188
  26. ^ MacDonald, p.295
  27. ^ MacDonald, p.295-296
  28. ^ "George Drew fonds: Call# MG 32-C3" (PDF). Restricted Papers. Library and Archives Canada. 2005-01-04. Retrieved 2007-05-13. When Edward Drew (George's son) dies, these archives will become unrestricted.
  29. ^ Lewis, pp. 276, 287
  30. ^ "Donald MacDonald New Leader of Ontario CCF". Toronto Daily Star. 23 November 1953.

Sources

[edit]
[edit]
Preceded by
none
Leader of the Ontario CCF
1942–1953
Succeeded by
Preceded by Leader of the Opposition in the
Ontario Legislature

1943–1945
Succeeded by
Preceded by Leader of the Opposition in the
Ontario Legislature

1948–1951
Succeeded by