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 (MLAs) became
Liberal-Progressives aligned with the
Ontario Liberal Party, the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO), as an organization, participated in the formation of the Ontario CCF, and was briefly affiliated with the party. 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. Macphail served as the first chairman of the Ontario CCF from 1932 until 1934. As a UFO Member of Parliament (MP) 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 (
Grey South) and former MLA
Leslie Warner Oke (
Lambton East) under the UFO banner rather than with the CCF (though Oke was also endorsed by 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 (MPP) 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Election Day, June 4, 1945 Jolliffe's CCF went from 34 seats to 8, but almost garnered the same number of votes cast, though their percentage of the popular vote dropped from 32 to 22 percent. A Gallup poll done a month earlier showed the CCF at essentially the same percentage, making it questionable whether or not the "Gestapo" speech had an effect on the campaign. Drew, with his attack campaign, successfully drove the voter turn-out up, thereby driving the CCF's percentage and seat totals down. Nineteen forty-five 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–most of that time with majority governments until the mid-1970s. For 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.
LeBel Royal Commission On May 28, Drew appointed Justice A.M. LeBel as the
Royal Commissioner, thereby forming what has become known as the
LeBel Royal Commission. 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." Wider questions like why the OPP, Ontario civil servants, were keeping files on MPPs were not allowed. Jolliffe acted as his own counsel throughout the commission, but was assisted by fellow CCF lawyer,
Andrew Brewin. 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, 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. Sanderson was, in late 1943 to 1945, along with Gladstone Murray, leading the libellous advertisement campaigns against the CCF in newspapers and billboards, with information gleaned from Dempster's briefings. Jolliffe presented several witnesses that claimed to have seen these documents. But Jolliffe could not produce the letter, and Drew denied ever writing it. On October 11, 1945, Justice LeBel issued his report that essentially exonerated Drew and Blackwell. Because Jolliffe presented 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. Jolliffe's motives regarding his accusations, and his choice of words, were questioned for many years afterwards. In the late 1970s, when
David Lewis was doing research for his
Memoirs, he came across archival evidence proving the charge. Because of Lewis's discovery, Drew's son Edward, placed extremely restrictive conditions on his father's papers housed in the
Public Archives of Canada. 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."
1945 election aftermath After the LeBel Report was published, the Ontario CCF still had to go on with the business of running the party, and hold its annual convention. It had been over 18 months since the previous provincial convention was held. The convention was held from Thursday, November 22, to Saturday, November 24 at the Toronto Labor Lyceum on Spadina Avenue. After that, the party's establishment candidates held on to their positions: University of Toronto professor,
George Grube remained as president, while Jolliffe remained leader. In 1946, there was major labour strife in Ontario, and the CCF made it clear they were on the side of the unionists. The party's annual convention was held outside of Toronto for the first time. The convention was held at the Royal Connaught Hotel in
Hamilton, Ontario from December 9–11, 1946, the city where the
United Steelworkers of America (USWA) went through a long protracted strike about reducing the work-week to 40 hours. Jolliffe faced a leadership challenge at this convention from former Toronto
Controller
Lewis Duncan. There were rumblings in 1945 that Duncan would take over from Jolliffe, but that was rumoured to be only if he were able to defeat Drew in the High Park constituency, which he failed to do. As party chairman
John Mitchell stated at the time, it wasn't even close, as Jolliffe was easily re-elected CCF leader again for the fourth time. The CCF were able to rebound from their previous dismal election performance in 1945, and this time managed to get 21 members elected, including Jolliffe in York South, to again form the Official Opposition. The real surprise was that Premier Drew lost his seat, even though his Progressive Conservatives won a majority. In his High Park constituency, Drew was up against his local nemesis
William (Bill) Temple. Temple was a
temperance campaigner and made Drew's cocktail bar legislation the main campaign issue. Temple castigated Drew for softening Ontario's liquor laws, claiming the Premier was the captive of "liquor interests" because of the government's decision to allow liquor sales in cocktail bars.
1951 election disaster and its aftermath The CCF's return to popularity was short-lived because of the prosperity of the 1950s and the
anti-Communist hysteria of the
Cold War. This rapid decline in their popularity reduced the party to two seats in the
1951 election and allowed the
Ontario Liberal Party to become the Official Opposition. No social democratic party would be the Official Opposition again until
1975, when Stephen Lewis's NDP displaced the Liberals as the second party in the
Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Beginning with the 1951 provincial campaign, the
Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) played an increased role in the Ontario CCF by lending it organizational, personnel and material support. The increasing role of the trade union leadership in the party was unpopular with some activists like MPP Bill Temple. Temple did not stop from making trouble for the establishment, when he ran for party president, and almost won. and spent the next years rebuilding the party, from two seats when he took over the party's helm, to three in his first election and then five in 1959. Delegates from the Ontario CCF, delegates from affiliated union locals, and delegates from New Party Clubs took part in the founding convention of the New Democratic Party of Ontario held in Niagara Falls at the Sheraton Brock Hotel from 7–9 October 1961 and elected MacDonald as their leader. The Ontario CCF Council ceased to exist on Sunday, 8 October 1961, when the newly elected NDP executive officially took over. The rebuilding process continued under Macdonald who led a 20-person caucus by the time he stepped down in 1970. ==Election results==