The Great Deception Chapter 7. The Great Bipartisan Cover-Up.
The CCF, NDP, Progressives and Conservatives put their differences aside to stuff their radical past and KKK collaboration down the "memory hole"
As we’ve seen in previous chapters, some of the most significant political figures in the history of both the NDP and the Progressive Conservatives, two of Canada’s major political parties, have an embarrassing history they would rather not discuss. That includes national leaders of both parties. The founding leaders of the CCF - J.S. Woodsworth, M.J. Coldwell, Tommy Douglas and William Irvine, all from Western Canada, all supported eugenics.
Yet, if you go to the “Our Founders” section of the Douglas Coldwell Layton Foundation – their biographies are a whitewash of history. The foundation claims Woodsworth “became aware of the desperate poverty faced by many working class immigrants, and he expressed this with passion in several books including Strangers Within Our Gates,” when the book promoted residential schools and made sweeping, racist generalizations. The foundation’s biography omits M. J. Coldwell’s participation with the Progressive Party and the 1929 election in Saskatchewan entirely, when the Progressives were collaborating with the KKK. The foundation mentions that Tommy Douglas’ wrote a Master’s Thesis, but is silent on its subject, forced sterilization and eugenics.
This history is also deeply uncomfortable for two Conservative Prime Ministers from Western Canada: R.B Bennett, who was told that he had KKK MPs, and John Diefenbaker, who was a Conservative candidate for MLA in Saskatchewan in the 1929 Election, when the Conservatives were supported by the KKK.
The people who were implicated in these radical politics included Premiers, Members of Parliament, Members of the legislature, Mayors, City Councillors and Church Ministers in 1930s Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC.
The NDP and Conservatives and their allied parties, including Social Credit, PC, UCP, Reform have dominated provincial politics in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba for decades.
It’s one thing for one political party to cover something up. But what’s happened is that both parties have been guilty, so both have stayed silent about it. They all have a mutual interest in letting the dead past bury its dead, because both the NDP, Conservatives and Progressive parties share the same shameful past – endorsing eugenics and sterilization and collaborating with the Ku Klux Klan to win elections in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and spreading those ideas across Canada.
A conspiracy of silence: Bad Acts and Guilty Minds
There is a thought experiment known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s used to demonstrate something called “game theory”, one of the ideas being around how people make decisions and can co-operate with one another even when they can’t communicate. The premise is as follows.
Two suspects are arrested on suspicion of committing a crime together and are put in separate cells. They each have two options: rat the other out, or staying quiet.
If you rat your partner out, and they stay quiet, you will go free while they will go away for three years.
If you stay quiet, and your partner rats you out, they go free, and you go away for three years.
If you both rat each other out, you each spend two years in jail. If you both stay silent, you will each serve one year on a lesser charge.
The idea is that – among other things – it shows how people can coordinate and cooperate with one another based on mutual interest, without even communicating.
This conspiracy of silence explains what has happened in Canada between Conservatives and the NDP.
Instead of calling each other out, or holding each other to account over their questionable judgment in collaborating with Ku Klux Klan organizers to win elections, two parties that are supposed to be political opposites of left and right end up collaborating to cover for each other.
When people say “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” they don’t mean the cover-up is worse than the crime - it’s the cover-up that gets people caught. When they cover up, it shows they’re trying not to get caught.
A crime requires both a bad act and a guilty mind. A bad act alone can be a mistake, an error in judgment, or a decision made without the facts. The cover-up proves the guilty mind – because it shows they know they’ve done wrong.
When M. J. Coldwell was provided with a list of all the people in Regina who were in the KKK, including Conservatives but, he didn’t disclose it or publicize it - he destroyed it. It was stuffed down the memory hole. In 1929, Coldwell was a Progressive, in a campaign where the KKK was collaborating with Conservatives and Progressives as well.
Coldwell and Douglas were also responsible for ignoring and suppressing progressive economic policies. They were both fiscal conservatives - and consistently pushed the party away from more progressive economic policies, and to push “progressives” out of the way.
Tommy Douglas was chosen by J.S. Woodsworth to suppress the “leftists” in CCF youth in 1934.
In the 1935 federal election, when Douglas sought Alberta Social Credit Premier Bill Eberhart’s endorsement, and his campaign organized a sham Social Credit meeting to endorse him, more left-leaning members of CCF, like George Williams demanded that candidates who received Social Credit endorsements be removed as CCF candidates.
While other candidates were kicked off the ballot, Coldwell intervened to protect Douglas.
In 1944, when Douglas ran as Leader of the Saskatchewan CCF, he attacked the Liberal government for debt, and ran the government as a fiscal conservative, something made considerably easier because the Federal Government was running debt forgiveness programs for farmers, and oil was discovered in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
The practice of continually pushing the CCF/NDP to the right economically has continued through its history - and economic policy is what shapes societies.
Tommy Douglas asked for the Coldwell-Douglas foundation to be created as “Tommy’s Dream”. On its tenth anniversary, Douglas gave an interview to the Regina Leader-Post for August 5, 1981.
“What started as a modest retirement gesture for Tommy Douglas. has grown into a national organization with international scope and total cash investment assets worth $250.000.
The Douglas-Coldwell Foundation. established at the request of Douglas when he stepped down after 27 years leading either the provincial or federal wings of the CCF-NDP. is an organization separate from the party, but serving as an intellectual stimulant for the democratic socialist movement
The foundation draws its name from Douglas and M. J. Coldwell, both former federal party leaders.
It came as a result of Douglas insisting that the party not buy him an elaborate gift to commemorate his retirement as federal leader in 1971. Instead, Douglas asked the party to create a body that would study issues and serve as a focus of intellectual activity which the party might be able to draw upon.
"The party wanted to buy me a house or a car when I retired, but I said no, that we should look at something that would be of more real value." Douglas said in a telephone interview Monday from his summer retreat in the Quebec Gatineau Hills. The foundation was set up with very little capital, but has been built up and I would have to say that I am greatly encouraged by its progress."
Maplewashing Provincial History
A Montreal activist named Luke Savage has written of “Maplewashing” to describe the erasure of Canada’s racist past, or the idea that Canada is exceptional in some way.
Canada is different from other countries in at least one, very important way that is not recognized for the impact it has on our lives. Canada is one of the most decentralized countries in the world.
What that means, in real terms, is that provincial governments are more powerful, and have more responsibilities as compared to the federal government, than most other countries. The Federal Government doesn’t actually deliver most services that affect people’s lives in Canada. Provincial governments run almost everything. That includes human and civil rights, birth, marriage and death certificates, roads, education, health care, child and family services, justice systems, municipalities and police forces and natural resources.
So, while there is no denying the appalling decision of the Liberal government of Mackenzie King to turn away Jewish refugees fleeing in Europe, or the Federal role in Residential Schools, many terrible decisions in Canada were decisions made by provincial governments, who actually make most of the decisions about all the systems that affect your life.
The reality in our history is that means there are horrific injustices - for which provincial governments and the politicians who run them are entirely responsible for all the choices made, like decades of forced sterilization or the creation of child welfare systems that are considered the successors to Residential schools.
NDP and CCF apologists and historians often try to diminish Douglas’ views on eugenics by arguing other prominent Canadians supported eugenics too. That is a moral cop-out. Only BC and Alberta passed eugenics bills - there was opposition to such bills elsewhere across Canada. At the core of eugenics is a totalitarian impulse and total control – that for one group to secure permanent power, others must be robbed of their ability to reproduce. It is an essentialist view of human beings that asserts that people are destined by genetics to be unequal. It stands in total opposition to individual rights that define liberalism, freedom, and respect for rights in a free and democratic society.
There is a saying that the political spectrum is not a line, it is a circle, and if you go far enough left or right, they meet.
These policies had real harm. Thousands of people were sterilized, in part because of the work of CCF Founders JS Woodsworth, William Irvine and certainly by Bill Aberhart and the Social Credit Government, which endorsed Tommy Douglas.
The reality is that there were people who resisted and vocally opposed eugenics, which is why it was not law everywhere in Canada. In Manitoba, there were multiple attempts throughout the 1930s to introduce sterilization legislation, and they never passed.
As reported in the December 3, 1940 Winnipeg Free Press - when Canada was already at war, K.C. Sexsmith, Conservative MLA for Portage la Prairie, argued that Manitoba should adopt a sterilization bill. He had the backing of two other Conservative MLAs, Dr. J.S. Poole of Beautiful Plains, and Dr. E.J. Rutledge of Minnedosa.
The December 3, 1940, edition of the Winnipeg Tribune shows that the suggestion met stiff opposition from the Manitoba Liberal MLA from Iberville - WWI veteran, and lawyer, J.S. “Bud” Lamont - my grandfather.
Sexsmith argued sterilization would save money and argued that Lamont hadn’t read the legislation from other provinces.
Lamont responded:
“We’ve got along without sterilization for hundreds of thousands of years, and we can get along with it for a while longer…. This is still a democracy, and 51 percent of the people are not entitled to govern the remaining 49 percent. The element of individual freedom still counts for something… Doctors always resent anybody else talking on these matters. Sterilization may be a medical matter but its effects create a social problem.”
He went on:
“The principal argument in favour of it [sterilization] was that ensuing generations would be perfect. “How do we know that? An idiot may be born in a royal palace, and a Lincoln in a log cabin. We can’t generalize.”
I never met my grandfather. He died before I was born. My grandfather’s critiques of eugenics were based on what was self-evidently true according to science, ethics, rights, and democracy. He recognized that there must be essential limits on the power of the state to take away the rights of individuals – limits that eugenicists and collectivists on the right and left both always ignored: because they want to control you. And they do.
All these events had a direct impact on today’s politics - not just the legacies of political party’s policies, on eugenics, residential schools, forced sterilizations and social policy that has continued to this day. These issues decided elections, and ruined lives.
Eugenics were not just “unscientific” opinions – they were conspiracy theories, based in pseudoscience, held by religious zealots, who wanted to blame the ills of the world on “the other.” – Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and the politicians who sided with them. Conspiracies have many characteristics, but one defining feature is that everything is someone else’s fault. The righteous conspiracy theorist will never admit blame because they have never done anything wrong. Everything is always someone else’s fault. That’s one of the reasons conspiracy theories can be corrosive to democracy – they are a dark mirror to reality, but they always fix blame unfairly.
Accountability is essential to the functioning of democracy, and conspiracy theories are dangerous not just because they are wrong or deluded, but because they are horrifically unjust, because they shift the blame from the perpetrator to the victim.
If someone is incapable of admitting something wrong – even a historical wrong - how can they be trusted to make it right? We still need our politics to be based on something more than conspiracy theories and deception. We need policies to be informed by ethics, and evidence – and there have always been voices of reason and sense and compassion, even when they did not prevail.
In 1907, as J.S. Woodsworth was repeating racist stereotypes being passed off as research, Dr. Peter Bryce was using data to disprove them, and pleading action on what he considered a national crime.
Bryce recognized that First Nations children were dying, not because they were inferior, but because they were being treated worse by the governments because of the perception that they were inferior.
In the 1920s, when Alberta was passing sterilization laws and the Saskatchewan Conservatives were in bed with the Ku Klux Klan, Jimmy Gardiner and others stood up against them, for democracy and rights.
Sadly, neither Bryce nor Gardiner prevailed. Their warnings weren’t heeded.
The KKK thrived on the fear people felt in the 1920s that they were going to be replaced.
The same existential fears are fuelling conspiracy theory and division today – “replacement theory”. The seeds of fear and hate find fertile soil in economic distress and the sense that things are getting worse and worse.
History is our guide. We have been here before – and through worse – and we can emerge from it again for the better – perhaps, this time, with something closer to justice. A focus on historic justice and the law – and not just politics – makes a difference to the histories we tell.
Because there are more recent tragedies - even crises that are happening right now - that are being ignored just as the rest of these issues were.
