“FEATURE By JANICE HARRIS On the night of Nov. 15, 1980, Effie Jones, now 92, was sitting close by her radio eagerly listening to the civic election returns. And the news that was coming across Was dramatic: not only was Harry Rankin elected at the top of the Polls again, but elected along with him this time were Bruce Eriksen and Bruce Yorke. No less than ten candidates from - the Committee of Progressive Elec- tors were elected, five to school board to make up a first-ever ma- ° jority, two to parks board, and two to accompany Rankin, who, for Over a decade had been COPE’s only elected candidate. “I went wild with joy,’ Effie remembers now. 4 She had good reason to be elated, because it was on the legacy of her. pioneer efforts in the municipal field that COPE’s.elec- toral victory was based. Talking to Effie today in her east end home where she has lived for most of her politically active life, One is immediately struck by her in- terest in people and the countless Memories she has of the cir- cumstances which drew her into their lives, and they into hers. “Effie always dealt with people and their problems, not in an ‘academic way, but in a practical way — because that’s: where her concerns always were,” Harry ‘ Rankin, COPE’s first elected alderman and the first beneficiary of Effie’s legacy, said. ‘She was a shrewd, class con- scious and extremely capable woman,’’ he said, adding that her imaginative and tenacious style of work when fighting against evic- tions, transit hikes and unfair taxes was so. effective that the Non- Partisan Association council members would ‘‘fly in every direc- tion when Effie showed up at city hall. ‘‘She knew the dirt on everyone,”’ he chuckled. Born in 1889, in England, Effie spent a good deal of her childhood in Wales which was then, accor- ding to Effie, ‘still practically a feudal country.” She recalled her first stirring of class consciousness when the major landholder in her village fenced off the common land used by the villagers for grazing their sheep for his own uses. “I thought it was very unfair because he had a huge estate and. Owned pretty well everything anyway, including the mines.” Coupled with another vivid childhood recollection of a choir of unemployed Welsh miners singing for pennies to send back to their - families, she said that “from then — a I knew which class I belonged The destitute situation of the Welsh miners, it turned out, would be similar to that of the thousands of single unemployed men Effie remembered ‘roaming the streets looking for work or something to eat”? during Canada’s depression years. : Effie had immigrated to Canada in 1919 to marry Frank Jones, a telephone lineman. ~ She joined the CCF (the forerun- ner of the New Democratic Party) in 1933 because ‘‘the situation was So desperate and I thought it was a hope.” Around the same time, she Joined the Housewives’ League - and was largely responsible for transforming it into a militant Organization that. mobilized around, among other things, evic- tions, rising food prices, work and Wages for the single unemployed. The fight against evictions lauched Effie as a “‘people’s cham- EFFIE EFFIE JONES . . ONES _ . recalling an historic electi tie on campaign. - COPE’s victory was based on her legacy pion” on the municipal scene. One story she took a great deal of delight in recalling was when she and four other women from the Housewives League occupied city hall until the then NPA mayor, J. W. Cornett ordered the sheriff to put back the furniture of a recently evicted household. Another successful anti-eviction action provided Effie with the supreme pleasure of watching about 200 men and women — ‘some of the ladies were wearing fur coats’? — carry back into a house, at Effie’s request, the funiture of a woman who had been unable to keep up her mortgage payments because of the ill-health of her husband. : “} was so busy I hardly had a chance to eat, there were so many of them (evictions),”’ she recalled. The phone literally rang all the time, prompting Frank to take it offthe hook so she could catch a bit of sleep when she came home. ‘‘Wherever there was an - organization or coalition that took up the fight for people’s rights on a platform of unity, I participated. A member of the CCF for five years, and secretary of one of the largest branches in the South Van- couver area, Effie quit in 1938, disgusted because “‘it wouldn’t unite with anybody on anything.” Shortly afterwards, she joined the Communist Party. . The 1930’s. were grim years, characterized by- political repres- sion and extreme economic hard- ships for working people. According to Effie, there were few effective fight-back organiza- tions, because ‘‘people were so ” “No organization really func- tioned as effectively as the’ Housewive’s League during that time. The powers that be let us alone, though they always had the RCMP come to our meetings.” She laughed when she remembered how she would call at- tention to the seven or eight of them standing in the back of the halls where the League met. She added that the Housewives’ League, far from being closed to men, sought and received their help when they undertook to stave off ‘the sheriff and his ‘‘goons’”’ when they arrived to evict families from their homes. The League, in its turn, sup- ported the 650 single unemployed men during their sit-in at the Van- couver post office and art gallery in 1938, cooking food for them in the kitchen at the Ukrainian Hall. Undoubtedly, the culmination of Effie’s political efforts was her high profile campaign for mayor many years later, in 1947. She had, in the previous years, run for school board — for the first timein _' 1939 — and for alderman on several occasions, and had entered the ’47 elections with the intention of running for alderman again. However, she, along with members of the Civic Reform | Committee — which had coalesced following World War II as a reform alternative to the Non- Partisan Association — decided the time was ripe for a new kind of challenge. Her campaign focused on the seemingly endless round of street car fare hikes granted the privately- owned B.C. Electric Company without a murmur of protest from the NPA city council. The 10 cent fare increase granted by the Public Utilities Commission that election year was the last straw. Effie tapped a wide-spread anti- B.C. Electric sentiment, and it almost propelled her into the mayor’s seat. Her vigorous cam- BUNE PHOTO—FRED WILSON paigning against unjust fare hikes, the monopolistic and arrogant position enjoyed by the corpora- tion and the city council’s obvious partisanship towards the corpora- tion, evident by its failure to contest any of the fare increase applica- tions, captured the imaginations — and the votes — of people all over the city. The slogan for her campaign ‘was, appropriately, ‘‘Clean B.C. Electric politics out of city hall,”’ ‘and the key campaign demand was for the nationalization of the com- y. : “I ran for mayor Vancouver in 1947 and I remember the an- tagonism of the NPA and those -who wererunning against me,”’ Ef- fie recalled. “Tran for mayor really because we need to rally the people around what was happening to them because of the B.C. Electric. They wee increasing the fares continual- y« “The NPA council was letting them have it all their own way and their was nobody to spearhead the fight against the company,’’ she said. It was an exciting race, and a close one. Effie ‘‘Low Fare”’ Jones polled 19,218 votesto NPA incum- bent, George ‘‘High Fare’’ Jones’ 24,135 — less than a 5,000 vote dif- ference. Her campaign was, without a doubt, one of the most imaginative - and the most popular in the history of civic elections in Vancouver. Campaign incidents included the . disappearance of B.C. Electric’s _information bulletin called The Buzzer from the street cars and its replacement with The Buzzard. It contained election material about Effie Jones and asked people to vote for ‘‘Low Fare”’ Jones. “T also remember my husband coming home and telling me that the passengers in the street car he was riding in were beside each other to look out the window. “Tt was a plane pulling behind it a banner that said ‘Vote Effie Jones!”’ : ' John Stanton, Effie’s campaign manager summed up the results on the election in the Pacific Tribune, Dec. 12, 1947. “Effie Jones won a majority of the popular vote. There can’t be any dispute about that. “Discount the multiple and cor- porate vote, allow for the restricted franchise which favors the NPA and the vote for Effie. Jones becomes a majority rejection of the NPA’s entire transportation policy.” On the same night, Effie summ- ed up how she felt about the final tally. “‘The vote indicates that I have carried with big majorities the area — the east end — in which the working people live, in spite of only a two week’s campaign. “This has been a splendid united campaign which has caused the NPA machine to slip several cogs, with not a little consternation about the future.” = Effie continued to fight on issues on the civic scene, in her attempts to make city council more respon- sive to the needs of the poor and working people. In the early ’50s fare increases granted to B.C. Electric became a hot issue again. Effie and the then “brand-new lawyer’’ Harry Ran- kin — he had been admitted to the bar two years earlier — successively had the increase declared illegal by the B.C. Court of Appeal. They argued that the Public Utilities Commission had heard evidence for the increase by B.C. Electric without other concerned parties being present. : Typically, Effie went on, with the help of lawyer Elspeth Gardner to take B.C. Electric to small debts court in order to get the corpora- tion to return the illegal increases collected before the court of appeal made its ruling. Although she didn’t win, Effie showed the kind of pluckiness that had come to be her trademark. Gardner recalled that B.C. Electric was so afraid of Effie’s challenge, that they. sent their senior lawyer, Senator Farris to argue the case. During her. years of political ac- tivity and involvement with people, Effie could be seen and heard throughout the city in any number of capacities around any number |; of issues — as amember of the City Committee of the Communist Par- ty, a spokesperson for the Party’s women’s committee, as the provin- cial organizer of the Housewives League,- president of the Tenants and Owners League, or leader of the civic reform movement. And, of course, she was on the hustings during municipal elections until 1958. She travelled all over the city on a platform of increased civic democracy, affordable housing, tax reforms and the nationalization of B.C. Electric — the kind of - issues that continue to be cham- pioned by COPE. From the stage of the Russian | Peoples’ home where COPE’s sup- porters gathered for the election night returns last year, Harry Rankin fittingly paid tribute to Ef- fie’s pioneering role, as well the work of other pioneer civic ac- tivists. “Our victories are their victories,”’ he said. ‘They laid the basis for unity and made our breakthrough possible tonight.”’ ian ae WAS \ Vancouver lawyer Munro Gardner wheels into Small Debts Court with the weighty documents that she and Effie Jones used in an un- successful effort to compel B.C. Electric to repay the rate in- creases it had illegally obtained from customers. Elspeth PACIFIC- TRIBUNE—MAY'1,'1961 — Page 9.