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A look back at the first coalition gov't

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EYOND the hullaballoo that the ambitious provincial
Tory leader, Vic Stephens, is doing his best to drum up,

' there is throughout the province a quiet acceptance of the
_ fact that his charge of a deal between the federal Conser-
_ vatives and the provincial Socreds to deliver their respective
_ votes May 10 and May 22 is true.

After all it is fairly basic to B.C. politics that with the NDP

holding down better than 40 percent of the popular vote, the
/ right wing vote must be: almost completely united behind
‘ Social Credit to keep the social democrats out of office.

~~ By Fred: Wilson”

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| Hence the “moneyed interests’? Stephens talks about
/ engineering the ‘ back room deals’’ to bury the provincial -
’ Tory party on the threat that if the Tories fail to guarantee a
solid Socred vote in the provincial election, money and sup-

rt for the federal Tories will dry up on the eve of the

| federal election.

And didn’t Bennett know it when he made his seemingly

‘untimely election cali. It was exactly the kind of

machiavellian ploy mastered by Bennett Sr. over 20 years of
Social Credit reign in B.C., and by Tory and Liberal power-

’ prokers for ten years prior to that.

There has been a ‘‘deal’”’ to rule B.C. for more than 37
years. Its objective has been nothing less than the uninter-

_ rupted rule of the corporate interests for which Vic Stephens
and his Liberal counterpart have been sacrificed. This deal |
- embraces almost a whole class, once divided along traditional
’ Liberal and Conservative lines, bringing federal Liberals and

Tories together in a coalition for their joint domination over

B.C. politics, although it has never been much of a secret

that it is the Tories who are the real power. .
The coalition’s goal of continuous rule wasn’t achieved,

’ even if it did take 30 years to break its grip on government
’ for a short three years. But it could have ended much earlier,

and possibly even averted altogether, had it been challenged
by a coalition of peoples’ forces. It could have been, but it

. was not, due to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation
_ (CCF) which chose instead to spurn unity and attack its class
" allies as enemies — a tendency which also found reflection in

accomodation to the capitalist policies of the coalition. Near-

ly 40 years later, the lessons are yet to be learned and the

CCF’s successors still consider that they alone are the alter-
native to the coalition,
According to one source, the deal was first struck

/ December 10, 1941, at Government House in Victoria over
’ tea and hors d’ouvres. All of the niceties of a Victorian tea
| party, however, betrayed the serious matter which brought
’ together the dozen or so eminences of B.C. political and

business life. Included in the party was the right honorable

) John Hart, recently named premier of B.C. by his Liberal

caucus after the resignation of Duff Patullo; Conservative

party luminaries R. L. Maitland, Herbert Anscomb and R.

Bruhn. And rounding out the party were William Wood-
ward, the department store man and bank director who lat-
terly dabbled in public life as the lieutenant-governor, and

_ p’Alton Coleman, vice-president of the Canadian Pacific

Railway.
The business at hand was important as business itself. On-
ly two months earlier the Liberals had barely scraped

through a provincial election to form a minority government

_ of 21 members. Second place fell to a growing CCF which

took 14 members. But what really worried the guardians of
the public peace was the 33.6 percent of the popular vote

taken by the CCF, more than the Liberals’ 32.94 percent and
e Tories’ 30.9 percent.

Hence the deal. which early in 1942 ushered in the coalition
government. The rationalization was a united war effort, but
the reality was the relative strength of the parties and the fear
that the privileged seats of Woodward and Coleman and
friends were in jeopardy. Hart threw a sop-to CCF leader
Harold Winch to join in the new and holy alliance against
fascism, but Winch obligingly declined. All that remained
was for Hart to re-divide the cabinet seats, granting three to
the Tories. Tory leader Maitland was given the weighty posi-
tion of attorney general.

The new majority went right back to work, helped out by
the enormous boost that the war effort gave to the B.C.
economy, doubling gross production between 1940 and 1945.
The CCF apparently had little to complain about as the coali-
fon transformed the “‘howling socialist wolves into woolly
pink sheep.” ‘‘On more than one occasion, the Hart govern-
ment ‘jumped the gun’ on CCF ‘socialism’ by cancelling out
the noisy CCF fulminations with practical measures,’ Tom
McEwen commented in these pages in 1945.

But by 1945 when the coalition prepared for its first elec-
toral test, lots had changed. The war was ending and the
boom period with it, while thousands of veterans were retur-
ning home looking for work. The labor movement, largely
under the dynamic leadership of the Communists, had
become aroused and had vastly increased its membership and
influence. The B.C. Federation of Labor was formed in 1944
with Communists Harvey Murphy and Harold Pritchett in
the leadership. Still underground in 1941, the Communists
had emerged as a legal political force again in the Labor Pro-
gressive Party and were winning significant public support.

As the election approached the LPP offered to reach an
“electoral arrangement’’ with the CCF to put up only a

Maitland even as half as united as are the latter, the people of
B.C. could win the most emphatic and significant victory
ever won in Canada. This is what organized labor has re-
quested. This, in my judgement, is what the overwhelming
majority of rank and file voters want.’”.

None of it was obvious to the CCF, however, and the
Coalition romped home victorious. The CCF actually lost
votes over [941 while the LPP’s 21 candidates, led by its new
leader, Nigel Morgan, took a respectable 5.1 percent of the
vote where it ran, and 3.5 percent overall.

Simple addition of the CCF and LPP vote wouldn’t have
made much difference, but the lack of unity ‘‘undermined
the spirit and heart of the people,’’ Morgan said, *‘They

could see no attainable alternative to the coalition.”’

The election results would have a ‘‘terrible impact’’ on the
CCF, Morgan predicted election night, and the following
years bore out his prognostication. The weakened CCF was
less an opposition than before and, endemically, attempted
to make up for its set back by ‘tmoderating”’ its policies.

Late in 1947 the coalition underwent a succession in
leadership with a Liberal convention naming Byron ‘*Boss”’
Johnson as new party leader and premier. Earlier in the year
a Tory convention had named Herbert Anscomb their chief,
replacing the retired Maitland. Anscomb defeated the highly
ambitious Tory MLA from Kelowna, W.A.C. Bennett who
had earned a name for. his advocacy of turning the coalition
into a new, monolithic ‘‘free enterprise’ party.

Months later, in April, 1949, Johnson announced that the
coalition would seek another mandate in June. Even without
the new sales tax it had acumulated a $4 million surplus — ‘‘a
big pork barrel to bribe the voters’’, labor spokesmen decried
it — and it promised a $90 million development program.

The pork barrel rolled right over the CCF in the June elec-
tion as the social democrats, who had by then joined
wholeheartedly in the growing cold war, looked increasingly
similar to their coalition opponents. The CCF was reduced to
only seven members, but they couldn’t blame the LPP which
ran only Nigel Morgan in Alberni. Z

The coalition, however, was less healthy than its electoral
success indicated. The Liberal and Tory factions were in-
creasingly less united as the CCF challenge ebbed and each
looked to its own self interest. Liberal discontents charged
that the Tories were determining policy; Tory dissidents were
fed up with the coalition arrangement which granted the
premiership and the majority position in perpetuity to the
Liberals. And the public was becoming fed up with both par-
ties defending the single government’s actions, long after
they supposedly buried their differences for the holy mission
of the war.

Public credibility with the coalition continued to drop
through 1950 and 1951, especially after the July 1, 1951, in-
creases in hospital insurance premiums, raising annual
premiums by more than 50 percent and adding a new per day
hospital fee. Dissafected Liberals and Tories were beginning
to desert the ship, led by W.A.C. Bennett who took the

hospital insurance debate in March, 1951, as his cue to walk |

across the floor and sit as an independent. There was a
tremendous cry from both parties to dissolve the coalition,
and in early 1952, Johnson responded by firing the Tories
from his cabinet and dissolving the first coalition government
which for ten years had held the fort for B.C.’s business
establishment.

The election was set for June, 1952, but before meeting
each other in battle, the Liberals and Tories first ensured the
passage of the last and perhaps most important legislation to
originate from coalition: the election act amendments to pro-
vide a system of preferential balloting. The new weird system
would require a clear majority to elect an MLA. If no can-
didate received a majority on the first count, the ballots of
the last candidate would be recounted with the ‘‘second

choices” allotted accordingly to the remaining candidates. If ©

there still was not a majority for any candidate, the process
would be repeated with the next to last candidate and so on.

“It was designed primarly to confuse the electorate and is
based on the phoney assumption that democracy, like eggs,

The leaders of the first, second and third coalition governments: John Hart and Byron “Boss” Johnson; W.A.C.
Bennett; and Bill Bennett.

single labor candidate against each coalition candidate, but
the CCF rejected the proposition out of hand. ‘‘The CCF
leaders claim that they alone are the alternative to the coali-
tion,’’ newly elected LPP provincial organizer, Maurice
Rush explained in October, ‘‘In the last provincial election
the CCF elected with an overall majority in only one seat,
Vancouver East. In every other seat where they were*elected
it was the result of a split vote between Liberals and Conser-
vatives. This time the CCF is faced by a combination of both
parties... :

“Is it not obvious that the only way labor can possibly
hope to defeat the coalition of big business is by a coalition
of its own which would embrace all progressive groups, in-
cluding CCF, LPP, Peoples CCF and labor organizations.”

On the eve of the election, Vancouver Sun columnist
Elmore Philpott, generally a CCF supporter, wrote, “‘If
Harold Winch and Nigel Morgan faced Messrs. Hart and

can be graded A-B-C,’’ Tom McEwan attempi-d to explain
prior to the vote.

The coalitionists, of course, were counting on the
preferential ballot to prevent the CCF, which was again
resurgent as the coalition fell into disrepute, from capitaliz-
ing on their split vote to form a government. Liberals would
vote Tory as their second preference and Tories would
choose Liberals on the second option, the theory went, and
the CCF would be frozen out.

There were two factors, however, that Johnson and
Anscomb left out of their thinking. One was the possibility
that a strong, issue orientated CCF campaign could isolate
the Tories and pick up a large number of Liberal
“‘seconds’’. That, with any co-operation between the CCF

see SOCREDS pg. 13
PACIFIC TRIBUNE—APRIL 27, 1979— Page 9

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