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50 YEARS AGO

Some of the scores of labor papers — including at top left, the Industrial
News, launched a century ago — that are part of British Columbia's tradi-
tion of working class journalism. The photo is from 1937.

In half a century of publication, the Pacific Tribune has been denounced from the
floor of the legislature, sued for libel, censored and finally refused by its printer and
supressed by the federal government. From all these assaults on freedom of the
press, a cherished freedom about which the daily press was silent when it was banned

in 1940, it has emerged triumphant.

During this same half century, two Vancouver dailies, the Vancouver News-Herald and the
Vancouver Times have folded, ownership of the Vancouver Sun and The Province now gives the
Southam interests a daily press monopoly in the city and merger of the Victoria Times and the
Victoria Colonist into the Times-Colonist has created another monopoly in the capital.

Yet, with meagre financial resources and scant advertising revenue, the Pacific Tribune has
survived where the giants have perished. From the struggles for work and wages, against
fascism, in the first great depression of the Thirties to the struggles for peace and jobs in the
second great depression of the Eighties, its steadfast adherence to the socialist principles of its
founding have won it the dedicated support of three generations of readers who have raised
millions of dollars to ensure its continued publication.

The tradition of a newspaper espousing a cause and fighting for the people’s interests is as old
as British Columbia. Amor De Cosmos, who became the second premier after Confederation,
started it with the British Colonist he founded in 1858 to oppose the autocratic colonial regime
of Governor James Douglas. John McLaren, editor of the Cariboo Sentinel and, like De
Cosmos, a leading figure in the Confederation League, continued it as the champion of the

Cariboo gold miners.

Even before Vancouver was incor-
porated as a city in 1886, the tradition was
taking new shape among the working
people of the province. This 50th anniver-
sary year of the Pacific Tribune is also the
centenary of the first labor paper, the Indus-
trial News, published by the Knights of
Labor in Victoria, the first issue of which
appeared on Dec. 26, 1885.

After the Industrial News, which lasted
two years and attained a circulation of
around 1,000, many labor and socialist
papers came and went. Some, like the Indus-
trial World in Rossland, official organ of the
Western Federation of Miners, and the
Independent, supported by the Vancouver
Trades and Labor Council, were predomi-
nantly union papers. Others, like the West-
ern Clarion, established by a merger of the
Clarion in Nanaimo and the Western Social-
ist in Vancouver, advocated the policies of
the old Socialist Party of Canada.

As The Advocate, one of the Pacific Trib-
une’s forerunners, was to be during the
Second World War, the Western Clarion
was banned during the First World War,
reappearing as the Red Flag and then the
Indicator.

By far the most successful and influential
of the labor papers, whatever their political
coloration, which published for a few
months or a few years before the B.C.
Workers’ News appeared, were the B.C.
Federationist, published jointly by the B.C.
Federation of Labor and Vancouver Labor
Council, and the Commonwealth, which
drew its support from the CCF but was
privately owned by Bill Pritchard through
his majority share control of the Common-
wealth Printing and Publishing Company.

Like the Commonwealth and the B.C.
Workers’ News two decades later, the B.C.
Federationist was born at the onset of one of
the economic crises inherent in the capitalist
system. Founded as the Western Wage-
Earner, the first issue under the new name
on Nov. 2, 1912 set the militant tone the

14 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 1, 1985

By HAL GRIFFIN

paper would maintain until its decline in the
postwar years.

It championed ‘the cause of the Van-
couver Island coal miners, then two months
into their historic two-year strike. It called
for action to relieve growing unemploy-
ment, reporting that half the city’s building
trades workers had no work.

“Soup kitchens in Vancouver, the last
word in poverty, miserty and squalor. A
Cordova Street restaurant advertises a free
bowl of soup on a cotton sign,” wrote
George Bartley, prioneer printer, editor
— he was editor of the Independent — and
labor historian, in the Apr. 10, 194 issue.
“...Workers wanted indeed — with thou-
sands now walking the streets lacking food
and shelter and thousands more silently
starving. . :Everyone knows that business is
practically at a standstill and the sooner
people outside know it, the better. It’s no
use living in a fool’s paradise, pretending
that things are ‘going good’ when they are
emphatically not...”

The B.C. Federationist campaigned
vigorously for workmen’s compensation
and votes for women, both of which were
won after defeat of the corrupt McBride-
Bowser government in the 1916 provincial
election. And it was threatened by the cen-
sor for its strong campaign against con-
scription although, unlike the Western
Clarion, it was not banned.

The Commonwealth, launched in 1933,
barely outlasted the B.C. Workers’ News’
first year of publication. At the height of its
influence it had a circulation of 21,000,
including 1,200 in Saskatchewan, and was
selling shares to launch a daily.

The issue on which the Commonwealth
foundered was control of the paper and the
developing split in the CCF, which had
elected its first seven members to the legisla-
ture in 1933. Pritchard held 10,000 A shares,

which carried three to one voting rights over
B shares in the Commonwealth Printing
and Publishing Company sold to CCF sup-
porters. This gave Pritchard a majority con-
trol he was loath to relinquish, for he
envisaged himself in much the same rela-
tionship to the CCF as Odhams Press after
it took over the London Daily Herald to the
British Labor Party, submitting only editor-
ials for scrutiny to the party.

The paper’s staff wanted 5,000 of Prit-
chard’s 10,000 A shares transferred to the
CCF to be vested in the provincial president
and under pressure Pritchard made state-
ments creating the impression that this had
been done. In fact, it never war.

Finally, to force the issue, the staff went
public over Dr. Lyle Telford’s popular
radio program. I wrote the statement that
Don Maxwell, killed in Italy during the
Second World War, read over Telford’s
program. The next morning Pritchard fired
both of us and the majority of the staff
walked out in our support.

It was the beginning of the end for the
Commonwealth. The nearly bankrupt paper
languished for a few months, but shorn of
CCF support it had cut its own roots. The
final chapter was written in the 1937 provin-
cial election after Rev. Robert Connell, the

CCF leader, and three of the MLAs, Jack ©

Price, R. B. Swailes and Ernest Bakewell,
broke with the CCF, formed the Social
Constructives and ran 14 candidates,
including Pritchard. All were defeated and
the CCF returned to the new legislature with
the same number of seats it held in the old.

With the Commonwealth gone, the CCF
launched a new weekly, the Federationist,
edited by Barry Mather, But it lacked the
earlier crusading vigor of the Commonwealth
and its stand on the issues of the day
had none of the forthrightness and mil-
itancy of the B.C. Workers’ News, which
surpassed it in circulation.

The B.C. Workers’ News — it became

the People’s Advocate on Apr. 2, 1937 and
The Advocate on Sept. 1, 1939 — fought on
every issue from jobs for the unemployed to
support for the Spanish Loyalists fighting
Franco’s fascists in Spain. It chronicled the
On-To-Ottawa Trek in 1935 and the Post
Office Sitdown of 1938 and its headline on
the ‘Bloody Sunday’, June 19 — ‘30,000 at
dock as boys go’ give the lie to Margaret
Ormsby’s claim in her British Columbia: A
History that only 2,000 were there. And as
Hitler continued his march to the east
through Austria, the Sudeten and Czech-
oslovakia and the threat of world war drew
closer, the paper’s headlines reflected the
reality that western governments concealed
with declamations about peace — ‘Cham-
berlain’s policies leading to war’ and ‘Plans
of Munichmen exposed by Molotov’. They
have stood the test of history.

With the outbreak of war, the paper
entered on the most difficult period in its
history. The advocates of appeasement, the
apologists for fascism suddenly became
anti-fascists, although nonetheless vitriolic
in their denunciation of the Soviet Union
for the pact with Nazi Germany through
which it thwarted the grand imperialist
design for which Austria and Czechoslova-
kia had been sacrificed to embroil the Soviet
Union in war with Germany.

The Vancouver Sun called the pact “the
most outstanding example of double-
dealing and chicanery modern times have
seen.” The Federationist said, ““We would
go further than that...and say’ it is a
betrayal of the working class of the world.”
Those statements have not stood the disclo-
sures of history.

When the Soviet Union and Finland
went to war after Finland had rejected
Soviet proposals for territorial exchange
and financial compensation as_ being
“inconsistent with Finland’s policy of strict
neutrality,’ Angus McInnis, MP for Van-

see ‘30s page I5