Spartacist Canada No. 174	Fall 2012

The Communist Party of Canada and the Quebec National Question

Part One: The 1920s

We print below the first part of an edited presentation by comrade Charles Galarneau at the Twelfth National Conference of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, held in the summer of 2011. The presentation was part of a panel on the stance of the Canadian left toward the Quebec national question from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Inspired by the Russian workers revolution of October 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) was founded in 1921. Its clear intent was to build a Bolshevik vanguard organization on Lenin’s model, in order to lead a workers revolution to victory. Much of the party’s work in its early years was powerful and even admirable. A useful account of this history is provided by Ian Angus in Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada (1981). However, these early pioneers of revolutionary Marxism failed to grapple with the national question in this country, i.e., the oppression of Quebec in an Anglo-dominated Canada.

Crucial to the Bolsheviks’ victory in the 1917 Revolution was their defense of the right to self-determination for the many nationalities trapped in the tsarist “prison house of peoples.” This was an integral part of the Bolsheviks’ struggle for world socialist revolution leading to a communist society in which the rise of international productive forces brings about the dissolution of all nation-states. The Bolsheviks could not have won influence over Russia’s multinational working class, to say nothing of the urban petty bourgeoisie and rural peasant masses, without being the best champions of the just causes of the myriad oppressed nationalities of the Russian empire. This was particularly true during World War I (1914-18), when most of the “official” socialist parties descended into the grossest national chauvinism, backing their own ruling classes in the first great interimperialist conflict.

The Bolshevik position on the national question was summed up by Lenin in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914):

“In this situation, the proletariat of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognise, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession. And at the same time, it is their task, in the interests of a successful struggle against all and every kind of nationalism among all nations, to preserve the unity of the proletarian struggle and the proletarian organisations, amalgamating these organisations into a close-knit international association, despite bourgeois strivings for national exclusiveness.”

The Leninists’ aim was to get the national question off the agenda, to counterpose to all variants of bourgeois nationalism an appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle.

As comrade Galarneau lays out below, the opportunity for the early Canadian Communist Party to eventually draw the correct lessons on the national question from the Bolsheviks’ experience was to be foreclosed by the Stalinist political counterrevolution. Following the defeats of workers revolutions elsewhere in Europe between 1918 and 1923, a conservative, nationalist bureaucracy, with J.V. Stalin at its head, had by 1924 usurped political power from an exhausted and demoralized Soviet proletariat.

The Bolsheviks’ revolutionary, internationalist policies began to be reversed. The dogma of “socialism in one country” proclaimed by Stalin in late 1924 was to become synonymous with the sellout of countless revolutionary opportunities abroad in the coming decades, as the Stalinists came to pursue an illusory “peaceful coexistence” with the rapacious imperialist powers. Along with the other parties of the Communist International (Comintern), the Canadian CP became a servile machine for the implementation of the bureaucracy’s futile attempts to appease world imperialism, and a promoter of class collaboration with its own bourgeoisie.

But the Stalinist degeneration of the international Communist movement met strong resistance around the globe as Communist leaders and working-class cadres from America to France, from Poland to China joined the fight to continue Lenin’s road. In Canada, founding CPC leaders Maurice Spector and Jack MacDonald were among those won to the Left Opposition led by Trotsky (see “How Stalinism Wrecked the Communist Party of Canada,” SC No. 77, Winter 1989/90).

The Left Opposition opposed the nationalist reformist program of Stalinism and sought to preserve and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution which had been betrayed but not yet overthrown. The Trotskyists fought for a political revolution to oust the bureaucracy and restore workers democracy and an internationalist leadership to the Soviet Union, while standing in unconditional defense of the conquests of the October Revolution against capitalist counterrevolution. Among its many crimes, the Stalinist bureaucracy came to replace revolutionary internationalism and defense of oppressed peoples with the crudest Great Russian nationalism and chauvinism.

In Canada, the Trotskyists were expelled from the CPC starting in 1928. Eventually—by the late 1930s—these comrades were able to find their way to correctly advocate the right of self-determination for Quebec, and they made persistent efforts to establish an organizational expression of authentic communist politics among the Québécois proletariat.

Building on that tradition, from our inception in 1975, the Trotskyist League has vigorously upheld the Québécois’ right to independence. Following extensive internal discussion, recognizing that the national animosities within the Canadian state had come to constitute a decisive barrier to the development of anti-capitalist class consciousness, we have since 1995 advocated the exercise of that right. Independence for Quebec would help clear the way for united struggle by the working class of the whole continent against the capitalist system that threatens the future of all humanity.

Part one of this presentation covers the early history of the socialist movement in Quebec and, in particular, the stance toward Quebec of the CPC from its origins to the late 1920s.

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Today we will look at political events and characters that shaped a fascinating period in the history of the left in Canada and Quebec. From the Great Depression of the early thirties until 1947, the Communist Party of Canada recruited in Montreal hundreds of young francophone working-class men and women, workers in longshore, transit, rail yards, city works, clothing, tobacco, the building trades, etc. Together with their anglophone, largely Jewish comrades in the Montreal branches of the CPC, they played a leading role in building the industrial trade unions of Quebec, which remain powerful to this day. A reflection of their success was the two election victories in Montreal of the only-ever Communist MP in the House of Commons.

In spite of their party’s profound Stalinist deformations, many of these activists believed with burning hearts in the defense and emulation of the Soviet socialist “motherland.” On top of their trade-union activities, their belief and propagation of communism as they understood it earned them the most severe repression then meted out anywhere in Canada. They had their offices and homes raided, they were thrown in jail, religious family and friends would pressure them to quit.

They stuck it out through all of this, with slow incremental recruitment building up to about 500 francophone members by the mid-1940s. These were typified by a smart and strapping young electrician named Henri Gagnon, who was to become the recognized leader of this group and later the prime target of CPC Stalinist leader Tim Buck’s Anglo-chauvinist and bureaucratic manoeuvres. Indeed, in the end they were practically all lost by the party not because of state repression or the pressure of the Catholic church. These determined leftists walked away thanks to the Communist Party’s reactionary position on the Quebec national question.

We will cover the origins and development of this position. We will speak more of the CPC’s history in Quebec. And we will paint portraits of extraordinary characters, all of whose political trajectories, though in different fashions, ended in tragic waste. First however, let’s turn the clock back even further, to look at the Montreal left prior to the founding of the Communist Party, indeed, prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and in particular to a man who could or should have been a great early leader of communism in Quebec—but never was.

Pre-History: Albert St-Martin and the Early Socialists in Quebec

A significant industrial proletariat did not emerge in Montreal until the late 19th century. Working-class revolts occurred as far back as the building of the Lachine canal in the 1840s. A number of Montreal workers had also participated in the 1837 Lower Canada Patriote Rebellion, a bourgeois-nationalist revolt that was brutally crushed by the British. While largely rural, this Rebellion also swept the streets of Montreal. At one demonstration, Wolfred Nelson, an English doctor, Patriote and ardent champion of the rights of the oppressed French Canadian population, roared at a crowd that they should seize thousands of dollars from John Molson Jr.’s outlandish mansion on Sherbrooke Street. (Incidentally, the Rebellion was saluted by a special address of solidarity from the Chartist London Working Men’s Association, “To the People of Canada.”)

In the second half of the 19th century, Montreal started to draw massive numbers of poor Québécois pushed out of the countryside by rural population growth and the mechanization of agriculture. Greater Montreal grew sixfold between 1870 and 1930, when it reached a population of one million. Many others fled to the industrial regions of Ontario and the U.S. eastern seaboard, including, among others, the Québécois parents of legendary Beat writer Jack Kerouac. In Montreal, along with immigrants from Ireland and Eastern and Southern Europe, they became factory hands in the rapidly growing industries owned by the city’s Anglo capitalist masters. In contrast to the palaces and clubs of Westmount and Pine Avenue (and the fairly cool digs of Outremont), the working-class slums spreading all around the old city saw the reign of poverty, overcrowded tenements and early death.

Appalled at this state of affairs, in the 1890s a young clerk at the Montreal municipal courthouse decided to dedicate his life to ending the oppression of the working masses. Albert St-Martin was born in 1865 in the working-class borough of Sainte-Marie, near the Molson breweries and around where we now find the Jacques-Cartier bridge and Radio-Canada tower (the construction of the latter having caused the razing of the Sainte-Marie district). At the courthouse, St-Martin sought to help the poor and the illiterate with complex legal documents. He had the mind of an internationalist: he learned Esperanto and became a supporter of the international socialist movement. In 1904, he was a founding leader of the first workers party, the Parti Ouvrier, in Montreal. In the next decade, he would go on to lead the Quebec branch of the Socialist Party of Canada.

Albert St-Martin was a prominent leader of the movement against conscription in Montreal in 1917. He was also an orator at many other public protests. He definitely maintained nationalist leanings, as can be seen in his participation with reactionary nationalists such as Henri Bourassa (the founder of Le Devoir) in a protest movement against opening businesses on Sundays, which was anathema to the Catholic church. Yet he was deeply anti-clerical and a fervent atheist, which would bring him into innumerable conflicts with the church and the state.

St-Martin was over 50 years old when the 1917 Russian Revolution struck victory. He showed his colours in a searing 1920 indictment against imperialist intervention into the young Soviet republic. In his pamphlet “T’as menti” (You Lied), he stated that after having sought to isolate Soviet Russia, the bourgeoisie aimed:

“through Associated Press dispatches, through the writings and speeches of its prostitutes, through its newspapers, its governments, its clergy, its animated flicks, in a word through all the means of propaganda at its disposal, to build a campaign of denigration, of lies, of odious slanders, of charges of every imaginable crime against the Soviet Republic of Russia.”

— quoted in Marcel Fournier, Communisme et Anticommunisme au Québec 1920-1950 (1979) (our translation)

Speaking of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, he added: “This dictatorship will disappear the day the bourgeoisie disappears, melted in the future, sole and only class: the workers of the earth.”

I could not find any clear documentation of the relationship of the fledgling Communist Party of Canada with Albert St-Martin in the early 1920s. They certainly were aware of each other, although St-Martin was probably not present at any of the early conferences of the party. Tim Buck’s later claim that St-Martin had briefly been a member but had to be expelled for “bourgeois nationalism” is almost certainly false. What is undisputed is that in 1923 St-Martin asked for a charter for his Quebec group directly to the Communist International. He was rebuffed for the valid Leninist notion of “one state power, one revolutionary party”—the need for a centralized political force of the proletariat to take on and defeat the centralized force of the bourgeoisie. I don’t know if this episode reflected his own nationalist leanings, or just an understandably poor grasp of Leninist party building. Probably a little bit of both. Whatever the case, it doesn’t sound like the early Canadian CP ever made much of an effort to bring him on board—and they certainly never attempted to win him away from whatever nationalist leanings he had through a correct exposition of the Leninist position on the national question. As we will see, they had no such understanding themselves.

In 1925, St-Martin founded the Université Ouvrière, modelled on the English-language Montreal Labor College, which then-Communist Party leader Michael Buhay and others had founded a few years before. St-Martin refused to fuse the Université with the CP organization, but he never stopped his supporters from joining the CPC. During the 1920s, the school effectively became the training ground for the first generation of francophone party cadres. An eclectic place, reflecting an eclectic founder, the Université held classes on everything from the Russian Revolution to anti-clericalism and astronomy, through to lectures on the virtues of free love (St-Martin was also a fervent advocate of women’s rights). In the late 1920s, according to Marcel Fournier, there were reports that St-Martin was sympathetic to the struggle of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In 1933, at age 68 and still an activist, St-Martin was brutally beaten by fascist youths in Montreal. He fell victim to an anti-Communist state witchhunt in that same year, convicted of “blasphemous libel” under Section 198 of the Canadian Criminal Code for articles which appeared in Spartakus, a newspaper of the unemployed. He died a forgotten and broken man in 1947, then in his eighties.

I do not know what St-Martin and the Socialist Party he led could have brought in terms of numbers to a young CP organization in Quebec in the early 1920s. More research is needed on that. I don’t know much about his relation to the early trade unions either, though I know he had some. What I do know is that if the early, revolutionary Canadian CP had had a correct, Leninist approach to the Quebec national question, it would have had a great chance of winning St-Martin and/or some of his supporters. Communism could thus have become a serious factor in Quebec very early on, especially in the cosmopolitan, industrial city of Montreal.

For Leninists, the point is to find the way to best break the hold of chauvinism and nationalism, to turn workers against their exploiters and open the road to socialist revolution. In Canada, that meant standing forthrightly against the repressive chauvinism of the dominant Anglo-Canadian rulers and championing the right of self-determination for the oppressed Québécois nation while calling on Québécois workers to oppose their “own” nationalist leaders, who were then tied closely to the Catholic church. But the early Communists didn’t have such an approach, to say the least, and our movement has paid dearly for that.

The Early CPC and the National Question

The elites of Quebec also reacted to the Russian Revolution, but with absolute hostility and fear. Among other things, in 1921 the clergy helped found the Catholic union federation, the Confédération des Travailleurs Catholique du Canada, in direct reaction to workers’ radicalization around the world. And the anti-Communist laws of both the federal and provincial governments were no less brutal than the later ones under the reactionary rule of Maurice Duplessis. Even with the best political tools at its disposal, Communism faced an uphill battle in Quebec. So let’s look at the tools that the early CPC was working with.

As comrades know, the Communist Party of Canada was founded by 22 delegates in Guelph, Ontario in June 1921. There were no Québécois (or “French Canadians” as they said then) in that group, and no indication that the Quebec question was brought up in any form. The following December, a preliminary conference assembled in Toronto in preparation for the creation of a legal party, the Workers Party. Michael Buhay came in from Montreal and spoke to the issue of recruiting francophones, but mostly in negative terms: “Our difficulty is French Canadians who are Reds, we cannot get them to work, they think all we need to do is sing the Internationale three times every Sunday” (Workers Guard, 17 December 1921, cited in Bernard Gauvin, Les Communistes et la Question Nationale au Québec, 1981). He then expressed some optimism in recruiting a few of those singing Frenchmen anyway.

Later in the 1920s, the party finally did recruit a handful of Québécois. A sporadic newspaper called l’Ouvrier Canadien published 12 issues between 1927 and 1931, with content very similar to that of the CPC’s newspaper, the Worker. The Communist Party members in Quebec remained overwhelmingly anglophone, or at least not francophone. In 1924 federal government reports put the total membership in Montreal at about 100, mostly Jewish.

The Quebec national question hardly came up at all from those founding conferences until 1929. According to Gauvin, who studied the party documentation in detail, when it did, either in congresses or in the pages of the Worker, it was usually a variation on the theme of how difficult it was to recruit French Canadian members. At best, they occasionally recognized the economic oppression of the francophone workers of Quebec, but never even hinted at an analysis based on the Leninist understanding of the national question. They never referred to Quebec as a nation.

Stalinism Wrecks the CPC

From the outset, the CPC and the Comintern had unambiguously and accurately characterized Canada as an imperialist power. But in 1925, as the anti-revolutionary politics of Stalinism began to take hold, this understanding was overthrown. Consistent with the dogma of “socialism in one country,” the Comintern had begun to seek alliances internationally with a supposed “progressive bourgeoisie.”

In keeping with this, the CPC adopted its terrible line for “Canadian independence,” declaring that Canada was still a colony of Great Britain. This “independence” was sought, alternatively or simultaneously, from Britain and/or the U.S. This statement by Tim Buck in the Worker (21 March 1925) is typical (note that this position was shared by the entire leadership, including future Trotskyists Maurice Spector and Jack MacDonald):

“In their [the Canadian bourgeoisie’s] fight for complete independence from Downing Street, the Communists of Canada will help them with all their might. Having won independence, however, when they attempt to turn over Canada, lock, stock, and barrel, to Wall Street, they will find in us their bitterest opponents. Independence is only a step for each of us. For the dominant economic interests it is a step toward Americanization. To us the Communists, it is a step towards a Workers’ and Farmers’ Republic.”

— quoted in Norman Penner, The Canadian Left: A Critical Analysis (1977)

This is very wrong on many levels. Most importantly, it 1) incorrectly paints Canada as some kind of oppressed neocolony, and 2) from there takes the wrong position (even if it were a neocolony!) of a “strategic united front” with the Canadian bourgeoisie. As Penner notes, this position had hardly anything to do with even a deformed version of Leninism, but a lot more to do with bourgeois Canadian nationalists such as the then well-known J.S. Ewart.

For the purpose of this presentation, however, the key point is that it was the “oppression” of Canada that the CPC was now concerned with. It appears from this that the poor recruitment of francophones had little to do with the French Canadians’ lack of a work ethic, but much to do with the CPC’s capitulation to Canadian nationalism and ignorance of, and/or indifference to, Quebec’s actual national oppression.

As Ian Angus recounts in Canadian Bolsheviks, the Canadian CP was at first left largely untouched by the anti-Trotsky campaigns taking place elsewhere in the Stalinized Communist International. Indeed, the pages of the Worker, edited by Spector, maintained a conspicuous silence on the anti-Trotsky campaign. The rest of the Canadian leadership acquiesced to this with the notable exception of the one nascent Stalinist among the party leaders, Tim Buck. This situation did not last forever of course, as 1928 saw the expulsion of Spector, along with James P. Cannon and his supporters in the U.S. party, shortly after they openly began to fight for Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition.

It was Cannon, Spector and their comrades around Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the October Revolution, who remained true to the revolutionary program that animated the Bolsheviks. Leading the fight against the bureaucratic degeneration of the world’s first workers state, Trotsky and the Left Opposition took up the Bolshevik banner of revolutionary proletarian internationalism against the nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country.”

A year later, in 1929, the CPC’s social-patriotic line of “Canadian independence” fell victim to Stalin’s “Third Period” ultraleft turn, itself the fruit of Stalin’s betrayals and political zigzags. Inside the Soviet Union, Stalin’s rightist course in 1926-27—centrally the disastrous capitulations to the rich peasants epitomized by his then ally Nikolai Bukharin’s exhortations to these kulaks to “enrich yourselves”—had brought the workers state to the brink of catastrophe. Internationally, the Chinese Communist Party was directed by Stalin and his henchmen to subordinate itself to the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang led by Chiang Kai-shek. The result of this betrayal was the slaughter of tens of thousands of Communists and militant workers by Chiang’s forces in the Shanghai massacre of April 1927.

Reeling from these and other debacles, Stalin responded at home and abroad with panicked adventurism. Proclaiming the imminence of the world revolution, the Stalinized Comintern and its parties now abjured united fronts with other workers organizations and built “red trade unions” in counterposition to the existing unions led by social democrats and others. At bottom, the pseudo-leftist policies of the Third Period, as Ian Angus puts it in Canadian Bolsheviks, “stemmed from a single source: the bureaucracy’s commitment to national autarky under the label ‘socialism in one country,’ and its need to use the Comintern as an agency of that policy.”

This is the context for the Comintern’s directives to the CPC to get rid of its idiotic “Canadian independence” line, recognize the Canadian bourgeoisie as the main enemy and start making real efforts to recruit Québécois workers. Referring to the 1917 conscription crisis, a Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI) letter of 1929 noted “the strong anti-British sentiment among the French Canadians which played a very important role in the last war.” In another letter, the organizational department of the ECCI wrote prior to the CPC’s 1929 convention:

“The Party must immediately set to work amongst the French Canadian masses of Quebec. An organizer should be immediately placed in Quebec province for this purpose; the discontinued French paper should be renewed; special forms of approaching the French Canadian masses must be found in view of religious prejudice, language, etc. Upon no account must the French Canadian units be regarded as ‘language units’ in the ‘immigrant’ sense because Canada is a bi-lingual country and the French Canadians are native masses.”

—quoted in Penner, The Canadian Left

The Comintern expressed the wish that francophones, who made up a third of the population, make up one half of the party’s membership. Also around the same time, Montreal youth leader Fred Rose criticized the CPC’s 1929 Sixth Convention draft resolution for not mentioning “the French-Canadian question.”

Of course, “half of the membership” was not to be, not by a long shot. The Sixth Convention centrally dealt with the changes in line and leaderships both in Moscow and in Canada. The Trotskyist Spector had been expelled a few months prior and Tim Buck would use the occasion to seize the leadership from his other internal rivals. It was at this point that the CPC became “Tim Buck’s party.” Political battles revolved around the “Canadian independence” question—which the leadership would formally reject, at least for now. The Quebec issue continued to play a tertiary role at best.

Nevertheless the Third Period turn and the professed new interest in Québécois recruits would enable the party to win over a significant layer of activists in Quebec in the next decade. This was true even after 1933 when the Comintern made another about-face, which led to embracing the politics of the “popular front” (class-collaborationist alliances with and participation in the governments of the bourgeoisie and the calculated containment of revolutionary proletarian struggles).

Something else caught my attention in the disputes around the Sixth Convention. Reading excerpts from Fred Rose’s critical Worker article of March 9, 1929, “The Problems of the French Canadians,” I got to thinking about the situation from another angle. Rose wrote:

“…our C.E.C. [Central Executive Committee] still pays no attention whatsoever to this important question. It seems that they are busy discussing the Ukrainian or Finnish problems which always fill the agenda. At the last party convention not a moment was given away to the French Canadian question, while a whole night session was utilized to discuss the Youth sections of U.L.F.T.A. [Ukrainian Labor-Farmer Temple Association] which is always a problem for our C.E.C…. Our C.E.C. did not even see the necessity of putting one of the Quebec delegates on the organizational committee of the Convention [so] as to be able at least to bring the French Canadian problem before this body.”

— quoted in Gauvin, Les Communistes et la Question Nationale au Québec

From its origins, the vast majority of the CPC’s membership was Finnish, Ukrainian or Jewish—even as late as 1929, such immigrants made up 95 percent of the party’s members. And those “ethnic federations” constituted the bulk of the Canadian CP’s actual work on the ground. While not excusing the party’s terrible anti-Leninist line on Quebec, the weight of these federations sheds some light on the failure to grapple with this important political question.

Along with the ECCI organizational department’s 1929 letter, the ECCI Political Secretariat raised the Quebec question in more theoretical terms. It said that the French Canadian workers “form the most exploited section of the Canadian working class” and called on the Party to take up the fight for “complete self-determination” for French Canada (Penner, The Canadian Left). While vague, this is the first document I know of to speak of Quebec in terms of “self-determination.” But while instructions from Moscow to significantly increase the organizational work in Quebec were carried out, at least for a period, the Canadian CP’s theoretical political views of the Quebec national question actually got worse over the next few years. The party went from its previous agnosticism to openly denying the right to self-determination and, at least for the next dozen years or so, the very existence of a Quebec nation.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Spartacist Canada No. 175	Winter 2012/2013

The Communist Party of Canada and the Quebec National Question

Part Two: From the Great Depression to the Cold War

We print below the concluding part of an edited presentation by comrade Charles Galarneau at the Twelfth National Conference of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, held in the summer of 2011. Part One, which appeared in SC No. 174 (Fall 2012), covered the early history of the socialist movement in Quebec and the stance toward the Quebec national question of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) from its origins through the 1920s.

For revolutionaries in binational or multinational states, the experiences and work of the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky provide a peerless example of a revolutionary approach to the national question. The Bolsheviks steadfastly championed all struggles against national oppression and Great Russian chauvinism in the tsarist empire, which Lenin termed a “prison house of peoples.” Lenin combatted nationalism as a bourgeois ideology while fighting for the rights of oppressed peoples with the methods of proletarian class struggle, a stance that was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

The opportunity for the early Canadian Communists to draw the lessons of the Bolshevik approach to the national question and apply them to Quebec was foreclosed by the rise of Stalinism, which wrecked the CPC as it did Communist parties around the world. The Trotskyist movement, whose founding leaders in the U.S. and Canada were expelled from the Communist parties starting in 1928, carried forward the fight for authentic revolutionary Marxism.

At the end of Part One, comrade Galarneau noted that while the CPC increased its organizing work in Quebec starting in 1929, its “theoretical political views of the Quebec national question actually got worse over the next few years. The party went from its previous agnosticism to openly denying the right to self-determination and, at least for the next dozen years or so, the very existence of a Quebec nation.”

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The CPC’s Montreal youth leader Fred Rose played a leading role in the debates on Quebec. At the CPC’s Sixth Convention in 1929, he won the fight for the party to pay more attention to Quebec. However, in a January 1931 Young Worker article Rose then complained that “the discussion developed into a polemic as to whether or not the French Canadians are an oppressed minority,” instead of finding ways to “lay down a concrete line for work.” From this implicitly chauvinist irritation, he would go on to lay out a more explicit line a few months after the Seventh Convention in 1934:

“There being no French Canadian economy, but rather a Canadian economy it is obvious that there is no such thing as a French Canadian nation apart from Canadians as a nation but rather a Canadian nation of which the French Canadians (they are the biggest single racial group in Canada) are the basic group….

“The French Canadian bourgeoisie got its share either separately or jointly with the English Canadians. As for the ‘rights’ that the masses can enjoy under capitalism, the French Canadians have lingual and other so-called ‘democratic’ rights to the same extent as the English Canadians. The Canadian working class can use both the French and the English language in the fight against the bourgeoisie.”

—Worker, 19 January 1935, quoted in Bernard Gauvin, Les Communistes et la Question Nationale au Québec (1981)

Among other things, this schema conveniently skipped over the “so-called” democratic right of self-determination, i.e., the right to separate, which the Québécois did not and still do not possess under Canadian rule.

The party did recognize the particular superexploitation of the Québécois workers, but this was simply put down to an “economic” discrepancy (or remnants of Quebec’s supposed “feudal” past) which should be addressed by reforms from the federal government. CPC leader Stewart Smith spelled this out in a 1938 Daily Clarion article:

“Today the struggle for economic improvements for the Canadian people involves the most vigorous struggle against the terrible exploitation of the French-Canadian people of Quebec….

“The significance of any national social legislation, equally applicable in all parts of Canada is that it would tend to break through the double yoke of exploitation of the French-Canadians. It would mean a change in the relationships between the French-Canadian people and the rest of Canada, who have led the fight for unemployment insurance, the hope of economic improvement for themselves.”

—quoted in Gauvin

This kind of condescending federal-reformism would soon cause enormous damage for the party in Quebec.

True, in later years the CPC would evolve a less openly chauvinist line. In 1943, it started speaking of “national” equality for French Canada and formally endorsed the right to self-determination in 1952. But this was never anything more than a hypocritical nod to Leninism, as the party has to this day remained a deeply Canadian nationalist outfit. Indeed, party leader and Stalinist hardliner Tim Buck revived the “Canadian independence” slogan in the late 1940s, which as I noted earlier was a blatant capitulation to Canadian nationalism (see Part One).

Stanley Ryerson and the Quebec National Question

Hypocritical, yes—except, I think, for one leading member of the Communist Party. Here I need to break our narrative and speak about another fascinating and quite contradictory character in this story.

Born in 1911 into a wealthy and iconic Toronto bourgeois family, and with maternal lineages going back to a French military commander who had arrived in New France in the 17th century, young Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson was sent to study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1931. From there he travelled through Italy and Spain, experiencing first hand some deep-going class struggle, including the beginnings of what would become the Spanish Civil War. He got involved with the French Communist Party in Paris, where in 1932 he took part in the 200,000-strong funeral procession for Zéphyrin Camélinat, the last surviving member of the Paris Commune of 1871.

On Ryerson’s return to Toronto, Tim Buck rapidly worked to advance this young intellectual. The party direly lacked good writers at the time and Buck saw Ryerson, a fluent French speaker, as a natural fit to represent the leadership in the CPC’s Montreal branches.

Stanley Ryerson was a contradictory political figure whose stature as an intellectual seems to have given him a degree of independence that had become extinct for most everyone else in “Tim Buck’s Party.” Yet he was also a central leader of a party that stood out for its servility to the dictates of the Kremlin Stalinists. A Central Committee member from 1935 to 1969, he was unswerving in his loyalty to Tim Buck.

Throughout this period and after, Ryerson’s primary theoretical pursuit was the understanding of Canadian history—most centrally, the Quebec national question—and some of his historical works are of lasting value to the working class. His views on Quebec contributed to his eventual exit from the CPC in 1971, unfortunately into the arms of the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Québécois (he died in 1998). But prior to this, he published in 1968 a significant work of history entitled Unequal Union: Confederation and the Roots of Conflict in the Canadas, 1815-1873. I read it recently in the French translation and I have to say that any communist doing work in this country now or in the future ought to read this book.

Back in 1937 Ryerson published the pamphlet Le Réveil du Canada Français (The Awakening of French Canada) and an article in the CPC’s French-language Clarté, “La Rébellion de 1837, Bataille Pour la Démocratie!” (Rebellion of 1837, A Battle for Democracy!), under the party name E. Roger. These were polemics against reactionary French Canadian nationalism. While perfectly in line with the CPC’s chauvinist line on the national question, Ryerson’s pieces added a new dimension of looking back to the “tradition” of 1837, as a way of mobilizing French Canadians in the “anti-fascist” struggle for “democracy.”

Unlike in 1837, when one could envision a progressive bourgeois struggle against the British aristocrats and overlords, in the 1930s this was an expression of the crudest Stalinist class collaboration. Indeed by this time, the struggle for “democracy” which Ryerson invoked was simply the ideological justification for the betrayals of the popular front. In Europe, the Stalinized Communist International sought to ingratiate itself with the bourgeoisies of the democratic imperialist powers through the containment of revolutionary proletarian movements. In practice, this meant class-collaborationist alliances with and participation in the governments of the bourgeoisie under the cover of “fighting fascism.” The popular front in Spain was the guarantor of the bourgeois order, ensuring the betrayal and defeat of the Spanish Revolution. In Canada, it meant pandering to Canadian nationalism and imperialism, as we shall see.

Stanley Ryerson would spend the rest of his life adjusting the politics of these first 1937 essays. This eventually led to the aforementioned Unequal Union. But as early as 1943, he published French Canada, A Study in Canadian Democracy. In this work, largely devoted to grotesque justifications for Canadian imperialism, Ryerson nonetheless wrote in direct contraposition to the CPC’s line:

“It is important to understand the fact that the democratic struggle of the French-Canadian people during the whole of the preceding period [before Confederation] had been a struggle for the right of national self-determination, for their right as a nation to choose their own form of state….

“The French-Canadian attitude towards the Confederation proposals was dominated by a profound concern lest the right to their own state be denied them by the English-Canadian majority.”

During heated debates at a 1945 National Committee meeting of the party, Ryerson went so far as to denounce “great nation chauvinism” in the central party leadership. He evidently got away with that, as he did with a 1946 article in which he argued outright in favour of the call for the right of self-determination for Quebec. As I mentioned, the party would eventually adopt that line in 1952.

But it was already too late. In 1947, the party’s line on the Quebec national question was still openly chauvinist, and so was the treatment of its Quebec leaders. Tim Buck’s bureaucratic machinery would literally cut off a whole arm and throw away an entire generation of Québécois would-be communists, rather than admit any doubt about his infallibility. So let’s look at that story, and at a couple of other powerful characters.

The Communist Party in Quebec

But first, let’s go play some softball! Young Henri Gagnon had obtained his electrician’s ticket in the early 1930s, but like tens of thousands of others in Montreal during the Great Depression he couldn’t find any work. By the mid-thirties, only 23 years old, he had a wife and six children and was collecting about $15 a week in social assistance. He paid rent in kind by doing electrical work for his landlord. He had a lot of time on his hands, and with a bunch of other unemployed workers put together a softball club in Lafontaine Park. The club soon turned into a small league, where Gagnon was a key organizer.

Henri Gagnon had heard of socialism, including from an eccentric freight train jumper when he was an apprentice. Some left-wing activists would come to the ball game and try to recruit some of the guys. They weren’t very successful, but eventually Gagnon got curious and started attending workers and unemployed meetings animated by the CPC.

At one of these meetings, just before the 1936 provincial elections, Gagnon argued for supporting the Union Nationale (UN) of Maurice Duplessis because of its “anti-trust” positions. Napoléon Brizard, a streetcar driver and trade unionist—and, Gagnon would later find out, a local leader of the Communist Party—countered him by explaining that Duplessis’ UN was in fact a representative of big capital. Later, Gagnon attended meetings of the CPC-affiliated “Front Populaire,” an unemployed workers support group, where he heard very convincing arguments in defense of the working class and against capitalism. This was where Henri Gagnon bought his first issues of the CPC’s Clarté, and he soon began to avidly read the works of Karl Marx.

He had to fight his way into becoming a Communist Party member, as the party was under severe repression and had to function clandestinely. But Gagnon was a stubborn fellow, and eventually he was accepted. His first CPC cell meeting in 1936 was made up of employed and unemployed francophone workers, including two members of a printers union. He soon got to meet comrades from other cells and sections, including longshoremen and streetcar operators, workers from McDonald Tobacco, from CP Rail’s Angus Shops, from Dominion Glass, from fur and leather factories, construction, the food industry and the City of Montreal (CUPE’s still often militant Montreal blue-collar Local 301 was founded by Communists).

All the francophone branches included many women involved in trade-union and party work, as well as the CPC-led La Voix des Femmes du Québec (Voice of Quebec Women). In 1938, the CPC launched French-speaking branches of the Young Communist League (YCL), which were soon teeming with dozens of young working-class men and women who organized meetings and other political activities, as well as popular monthly dances.

Gagnon also got to know some of the anglophone and Jewish members of the YCL in Montreal, whom he described as unfailingly supportive and helpful to the francophone group. Many of the English speakers were themselves leaders of working-class struggle, especially in the textile industry. In 1946, party supporters Kent Rowley and his companion Madeleine Parent led the bitterly fought Dominion Textile strike in St-Henri and Valleyfield, which ended in the victorious unionization of its 6,000 workers. A year later, Duplessis had both of them charged with “seditious conspiracy” because of their union activities.

In his 1985 memoir, looking back to the CPC’s trade-union work of his youth, Henri Gagnon observed:

“The socialist activists of Quebec played a vanguard role in building the union movement. During the Great Depression, nascent trade unionism depended on the voluntary work and sacrifice of the most dedicated workers. This was the heroic period when trade unionism was not the institution that it has become in our times. It was also a time when unionized workers constituted a small minority of a Québécois working class in formation. It was a time of hard battles for union recognition, which was always opposed by the bosses. In the union movement of those days, one was more likely to get a bad licking than a medal.”

—Les Militants Socialistes du Québec, d’une Epoque à l’Autre (1985) (our translation)

From Bogus “Anti-Imperialism” to “Total War”

As I mentioned earlier, the repression against the CPC was severe. During this entire period in the 1930s and beyond, even before Duplessis passed his Padlock Law in 1937, between federal and provincial legislation the Communist Party in Quebec was actually somewhat legal for only about one year. But Gagnon also notes in his memoirs that the CPC was virtually the only well-organized left group in Quebec. The CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, forerunner of the NDP) had nothing going there, and the rest of the Montreal left was mostly made up of anarchists and anti-clericalist talkers who didn’t do much. Repression made it practically impossible for the CPC to do work outside the Montreal area, but otherwise they had a politically open field.

Repression was definitely a deterrent to membership. Gagnon spoke of how scared he was when he went to his first cell meeting and on his first assignment, passing leaflets door-to-door, thinking he would be picked up by the cops at any minute. But—somewhat unsurprisingly—the biggest obstacle reported by many young recruits at the time was breaking with their Catholic beliefs. For many, it took months or even years after they joined before they could fully abandon their faith and become atheists. I’m sure quite a few never made it that far.

For most of the 1930s, the national question had not been a big factor against recruitment. During this period Quebec nationalism meant almost exclusively Duplessis, the Catholic church and fascist bands. This helps to explain why, in spite of their blindness on the national question, the CPC made gains in Quebec. Certainly their position on the Quebec national question was bad throughout these years. As an example, in 1938 the party’s brief to the Rowell-Sirois Commission in Ottawa was a crawling statement of support for federalism, arguing above all for “national unification.” It took some time before such positions finally came to bite the party in the ass. But when they did, this destroyed almost everything that the CPC had in francophone Montreal.

The national question became more of an issue in Quebec society at large as World War II approached. When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in 1939, the CPs around the world suddenly veered from “anti-fascist” popular frontists to a posture of opposing Anglo-American imperialism. While this was entirely cynical on Moscow’s part, it did spur further success for the CPC in Quebec.

As in the first interimperialist world war, popular opposition to again going to war for Britain was huge in Quebec. This reflected both widespread hatred for yet another war on behalf of the English oppressors and support by sections of the Catholic nationalist elite for fascism and clerical nationalism, notably the pro-Hitler Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain in France (see “Imperialist War and National Oppression: Quebec and the Conscription Crises,” SC No. 119, Winter 1998/99). Gagnon reports that from May to July 1940, the Montreal YCL managed to get out over 250,000 pieces of propaganda, mostly leaflets at various demonstrations, denouncing British imperialism and opposing Canada’s participation in the war.

In line with this shift, the CPC started schmoozing with pretty unappetizing Quebec nationalists. In late 1940, the party launched something called the “Congrès des Canadiens Français” (Congress of French Canadians) on a deeply class-collaborationist platform with groups like the Young Patriots, the Société St-Jean-Baptiste, the Third Battalion of the Papal Zouaves and the Société du Bon Parler Français (Society for the Proper Speaking of French)! The first issue of the new group’s newspaper, co-edited by Gagnon, carried a giant front-page picture of Conservative Montreal mayor Camillien Houde, hailing him as a hero and martyr after his incarceration at an internment camp in Petawawa for opposing conscription.

Of course, this all came to a dramatic collapse after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. “Anti-imperialism” went out the window and it was back to supporting Britain and other imperialist powers, including Canada, in a supposed “great war against fascism.” CPC militants now turned to supporting the “total war effort” (Henri Gagnon himself enlisted and fought in Europe), arguing for a no-strike pledge in the unions. The CPC went on to support the “yes” side in the conscription referendum of 1941, but allowed a sop to its Quebec leadership, which continued to object to conscription in Quebec. So the CPC’s line became: vote “yes” in English Canada and vote “no” in Quebec!

Against the CPC’s hard swing over to Anglo chauvinism in the service of imperialist war, the Canadian Trotskyists opposed the imperialist war while calling for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union which, despite Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration, remained a workers state. Driven underground, their paper banned, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers League nevertheless sought to intersect the powerful anti-conscription movement in Quebec.

In 1943, the CPC re-branded itself the Labor Progressive Party (LPP) around a program centred on demands for “National Unity” and “Democratic Progress.” Tim Buck started to push for a “Lib-Lab” coalition between labour and the ruling bourgeois Liberals under Mackenzie King.

The LPP continued to achieve gains in Quebec, however, as exemplified by Fred Rose’s surprise 1943 by-election victory in the mixed Jewish-francophone riding of Montreal-Cartier, at the western end of Plateau Mont-Royal. It’s notable that among his defeated opponents was a certain David Lewis for the CCF. Rose won the riding again in the 1945 general election, this time by 1,500 votes. And of course, party members were playing key roles in the unprecedented wave of strikes following the end of the war, particularly during the tumultuous year of 1946.

The Cold War: Anti-Communist Reaction

By the end of the war, Tim Buck and the party had totally embraced the promise of “universal peace” coming out of the various Allied conferences that brought the U.S., British and other imperialist leaders together with Joseph Stalin. But instead of the Stalinist delusion of peace on all fronts, what came after World War II was the fiercest wave of anti-Communist repression yet seen. As in the U.S., the Cold War would strike a body blow to the party and more broadly to the workers movement. In Canada, one of the first and most famous victims of the witchhunt was Fred Rose.

Rose was born Fred Rosenberg in Poland in 1907. His family followed tens of thousands of other Jewish immigrants to the shores of North America, in their case to Montreal, where they arrived in 1916. Rose joined the Montreal YCL and in 1925 became its national secretary. As a fluent speaker of both English and French, he was well placed to play a leading role internally and externally, which he did. He was evidently a talented speaker and a personable guy, and his election victories reflected his personal popularity in the neighbourhood.

In late 1945, a Soviet defector by the name of Igor Gouzenko accused MP Fred Rose as well as party leader Sam Carr and Quebec scientist Raymond Boyer of spying for the USSR. Boyer himself admitted that he passed on information about weapons production to the Soviet Union, then a Western ally, in the interest of coordinating the “scientific war effort.” All of them were tried and jailed. Sentenced to six years, Rose was released in 1951, but could not find work anywhere as the RCMP made sure to tell any potential employer not to hire him. According to Gagnon, who I tend to believe, that charmer Tim Buck dropped Rose and Carr from membership as soon as possible during the witchhunt. This allowed Buck to avoid having to defend them in the context of his own appeals for unity with the Mackenzie King government, which was persecuting Rose, Boyer and Carr.

Fred Rose eventually had to move back to his native country, where he went on to work for the English-language journal Poland. His Canadian citizenship was revoked and all his appeals to come back and clear his name remained fruitless. He died peacefully in Warsaw in 1983.

Tim Buck Wrecks CPC’s Quebec Work

Soon after the Fred Rose trial came the climax of this story: the spectacular collapse of the Communists in French Canada. As the struggle against Quebec’s national oppression slowly started to shift from the reactionary Catholic nationalists of the past and into the labour movement, this was bound to happen sooner or later. In the event, it was precipitated by Tim Buck’s bureaucratic megalomania.

In 1946, after returning from the war, Henri Gagnon and the local LPP led a militant and ultimately successful struggle for housing for war vets and their families, which was deplorable to non-existent in Montreal at the time. Gagnon’s Squatters’ Movement drove the Duplessis government and the city’s bourgeois masters to fits of rage. Even the New York Times covered the story of Henri Gagnon, the “Number 1 Communist” taking over this supposedly “non-communist” movement, along with a heavily cropped picture of him and “that spy” Fred Rose side by side.

The Squatters’ Movement received very little coverage in the English-language press of the LPP and was clearly irritating to the party leadership with its “Lib-Lab” coalition crap. It is apparent that Tim Buck had decided that he had a dangerous potential rival on his hands. Regardless, the sudden and vicious political assault on Henri Gagnon appeared well-prepared and thought out. As Buck wasn’t going to “get” him on his irreproachable record as a party activist and leader, he manufactured the only accusation against Henri Gagnon that could possibly stick inside the party: that he and his supposed “clique” were Quebec nationalists and anti-Semites. The accusation of cliquism was obviously false, as Gagnon had no “group” of any kind—except, if you will, the overwhelming majority of the francophone rank-and-file members, who followed and respected him as an earnest and talented leader. And he definitely wasn’t an anti-Semite.

The evidence against Gagnon was flimsy at best. He had made an intervention at a 1946 National Committee meeting where he spoke of the “relations between the two nations of Canada,” and at a later meeting in 1947 he said that Duplessis was “not a nationalist leader,” likely a clumsy formulation used to make an analytical point. Later, in September 1947, Gagnon wrote a document in response to one by Tim Buck defending the party’s policy on “constitutional reforms.” In it, he entirely agreed with Buck’s federal social reform plans, but included the following sentence: “The struggle for a unified social legislation, for the national equality of French Canada, is an integral part of the battle for the right of national determination.” (Remember that Stanley Ryerson had already publicly argued for the right of self-determination for Quebec in early 1946, and nothing happened to him.)

This last piece set off a full-fledged campaign against Gagnon. It was kicked off by Quebec provincial leader Oscar Roy, who denounced the “shades of nationalism” in Gagnon’s document and in his earlier comments (of course the CP didn’t have a problem with Canadian nationalism when it suited them). Then came the “surprise motion,” cooked up overnight just before the October 1947 LPP Provincial Congress. This motion (reportedly drafted by Stanley Ryerson) denounced the existence of a “tendency” that “constitutes a nationalist, anti-Marxist deviation,” “adopts the point of view of nationalism on the question of federal-provincial relations” and “openly expresses a scornful attitude toward internationalism, is anti-Semitic, propagates organizational and political separatism within the party.” And the clincher: it “rejects in practice the principle of internationalist unity of the party in Quebec and Canada; takes an attitude of hostility toward the leadership of the party centre; attempts to organize a faction in opposition to the party leadership.” Other issues were thrown in related to trade-union work and what-not, but this “nationalist” and “anti-Semitic” stuff was the heart of it.

The Congress was followed by the resignation or withdrawal of up to 300 French-speaking members from the party. Gagnon and another 100 or so supporters tried to fight to stay in, but bureaucratic maneuvers got the better of them. After the Congress, some nefarious forces got the Montreal Herald, a bourgeois daily widely read in the Jewish community and with many LPP supporters on staff, to print as good coin the accusations of anti-Semitism against Gagnon. He obviously had to reply sharply to the slander, which he did, and the Herald shut up about it. But this itself became an excuse for suspending him from the party for talking to the bourgeois press. Tired and disgusted, he quit a few weeks later, taking with him most of what was left of the francophones within the party. About 100 French-speaking Tim Buck loyalists stayed in. But most of them would quit anyway amid the turmoil and bureaucratic infighting that followed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech exposing some of the crimes of Stalin, who had died in 1953.

This was pretty much the end of the line for the CPC in Quebec, despite the creation in 1965 of a semi-autonomous Parti Communiste du Québec (PCQ). By the early 1990s, as capitalist counterrevolution swept the former Soviet Union, the CPC and its Quebec wing crumbled, their worldview shattered by the terminal crisis of Stalinism.

In the aftermath, a small group in Quebec was patched together, only to split once again over the national question in 2006. Both wings call themselves the PCQ. One waves the Maple Leaf, calling to “struggle against U.S. domination and for genuine Canadian independence,” while railing vis-à-vis Quebec that “The separatist solution would bring severe additional economic hardship to the working people of both nations and would weaken their political unity against the common enemy” (Program of the Communist Party of Canada, adopted in 2001). The other, meanwhile, gives electoral support to the bourgeois-nationalist Bloc and Parti Québécois, while operating as a pressure grouplet inside the petty-bourgeois populist Québec Solidaire.

Gagnon and his group remained active after their expulsion, even briefly forming a “French Canadian Communist Party,” all the while trying to mend fences with Buck’s party. The Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party briefly sought to intersect them, but this didn’t go anywhere. Gagnon remained an unrepentant Stalinist, and in 1956 he and some of his supporters were allowed to rejoin the party. But they too were soon repulsed by the situation following the Khrushchev speech and quit again. After that, Gagnon remained active in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers until his retirement. In 1985, he published his memoirs, on which some of this presentation is based. He died in Montreal in 1989.

We’ll end our story here. The central lesson of the history of the Communist Party in Quebec is the absolute necessity of a correct line on the national question in this country. A would-be revolutionary party that fails to maintain a Leninist approach—the defense of the right of self-determination, i.e., to independence, for all nations while opposing any form of chauvinism and nationalism—will necessarily capitulate to its “own” capitalist ruling class. The Stalinist CPC ended up flatly endorsing the nationalism of the English Canadian oppressors. No less a dead end, other groups on the left have gone the other way, capitulating to Québécois nationalism.

We Trotskyists carry forward the Leninist program on the Quebec national question. Since 1995, we have advocated Quebec independence as the best means to undermine chauvinism and nationalism among a working class that is deeply divided. This will stand us in good stead to win the working-class militants of the future in the fight to forge a party that struggles for North American socialist revolution.