Introduction

My initial motivation to undertake this research was due to my father’s advancing Alzheimer’s disease. His memory shot, he could no longer remember the pivotal moments of his life nor the individuals who interacted with him at any particular time. The short but violent Lenkurt Electric strike of 1966 was one of those moments. Involving a predominantly female workforce and ostensibly illegal, it pitted cops versus picket lines, split the leadership of Local 213 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), and generated headlines for several weeks in Vancouver-area newspapers. Only eight years old at the time, I remember the excitement and tension in our house surrounding this event, my dad being absent for several days at a time, then the house being full of visitors. I also remember the phone ringing off the hook, but I remember little else. However, as a graduate student in history at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in the early 1980s I had the opportunity to reconnect with my father, Les McDonald, and had several long conversations with him about the Lenkurt strike. I made notes of some of those conversations. In the end the strike was smashed. Les McDonald initially received a thirty-year suspension from his union, the IBEW, and almost lost his ability to make a living from his trade as an electrician.

At the same time, the loss at Lenkurt contributed to his turn away from trade union politics toward sports, his other passion in life. After many years of rock climbing, playing soccer, mountaineering, alpine skiing, marathon running, and cross-country ski racing, Les eventually took up triathlon, first as an athlete, then as an organizer and administrator. While his ongoing involvement at a competitive level in a variety of athletic endeavours amply attests to his abilities and to his mental and physical toughness, his impact on the sport of triathlon was tremendous, to the point that it has tended to eclipse his earlier accomplishments. Combined with his charismatic, extroverted personality, there can be little question that his enormous energy, his organizational skills, and his ability to read and motivate people were instrumental in the inclusion of triathlon on the program of the 2000 Summer Olympics, in Sydney, Australia.

Apart from his enthusiastic participation in sports, the other key part of Les McDonald’s life was his ten-year passage through the Communist Party of Canada, from 1958 to 1968. For the most part, Les McDonald’s left-wing position on issues, when combined with his storytelling abilities, would sometimes confound middle-class triathletes and sport bureaucrats. Les would often attribute the effect he had on people to his background as a “long-time trade unionist,” although that was often just code for his own youth as the son of a leftist coal miner and his time in the Communist Party of Canada. During those years he was exposed to the teachings of Marx and Lenin and to endless discussions on world and trade union politics. His interlocutors included local left-wing luminaries such as Dora and Bill Stewart (“Electrical Bill”), Lionel Edwards, Bruce Yorke, Charlie Caron, Charles Boylan, Betty and Harold (Hal) Griffin, or Alex and Fell Dorland. It was an informal Vancouver-based working-class education, the rigours and demands of the workplace being the traditional starting point for questions and inquiries. Les McDonald’s education was definitely not developed in the classroom or a university setting, but the party nevertheless demanded discipline and thorough study when it came to understanding the political economy of labour in British Columbia and around the world.

Les McDonald’s father, Hugh McDonald, had also been in the Communist Party (of Great Britain), becoming an activist at the beginning of the Great Depression; his mother managed and was part owner of a newsagent’s shop in his hometown of Felling, a colliery village near Gateshead, in the northeast of England. By his own retelling, McDonald’s knowledge of how capitalism worked and figuring out who was on his side on the issues of the day was simply reawakened and reinforced when he arrived in Vancouver. Like so many others before him, he had his socialist roots in Britain hybridized by local experience and grafted onto the Canadian tree of “homegrown radicalism.” How much of the Canadian Communist Party’s program and influence was “homegrown”? In the author’s opinion, its roots and activist base were certainly grounded in the community or regional construct, though the national leadership’s unyielding subservience to Soviet foreign policy over the decades was too often prioritized over both the realities and relevance of Canadian issues.1 Les McDonald’s party experience would become tightly meshed with some of the background events leading into the Lenkurt strike and was integral to his participation in the left “faction” or “caucus” inside IBEW Local 213. This was an activist Communist grouping that had been an important factor in the life of the local since at least the latter part of the 1930s.2

In August 1968, Les McDonald was sent as a trade union delegate to a labour convention in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He was accompanied by Lionel Edwards, a former captain in the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion—the Canadian contingent of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War—and a stalwart of the Communist Party in BC. Being turned back by Soviet troops at the Austrian-Czech border with Edwards decisively changed McDonald’s worldview and constituted a second hammer blow for him personally. It explains his decision to turn increasingly toward sport as an outlet for his boundless energy. Like so many others before him at other pivotal points in the twists and turns of Soviet history, he and Edwards both then left the Communist Party.

Yet politics was so much a part of his DNA that he took an active part in the fight against a third automobile crossing linking the North Shore to Vancouver in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This preceded his reluctant, though temporary, turn toward social democratic measures as solutions to the problems of society, and realistically the only way to get close to the actual levers of political power. Following his participation in a handful of local riding association meetings, he was even able to win nomination as a New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate in the provincial election of 1972, the election that catapulted a youthful Dave Barrett and the NDP into power for the first time in British Columbia.3 But that was McDonald’s last gasp at formal politics. His defeat in the riding of North Vancouver–Capilano signalled a complete shift toward his other passion, sport.

Les McDonald’s athletic prowess and his subsequent career in the organizing and promotion of sporting events, particularly in connection with triathlon, has already been documented elsewhere. Yet none of these accounts exhibit much understanding of his earlier life as a trade union activist and Communist Party member.4 The most succinct description of Les McDonald from triathlon commentators, however, might have been that of Brad Culp: “McDonald is perhaps the most important and controversial figure in the history of triathlon. The son of Scotch-Irish coal miners, McDonald was tenacious, fiery, outspoken and extremely hard working.”5 And controversial he remains. I propose to try to bridge the gap between these two defining characteristics in my father’s life, viewing them as reciprocal rather than sequential. I embark on this endeavour fully aware of the perils of writing about family members, especially a parent. Objectivity is inevitably a fiction, and I am fully aware of the very real temptation of succumbing to a hagiographical treatment of someone who, in turn, was so influential in my life. I have tried my best to step back far enough to achieve a broader, more balanced perspective, but I realize that I may at times have not been entirely successful. Clio, Greek muse of history, would have been pleased with my dilemma.

Another difficulty I encountered was my father’s reluctance to volunteer information about this period of his past or to reflect on it in any great detail. He considered the debacle of the Lenkurt Electric strike a personal defeat, an event whose outcomes he was not particularly fond of recalling. Given that his politics shadowed him throughout the Lenkurt crisis, he was also quite aware of the double-edged sword represented by his adherence to the Communist Party. On the one hand, he was highly cognizant of and thankful for the class-oriented education he received, as well as for the people he met through the party. Equally important were the events that he helped promote and in which he subsequently took part. His status as a trade union activist and as an up-and-comer in the Canadian Communist Party was part and parcel of his identity at the time and to a great extent framed his outlook on the world as a young man.

On the other hand, as he grew older, he became disheartened and dispirited by the knowledge that he had served a party that blindly supported the Soviet Union. He came to realize that the Stalinist regime truly was guilty of numerous heinous crimes—that the nightmare of show trials, the gulags, and the murder of countless numbers in the name of the revolution were not just the inventions or exaggerations of an imperialist, capitalist West. A proud man, rarely admitting to making errors in judgment, he nevertheless acknowledged at least once that choices made and legacies bequeathed can end up in ideological cul-de-sacs. Despite my several conversations with him on the matter, I regret that I never interviewed him at length in a formal, tape-recorded session when he was still of sound mind. As it is, relatively little exists by way of detailed accounts of Communist Party activism within IBEW Local 213 during the 1960s. In the autumn of 2015, however, my mother discovered a sizable collection of documents and photographs that my father had evidently squirrelled away in a chest of drawers in the basement of our family home. When Les first became institutionalized, my mother and I decided to sort through them, and they have since joined other documents relating to the history of IBEW Local 213 housed in the Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of British Columbia. My father’s personal notes on the union, on politics, his charges and subsequent correspondence with the International Office of the IBEW, and the newspaper clippings he kept all tell a fascinating story.

Let me make it clear right at the outset, however, that this book is not just about one person or a single event: it is as much about the history of IBEW Local 213 during the Cold War era as it is about Les McDonald. Telling of the story of Lenkurt and of this era through the life of Les McDonald also sheds light on the patterns of political development inside a specific union local. While there are definitely similarities between all union locals in Canada, especially in the building trades, there are also significant differences. In this regard, Jason Russell’s recent work on auto workers within Local 27 of the UAW/CAW in London, Ontario, offers a useful template in that he persuasively argues that the union local, not the national or international organization, is the key labour framework most commonly encountered and used by working-class Canadians to voice their aspirations and advance their interests.6 Russell builds on the work of earlier scholars who have drawn similar conclusions—Bill Freeman’s exceptional study of Hamilton Local 1005 of the United Steelworkers springs to mind.7 To better understand the resulting struggles of rank-and-file workers, historians need to probe more extensively into the internal dynamic of these local union structures. In addition, the labour movement’s “militant minority” in British Columbia, so well chronicled in broad brush strokes by historian Benjamin Isitt, should be explored in more detail.8 As Isitt documents, the aptly named minority movement was clearly not homogenous. The shifting sands of militancy and of leftist traditions—in particular “vanguardist” practices—inside specific locals, indeed within leading elements of the rank and file, requires a more thorough examination at a personal, individual level.

Much of the emphasis in the pages that follow, in particular chapter 6, will be to track the significant inroads the “left faction” made within Local 213 in the decade after the IBEW’s International Office placed the local union under trusteeship in January 1955. Led by a core of remarkable activists, notably Bill Stewart and Les McDonald, this Communist faction renewal within the local would prove to be highly influential as it slowly but surely—and for the second time after World War II—arguably embodied “the social determination of historical contingency.”9 Over the years, through both word and deed, Communist electrical workers in Vancouver advanced positions that would alter both the course of their own history and the history of IBEW Local 213. That they did so not in feeble and futile individual attempts, but through an organized form of human action and co-ordinated intervention, made all the difference. Critically important in affecting trade union outcomes at different times and at various political junctures, they also left behind distinct signposts entailing an alternative vision for ensuing generations to identify, discuss, and perhaps even act upon. The antagonism and controlling internal logic of business unionism would, in response, ultimately prompt a significant splinter group from within Local 213 to pursue an alternative trade union trajectory. Les McDonald’s persuasive abilities would provide the initial inspiration to pursue this option once the dust had settled and IBEW retribution had been meted out following the upheaval caused by the largely unanticipated Lenkurt strike. Taken together, and with time and distance providing perspective, these events would prove to be a textbook model of history’s dialectic dynamic visibly unfolding within the contours of a local union setting.

Although women dominated the workforce at Lenkurt Electric, their experiences are rarely reflected in the available sources. While I have unearthed a partial set of interviews conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, I was able to find only a single woman who was employed by Lenkurt at the time of the strike. However, she did not wish to be interviewed as her memories of the events surrounding the Lenkurt strike were still too bitterly resonant. For that reason, and despite having played what appears to be a significant role, she will remain anonymous.

Moreover, the vast majority of the personal interviews I conducted were recorded in the early 1980s for my master’s thesis in history at SFU. Among other things, I was seeking to understand and explain the particularities of Local 213’s eight-year experience (1947–1955) in Communist-led trade unionism under the leadership of George Gee, the local’s business manager (or “business agent,” as the position was known at the time). A substantial number of the interviews thus understandably focused on this period, with the result that information garnered from interviews with major protagonists, such as those with Jack Ross, the representative of the IBEW’s International Office responsible for British Columbia, does not extend far enough to include the events immediately leading up to and including the Lenkurt Electric strike. The same largely holds true for my interviews with Angus MacDonald and Art O’Keeffe, respectively president and business manager of Local 213. All three protagonists continued to be politically active in the local all the way through to 1966 and somewhat beyond, and they occasionally offered enlightening nuggets of information regarding events in the 1960s.

At the outset, this book was not meant to be deliberately provocative. Following the chain of evidence, however, has meant that its necessary conclusions might indeed become vexatious. Not to poke too many people with a stick, in hindsight it is unintentionally provocative to a number of parties: it is provocative to the McDonald family in that the Communist past of the scion of the McDonald clan in Canada is now fully revealed; it is provocative toward the IBEW in that it pierces the veil concealing largely suppressed accounts of Communist agitation and the latter’s subsequent contributions originating in Local 213; it is provocative to employers, governments, and conservative union leaders as they worked, at a minimum side by side, to limit the extent of left-wing influence and agitation among rank-and-file electrical workers; it is provocative toward the Communist Party in that its unquestioned loyalty to the Soviet Union was manifestly counterproductive to being more effective in the Canadian context; and it is provocative to the global triathlon community in that the foundational reasons for the confounding outlook of its first president is largely explained. To hopefully clear the air, being provocative is not meant to arbitrarily rile people up for reasons related to a twisted notion of devious amusement; in fact, it is not necessarily a bad thing at all. Provocative histories can help to spark discussions, as they elicit contrasting opinions and just might lead to a greater understanding of the world in which we live.

Finally, and evidentiary provocation aside, if not well researched and carefully explained, important events such as the Lenkurt strike could very easily default to the interpretation of those cast in the same mould as Selig Perlman. A century ago this historian of institutional labour commented from the United States that trade unionism, “despite an occasional revolutionary clamour on its fringes, is a conservative social force.”10 If viewed only from the top down and from the perspective of the alleged “winners in history,” there might appear at first glance to be a fair amount of truth to this affirmation. But this is surely not the whole truth, and it certainly masks a fascinating and often discordant narrative. Indeed, as a British authority of note on the subject once intriguingly wrote, the so-called “losers make the best historians.”11 Losers can also become winners in their lifetime, in this exceptional case a bold and pioneering Olympic sport administrator.

Equally important in providing energy and a measure of passion to this effort, the captivating Lenkurt episode—as with all labour history—encompasses individuals whose lives and moments in the limelight, no matter how fleeting, often deserve to be retold. They may not be famous politicians, company directors, actors, rock stars, or sports heroes—and they may even have lost an important battle—but their contributions to the story of what made our society function should not be forgotten. My obvious close familiarity with Les McDonald will also hopefully impart a sense of the history of Local 213 as lived experience. In short, as attempted in the following pages, historians need to delve more deeply into the lives of these interesting working-class characters if they are to get a handle on the sometimes-significant nuances that exist in the pattern of BC’s labour and working-class history.