Chapter 6.6Les McDonald and IBEW Local 213

Leslie (Les) McDonald was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on April 30, 1933, and grew up in the nearby coal-mining village of Felling. His father, Hugh, had been a pitman at Felling Colliery but had switched over to Heworth Colliery when the mine at Felling closed in 1931. Les had a difficult childhood. Starting at eight years of age, he was delivering newspapers morning and evenings for his mother’s newspaper shop, as well as doing subscription collections on Sundays; this meant he would often miss school and had no time for homework. His father, Hugh, was an alcoholic and often physically abusive toward his mother, Catherine, and then was absent for five years during World War II. When Hugh came home, the drinking and abuse started up again. It got so bad that Les was forced to live with his maternal grandparents for about three years when he was a teenager. Finally, as a young adult, Les had had enough and physically kicked his father out of the house. It was a difficult time and affected him for the rest of his life. Estranged from his father, he rarely talked about it.

On a more positive note, Les grew up surrounded by very strong women. In particular, his maternal grandmother, Margaret Davidson—known in the family as “Ma Daver”—was philosophically and politically very much inclined to the left. According to family lore, she had been an early suffragette in the Tyneside area, later working alongside the socialist and Labour Party member Ellen Wilkinson, who served from 1935 to 1947 as member of Parliament for the town of Jarrow.1 The strong women surrounding Les had a massive impact on the young man’s outlook and his perspectives on the way the world worked. Though he was often left to his own devices as a youngster when not out on his newspaper route, it was evident that both mother—and especially his grandmother—had inculcated him with perspectives on the ways of the world he would never forget.

As a fourteen-year-old fresh out of school, and following in his father’s footsteps, Les “gan doon the pit” for six weeks before deciding to try his hand at various other occupations. This was followed by his mandatory two-year stint of National Service in the British military between 1952 and 1954. His horizons were then broadened by occasional ski outings in winter, and, more importantly, once the weather improved, rock climbing every weekend with the informal Dunsdale Ski and Climbing Club, based in Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills, which straddle the border with Scotland. In those days, skiing often meant a lengthy uphill slog through deep snow drifts, carrying wooden skis on one’s shoulders, followed by a less than two-minute run down an ungroomed hill. But rock climbing exerted a special pull, and Les quickly became hooked on this thrilling new sport. He seemed to have a knack for finding seemingly impossible holds along cracks and ledges while perilously perched on the face of imposing rock walls.

Les did not merely “play” at rock climbing: he worked at perfecting his abilities every spare moment he had. In the liberating era that was post–World War II Britain, he was away from home every weekend on his motorbike, part of the wave of working-class climbers invading a hitherto middle-class pursuit. Les climbed many of the most difficult routes of the day. In his home ground of Northumberland, and with other leading Dunsdale lads, he opened up climbing in the Hen Hole, a rocky chasm on The Cheviot, the highest summit in the area. In Scotland, his climbing would encompass expeditions to Glencoe and to the Isle of Skye, while in England’s Lake District the group undertook difficult ascents mainly on Great Gable mountain and on Scafell and some of the other Langdale Pikes. With the talented Danny McCleod in the lead, Les and another Dunsdale member, Harry Warmington, helped to conquer the Central Buttress on Scafell, reputed at the time to be the hardest climb in the Lake District. Like the rest of his Dunsdale friends, he was ethically opposed to being over-reliant on pitons and similar artificial aids, principles he maintained throughout his climbing career. Known to be adventurous and full of energy, he soon garnered the reputation of being one of the young climbers of note to watch for in the northeast of England.2

Along the way he had met up with Monique Richer, a French university student working as a teacher’s assistant at a local high school; he proposed to her following a whirlwind romance. Monique agreed to his marriage proposal and to emigrate with him to Vancouver as they had heard that it was a beautiful city full of opportunity.3 Les arrived on Canada’s Pacific Coast in 1955, allowing time for Monique to finish her English degree at the Université de Bordeaux. He worked odd jobs at first, mostly on the green chain in a sawmill in North Vancouver, then married Monique in 1956. Three children followed: Ian (1957), Helen (1958), and Daniel (1962).

What was Les McDonald like? Physically, he appeared to be very average, even on the small side, as he was only five foot nine inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds. His slender build, however, camouflaged an enormous aerobic machine and also a superlative weight–strength ratio. Les McDonald had a surprising ability to work unrelentingly at any task, whether it was physical or mental, and many a friend and adversary over the years has commented on this aspect of Les McDonald’s approach to the challenges he was periodically forced to contend with. His ruddy face was topped by an increasingly unruly mop of dark red hair that he sometimes let grow as he began to develop bald patches early on that he regularly tried to hide with a comb-over. He had dark brown eyes and visually he could have been a family cousin to BC labour martyr, Albert (Ginger) Goodwin. Temperamentally, Les was problematic. On a personal level, he was short tempered and did not bear fools gladly. He could sometimes be cruel in berating those less able than himself in the give-and-take of heated political or philosophical discussions. One of his close companions from his Dunsdale ski and climbing days, Gerard MacGill, described him as “highly intelligent, funny and infuriating by turn.”4 This meant he had many admirers but few very good friends, though the handful he did have usually stuck with him for life. Growing up, his children sometimes suffered due to his impatience with their lack of maturity and savoir-faire. Les had always been a voracious reader, with the passage of time expanding his breadth of knowledge on history and world affairs, and soon became a champion debater during informal discussions. His foes quickly learned he was possessed of a highly effective combination of verve, turn of phrase, and rapier-like wit, often at their expense. During more formal occasions in front of large crowds, he was equally impressive, usually speaking off the cuff at the microphone with emphasis and poetic flourish; he could, for example, recite Robbie Burns, Scotland’s national ploughman’s poet, at will. Les was often able to win over audiences with his sense of humour and histrionic anecdotes, but he would then quickly veer off to make telling political and philosophical points. Sarah Springman, British triathlon personality and one-time political adversary to Les McDonald, had once been a target of his withering form of criticism. She spoke of her impressions of him years later, when he had already left the trade union movement far behind: “Les is a real autodidact. He will make you think he knows more than he does, but he is incredibly brilliant.” His wife, Monique, was equally complimentary of her husband’s character: “He’s a born leader. This is because he can make decisions quickly, even harsh ones, and above everything else he has this amazing ability to be a brilliant judge of character.”5 Later on in life she would write more critically of her husband:

He was demanding of his friends, tyrannical with his collaborators, ruthless towards his enemies. Sometimes people transited without knowing it from one category to another. His charm exerted itself especially on strangers, newcomers, who he could astonish and dazzle. For family and friends, however, this charm took on a form of déjà-vu and was often irritating.6

Les McDonald’s physical and intellectual abilities would serve him well in British Columbia. On the job front, things changed in 1957 when he was picked up on a tryout basis by St. Andrew’s Football Club of North Vancouver in the Pacific Coast Soccer League and scored three goals in his first game. As often happens in the sports world, arrangements were made for him in the subsequent change room banter to get a more solid and better-paying occupation. He was told to report to Burrard Dry Dock in North Vancouver, speak to the supervising manager, and a labouring position would be his for the asking.

Once he was working on the shipbuilding site in North Vancouver, it became clear that he was capable of more than labouring. As Les had been in the electronic-reliant communications battalion of the Royal Corps of Signals for two years, someone suggested that he should begin his apprenticeship as an electrician. So he did.

It was while he was working in Burrard Dry Dock in 1958 that Les McDonald’s combative temperament became apparent. While overseeing the installation of new wiring on a vessel in for repairs, a foreman had taken exception to the slow rate of work of “Taffy” Jones, an older worker who was close to retirement. The foreman scolded Jones, a gentle fellow with obvious Welsh origins, and then laid him off. Les was furious. Ingrained with a deep hostility toward an arbitrary abuse of authority, he immediately demanded that Jones be reinstated. When the foreman ignored him and told him to go take a hike, Les gathered the work crew around him, explained what had happened, and convinced them all to immediately begin a sit-down strike in the bowels of the ship. It was his first “wobble,” a term widely used among unionized construction workers on the west coast to refer to what is elsewhere known as a “wildcat strike.”7 The hastily organized protest also exemplified why Gerard MacGill, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, had discerningly commented about his energetic and fearless climbing companion: “Les could be dangerous to know.”8

The company was perplexed: who was this young red-haired upstart? Why hadn’t the union gone through the proper grievance channels? But the point was made: the wobble had nothing to do with the union, it was spontaneous or, at least, spontaneous in the sense that a young Les McDonald had led his small crew of shipyard workers to sit down and stop work until the older worker was brought back into the fold. After heated discussions, the crew’s senior workmate was eventually reinstated and the men went back to work repairing the ship.9

Les was immediately accosted by the union shop stewards in Burrard Dry Dock. Many of them were current, or had been, members of the Communist Party while working in the shipyard, though the party’s influence was definitely waning by the late 1950s at the previously massive work site.10 Who was he? What the hell was going on? After work, when calm had reasserted itself, the union leadership took Les out to the bar for a beer and a chat. The upshot was that in the following month there was a knock on the door of Les and Monique’s recently purchased, modest split-level home in Pemberton Heights in North Vancouver; it was Jack Gillett, a suspended member of Local 213 and a journeyman electrician from the shipyard. Monique remembers him vaguely as “a quiet guy, very serious.”11

One of the members of the 21 Club formed following the anti-Communist purge of Local 213 in 1955, Jack Gillett was there as a representative of the Communist Party. He explained to Les that the party had done some research through its counterpart in Britain and it was confirmed what had come up in previous conversations; that Hugh McDonald, Les’s father, was indeed in the Communist Party back in England. Gillett explained that the party in Vancouver thought he would make an excellent addition to their group in-fighting on behalf of working people in their daily struggles and for the long-term goal of building a socialist Canada. Would he join? After a short discussion, and curiously having not disclosed the bitter personal estrangement from his father, Les McDonald agreed to become a member of the Communist Party of Canada. The ideas and discussions he had absorbed in his youth were evidently deep-rooted and part of the cultural fabric that existed in his family when he was growing up. Any personal enmity he may have harboured against an abusive father seemingly did not weigh that heavily in the balance when he made the choice to join the party in Canada.12

Les did not think it was that big a deal. His father, after all, had been in the Communist Party for years in and around the Tyneside area and he had grown up knowing Communists on a personal level. These were active, committed, and interesting people. Socially, then, there was no issue with Les as far as associating with Communists was concerned. Another point, which cannot be downplayed, was that he had discovered upon his arrival in British Columbia that the circumstances of work in Canada’s westernmost province could sometimes be worse than in the old country. If wages were unquestionably higher, so too was the cost of food and housing, while the boss seemingly encountered fewer checks and balances in this new country from a less militant trade union movement. These unsettling factors pushed people like Les McDonald to become active on the left. It was an echo of the experience Ernie Winch had forty-five years earlier when his family arrived in Vancouver in 1910 to begin a new life. The Winch family came with “orthodox views on politics, hoping to better themselves in a land of the future.” Instead, Ernie and his son, Harold—who in the 1920s and the early part of the 1930s was an electrician working out of Local 213—found “a more vicious kind of competition and exploitation than they had seen at home.”13 Winch father and son would eventually become well-known icons of the socialist-inclined CCF in British Columbia.

The party required at the time that wives agree to their husbands’ decision to become members of the Communist Party. Monique accepted with little hesitation. In her youth she had been a keen follower of the social Catholic movement of the time that promoted the ideas of worker-priests and anti-poverty clerics like Henri Grouès, popularly known as “l’Abbé Pierre.” Monique remembered that “this certainly influenced my sympathy for a better world through communism.”14 Having also been an avid outdoor enthusiast while growing up, hiking and skiing in the nearby Pyrénées, she agreed to her husband’s adherence to the Communist Party in part, also, “because of my years of friendship and admiration for Henri ‘Coucou’ Barrio, a charismatic French mountaineer, war-time resistance fighter, and Communist.”15 Busy raising her three kids, working part-time, and later involved in doing graduate work in linguistics Monique, however, never personally joined the party.

Soviet foreign policy decisions or Khrushchev’s revelations on Stalin’s horrifying murderous misdeeds had not yet entered the equation for either one of them. Both Les and Monique came from areas of Europe where the anti-Communist, American-based McCarthyist hysteria did not easily convince all ordinary working and middle-class people and were often viewed as curious diatribes on American newsreel highlights before movies at the local theatre. Political and generational influences originating in the United States did not always travel well over large geographic distances in the immediate post–World War II era, nor did it affect all social classes equally. Les claimed on several occasions that he had not personally met anyone who did not vote Labour, or parties further to the left, until he departed from Felling to do his mandatory two years of National (Military) Service between 1952 and 1954. In the public sphere, the often frenetic McCarthyist attacks on the Communist Party and its fellow travellers had evidently not taken place to the same extent in Britain as they had in the United States and Canada. Although there would definitely be some echoes in the trade union movement—specifically in the 1961 Electrical Trade Union (ETU) trial following allegations of election-rigging on the part of the British Communist Party—historians have since pointed out that the political background unfolding around McDonald during his youth was such that academic scrutiny and writing on the topic of anti-communism has been intermittent at best.16 One author underscored that it was evident “there were broader patterns of political toleration in Britain,” even going so far as to write that compared to the United States, “British anticommunism is a historiographical nonentity.”17 Despite having his own family war heroes he could look to for personal inspiration, the resounding exploits of the victorious Red Army during World War II also reverberated with Les and his relatives during the ensuing decades. These sensibilities and left-wing political outlook were typical of the coal-mining basins of Britain, even after the mines had closed down.18 In France, meanwhile, there were entire unions, including easily the largest labour federation, “la Confédération Générale du Travail” (CGT), that were bastions of Communist influence and were often Communist-led. The strength of the Parti communiste français (PCF) was such that in nationwide elections it regularly polled between 20 and 25 percent of the popular vote between 1945 to 1969. Although the rare political discussions involving Les and his in-laws created huge and discomforting rows during otherwise cordial evening meal conversations, it was not unusual in France to find individual family members in otherwise conservative families sympathetic to “le Parti des Fusillés.”19

As a Communist electrical worker, but still an apprentice until 1963, Les fell immediately under the influence of William Evans Stewart, better known as “Electrical Bill” Stewart. Electrical Bill was given his nickname so as not to confuse him with “Boilermaker Bill Stewart,” at the time the Communist secretary-treasurer of the Marine Workers’ and Boilermakers’ Union, also centred in Burrard Dry Dock.20 Having met at the same jobsite and often working together, Electrical Bill soon became a mentor to Les and was often at the house in North Vancouver discussing history, politics, and trade union tactics; there is little doubt that he fundamentally altered the trajectory of McDonald’s life. Having grown up in Hamilton, Ontario, Bill Stewart had deep roots in the country as he was a fifth generation Canadian originally of United Empire Loyalist stock. He had become a member of the Communist Party during the latter part of the 1930s, then decided to enlist with the Canadian Army in 1942 to fight fascism. As part of the tank corps, he was sent first to North Africa but was severely wounded near Lake Trasimeno north of Rome in the ensuing Italian Campaign, was hospitalized, decorated for bravery, then sent home. Following a lengthy convalescence and several years of work in Ontario, he relocated with his young family to Vancouver in 1953 and began working at one of the grain elevators on the waterfront. In about 1957 Stewart found work in Burrard Dry Dock in North Vancouver and he, too, became an electrician. A huge shipyard during World War II with close to 14,000 workers at its peak, Burrard Dry Dock had been a noted Communist Party centre of activism since the middle of the war, but with a workforce steadily diminishing in numbers during the postwar years.21

Not yet a member of Local 213 during the George Gee era, Bill Stewart came into the union after the events of 1955.22 It is hard to know for certain whether Stewart was parachuted by the party into Local 213 to revive its fortunes in the local union, but it is likely. The witch hunt for Communists in Local 213 in 1955 had not been that efficient—it had, for instance, initially missed John McCuish, former marine pilot in the IWA’s Loggers’ Navy in the 1940s. If he was indeed parachuted in, Stewart thus had a small nucleus of party comrades to start work with, and he became very active in the local. Through sheer force of intelligence, a fun-loving personality, and an ability to speak persuasively to audiences during public forums, Stewart set about influencing his fellow electricians wherever he found himself at work. Terry Simpson characterized his red-tinged reputation with the following commentary:

Bill Stewart was very effective. He had that way about him that colourful people with a certain amount of courage, flair, and excitement are able to have on those around them. He was able to inject a dose of enthusiasm on others that they don’t normally have. In that way he seemed to be a throwback to the type of individuals the Communist Party had in the thirties and forties, when there was a great deal of excitement surrounding the organization of working people.23

Les McDonald described his good friend and Comrade, Bill, in similar terms. According to McDonald, Bill Stewart was a “quixotic personality who could transform himself from gleeful juvenile pranks to heights of oratorical clarity and wisdom in the space of one day; it was always an astonishing transformation to behold.” Les, as was his custom, provided a story to illustrate his point. It was the late 1950s and they had just met at Burrard Dry Dock and were working inside the hold of a battleship in berth for a refit, a Restigouche-class destroyer. Les played soccer with another apprentice, Bill Cassie, who Bill Stewart had coaxed into a seaman’s locker at lunch, surreptitiously locking and trapping him inside the confined space. “We then passed judgment: ‘Bread and Water only’ in the brig. We gleefully fed him sandwiches through the grill, then poured water on him. How we laughed, such fun, no cares.” Bill Stewart then convinced the playful gang working on the ship to go to the electrical workers’ Unit meeting that night—Les picks up the story:

But Bill the comic was no more. A half hour into the meeting he stood up and analyzed the stupidity of the Cold War, of defense spending, a collaborationist union leadership. . . . He spoke about the dignity of working men, as he often did . . . He began by saying, instead of “Brother Chairman and Brothers” he would say “Comrade Chairman and Comrades,” then pause long enough as the jaws dropped and the eyes opened wide, to say “Oh sorry, thought I was in the Legion Hall.” That was a memorable evening, and it was in retrospect the first call in a moribund, beaten union, that was to transform it to be the most militant local in the province, throw off the trusteeship, establish a fair hiring system, and accomplished by Bill, not single-handedly of course, but by a combination of skills, human and intellectual—and a passion for unity—plus a non-affected humility . . . then [he] drifted back into the shadows of near obscurity.24

Bill Stewart and a young Les McDonald set about attempting to rebuild the Communist-led left caucus inside Local 213. It was not easily done. Neither one of them had roots in British Columbia, so other than the older and suspended members of the 21 Club, they really didn’t know anyone. But they were busy on the job, trying to educate their fellow workers on the contradictions and exploitive foundations of capitalism and ready to take the lead if worksite agitation became necessary. It also appears that their left caucus did not strictly demand Communist Party membership: close sympathizers could belong. The importance of Bill Stewart’s engaging personality in this respect cannot be overstated as he appeared to have had a mostly positive impact on those with whom he interacted. Ernie Fulton, then a young apprentice wireman, remembered well Stewart’s congenial presence on various construction sites: “I was on a job once with Bill Stewart. After some discussion at lunch, one of the guys asked a question: ‘What’s a Communist?’ Bill Stewart pulls out his wallet and out comes a card. ‘It’s a guy who has one of these.’ Well, it’s as if we had seen a ghost, we were that stunned . . . he was a great guy.”25

Once general meetings were finally reinstated in June 1959, both Stewart and McDonald went to the larger meetings at the IBEW hall on Dunsmuir Street, all the while trying to consolidate and grow the left caucus inside Local 213. Times had changed, and they had only had a couple of years with the inside wiremen’s unit to build relationships with their fellow workers, so it took hard work and dedication. McCarthyism had also undeniably had a profound effect on the outlook of working people in Canada. But the two comrades persevered and often worked in tandem. Dora Stewart, Bill’s spouse—now widow—remembered their relationship with fondness:

People like Bill and Les understood that the struggle was just ongoing. . . . I think Bill helped Les sustain optimism. People with as much talent as Les needed guidance. So Bill helped Les at a certain stage of his development. You know, Bill used to tackle Les on a whole range of issues. . . . Now, take Bill’s attitude towards property. You know, he dented Les’s car by jumping up and down on the hood to teach him a lesson. . . . Bill taught us all how to re-evaluate things and he had all the courage in the world in order to do so.26

Two reporters for a short-lived Vancouver-based newspaper, the Western Voice (described on its masthead as “A Newspaper of Working Class Struggle”), claimed in an extensive 1975 historical retrospective of Local 213 that Bill Stewart, “Party organizer, entered the local in 1957 and over the next four years built a group of 20 young Communists; some new recruits, others the remnants of those purged in ’55.”27 Although relatively small in number, the members of this group were undeniably influential in terms of the inroads Stewart was able to make rebuilding Communist Party strength inside Local 213. There is no question that in this process Les McDonald became his left-hand man. And when Stewart began to involve himself more extensively with the Communist Party and could no longer devote himself entirely to the electrical workers, Les McDonald naturally took his place as the leader of the Communist group, popularly known as the “left faction,” within Local 213.

What was Communist Party life like for Les McDonald? To begin with, he had to attend a minimum of two bi-monthly Club meetings and contribute dues of three to five dollars per month to the party. He would also have been given a political assignment, whether it was within a trade union, civic politics, or the peace movement.28 The Communist Party did not dictate to him how he should live his life; the party was more about a set of guiding principles than an organization that would tell him how he should live day-to-day or conduct himself when interacting with others. The most appropriate analogy might be that it was the North Star of his political outlook during this period of his development. Les would have agreed wholeheartedly with the description of former IWA organizer John McCuish, who, blacklisted from the forest industry, had been taken in as a non-skilled groundman in IBEW Local 213 during the Gee era.29 McCuish was once paraphrased as emphasizing that “being a red in the trade union movement had nothing to do with doing Moscow’s dirty work, rather it was . . . a way of being a trade unionist.” A staunch party member, he brazenly ignored in his statement some serious zigzags in the “line” required of Canadian Communists in the past. Considered a likeable rogue, the rough-and-tumble McCuish also managed to put into the historical record an intriguing and heartfelt question. He asked of those who questioned his twin allegiances, was it possible to have successful unions “without a Marxist theory?”30 For McCuish, this theory probably alluded to a fundamental Marxist idea relating to the labour theory of surplus value, the notion of profit as a form of theft. McCuish would have argued that unions have been formed, in large part, to reduce the “theft” surrounding the wages that capitalists pay their employees.

Even as Les was coming to grips with these ideas, being a Communist trade unionist could be energizing and stimulating. Les definitely liked certain aspects of life in the party, in particular for the opportunity to socialize with like-minded people. He enjoyed discussing the latest Marxist-oriented history book, attending concerts when Pete Seeger or the Soviet Red Army chorus was in town, participating in semi-regular public demonstrations, or meeting Eastern-bloc athletes when they came to Vancouver to participate in Canadian competitions (among them the legendary Soviet gymnast Boris Shakhlin, who visited Vancouver just a few years after his triumph at the 1960 Summer Olympics). This personal aspect of the Communist Party grew in importance as his friendship with Bill Stewart and others, such as Lionel Edwards or Charlie Caron, flourished.

Following on Stewart’s lead, Les gradually came to be recognized as an effective rank-and-file trade union activist. Stewart would have emphasized to him several times over that the cause of working-class progress could not be realized by “merely joining an organization; acting on ideas is what changes the world.”31 Transforming into reality this crucial Marxist notion, that human agency can indeed be a causal force for change in the world, required long hours and continuous effort. Going to Communist Party and union meetings, caucusing ahead of time with the party’s left faction to decide on what position to take on various issues and choose who would present resolutions and speak to them, and afterwards to deconstruct what had happened and plan ahead again—and then be up at the crack of dawn to work the tools the next day—was both time-consuming and potentially exhausting, and Les noted as much in an interview years later: “We’d meet every day, seven days a week, meeting after meeting. What you have to understand is a party member will get up at 6 a.m. and work until midnight.”32 One of his good friends recalled of this time in the Communist Party that whenever there was an important issue that arose, “it seemed like we would have a meeting just to call a meeting.”33 Though they may have somewhat inflated their recall of the hours they committed to party activism, Les’s dedicated work and his commitment to bringing about a shift in the political outlook of Local 213 would bear fruit by the mid-1960s.

At the same time, Canada experienced a slowdown in economic growth in the late 1950s, accompanied by an increase in levels of unemployment. The impact of such downturns on the construction industry meant that lack of employment was a constant concern, and it hampered efforts to rebuild the Communist Party numbers inside Local 213. Periodic declines in the number of new construction projects made steady employment a priority for inside wiremen. This was also true of the contract linemen, who mainly worked for Hume and Rumble or Peterson Electric. But the linemen seemed more willing to do what they had often done in the past: they became “boomers,” picking up stakes to follow the jobs elsewhere across the continent while working “on permit” via other locals of the IBEW.34 In contrast, the concern about job loss was much less pronounced among the utility workers employed on a steady basis by BC Electric.

The fact that British Columbia’s economy was heavily dependent on mining and timber further left it vulnerable to shifts in the overall demand for raw materials. This economic instability hit Les and Monique hard in the early fall of 1960 when Les was laid off from a $50 million megaproject to build the American-owned Celgar pulp mill near the town of Castlegar, while yet another downturn hit the economy on the coast.35 This meant that suddenly Les could no longer contribute to the young couple’s monthly mortgage payments for their newly purchased home. The layoff from the Castlegar work site was definitely of a political and punitive nature, as Les had been involved in a work stoppage of several days’ duration at the Celgar construction site. This event took place within the constraints of an imposed international agreement. The evident shortcomings of this type of contract had already been vehemently protested that year by the inside wiremen from a geographically adjoining jurisdiction. IBEW Local 46 in Seattle, Washington, had angrily resolved at a union meeting in May “that a letter of censure [be] sent to International President Gordon Freeman from the Washington State Electrical Workers Association in regard to these agreements.”36

In the description of the Pacific Tribune, the struggle on the ground in Castlegar concerned the fact that “the company packed the men into cramped trailer accommodations far below the standards set by provincial regulations.” As the paper noted, however, the underlying question was whether “the job stewards movement in the construction trades is to be a genuine movement with power of decision or whether it is to be a meek instrument of the International Roadmen to carry out their collaborationist policies.”37

One of the principal engineers on the Celgar project, Al Fisher, had met Les in the late fifties when Fisher was still the head coach for the UBC ski team and Les used to tag along on training sessions at nearby Grouse Mountain. The two ran into each other again in Castlegar, where Les was working as an apprentice electrician and living on the Celgar worksite. Fisher was not yet aware of high-level trade union developments aimed at reducing the traditional authority of onsite shop stewards: for him, the immediate issue had to do with meeting provincial regulatory standards in connection with the living quarters available to the 3,000-strong construction crews. Les strongly objected to the “two-bunks-in-one-trailer set-up” for the work crews, insisting instead on only one bunk per trailer, for the sake of privacy. And “damn it if Les didn’t help lead a wobble on that job over camp conditions!” Fisher recalled.

Fisher agreed with Les’s position and persuaded Tom Simons, president of H. A. Simons Engineering, to agree to expanding the work camp for all the crews coming and going on the project so that there would be only one worker per trailer. “It delayed our project by about a month and cost a stack of money,” Fisher remembered, and in the meanwhile “Les was being hounded by the construction bosses, the union roadmen, and even the cops.” In the end, he reported, “we got Les out of there before he got into serious trouble and back home safe and sound to North Van.”38

After Les returned from Castlegar, he and Monique had several discussions that ended up with the young couple deciding to move to Dax—Monique’s hometown—and rent out the house in North Vancouver while they waited for the economy to pick up again on the west coast. But the economy may not have been the sole factor in their departure. Al Fisher certainly thought that Les’s recent experience with IBEW roadmen contributed to their decision to go and live in France for a while.39

After a brief trip back to the Tyneside area in late September to visit Les’s family and friends, off to France they went. While living with his in-laws, Les played midfield on the local soccer team and worked in a nearby creosote plant, Bois Imprégnés, which specialized in railway ties. It was not a good situation, given that Monique’s parents were fairly conservative, but the young couple made the best they could of their difficult circumstances while they waited out the recession in Canada and hoped that by the time the economy picked up the furor surrounding Les’s problematic departure from Castlegar would have blown over.

Somehow, sports always seemed to find Les McDonald wherever he was located. While he was in France, he got a letter from a Vancouver friend, Declan Daley, who had taken up ski racing with him with the Grouse Mountain Tyee, a well-known ski club located in North Vancouver’s backyard. Declan was going to Wengen, Switzerland, to try out for the British National ski team and wondered whether Les would be interested in coming along and trying out as well. Happy to get a break from his in-laws and the creosote plant, Les jumped at the chance. Even though rock climbing was by far what he did best, Les made it onto the British ski team that participated in the Low Countries ski championships. Among his teammates was twenty-three-year-old Karim Aga Khan, who had, upon the recent death of his grandfather, become the leader of the Nizari group of Ismaili Muslims and was by all reports easily the most talented skier on the British team. In Wengen, both of them participated in the Lauberhorn Downhill, the longest downhill ski race in the world. Les never forgot the experience and the chance to watch skiers like Toni Sailer, Pepi Stiegler, and Guy Périllat up close.

In the late spring of 1961, Monique and Les returned to North Vancouver, after only eight months in France. Les soon threw himself back into local politics, becoming an unsuccessful labour-backed municipal candidate for North Vancouver District Council in November 1962.40 He also went back to work as an apprentice electrician and passed his exams, becoming a journeyman at the end of March 1963.

During negotiations with employers in the construction industry in the spring of 1964, Les McDonald would again bring himself to the attention of the leadership structure of Local 213. Incapable of taking a back seat to anyone for very long, he wanted to demonstrate his mettle to his fellow workers and to the local union leadership. Encouraged by Bill Stewart, Les zeroed in on the possibility of a shorter work week for Vancouver-based electrical workers. This age-old objective of the working class around the world was felt to be in reach due to the advances of automation at the workplace. One man could now do the work of three compared to fifty years ago, so why shouldn’t the remaining workers garner part of the tremendous increase in surplus value by getting a shorter work week? Having been Local 213’s delegate to the BC Federation of Labour conference on precisely this issue earlier in the year, Les was also pointed in the direction of the Communist-led and -directed Trade Union Research Bureau (TURB), run by Marxist economist Emil Bjarnason.41 In short order he quickly founded the Shorter Work Week Committee of the Inside Wiremen (Unit 6) during negotiations. At an inside wiremen’s meeting on May 25, 1964, he then produced a report from the floor “stating reasons labour is entitled to shorter work week.” He listed a number of examples where the thirty-five-hour work week was already being implemented elsewhere around the world—in this regard he perhaps cited New York City’s path-breaking IBEW Local 3—and listed a number of occupations being lost to automation in a variety of industries. Significantly, he did not think that a shorter work week in the province could be accomplished through a united front with the other building trades in British Columbia, as the other unions had already signed five-year collective agreements. Opting for a shorter duration for any prospective agreement meant that the wiremen, as with the other construction trades, could continue to “whipsaw”—that is, to play off as rivals—one group of contractors against another. Les McDonald concluded: “We must go and out and fight for it ourselves.” The wiremen’s unit was so impressed that the membership asked that “Bro. Les McDonald’s report be condensed and sent to executive board, mimeographed and distributed to members at next card-called meeting.”42 Business manager Art O’Keeffe was enthused by the boldly stated claim for a shorter work week as he had previously tried to negotiate a 35-hour work week with the electrical contractors in 1958, but to no avail. He was thus more than predisposed to the idea, and quickly came on board to make it a priority during negotiations. He reported to the membership that during initial talks with employers “the demand for the shorter work week was stressed. We will receive strong opposition to this, but we should dig our heels in and go after it.”43

And go after it they did. Desperate for stability due to a massive boom that had begun in the construction sector, the employers caved.44 At the July 31 card-called meeting of the wiremen’s unit, which only certified electricians were permitted to attend, Art O’Keeffe gave a synopsis of the proposed four-year agreement that offered a 37.5-hour work week and urged the workers to accept the offer, crowing even that it “would probably make some history in this country.”45 The vote that followed was near-unanimous and the first shortened work week in decades for construction workers in Canada became a reality. At the press conference that took place after ratification of the new collective agreement, O’Keeffe proudly outlined how electricians would continue to be “the highest paid workmen in BC’s contract industry” and, most importantly, that the shorter work week was “a major breakthrough.”46 Messages of congratulations were sent from the International Office in Washington, from Canadian headquarters in Toronto, and from local unions in British Columbia.47 Art O’Keeffe and his team of assistant business managers had made their mark. While not directly involved with negotiations, Les McDonald had helped as well; indeed, his contributions were deemed important enough to have been placed into the historical record. Unfortunately it appears that Local 213 has since had to dial back its 37.5-hour work week, as the latest collective agreement specifies a forty-hour work week.48

Naturally Les also caught the immediate attention of Communist Party officials. Impressed by both the research and presentation abilities of the persuasive ginger-headed wireman, in July 1964 they requested that he attend a one-week educational camp hosted by the Communist Party of Canada in Sylvan Lake, Alberta. The first lecture he attended was delivered by Stanley Ryerson on the topic of “Philosophy in Today’s World.” Ryerson was a historian of some repute in Canada, and also a leading intellectual and long-standing member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Other sessions followed on “Philosophical Materialism,” “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” and “Universal Forms of Existence of the Material World.” The final address to the students was given by Leslie Morris, general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada, on the looming “Challenge of the 60’s.”

Making efforts to be a model student, Les filled his scribbler with copious notes on the talks given at the Sylvan Lake retreat. Perhaps the most striking feature of his notes is his obvious focus on dialectics, a philosophical and historical theme that would characterize his time in both the trade union movement and in the sports world. One note in particular summarizes Les’s views: “In class society the struggle of two opposites produces progress. The greater the struggle the greater the rewards. No struggle, no victory.”49

Between periodic bouts of unemployment during which he went climbing or skiing, Les McDonald was dispatched by Local 213 to various large industrial jobs then occurring around the province. These included the building, or expansion, of pulp mills in Castlegar and Port Mellon, modernizing the electrical system used underground at the Britannia Beach copper mine, building Simon Fraser University, and working on the construction of the FMC Corporation’s $12-million chemical plant in Squamish. Despite the tribulations that led to his and Monique’s sojourn in France, McDonald participated in a sanctioned strike at the Britannia Beach Copper Mine in September 1964 that involved both a few electrical workers from Local 213 and the much larger Mine-Mill union. But it was during a heated two-week wobble involving “mystery pickets” and a deliberate jobsite slowdown at the FMC construction site in the summer of 1965 that much of his character as a workplace activist became evident. The issue was fairly straightforward for the fifty-seven electricians employed by Burns and Dutton Construction, the Alberta-based electrical contractor for the project: the company was not paying the men who chose not to live in the supplied living quarters the same living-out allowance as on other worksites in the province. In addition, Burns and Dutton was skimping on how much it was spending in terms of the upkeep of the camp itself.

Les, who had a lifelong interest in photography, took a series of black-and-white snapshots of the strike action that ensued at the end of July and the beginning of August in that year. The first picture in the set shows fellow worker Reg Wiley standing under a crude wooden sign where someone had written “Burns & Dutton Go Home, take Jack Ross with you.” The electricians’ dislike for Jack Ross had evidently become evidently a public issue, something the targeted IBEW representative was not likely to ignore or to forget.

The second picture is of a long line of electricians engaged in a slowdown tactic by checking in and out of camp on a daily basis, despite the fact that they are living on the site and hence have no need to do so. The tactic served to stall the beginning of the workday and then to create chaos in the company office in the afternoon, thereby substantially reducing levels of worker productivity. The third picture says even more about Les McDonald—a sign in Irish Gaelic on his IBEW hard hat reads: “Ten dollars a day living out allowance.” Reaching out to some of his fellow electrical workers in their native language and culture to win them over to his side of the class struggle was a classic McDonald move. Having grown up in Felling with immigrants from the Emerald Isle, and with Irish family parentage himself, Les could play the Irish accent to perfection, and he realized that this small gesture would appeal to the electricians with Irish surnames on the site and in the pictures—people like Jim Aherne, Paddy Griffin, and Bert Clancy. More importantly, the Gaelic-inscribed hard hats very obviously played to Art O’Keeffe’s ethnic sensibilities, reaching out to Local 213’s business manager to keep him onside in the growing dispute.

Faced with an intransigent employer, the next tactic was to make a phone call. The result was that two non-IBEW mystery pickets appeared on the road leading to the chemical plant in short order, their signs proudly worn on this occasion by volunteer recruits identified in Les McDonald’s photo album as Don Cox and Dennis Rankin. Neither Cox nor Rankin were electricians and had been recruited from the roster of available left-wing labour supporters to set up the mystery picket line.50 These mystery pickets lasted only a single day as the company was quick to react and had, in turn, made a phone call of its own: according to the Vancouver Sun, “a Supreme Court injunction banned mystery picket lines that appeared at the site.”51

Mystery pickets were not unusual in British Columbia at the time, and the electricians evidently felt it necessary to use the tactic in Squamish. Following the new BC Trades-Union Act passed in 1959, which permitted the use of temporary ex parte injunctions to safeguard public order or to prevent “substantial or irreparable injury to property,” Supreme Court injunctions, specifically in connection with union picketing, were issued in vastly increasing numbers in the ensuing years, especially if pickets appeared when the term of a collective agreement had not yet expired.52 Mystery pickets made these injunctions a little more difficult: if some of the picketers could not be identified as members, against which union or other organization should the injunction be issued? In response, ex parte injunctions began to include a “John Doe provision” against any and all persons blocking the entrance to a particular workplace. And this is precisely what happened in Squamish, with the result that the mystery picket line had to be abandoned as a tactic so that the anonymous volunteers would not be arrested.

To avoid the strict interdictions of the injunction, the electricians absconded to the nearby park at Alice Lake for a picnic and a study session on what to do next. Among the people in the pictures Les McDonald took of this occasion, we see Bert Adair, the former leader in Burrard Dry Dock of the independent All-Canadian Electrical Workers (ACEW) conversing with the likes of Bob Towle and Dan Martin, two members of the left faction in Local 213. When the Burns Detective Agency appeared on the work site with five of their finest, another grey-haired electrician employed on the Squamish site, Sid Sheard, stood on the walkway to face them down. A long-time and militant Communist originally from Birmingham, England, Sheard had been one of the 21 Club members suspended alongside George Gee in 1955, but was evidently back at work, this time alongside an energetic and youthful Les McDonald. Jack Gillett, who had officially recruited Les into the Communist Party, was also part of the Burns and Dutton crew.53

Old left was meeting young left and the conversations appeared to be vigorous and passionate. The classic combination of agitation at work alongside political education was taking place, and a continuity of experience was being transmitted between the generations. Also among the picnic-goers is shop steward Herb Crabtree, who left a very positive impression on thirty-two-year-old Les McDonald.54 Crabtree had been instrumental in leading a wobble earlier in the year at an $85-million construction site for the expansion of a pulp mill in Prince George, a dispute that resulted in the extraordinary firing of thirty-five inside wiremen from the giant Marwell Construction site, and the accompanying immediate suspension from the union of seven of the leading participants.55 In later years, Les described his fellow wireman as “a man who would rather lose an argument than a friend,” and who had developed within himself “the greatest of all virtues, class consciousness.”56

Several carloads of RCMP officers then arrived at the FMC jobsite accompanied by a German Shepherd, which bit then-apprentice Ernie Fulton in the leg during the ensuing confrontation.57 As Fulton had to get stitches to heal the wound, that bloody incident proved completely unacceptable to the electricians, so much so that they refused to go back to work under the police threat. A stand-off ensued with the result that no work was done that day. Nor was there much production the following week as the vast majority of electrical workers all reported in sick to protest the laying off of thirteen electricians at the work site, including Herb Crabtree.58 These tactics were all innovative ways to get around BC Supreme Court injunctions against picketing, even if only temporarily, and also to find ways to retaliate against an initially unyielding Alberta employer.

Local 213 sent Frank Stepney, the wiremen’s new assistant business manager, to investigate the events then unfolding in Squamish. At the general meeting on August 2, he relayed his account of the events he had witnessed with the security guards, the RCMP, and the continuing impasse with Burns and Dutton.59 Eventually, as the Vancouver Sun reported, a settlement was arrived at whereby the company agreed to increase living-out allowances and maintain a better-quality camp. But the presence of the police was vigorously protested. Championing the position of the Squamish electrical workers, Art O’Keeffe was quoted as saying he “considered the presence of police . . . provocative.”60 The membership of Local 213 also jumped into the fray, passing a resolution fully supporting their embattled brethren at the north end of Howe Sound.61 There was no word in the Sun on whether or not the laid-off men and the shop steward were rehired, but the Pacific Tribune recounted via an anonymous reporter, that “the 13 men who have been fired have been reinstated with full pay for the entire period of the ‘lay off.’”62 Local 213’s Minute Books stated that the “Shop Steward was reinstated after much discussion.”63 BC Attorney General Robert Bonner also got into the act as he had received a telegram signed by “The Workers” complaining that they were being harassed by private security guards carrying side arms. The signature on the telegram was typical of Les McDonald, raising a crucial issue with the powers that be but crafty enough still not to be singled out for retaliation in the process.64 The gun-packing issue was to be investigated by the attorney general, so work on the expansion of the chemical plant finally resumed.65 The Pacific Tribune trumpeted the electrical workers’ collective triumph, declaring: “The company obviously had notions of cracking the whip and showing the workers who’s boss. But they just as obviously failed to reckon with the high degree of militancy and unity of BC workers.”66

One disconcerting detail about the events in Squamish that emerged from the Local 213 Minute Books was the announcement that there was an upcoming three-way meeting of “a Special Representative from Burns & Dutton with A.B.M. [assistant business manager] Stepney and Bro. Ross, Int. Rep.”67 Jack Ross had been busy investigating the internal dynamics of the events in Squamish. It was definitely not a good omen for future endeavours.

The contrast between the Burns & Dutton events and the strike some years earlier at the Phillips Cables’ plant is edifying. The wiremen in Squamish, isolated as they were from Vancouver, had developed and deployed their own innovative tactics without help or interference from the officials in the union hall on Dunsmuir Street. Nor does it appear that Communist Party headquarters in Vancouver intruded in the matter at any point; it was mainly party activists on the ground that helped guide and carry out the tactically imaginative wobble. There is no question that the apolitical rank-and-file electricians took part, and were entirely supportive, of the actions undertaken in Squamish. The pictures in Les McDonald’s photo album show that the confrontation with Burns and Dutton appeared to be meticulously planned and that young McDonald had a hand in it, from the use of Irish on his hard hat to the appearance of mystery pickets at the entrance to the jobsite. The Phillips strike, on the other hand, while not lost, had engendered bad blood between some of the workers and local union officialdom. These two currents would have met in Vancouver at Local 213’s general meetings and become acquainted with one another once the Squamish job was completed. The electricians who had been employed by Burns and Dutton would have gone home to Vancouver, waiting to be dispatched to another construction site by the union. In the meantime, Les McDonald returned to attending Communist Party meetings, and planning and participating in demonstrations on issues such as banning the bomb. He was also elected to various labour conventions as a delegate from Local 213, intermittently played soccer on the weekends, climbed on the Squamish Chief in warm weather, participated in ski races on Grouse Mountain and Mount Seymour in winter, and published the occasional article in the PacificTribune.68 When he had time, which wasn’t very often, he would also lend a hand in raising his three kids.

The events in Squamish and the earlier strike at Phillips Cables were symptomatic of a wider current of increasing working-class militancy that spread across Canada over four decades. In every ten-year tranche, from the 1940s through to the 1970s, strike action grew on a national scale. The constantly rising cost of living was one important factor that helps to explain this militancy within Canada’s working class, as was the attempt to gain job security through the initial signing of collective agreements or, as was more often the case, to achieve wage increases and improvements in job-security language in the context of already-existing collective agreements. But what is most singular in the thicket of statistics on this issue is the regional concentration of wildcat strikes, or what Les McDonald and his fellow electrical workers persistently described as “wobbles.” The proportion of wobbles during this forty-year time frame was higher in British Columbia than in both Canada and the United States combined—36 percent of all strikes in BC were wobbles, versus 30 percent in the rest of North America. In particular, there was a spike in these types of “illegal” work stoppages between 1965 and 1969 and again between 1970 and 1973.69 The events in Squamish and a year later, at Lenkurt Electric, were thus right at the beginning of this concentration of unsanctioned collective actions that directly contravened provincial labour laws. While it would be foolish to extrapolate the experience of the electrical workers to the rest of British Columbia, it is nevertheless worth noting that both of these wobbles were begun because of employer-initiated provocation toward their workers.

By the mid-1960s the best-known of the successful wobbles, or wildcat strikes, involving BC working-class militancy took place at the Shellburn oil refinery located toward the eastern end of Burrard Inlet. Reacting to speed-up and increasing mechanization, a young group of workers led by Jerry Lebourdais, president of the Burnaby local (Local 9–601) of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers’ Union (OCAW), organized a sit-down strike at this oil refinery in October 1965. The occupation of the refinery by the young workers triggered an OCAW-led province-wide strike against the British American (B-A) Oil Company, which meant that the Shellburn refinery was not the only one behind picket lines. Significantly, Lebourdais was also a member of the Progressive Workers’ Movement (PWM), founded a year earlier in 1964.70 Jack Scott, an ex-Communist by then, and also the founder and leader of the same Maoist-oriented group that was attempting to make inroads into organized labour in BC, recalled that “Lebourdais had led the thing but didn’t know where it was going. I told him you don’t do things like that.” He added: “It was something that took place spontaneously . . . it was quite a wrong tactic to pursue.”71 Moreover, due to a complete lack of progress in negotiations and a situation wherein “large scale scabbery and wholesale injunctions” were taking place, the BCFL began the process of organizing a supporting forty-eight hour general strike.72 The provincial Cabinet convened an emergency meeting to discuss the potentially looming crisis, and Premier W. A. C. Bennett had to personally intervene before the BCFL general strike deadline of November 24. In the ensuing settlement, the striking oil workers received a thirty-five cent per hour increase in wages, consultation on automation, stronger language on job protection and, if necessary, retraining for displaced workers.73 Lebourdais lost his job, the only worker at the Shellburn refinery to do so, but it was considered a massive victory for workers at the time. The Pacific Tribune was jubilant: “This was a smashing victory for organized labor against some of the biggest monopolies in the world and, most importantly, a breakthrough in harnessing the benefits of automation.”74

Tribune reporter Jerry Shack should probably have adopted a more cautious tone. It was misguided to believe that workers in BC could be recklessly militant, threaten a general strike, then simply chalk up victories in the win column for organized labour. But these were heady times and the Pacific Tribune’s triumphant tone was understandable, even if over the top. A less cavalier regard for the history of successful labour strategies would have shown that spontaneous militancy at the workplace did not always lead to victories, especially if it was not thoroughly planned to begin with. Though Lebourdais suffered personally, the other oil workers were lucky, perhaps even a historical anomaly in BC. Lebourdais ended up leaving the labour scene altogether in the Lower Mainland and founded a number of agricultural communes in his home region of the Cariboo in the central interior of British Columbia. He also got involved in mainstream politics as a candidate in Vancouver East for the PWM, first in the 1965 federal election and later taking on Social Credit cabinet minister Alex Fraser, during successive provincial elections as an NDP candidate in the 1980s.75 But the earlier strike he helped spark in October of 1965 demonstrated that there were now other currents of communist-inspired working class groupings to contend with in British Columbia in the mid-1960s.

Though the Communist Party of Canada easily remained the major actor in this respect on the provincial scene, in particular within the ranks of organized labour, it was increasingly being challenged. In Local 213, in addition to Chief Shop Steward George Brown, a former Trotskyist active in the manufacturing unit, there appeared to be at least two young adherents to the Progressive Workers’ Movement among the inside wiremen: John Wood and Dave Unger. But the latter were neophytes, still ensconced in the apprenticeship program and relative newcomers to the trade union scene. Their influence as a third potential vanguardist group thus appears to have been inconsequential at first glance, but that may be only a superficial impression.76 It is worth pointing out that Local 213 donated $2,000 to help the embattled oil workers during their struggle. This was a donation that went to an “illegal” strike, both in terms of then-existing provincial law and in terms of the IBEW’s own constitution.77 The only real note of dissent came from Local 213’s president, Angus MacDonald, who argued at a Special Meeting that passing a motion supporting the oil workers “does not give members right to take part in 48 hour strike.”78 His legalist position, bordering on sophistry, was ignored and drowned in a tidal wave of support for the OCAW union. As a point of contrast, a short time later, at another local union conclave, Les McDonald praised Art O’Keeffe effusively for his handling of a dicey situation within the executive council of the BC Federation of Labour. “The oil companies,” he declared, were “trying to break the union movement in BC,” but Local 213’s business manager “did an exceptional job of unifying the [BCFL] members during the meeting.”79 McDonald may have taken this opportunity to describe part of the debate that had taken place within the leadership of the BCFL on the feasibility of conducting a province-wide general strike in support of the embattled oil workers. At a crucial moment, when the Building Trades Council threatened a veto of the proposed two-day walkout, O’Keeffe surprisingly supported Communist Lorne Robson of Local 452 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and the two of them “negated the veto by voting for strike.”80 Les was visibly warming up to Art O’Keeffe’s style of leadership, despite the latter’s well-known role in the successful ouster of former business manager George Gee. More importantly, McDonald, and others in Local 213’s left faction, would have made a mental note of the tempting tactical template provided by the oil workers. When faced with similar, though not identical circumstances, they would attempt to revert to what appeared to be a winning formula.

By the fall of 1965 and the winter of 1966, Les McDonald was as active in the affairs of Local 213 as he would ever be, slowly growing the Communist Party faction to around fifteen members and affecting the decisions of the executive board.81 In October he presented a series of eleven resolutions to Local 213, which he hoped would be part of the resolutions package at the forthcoming BC Federation of Labour Convention in November. Elected as a delegate from the electrical workers’ local, he wanted the approval of Local 213 before presenting them at the BCFL convention. Seven of these resolutions were reproduced in full in the Minute Books. This was a curious and unusual occurrence as resolutions were rarely reproduced in their entirety in the Minute Books prior to conventions.82 Perhaps the most contentious of the resolutions McDonald presented were the second and third, whereby he asked that it be resolved:

1. 2. “that the BC Fed. of Labour petition the C.L.C. to admit all expelled unions without delay”; and
2. 3. “that the BC Fed. of Labour demand of the Provincial Govt. that they take over the BC Tel. Co.”83

These resolutions were important as the cat was now out of the bag. If politically active electrical workers in Local 213 were not cognizant of it before, they now had before them someone who was loudly advocating well-known Communist Party positions at their meetings.84 Though it could be humorously and ironically argued that the normally enthusiastic free enterprise premier of British Columbia, W. A. C. Bennett, had just recently nationalized the BC Electric Company in 1961, calls for the nationalization of major industries in 1965 were more often than not Communist-promulgated positions in the general political discourse across the country.85 Even if the NDP in British Columbia under leader Robert Strachan also had in its platform a policy-position in favour of the nationalization of the telephone company, this was systematically soft-pedalled in the face of periodic electoral warnings by Premier W. A. C. Bennett about “the socialist hordes being at the gates.”86 It was a not too subtle attempt by Les McDonald trying to leverage the NDP’s platform to advantage where it intersected with the Communist Party’s position on the issue. Not all of McDonald’s proposals were approved, including resolution 2, which showed that while the Communist-led left faction had indeed made inroads again among the electrical workers since the Gee expulsions, it was by no means the dominant influence. However, contrary to the Gee years when discussions initiated on the left appeared to have been largely contained within the backroom caucus of the local, Communist-generated issues were now brazenly put on the agenda and openly being debated. It was a momentous change. On matters of internal union debate it appeared that McCarthyism and the stifling of left-led initiatives were being challenged. Or, perhaps unwisely, that Les McDonald and the Communist-led left caucus believed they could be.

A startling new legal ruling had seemingly opened the door for the presentation of these spirited initiatives. In June 1965, the US Supreme Court had repealed the anti-communist union provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act in United States v. Brown, and closer to home, Pat O’Neal, the secretary-treasurer of IBEW (and certainly not a Communist) was quoted in the Pacific Tribune saying that “there is an urgent need of clearing the way for the inclusion of these vitally important ‘independent’ [italics in original] unions inside the BCFL, since all the ‘reasons’ given for their exclusion no longer exist.”87

An episode of some interest then took place at the November 1965 BCFL convention in Vancouver. It was vintage Les McDonald and also spoke to a philosophical current visibly existing both among the Vancouver electrical workers and a significant portion of BC’s labour movement. In response to the wobbles increasingly taking place in British Columbia, McDonald came out in support of a last-minute resolution put forward by IBEW Local 213, arguing for the right to strike during the term of an agreement.88

The resolution had not previously been endorsed by Local 213, but after discussion, it was approved by the executive of the BCFL. The resolution from the floor did not come out of the blue, however. It appears that “Boilermaker Bill” Stewart’s union, Marine Workers Local 1, based out of North Vancouver’s Burrard Dry Dock, had been the originators of the resolution, but it had to be amended. It was then represented anew from the floor by Local 213 in order to pass.89 McDonald’s intervention at the microphone is highly informative of the latter’s view of the use of the strike weapon to enforce both the spirit and letter of collective agreements. The resolution neatly echoed the actions that had recently taken place in Squamish with the electricians and on Burrard Inlet with the oil workers.90 It also perfectly illustrated McDonald’s sometime audacious behaviour during public events. Regardless of how it got onto the floor of the convention to be discussed and voted upon, the more important point is that the resolution indicated that Les McDonald, and undoubtedly some of the other delegates from Local 213, might have been tactical soul mates to a long-held position of the historically important—yet, in 1965, barely existing—IWW and their syndicalist sympathizers. The Communist electrician argued:

The ink is hardly dry on new negotiated contracts when Management with some of their lawyers begin to pore over the new agreement with a microscope. And soon they come up with new interpretations of the agreement which we never dreamt could ever been seen in there. We feel that the only way these problems can be resolved is through our right to strike.91

In the Communist Party Les McDonald might have been highly regarded as an up-and-coming talent, to be simultaneously nurtured and tolerated. But he was always a “little over the top,” as a former Comrade described him, “a little prone to play close to the edge” of what was acceptable, and what was not.92 His evident left-syndicalist sympathies would have been noted and discussed, and he might have been reprimanded by IBEW observers in attendance, such as a suddenly attentive Jack Ross, for somehow manipulating an unsanctioned resolution onto the agenda. Les McDonald would have replied that there was a reawakening taking place on job sites around British Columbia and that the BCFL needed to take the lead on this question, or risk being led. He would have pointed out that direct action and participation in wobbles were part and parcel of the wider picture of class conflict increasingly afflicting British Columbia in mid-decade. Perhaps then referencing events that had recently taken place that summer, he might have crowed about Local 213’s very own direct action victory in Squamish within the constraints of a duly signed collective agreement. Continuing to defend himself, McDonald would have reminded any interested IBEW cadres that the reworked resolution from Local 213 was part and parcel of a co-ordinated thrust on this issue, spearheaded by “Boilermaker Bill” Stewart, a respected stalwart in the province’s trade union movement and—yes—so what if he was a well-known veteran of the party! The resolution also mirrored an important concession previously won by several Communist-led CIO unions in the United States where the 1935 Wagner Act in the United States had not prohibited mid-contract “wildcat” walkouts.93 In discussions with similar-minded convention delegates, McDonald would, in contrast, have learned about the party’s view on the perceived dead end of IWW tactics and philosophy, in particular the latter’s disdain for electoral political action, their weakly articulated view of the role of the state, and their perceived “cult of spontaneity.” The latter, a gross misrepresentation of Wobbly labour tactics, would no doubt have been blithely accepted by an unknowing Les McDonald.94 Ironically, it might then have been pointed out to him that the Communist Party, in British Columbia at least, did indeed seek to support well-planned and co-ordinated “spontaneous” work stoppages during jobsite disputes.

An overview of the 1960s reveals that there certainly were wobbles involving Communist electrical workers on large construction sites that took place before Local 213’s resolution from the floor—in Castlegar in 1960 and Prince George and Squamish in July 1965—and others that followed it, such as that in Powell River in 1967 and perhaps also the walkout a year earlier at the Keenleyside Dam construction site north of Revelstoke. Such instances of stoppages suggest that there might indeed have been a deliberate policy of sparking wobbles on these often massive work sites, notably around the issues of camp living conditions and the extent of authority of local unions, elected shop stewards, and the validity of imposed “international agreements.”

The internal dynamic of wobbles on BC construction sites is poorly documented, if at all, but it is clear that labour-management relations in 1965 were definitely heating up. As so well described by historian Ben Isitt, the post–World War II history of labour in Canada’s Pacific province was not one that could be framed as it was elsewhere as a social pact, a historic compromise between capital and labour; instead, in British Columbia, it ended up as a “tug-of-war” between contending classes.95

Simultaneous with the Communist Party making a push in Local 213 from below, events from elsewhere in the political evolution of Canada’s socialist left were being introduced to the Vancouver electrical workers and, by all accounts, were loudly applauded. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Canada’s largest socialist party since its founding convention in 1932, had combined with the Canadian Labour Congress in 1961 to form the New Democratic Party (NDP). Increasingly social democratic, and often outspoken in its opposition to the Communist Party, the NDP saw electoral politics as the main arena for resolving class struggle issues, as opposed to figuring them out immediately at the workplace or within the trade union movement generally. Following business manager’s Art O’Keeffe’s initiative, Local 213’s executive board agreed to have Harold Winch, NDP member of Parliament for Vancouver East, speak to the assembled rank-and-file electrical workers during a general meeting in November 1965. The former Vancouver electrician “strenuously advocated regularly scheduled I.B.E.W. conventions of Canadian locals.” Given the multiple and well-known interferences by the American-based International Office into the affairs of Local 213, and also the lack of co-ordination among Canadian locals, “his remarks were enthusiastically received by the membership who have long recognized this overdue and vitally essential need.”96

Not everyone would have agreed with O’Keeffe and the executive board’s decision to mesh with the British Columbia NDP. A resolution on precisely this question had been defeated two months before by a vote of 115 to 94.97 President Angus MacDonald and conservative supporters of the International Office would undoubtedly have reminded everyone at the time of the long-standing position of the IBEW on political neutrality. Communist activists may also have objected; they obviously had their own political organization they would have liked unions in BC to support.

Les McDonald’s exposure to the very different reality of trade union politics in France, in particular with the dominant Communist-influenced CGT, might have led him to see different potential outcomes on this issue. Closer to home, the examples of outspoken left-wing critics of the NDP within Mine-Mill, the Fishermen, and the Longshoring union would also have resonated. As with Ohm’s law and electricity, there was obviously more than one current to the political voices then existing inside the electrical workers’ local.

Jim Kinnaird, future president of the BC Federation of Labour, was a young wireman at the time working out of Local 213. He, too, would socialize with the members of the Communist-led caucus, discuss politics, and even agree to common positions on issues of the day. Described as a man who held a “steady gaze” and who used “measured words in a quiet voice,” Kinnaird was politically active and right behind Les McDonald in terms of garnering votes as a delegate to various trade union conventions.98 But the immigrant Scotsman was still in the process of learning the ropes. On occasion, Les tried to take him under his wing and provide some semblance of guidance. For instance, they co-operated on producing a paper for a Labour-Management conference.99 They also played Pacific Coast League soccer together for the lower-division Vancouver Thistles. Les was supportive of his well-spoken new Scottish friend and, along with Comrade Bob Towle, was part of the unanimous vote of the inside wiremen’s executive committee to nominate Jim Kinnaird as the second assistant business manager for Unit 6 in October of that year.100 With an economic boom taking place in British Columbia, the inside wiremen’s unit was now growing so fast they required a second assistant business manager to help out with the local’s leadership team. In a second scribbler where McDonald kept copious notes, this time on his trade union activities in 1965 and 1966, he wrote of Jim Kinnaird that he expected the likeable Scotsman to “work closely with the Executive Committee and take direction from the membership . . . we expect great things.”101 Kinnaird listened politely to the advice and the support proffered by Les McDonald and his comrades and accepted it on occasion, but he did not consistently agree on all the issues. As Ernie Fulton noted, “Jim Kinnaird was friends with the left, but he wasn’t really part of the left . . . Jim was just pretty well thought of by the middle-of-the-road people in the union.”102

Despite the attempt from some on the executive board to drum up support for the four-year old NDP, there is little doubt that Les McDonald, Communist, was a rising star in Local 213 during the mid-1960s. Mentored and often supported from the floor of meetings by Comrade Bill Stewart, he had even been elected vice-chair of Unit 6 in 1964, representing the inside wiremen. This now gave him the opportunity to participate in executive board meetings of the entire union local when the chair of the wiremen, George Angus, was unavailable. The membership of the wiremen’s section alone was reported at 1,500 members in that year, so it was not inconsequential.103 On several occasions Les McDonald was also elected as a Local 213 delegate to labour bodies or conventions. In May 1965, for example, he was elected as a delegate to the Western Progress Meeting of the IBEW in Saskatoon, along with business manager Art O’Keeffe. In September he became the wiremen’s delegate to the Vancouver and District Labour Council.104 As previously noted, he was also elected to attend the BC Federation of Labour Convention in November of that same year. Moreover, the assembled members of Local 213 nominated him as a candidate for the post of third vice-president of the provincial labour body, an electoral contest, however, that he did not win.105 He would then be elected as a delegate to attend the April 1966 Canadian Labour Congress in Winnipeg, topping the polls with the assembled electrical workers.106 While his career as a political force inside Local 213 was only just beginning, it was visibly on an upward trajectory.

Les McDonald’s confidence and ability at public speaking was also improving. After spending several years working on out-of-town industrial projects, inside wireman Terry Simpson returned to Vancouver and began attending general meetings once again in December 1965. He remembered one winter evening particularly well when a slightly built, fit, and confident-looking young man, caught his attention:

The Carrall Street regulars were all speaking in favour of an increase to the International President’s salary. But then a guy got up and started to really work them over. First of all he asked them what the President was making at the time. And here they were approving an increase to his salary and they didn’t even know what his salary was . . . Well, he went up and down them, he had figures on not only Freeman’s salary, but also his pension. He knew how much George Meany was making, he knew what George Meany’s pension was . . . Well, he just demolished them! I had never seen this guy before, but I went home and told my wife that I thought I’d just seen a guy in action who was going to take us out of this mess the union had been in for several years. And that was Les McDonald . . . by Jesus, Les could really perform when he got his wind up and he was prepared. I hadn’t seen that kind of debate carried on before . . . he really let loose that night.107

Interesting and well researched lectures delivered from the floor of meetings were just one arrow in the traditional quiver of tactics used by the left faction. Positions of principle were espoused whenever possible, and there were also predictable interventions on points of trade union and parliamentary democracy. All of these started to have an accumulative effect on the electrical workers who were politically active and attuned to affairs in Local 213. Despite explicit warning signals from the higher ups in the IBEW, Les appeared confident of success and was even preparing a slate of candidates in upcoming union elections in June to challenge most of the positions on the executive board, except for the position of business manager. Art O’Keeffe was not to be challenged, as the left faction evidently felt the need for the feisty business manager to remain as the public face of Local 213. He was someone whom the left faction felt they were increasingly winning over to their side as he was being both pressured and persuaded to adopt a more progressive position on a whole slew of issues.108 Increasingly isolated from the more conservative members of his own executive board, Art O’Keeffe certainly needed all the allies he could get. Ernie Fulton, who would eventually gravitate from electrician to becoming a lineman, thought that Les and Bill Stewart had become tremendously influential in this regard: “The wiremen had been working on O’Keeffe; Bill Stewart was one of them, Les McDonald was another. They had really started to embarrass O’Keeffe. I think union principles, which they always emphasized, caught up to him . . . O’Keeffe was caught in the grind.”109

Les McDonald’s confidence and growing political maturity apparently extended to internal debates within the Communist Party. Though he rarely talked about interactions with his comrades at Communist Party meetings, Monique remembers that he did not enjoy local Club meetings in North Vancouver as he found these to be tedious and ineffective. He even stopped going after a while. His prime focus was the party’s Vancouver branch. That’s where the possibility of real change could be discussed and debated, particularly as it related to rebuilding the left faction within Local 213, and trade union matters generally. Jim MacFarlan, future president of the BC Teachers’ Federation (1973–75), participated alongside Les in the Vancouver meetings during the 1960s. He has a distinct memory of the North Vancouver electrician when the Labour Committee of the Communist Party used to meet in the Ford building at Hastings and Main: “Les McDonald was not a favourite at the Ford building in Vancouver. He did not toe the party line on every issue. Nigel Morgan, Maurice Rush, et. al. [Party leaders] were wary of him because Les definitely did not kiss ass.”110

Continuing on in this line of thought in a second interview, MacFarlan elaborated on his assessment of the growing and maturing working-class activist: “Les McDonald could not have survived much longer in the Party Church. He was too much of a free thinker and someone who wouldn’t hesitate to challenge the orthodox priests of an increasingly hide-bound and top-down institution.”111

Elected as a delegate to yet another convention, this time for the Canadian Labour Congress convention in Winnipeg held in April 1966, Les McDonald helped prepare a set of sixteen resolutions that were debated prior to the convention and, this time, all passed by the membership. It seemed like a major hurdle had been overcome, as at least one of the resolutions was nearly identical to that presented, but non-concurred in, for the BC Federation of Labour Convention some months earlier. This was the resolution that urged that the necessary steps be taken “to admit all the legitimate unions currently outside the C.L.C. now, so that it can become the true parliament of all Canadian labour.”112 The Communist-led caucus inside Local 213 appeared to be gaining in strength and in influence. Again, the resolutions were reproduced in full in the Minute Books by J. P. Milner, Local 213’s recording secretary. The first resolution, which requested that the Canadian Labour Congress work toward furthering the rights of Canadian members of international unions, reflected a major historical grievance within Local 213. The second resolution continued in a similar nationalist vein, in that it outlined how policies decided by international unions “tend to reflect the needs and views of our American brothers” which could sometimes be “in complete opposition to the sovereign rights of our Canadian membership.” In order to get yet more wiggle room for progressive Canadian policies, it also requested the CLC to “establish a Building Trades Department with branches in all major Canadian areas, which would rule on matters of jurisdiction and take over all the prerogatives of the Building Trades Dept. now located in Washington, D.C.”113

These were not new initiatives on either the left or the right in Canada. The Communist Party in the early 1920s, then known as the “Workers’ Party,” had proposed “that Canadian departments of International unions be conceded the sole authority and the initiation and the right to strike.”114 The remnants of the One Big Union, along with the All-Canadian Congress of Labour, denounced American interference in Canadian internal affairs. Percy Bengough, president of the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) had advocated for greater Canadian trade union autonomy throughout his career.115 As late as 1963, at the AFL-CIO convention in New York, CLC executive director, Joe Morris—former IWA white-bloc activist and future president of the CLC—had even formally supported Canadian workers in international unions to retain the right “to make decisions concerning our own national affairs.”116 However, serious disagreement from the American-based unions meant that the timid leadership in the Canadian labour movement had done little to actually force the issue because they were afraid of losing the financial contributions to the CLC from dues-paying “international” unions.117 Former Comrade Jim MacFarlan characterized these, and other politically oriented resolutions that Local 213 presented to the 1966 CLC convention in Winnipeg, as having “come right out of the Party play book.” MacFarlan would go on to compliment Les McDonald’s leadership and evident powers of persuasion as the Communist electrician had, in his view, successfully “formulated what was a Party position in a way which won support far beyond the small party circle.”118

Other resolutions from the Vancouver electrical workers dealt with petitioning the federal government to enact legislation guaranteeing the right to strike; vigorously opposing compulsory and binding arbitration for union members of public utilities, such as those employed by BC Hydro; opposing giving away Canadian water resources to the United States; pressuring the Canadian government to explore the possibility of a new Constitution for Canada establishing the national equality of what was considered then by the Communist Party to be the country’s two founding peoples; getting the CLC to fund free Labour Colleges in all of the provinces of Canada; having the CLC pressure the Canadian government to have a foreign policy distinct from that of Canada’s neighbour to the south, particularly as it pertained to the Organization of American States; and, undoubtedly the most favoured by Les McDonald as it was his special area of expertise, the necessity of the CLC to combat automation by “completely supporting the objective of at least the thirty-five hour work week.”119 Local 213’s resolutions deftly tried to replicate what the Communist Party had attempted in an earlier era when it controlled the British Columbia leadership of the IWA in the immediate post–World War II years; that is, to break the restrictive bonds of business unionism, to transform economic struggle into class struggle and, with a new program in mind, “to use trade union positions to oppose the new political and economic formation being constructed by American imperialism.”120

Art O’Keeffe and Angus MacDonald, the other two elected delegates from Local 213, accompanied Les McDonald; Jack Ross also attended. It must have made for a week of strained conversations, as Les and Art were becoming increasingly friendly and would stick together, leaving Angus MacDonald and Jack Ross to their own devices.

When the package of Local 213’s resolutions had been mailed out to meet the appropriate deadline prior to the CLC convention, little did the three elected delegates from Vancouver suspect that the chair of the Constitution and Laws Committee would be none other than their very own Bill Ladyman, Canadian vice-president of the IBEW.121 He would be heading one of the most influential groups in Winnipeg, responsible for vetting all 398 resolutions submitted to the convention before they were permitted to hit the floor during proceedings. Ladyman would have personally read each one of Local 213’s resolutions. He also chaired several sessions of the CLC convention in Winnipeg. It was not unexpected, then, that the resolution calling for the readmission of Communist-led unions to the national labour body were rejected by the Executive, as were near-identical resolutions from several other unions, as it ran counter to a long-standing CLC constitutional provision that disqualified “any organization controlled or dominated by communists, fascists or other totalitarians.”122 In the meantime, the two resolutions calling for Canadian autonomy within international unions and the establishment of a Canadian Building Trades Council, were referred back to the Resolutions Committee. Both were predictably watered down to become virtually meaningless. The latter resolution, for example, was eventually worded to instruct incoming CLC officers to “consult” the Building Trades Unions “with a view to establishing a C.L.C. Building Trades Department in Canada.”123 On the other hand, it must have been a pleasant surprise to the electrical workers from Vancouver that at least five of their resolutions made it to the floor of the convention, were debated, and then approved by the assembled delegates. Two more were pushed through in “composite form” after being fused with other similar resolutions.124 In addition, the words of one of the opening speakers in Winnipeg would have caught their immediate attention. Claude Jodoin, president of the CLC, spoke at length about the necessity of the labour movement to stand up and fight the evils of ex parte injunctions. He spoke of his dislike of the fact that “some employers . . . resort to legal technicalities in an effort to defeat unions.”125 Better yet, a resolution on the last day of the convention specifically condemning ex parte injunctions and urging affiliated unions to challenge them was presented and approved by the trade union representatives.126

The three elected delegates from Local 213 undoubtedly listened attentively. They would have approved of the suitably combative words used by both their French-Canadian CLC president and the delegates from across the country who spoke in favour of the resolution. But it was precisely when they were away in Winnipeg that the Lenkurt Electric strike broke out in Burnaby.