The Masques of Ottawa

by Augustus Bridle

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR

MR. TOM MOORE

Many years ago an Irish poet visiting Canada and voyaging down the
Ottawa wrote a poem of which may people recall only the lines—

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

The Tom Moore about whom this article is sketched is not a poet. He is, in fact, one of the prosiest public men in Canada. But we may leave it to any of those who have known him during the past three years when he has been President of the Trades and Labour Congress, if many and many a time he has not felt some such sentiment as—

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

Since Mr. Charles Draper first became Secretary of that Congress he has never known a period when so much was expected of a President by way of limitless patience, statesmanship and self-control as has been shown by Tom Moore. The rapids were always close to this man, and there were rocks under the rapids. It took steady piloting by the captain to keep the crew of the labour ship from getting holes in her bottom and going down.

So far as one has been able to follow the career of Moore at the head of the Congress, and as reported in the public press, he stands now and always for adherence to the principle of Union in evolution. He believes in labour getting ahead; but not by the method of upturning everything that is established just to see what kinds of crawling things there may be underneath.

When we reflect that Canada is not primarily an industrial so much as an agricultural country, it is startling to remember that two years ago it was the home of the only organized attempt ever made in America on a scale of efficiency to establish something closely resembling a Soviet government. The big Winnipeg Strike was a lurid menace to the solidarity of labour in Canada. West of Winnipeg, once the Red River Soviet had been set up, there was a chain of inflammable centres to link up with the revolution. Calgary was the scene of one convention which had sent a cable of sympathy to Moscow. British Columbia was full of seething susceptible elements, regarded by some of the Reds across the border as the real centre rather than Winnipeg, of the One Big Union idea. The mines of Alberta were dominated by swaggering foreigners who owed no allegiance to the British or any other flag except the Red emblem. Long ago under the influence of the clergy and the Archbishop of Montreal, Quebec had created a Canadian Labour movement intended to cut Canadian labour away from the American Federation. This was a phase of the Nationalism that had its headquarters in Quebec, but had spread in various strange guises to other parts of the country, when none of the clergy or intellectuals behind the movement dreamed that the One Big Union insurgent against the A.F.L. would be the most theatrical result. Once get the O.B.U. idea rampant in Quebec with its scores of big industries and its thousands of poorly educated workers, and the Red movement was due to spread faster than the United Farmers' programme had ever done.

In the propagation of the Red programme Ontario, and especially industrial Toronto, was regarded as the buffer state. But if the Soviet had succeeded in Winnipeg and further West, then the whole weight of that success marching upon Ontario, with Quebec bringing up the eastern end, would form a sort of nutcracker device from which Ontario would have had a hard time to escape.

This was the dazzling formula propounded at a time when every nation in the world was in a state of ferment, and when the vast loose-jointed nation known as Canada was in a condition of instability unknown since it became a Confederation. The apostles of the Red programme had all the advantages of being able to sling the paint on to the canvas of the future without caring overmuch about the drawing. Men in large numbers everywhere seemed ready to grasp at and embrace the unusual. People who for years had been ground down by high prices for the commonest necessities, considered seriously the question of the "salariat" joining forces with organizing labour under a banner that might be red. Civilization, physically shattered by the war and hysterically stampeded by the doctrine of self-determination of peoples—a high form of Bolshevism—stood ready to inquire whether the theories being tried in Russia were not, after all, right, no matter what butchery might be perpetrated in working them out.

Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.

Everything prepared the public mind.

A barrage of propaganda had been set up—and kept up.

Legitimate Trades Unionism itself in Britain had subscribed to The Aims of Labour put forth by Arthur Henderson, who foreshadowed barricades and bayonets in London streets if the proletariat did not get their "rights".

Canada did not surely escape. We had the Winnipeg flare-up, which was watched by legitimate labour across the border. The A.F.L. was challenged for authority in this country. It came to the peculiar pass, that in order to maintain the solidarity of Canada as constituted by Government under the Old Flag, the legitimate leaders of labour had to fall back upon the one continental organization which makes brotherhoods, not across the seas, nor so much across Canada, but across the border.

It was Ontario's opportunity; the steady old Province of some bigotry, great industry, many labour unions, and more or less fixed ideas regarding the function of Government. The office of Tom Moore is in Ottawa. There the President of the Trades and Labour Congress is in close touch with the Labour Department, with the Labour Gazette, with the Government in Council. We shall never know just how much of the steady conservatism of Moore at the first Congress following the Winnipeg strike, as well as at other Congresses later, was developed and held steady by association with Government.

But whether or no, even though it was nothing but loyalty to the established brotherhoods of the A.F.L. or a deeper loyalty to his own ideas of the case, the rock-steady influence of Tom Moore at the conventions was the one biggest hope of the indirect action element winning out. He was not opposed to Socialism. He has to work with Socialists—of many sorts. The whole basic idea of the Federation of Labour is a degree of Socialism. But it was the Marxian brand of Socialism born in Germany and transplanted to Russia to which Moore was opposed. He saw no field for this in Canada. He believed that Canada had a right to freedom of action. At least if it came to a choice between authority from the Gompers organization in the United States, and the Lenine tyranny in Russia, the course was clear. Time and time again he was bombarded and machine-gunned by the Red elements in Congress and Convention. As often he solidly stood his ground, based upon the older idea of labour getting its rights through negotiation and later through the ballot.

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near——"

But the daylight was not yet past for this Tom Moore. He could see ahead.

"I have seen Moore," says a close observer of him for two years, "faced by labour opponents in a number of Western cities. In all the howling he has never lost his temper or his dignity."

It would have been so much easier for this man to lose his temper, except that he knew it would be harder at the end when he had to face his own steady rank and file accusing him of poor chieftainship. It would have been so much easier to compromise with the preachers of glittering formulae, except that in the settling up he would have to justify himself to those who suspected him of defection.

Moore stuck to the commonplace business of wages and hours and agreements. He had no head for the poetry of Utopias. He knew, as he knows, that wages are the chief item of cost in all commodities, and that no matter what form of capitalism you choose, whether embodied in a Soviet or in a close corporation of dividends, wages of labour must be paid. He knows that prices of living and of labour are almost convertible. Amid all the howling and paeaning for a better day, for the new life, for the heaven upon earth, for the glorification of the proletariat, he could stand hard and fast by the common necessity of sticking to an agreement and as fast as possible bettering conditions.

We have heard independent observers say that the Reds have always shown a grasp of the new life, while the Trades Union men were crawling along with the uninspired programme of wages and hours; that the Reds were the sacrificing idealists and the Unionists the selfish Tories who wanted nothing more than to slowly improve their condition. Well, the logic of events seems to show that in the long run the Moores have the gospel. One scarcely cares to think what might have happened in Canadian industry and common living had Tom Moore given way to the Reds who came at him from almost every quarter.

At the 1920 Congress Moore had the old-fashioned courage to ask the new Premier of Canada, Arthur Meighen, to address the delegates. Of all men, the man who prosecuted the leaders of the Winnipeg Strike was the last to say anything to organized labour about milleniums or about anything more Utopian than a common agreement between labour and capital for the good of all. Moore had no fear. He believed that he was right. Had he invited Mackenzie King he would have got a speech with more in it about the philosophy of Industry and Humanity, and perhaps more to the point in the practical study of the labour question. By inviting the Premier, Moore paid respect to government. Even Mr. Crerar might have made a more sympathetic speech. But in the Moore philosophy there is no radical connection between Crerar and Labour. In the organization of the Drury coalition between Labour and the Farm he can see one way of getting the rights of each incorporated into legislation.

But the Government is the final thing. Statesmanship is bigger than programmes painted on the clouds. There's a vast deal to be done yet in this country for the enfranchisement of labour in industry as it is franchised in government. There are pig-headed Tories of industry who will have to illustrate tombstones before some of the old spirit of repression of labour will die out in the nation. But the die-hards are fewer every year. Some wages had to come down to get everything else down. But we believe also, as Moore probably does, that wages which are the chief item of cost in all commodities ought to be as high as production will stand and pay reasonable profits on investment; that collective bargaining is sound as applied to individual industries, but a form of bigoted tyranny when extended to the whole group or to the sympathetic strike; and that the slogan, "Union is Strength", does not mean levelling efficiency to the lowest common denominator.

The day may come in the recorded minutes of Trades and Labour Congresses in Canada when a man of broader and more constructive vision may be needed to build the brotherhood out into labour statesmanship. But for the past few years, and for the few to come, Canadian labour and common weal may well arise to thank Tom Moore, who, when the rapids were near and the rocks were under the rapids, kept his craft rowing into safe water. Tom Moore of Ireland was a poet. Tom Moore of Canada is not. The play on the names is only an accident. The parallel holds. May we never again need such a man in this country to be sure that labour does not run us all on the rocks under the Red rapids.