In the unfolding of this Great Adventure we pause here to observe that it was a newspaper which behind the Citizens' Committee administered a black eye to this attempt to make Winnipeg the Soviet headquarters of North America and 120 millions of people. The name of the paper was the Manitoba Free Press.
And the Free Press was seeing Red. What business had the Red Flag in a city like Winnipeg at all? If anywhere in Canada, why not in the industrial, big-interest East—in Montreal or Toronto?
"One revolution at a time, please," we almost hear the Free Press saying. "Now the war is done the West has to settle the fate of Government at Ottawa in its own way. And the way of the West is not with the Red Flag; not with Direct Action. This city is a headquarters of evolutionaries, not of outlaws. You people of the Strike Committee are trying to get the spot-light when you've no business anywhere except right at back stage."
A perfectly straight argument, though not couched in those words. Dafoe and his associates were profoundly busy with what to them was a ten times greater issue than any form of Soviet anywhere in Canada. As a matter of record the paper did admit that the metal workers had a right to strike for collective bargaining.
"But no other Union here or elsewhere," it thundered "has any right to a sympathetic strike to help the metal workers. This city is not going to be throttled by a thug minority, who want to exercise governing power as a revolutionary usurpation of authority."
A minority always leads. Majorities follow. The position of the Free
Press was, that it is only a minority able to command a majority that
should rule; and the Soviet was no such minority—while the Free
Press was.
A clear grasp of this is necessary in the business of judging Mr. Dafoe and his coming influence upon Canadian affairs. What Dafoe enunciated about the strike will have a strong bearing in the case upon what he thinks about the Agrarians. The judge must get a fair judgment. But of this later.
Dafoe was, so far as we know, the first editor in Canada to advocate from the beginning of the war a Coalition Government. This was natural. The Free Press had no faith in the Borden administration of Bob Rogers, owner of the Winnipeg Telegram. By the summer of 1916 it was into a Coalition campaign. A year later when the Premier came back from England declaring for conscription and inviting Laurier to join in a Coalition, the Free Press supported him.
Why this anxiety? We must pull off a bit of the makeup to find out. The Free Press was a Liberal paper. It supported Laurier in the West. But the older it grew the more clearly Dafoe and his associates saw that the man who had created the two new Western Provinces could not hold them. Other gods were now arising. Their organ was the Grain Growers' Guide; their parliaments were in grain growers' conventions; their policy was radical Liberalism. The Liberal organ of a Wheat City could not consistently antagonize this radical movement. The farmers must be studied. So far as they could strengthen Liberalism by becoming a Radical wing, they must be encouraged. At the point where they developed an extreme left away from the party they must be checked. The Free Press which was yet to fight an economic revolution must not itself be revolutionary.
This leads up to policy in Empire. The paper had gone against Borden in 1911. It was against the taxation Navy of Borden even though it could see the danger of war ahead. It was opposed to the whole super-Tory idea of a centralized British commonwealth of nations. It "hung the hide" of Lionel Curtis and his Round Table propaganda clubs to the Canadian National fence. It argued for "a progressive development in Canadian self-government to the point of the attainment of sovereign power to be followed by an alliance with the other British nations", who it was assumed would do likewise. For years before the war the Free Press had talked of this evolutionary Empire, deeply regretting that Mr. Bourassa had coined the word "Nationalist" and made it obnoxious.