The Masques of Ottawa

by Augustus Bridle

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.