Notes on the Durham Report and French Canadians

"In a Report from a Committee of the Assembly in 1826, of which Mr. Andrew Steuart was chairman, it is stated, that since 1784 population of the seigniories had quadrupled, while the number of cattle had only doubled, and the quantity of land in cultivation had only increased one-third. Complaints of distress are constant, and the deterioration of the condition of a great part of the population admitted on all hands. A people so circumstanced must alter their mode of life. If they wish to maintain the same kind of rude, but well-provided agricultural existence, it must be by removing into those parts of the country in which the English are settled; or if they cling to their present residence, they can only obtain a livelihood by deserting their present employment, and working for wages on farms, or in commercial occupations under English capitalists. But their present proprietary and inactive condition is one which no political arrangements can perpetuate. Were the French Canadians to be guarded from the influx of any other population, their condition in a few years would be similar to that of the poorest of the Irish peasantry.

There can hardly be conceived a nationality more destitute of all that can invigorate and elevate a people, than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in Lower Canada, owing to their retaining their peculiar language and manners. They are a people with no history, and no literature."

This passage from the Durham Report demonstrates how important it was in instigating Canada's long bourgeois revolution from above. As the strange Other that spearheaded the 1837-38 rebellions, the French Canadians were a central concern of Lord Durham. Durham was commissioned by the Crown to report on the political crisis in British North America.

Durham proposed assimilating the racialized French Canadians through forced dispersal into majority English regions within British North America. This was not a far-fetched idea. It had been carried out before with the Acadians. Another way of dealing with the French Canadians was proletarianizing them, subjecting them to dependence on wage labour and the discipline of the market. They could either work on the farms as waged labour, or become an urban working class where English capitalism was king. The latter route was taken, initiating the emergence of an urban French Canadian workers movement by the late 1860s (in sometimes violent competition with the Irish, Quebec's other racialized urban work force). French Canadians would, until the early 1960s, provide a massive pool of cheap labour for Canadian capitalism.

Much of the racialization revolved around blaming the French Canadian character for the population's economic woes. In reality, Quebec was going through a major agricultural crisis not uncommon to the feudal mode of production. This included soil exhaustion, land-crowding and the absence of a developed home market. Many French Canadian farmers recognized this problem. The abolition of the seigneurial system was one of their revolutionary demands in the 1837-38 rebellions, along with abolition the ruling "Chateau Clique" in favour of popular democratic sovereignty.

While the rebellion was put down, both these demands were eventually implemented as reforms from above. "Responsible government" was granted in 1848 and the seigneurial system abolished in 1854 (at the height of Canada's first railway boom). Canada's bourgeois revolution started with a genuine popular uprising. While the uprising was defeated, it set in motion a bourgeois revolution from above that was not completed until 1885. Riel's hanging on November 16 1885 came only nine days after the CPR's last spike.

It is not until the last half of the 20th century, from the 1940s through the 1970s, that French Canadians destroyed this century-old founding pillar of Canada in which they were a racialized and super-exploited segment of the population living in economic and cultural apartheid. Quebec's workers movement was the largest and leading social force in these 20th century transformations. This is only one example of how profound revolutions are required if the injustices embedded in Canada's long-standing economic and political arrangements are to be resolved.

All Power to the General Assemblies

The length, scope and success of the Quebec student strike has compelled many English Canadian students to investigate the structures, methods and ideas underpinning the Quebec student movement. The most striking difference is the presence of the general assembly as decision-making body on the Quebec campus. Held at the departmental, faculty and even campus-wide level, tens of thousands of students have participated in general assemblies, involving open democratic discussion and debate on how best to confront Charest’s tuition fee hike. It was this form of direct democracy which delivered (or denied) limited and unlimited strike mandates again and again through the months-long campaign. The highly participatory and democratic nature of the general assembly laid the basis for the enormous numbers of students who sustained picket lines, mass marches and the now-famous casseroles against Bill 78’s repeal of civil liberties.

While Quebec’s post-war history under the authoritarian Duplessis regime and subsequent Quiet Revolution (which became increasingly loud through 1960s) created a student movement far larger and politically astute than anything seen in English Canada, questions still remain as to why English Canadian campuses remain so dormant in comparison. Is it a matter of culture, or structures, or both, that impedes the development of a comparable student movement?

This always raises the question of what role the Canadian Federation of Students plays in galvanzing or squandering the potentially large numbers of students outside Quebec opposed to annual tuition fee increases and the commodification of post-secondary education.

A Tale of Two Student Movements
Since the 1950s, the fundamental distinction in structures between Quebec and English Canadian student unionism is that of direct democracy versus representative democracy; the general assembly versus the student council.

The general assembly was imported from France in the late 1940s by Quebec exchange students. Many French students in the late 1940s had emerged from a Communist-led anti-Nazi resistance. These students organized themselves in 1946 and drafted La Charte de Grenoble. The document described students as “young intellectual workers” who were responsible for participating in a democratic and socially-progressive reconstruction of post-war France. It was not by accident that this philosophy was termed “student syndicalism” as the general assembly was seen as the equivalent to a labour union general meeting with its ultimate decision-making authority, including strike votes. Through general assemblies on each campus, these same French students organized and led massive student strikes in 1947 and 1948; strikes which won universial healthcare for students and a number of other progressive reforms.

Through the 1950s, opposition to the authoritarian Duplessis regime in Quebec provided the space for student syndicalism to gain a foothold as a philosophy underpinning a student movement that sought to modernize and democratize the education system. Quebec’s student unions still elected leaders, but decisions affecting the membership were addressed in the general assembly.

This Quebec student movement did influence the direction of the English Canadian student movement. The National Federation of Canadian University Students, changed its name to the Canadian Union of Students and adopted student syndicalism in its 1965 “Declaration of the Canadian Student.” Based on a groundbreaking socio-economic survey of students, CUS irrefutably confirmed severe class biases in the composition of the university student body and endorsed a policy of eliminating tuition fees as a financial barrier. Through demonstrations and lobbying, CUS was also able to secure a decade-long Ontario tuition fee freeze that lasted until 1976.

CUS would go on to take ever more radical stances, including support for women’s liberation, immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam, and the democratization of university governance. These radical pronouncements alienated a number of local student unions who initiated referendum campaigns on CUS membership. Through the 1968-69 school year, CUS membership collapsed, destroying the union's financial stability and forcing its dissolution in October 1969.

As CUS leaders learned, such radical policies had no substantial organized support on the campuses. CUS organizers did try to rectify this by helping to build “Students for a Democratic University” groups. Dozens of SDUs existed across Canada, and in early 1969, their combined membership surpassed six thousand. While the SDUs focused on winning representation on boards and senates, lowering book costs, and exposing the ties between industry and university administrations, democratizing student unions was not on their agenda. Despite the Quebec example, the general assembly was never adopted in English Canada.

The Canadian Federation of Students
The CFS was born at Carleton at a delegated conference in 1981. With CUS as a warning, CFS has been careful to moderate the scope of its political interventions on campus. Its advocacy efforts focus on issues such as tuition fee reductions and a variety of valuable and necessary anti-oppression initiatives. At certain times, it has taken anti-poverty, pro-labour and anti-war stances.

An attempt to destroy the CFS did take place in 1995 and 1996. Amidst a harsh recession in the early 1990s, provincial governments sought to restrain post-secondary spending through concurrent increases in tuition fees. This was amplified by the 1995 federal Liberal budget which saw the deepest cuts in Canadian history to health and education transfers.

To its credit, CFS spearheaded a campaign to stop the cuts. Political Action Committees were setup on the campuses and these bodies served to build a campaign which culminated in a one-day 100,000-strong student strike on January 25, 1995.

The strike was such an affront to Liberal and other right-wing-led student unions, that a wave of defederation votes were held. Some right-wing student leaders unilaterally pulled their respective student unions from CFS without a democratic referendum. This right-wing split from CFS laid the basis for the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations.

Since then, CFS has devoted huge amounts of human and financial resources to combating defederation campaigns, often contending with calculated anti-CFS misinformation put out by Liberal and Tory campus groups, but also against the corruption scandals involving CFS-aligned student leaders.

The General Assembly
At Carleton and on other campuses, student activists are once again trapped in a battle between defending CFS from the right, while desiring something more democratic and capable of generating high levels of student participation in political action. It is no wonder many student activists identify not with CFS but l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), the Quebec student federation which led the victorious 2005 and 2012 student strikes.

Yet, ASSÉ itself is nothing without the general assembly. General assemblies are the forums in which students have ensured that the strike spread beyond the most radical campuses and into more conservatives ones aligned with other student federations. Furthermore, Quebec student federations have come and gone, but the general assembly has survived because it is the local form of democratic student decision-making. Direct democracy has provided a major obstacle for the student right and prevented them from making serious gains on Quebec’s Francophone campuses.

The general assembly and its threat of direct democracy is kept at bay with the current representative student council structure; a structure CFS activists continue to leave unchallenged. Its limited democratic nature and the power it places in the hands of the student union executive also allows a right-wing executive to do plenty of damage without any accountability outside of annual student union elections.

Student activists inside and outside CFS who recognize the need to build a powerful student movement in English Canada ought to being looking to the general assembly as the means to build such a movement. This would require a multi-level reform movement on each campus that can engage not only individual students, but make the introduction of the general assembly part of student union election campaigns, as well as a campaign within the CFS to compel the adoption and construction of general assemblies. More democracy will be the antidote to the student right as well as the prescription for a new student movement.

They Were Onterrible Times

From the OECTA deal with McGuinty in July, to Bill 115 in September, to the looming public sector austerity bill, we really see what doors concession bargaining opens.

We've gone from one union agreeing to a mere wage freeze, to teachers losing collective bargaining rights and having contracts imposed by the government, to the prospect of a juiced version of Bill 115 applied to half a million public sector workers.

What is to be done?

The lessons of the Quebec student strike ought to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of Ontario's labour and student movements.

Wasting Food

My initial instinct reading this article is that it lends to the notion that the problem is relatively low food prices in Canada and, even worse, some sort of ignorant first-world consumer culture. I think such an approach can lead people to blaming individual consumption habits as the source of the problem, while completely ignoring absurd and glaring structural problems with how we produce, distribute and consume food.

High levels of food waste in the home is a post-war phenomenon rooted in how our cities have been constructed around the car and the evolution of near-monopoly control of the food production and distribution system. The neighbourhood grocer/butcher/baker was based around the pre-war walking/streetcar city. The supermarket, however, became king in the post-war car-centred suburbs, and while it dominated the suburbs it also had the affect of devastating local neighbourhood food retail through lower prices and increasing control of food distribution networks.

Many local grocers fought the rise of the supermarket by forming business alliances capable of competing with the supermarket. But through engaging in market competition, these independent grocer alliances became part of the very tendency towards concentration and centralization and eventual monopolization of the food distribution industry. This is exactly the story of IGA: the Independent Grocers Alliance.

The lesson here is that whatever the market, competition over times leads to less competition as weak competitors are driven out and the amount of capital invested in such operations rises to such a point that upstart competitors are nearly impossible (imagine the initial capital costs of starting a car company today versus 1900). This trend towards concentration and centralization in food distribution was combined with a similar trend in food production. Like the local grocer/baker/butcher, the small farmer producing for a local market was also pushed to the margins of the food production market. The result for consumers is that buying food tends to require a car as local food stores within walking distance deter and even prevent daily shopping.

Food consumption habits have also been shaped by several important changes in working-class family life. The stereotypical 1950s two-parent family with a sole male breadwinner, has been replaced by two-parent families with two breadwinners, as well as a rise in single-parent families. Some have blamed this on third-wave feminism and the emergence of women's liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. This entirely misses the point that increased female participation in the workforce and accessibility to employment beyond traditionally-female jobs was necessary to breakdown profoundly unjust social norms which simply had to go. Likewise, rising divorce rates from the 1960s onward, as well as recent trends towards a decrease in marriage among families with and without children, represents an increased ability of women to determine their own relationships free of forms of male control and violence and wider cultural stigmatization. And it is not as though these interrelated struggles have at all been resolved.

Critically, these changes in the structure of working-class families operate within a changing economic system. Such transformations in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, coincide with stagnating and even declining real wages. The return of cyclical economic crises and the related rise of neoliberal economic and social policies since the 1970s has seen a sustained restructuring of the global economy around efforts to increase profit rates at the expense of labour's share of the wealth. In conjunction with stagnant or declining real wages, North America has also witnessed a rise in working hours amidst a change in family life increasingly relying on two working parents or a working single parent. Free time has become increasingly scarce. It is remarkable that the motto of the Eight Hours Movement in the 1860s - 8 hours work, 8 hours leisure, 8 hours rest - remains an anathema to capitalism's economic interests 150 years later.

With less free time and food consumption increasingly reliant on a car, it is no wonder that people will shop once a week and buy huge amounts of food. The decline of well-paying full-time jobs with stable working hours and job security (in part a function of trade union power) has also led to highly chaotic patterns in family life, making any sort of meal planning even more difficult and unlikely. This increases the likelihood of food going bad as families and especially parents are less able to actually plan out their food consumption on a daily basis when they've bought food for a week; something that is far more easier when you can buy your food each day or every two days. This also leads to an increased reliance on prepared and snack food; food which is far more likely to be unhealthy, loaded with salt, sugar and all sorts of chemical for preservation purposes. These processed and prepared foods are also integrated into the agribusiness system; a system which relies heavily on factory-farmed food which itself is heavily dependent on massive use of pesticides, GMOs, hormone treatments, etc. After a long-day at work and/or during a hectic day of a busy family schedule, would you rather be preparing and cooking food for 30-45 minutes, or using that time to unwind with something you can make in 5 minutes? The right-wing response - it's a question of personal responsibility! - is the utopian, unrealistic assessment of the situation. Such a view belies a complete lack of understanding (and compassion) for our fellow human beings. People aren't robots who don't get tired, don't need time to unwind, and don't live in a system not of their own choosing.

Even the most diligent food consumer can't affect or change this entire, complex system through individual consumption habits. The question of consumption is directly tied to how food production and distribution is organized and these realms of the food system are subordinated to concerns about market share and profitability; not geographic accessibility, financial accessibility, local economic activity or individual and community health concerns. And it is ultimately extremely wasteful both at the point of consumption, and in its environmental impact through GMOs, massive use of pesticides and other chemicals, depletion of good soil, and the air and water pollution from food processing and the transportation required for continent-wide shipping of even the most basic produce and meats that can be produced locally almost anywhere in North America.

These arrangements have not been shaped by consumption habits but by powerful economic forces - agribusiness, supermarket chains, the fast food industry - that have gradually transformed the food system into a profit-generating system, not a healthy, accessible one based on simple human needs. This is much the same problem as privatized healthcare in the US. A fundamental human need is being exploited for profit at the expense of that very need. A grounded, realistic and pragmatic approach to the problem requires us to concede the necessity of a profound revolution in how we produce, distribute and consume food.

Fire Margaret Wente

Margaret Wente, the 37-year veteran journalist, and thrice-weekly columnist for the Globe and Mail is a serial plagiarist.

Yet, the Globe and Mail has failed to fire her after retreating from a first pathetic response which effectively dismissed the iron-clad proof of Wente's plagiarism. A first-year university student is open to expulsion if they plagiarize. If they're lucky, they'll get an F on the assignment, a stern warning and a note on their student record. Wente, as a professional veteran journalist for Canada's so-called "national newspaper" should have been fired for this.

The Globe and Mail has hit an incredible new low, and not even in its gross political standards. This is a matter of base-level professional standards and academic standards.

Yet, the Globe continues to publish ridiculous apologetics like this bullshit from Kelly McBride with the opening paragraph:

"Professional journalism isn’t facing a plagiarism problem. It’s facing an originality failure."

A journalist, including columnists, don't need to have an original thought published in their life. They simply need to cite their sources clearly. End of story.

Fire Margaret Wente.

Canadian labour at the present

Richard Seymour has published one of his occasional "big picture" analyses entitled "A few points about the conjuncture in Britain." The read is a bit dense and filled with a Marxist and Gramscian language that is hard to handle for those not familiar with it. That said, there are plenty of insights that are not only informative for outside observers of the situation in Britain, but also thought-provoking for anyone trying to grasp the situation in Canada (and especially those of us not in Quebec).

Two passages in particular are worth highlighting as they help us come closer to grasping the situation of Canadian labour.

There have been important wildcats and creative workers actions since the Harper majority was elected in May 2011: the Tory MP office occupations during the postal lockout, the Ingersoll train blockade, secondary pickets at Cat dealerships, the Air Canada ground crew wildcat and pilots sick-in, the Vale Long Harbour wildcat, and the Marystown OCI blockade/occupation. However, the passage below is true of Canada and even Quebec given the active failure of organized labour to respond to the student strike's call for a wider "social strike".

"The only serious, national resistance to the Tories' programme is coming from the trade unions. It is not being led by the rank and file. Rather, the rank and file pressures the union bureaucracy for action, but remains dependent on the bureaucracy to actually take the initiative."

No unions within Canada have established, coordinated rank-and-file-driven reform networks capable of shifting a union leadership over the short-term, let alone the long-term. Observers of the Chicago teachers strike will note the importance of CORE - the Caucus Of Rank-and-file Educators - in shifting the union towards a highly democratic, highly mobilized, highly educated union with a strategy of organizing community alliances. This does not exist in Canada, which also means that there is no rank-and-file network spanning unions either. For example, Ontario's Teaching Assistant unions are almost all CUPE locals with the exception of three PSAC locals. Not only is there no rank-and-file/reform network amongst the CUPE locals, but there is no coordination between CUPE and PSAC locals (CUPE's OUWCC has this potential but it is a resolutionary, resource-sharing body, not an activist network)

Why do such networks not exist? Why the dependence on the leadership? This is a deep historical question that has hardly been asked let alone answered by Canadian labour activists, researchers and academics. Yet, the following passage helps us to begin thinking about why:

"No one has the confidence after decades of neoliberal assault and diminishing strength and influence, to risk everything in a big set-piece dispute with the government. This isn’t the 1980s but, alas, everyone still remembers the Miners. The result is that strikes are seen by the union leadership as a bureaucratic manoeuvre to force the government to soften its bargaining stance."

Canada has no one single Miners strike in which the defeat of labour can be traced. Instead, we can look to labour's defeats in Ontario during the first term of the Harris government, or to the aborted struggles of BC teachers and hospital workers in 2003-4. Both these provincial labour movements have since slipped into a long-term period of demoralization, defensiveness and defeats. Where political constellations were different, labour in Saskatchewan and Quebec made large efforts to elect social democratic governments during the 1990s following hard struggles against first-generation neoliberals in the 1980s. However, both the Saskatchewan NDP under Premier Romanow and the two terms of the Parti Quebecois between 1995 and 2003 witnessed social democracy turning to neoliberal fiscal policies. This generated labour opposition which broke the electoral alliances in both provinces, and paved the way for more committed neoliberal regimes under Brad Wall in Saskatchewan and Charest in Quebec.

Last but not least, while Canada's IR regime prevents strikes during the life of a contract, we should treat the last sentence in the passage above as including protest actions too. This would include the Hamilton US Steel rally in January 2011, the EMD London rally in January of this year and the OFL Queen's Park rally in April. All these protests pulled at least ten thousand, but this seems to be the ceiling for such actions which are not, as the Days of Action were, part of a wider campaign.

Another view of the Dieppe Raid

It’s no secret that the Harper government is making a sustained effort to situate Canada’s military history at the centre of a new interpretation of Canadian history. To save us time reciting all the evidence, people should listen to this talk given by historian Ian McKay which is a highly informative teaser for Warrior Nation:Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety. The book, co-authored by McKay and Jamie Swift, traces the transformation of official myths about our military from Pearsonian peacekeeping to the new post-9/11 militarism.

Other researchers have also been alerted us to this shift. Warrior Nation ought to be read alongside the works Yves Engler on Canadian foreign policy. His easy-to-read books, some of them co-authored, expose Canada’s ugly role abroad and knock down longstanding myths surrounding peacekeeping. Also essential is Todd Gordon’s excellent Imperialist Canada, which provides a well-developed political economy approach to Canada’s military, diplomatic and corporate interventions within our borders and beyond.

One current high profile example of military myth-making is the resurrection of the War of 1812 as a point of national pride. The official version goes little beyond celebrating the victory against American invasion, even though the invasion was directed at only two of the seven British North American colonies - Upper and Lower Canada. Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton (which was a separate colony until 1820) did not experience American invasion.

Given that Canada did not exist at the time and the United States, amidst its own expansionist desires, had legitimate grievances against the British for raiding their ships and impressing British-born Americans into the Royal Navy, it would be more useful to understand the War of 1812 as a catastrophe for Indigenous peoples who allied with the British against the Americans on the promise of a vast homeland. The British didn’t keep their promise.

It goes without saying that such celebrations of Canadian military history have no interest in going beyond a shallow, and often largely inaccurate interpretation of events.

One only has to walk around historic downtown Kingston to find such problems with the War of 1812 celebrations. Big banners adorn the streetlights of Princess Street, Kingston’s main drag, declaring Kingston “Invasion Free Since 1812”.






If you take a short walk south to City Park, you’ll find a historic plaque celebrating the volunteers who saved Kingston from an invasion during the rebellion of 1837-38. When I first saw this, I was puzzled. Weren’t the rebellions domestic? Initially, yes. But a number of rebels fled to the United States after their first failed uprising. The plaque does not mention that this invasion was launched from upstate New York by Canadian rebels, backed by American republicans, and led by a Polish revolutionary who had been exiled following a failed uprising against the Russian Empire.

Whereas the War of 1812 celebrations have at least sparked some critical questioning of its propagandistic intentions in the mainstream press, and led to some fascinating interviews with researchers on CBC Radio One, such an open space is still not allowed for more recent wars, notably the two world wars. 

The two world wars are understandably central to the new militarist national history. That’s why it’s still so dangerous to offer up interpretations that might cast aspersions on the decisions of Canada’s war-time politicians and generals and especially units involving thousands of rank-and-file soldiers and airmen who "just followed orders." Consider such ridiculous cases as the new Canadian War Museum in Ottawa ceding to the demands of Air Force veterans to change the wording of a plague describing the bombing of Dresden and other German civilian targets as war crimes. Such a response was foreshadowed in the early 1990s with a veteran-led assault on the gripping CBC documentary series The Valour and the Horror, and specifically the episode Death by Moonlight.


Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command by Brian McKenna, National Film Board of Canada

Efforts to revisit Canadian military history are dismissed as “revisionism” as if no reinterpretation, let alone a new interpretation based on new evidence, is valid. History, it is often claimed, is “just the facts.” That such attitudes are so widespread is the real failure of Canadian high school history classes, not the absence of a national narrative or the overemphasis on social history instead of military history, as claimed by Jack Granatstein in his 1998 best-seller Who Killed Canadian History?

Dieppe: the myth-building interpretation

With all this in mind, the recent 70^th anniversary of the Dieppe Raid should give us a moment to reconsider the mainstream nationalist and militarist interpretation of Dieppe as a tragedy with a silver-lining. Despite the ill-fated raid on the fortified French coastal city of Dieppe on August 19 1942 by 6,000 Allied troops, mainly Canadians, the raid provided the Allies an invaluable understanding of how to pull-off a large-scale invasion of France. So the story goes.

This interpretation is summed up very well in a Montreal Gazette article authored by Bernard Amyot. Amyot is not a historian, but president of the Canadian Bar Association. What Amyot is doing writing about Dieppe is beyond me, but his analysis of the raid is not at all different from something you would find in mainstream military history books. Amyot also provides us with the claim that this raid had a unifying effect for Canadians – a claim that is also rolled out fairly commonly even if there are criticisms about the raid.

Let’s unpack the two key passages that build the myth around Dieppe:

"The lessons learned from the mistakes of this failed landing would later help ensure the successful liberation of Europe, and the world, from Hitler’s unparalleled Nazi tyranny. Indeed, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had conceived of the Dieppe raid mainly as a “rehearsal” for the greatest and most successful landing operations in history which were launched around Arromanches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 (Operation Neptune), the success of which was paid for at a terrible price by Canadian forces 70 years ago."

and

"The Dieppe raid, though it resulted in tremendous loss for Canada, contributed to uniting Canadians of all origins in fighting a common evil. It confirmed Canada’s role as an independent force to be reckoned with, not only within the British Commonwealth, but throughout the world, starting in France. It has made us a better country, a united country that proudly vies for justice and freedom — something we can all celebrate."

Churchill's agenda

Let’s deal with the first paragraph by knocking down the myth of Churchill, the alleged military and political genius - a Tory who was ousted in a landslide only two months after the collapse of the Nazi regime, ushering in the most transformative, progressive British Labour government ever.

There’s always a curious and glaring oversight when someone draws a direct line from Dieppe to Normandy. Dieppe was not followed by the invasion of France. Italy was invaded nine months before France on Churchill's idiotic insistence that it was the "soft underbelly of Europe". Sicily fell very quickly and the Allies invaded Italy at the boot and heel. But Italy’s mountainous terrain and dense towns with narrow streets provided excellent natural defenses for the fascists and a huge hindrance to mobility. Italy became a long, arduous and costly campaign – with worse casualties for infantry than even the Western Front following D-Day. Success was measured in short distances and very high losses. The Allies didn’t even reach the more open terrain of northern Italy until a few weeks before the general German surrender in April/May 1945.

Why is the Italian campaign important to raise? Churchill clearly hadn't learned his lesson from the previous war when he spearheaded the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli in which Australian, New Zealand, French, Indian and British troops trapped on a narrow strip of rocky land for nine months before being evacuated. Churchill’s “military” credentials do not hold up to scrutiny. So why was he so insistent on invading Italy – with its fascist state crumbling amidst the defeats in North Africa – before France?

Churchill's emphasis on invading Italy first (and subsequent special operations interventions Greece) was about maintaining British control of the Mediterranean as well as keeping Communist influence out. When Mussolini’s government collapsed through mid-1943, the Nazis occupied Italy and put Mussolini in charge of a northern-based puppet state. The puppet state and the Nazi occupiers were subjected to a relentless resistance campaign led by the Italian Communist Party, which, as the war approached an end, became the most powerful political force in the country. Local Communist-led armed resistance in the Nazi-occupied Balkans and Greece also helped drive out the Nazis who were increasingly at risk of being cut off from an escape route to Germany by advancing Soviet armies. The story after Nazi collapse in Italy and withdrawal in Greece was the Allied disarmament of the partisans to prevent the eradication of Nazi-sympathizing domestic elites. These domestic elites were instrumental in British and American efforts to ensure that Italy and Greece would not become Communist after the war.

Stalin, who headed up the Soviet bureaucracy and had finally drowned the Russian Revolution in blood during the 1930s, sold out the Communists in Greece in October 1944 in a secret agreement between Stalin and Churchill. The agreement carved up British and Soviet influence over various European countries. There is much talk of the Soviets imposing the Iron Curtain on Europe. But this was a mutual decision by the Western allies, namely Churchill and Roosevelt, and the Soviet Union. It was a similar process to what happened after World War One – the carving up of Europe by the victors. It was this carving up that did not jive with many local, Communist, nationalist and democratic movements who had formed the backbone of the resistance across Europe. Greece was caught in this imperial tug-of-war and from 1946 to 1949, its domestic political conflicts which did have a violent edge escalated into a full-scale civil war in which the UK and US sponsored and armed the anti-Communist side. In Italy, CIA operations warped the country’s fragile new representative democratic system to prevent the Communists from winning elections in the immediate post-war years..

Through 1943, once North Africa had been secured by the Allies, the actual liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation and the invasion of Germany itself to physically destroy the Nazi state (which in itself is more complicated than we're taught), took a backburner to British imperial and Western anti-Communist interests in the Mediterranean. Although the Western allies did liberate Western Europe (with much help from the French Communist-led resistance) and invade western Germany, the Soviet Union had carried all the heavy lifting on continental Europe. On the ground, it fought the Nazis almost single-handedly from June 1941 to June 1944, and suffered the most horrendous casualties in the war – 27 million – casualties exacerbated by Stalin’s complete disregard for human life.

Dieppe as a function of Western-Soviet relations

So what, exactly, was the Dieppe Raid's purpose? Let's dispense with the "rehearsal" argument.

If "rehearsal" was the primary concern, the Dieppe Raid was not necessary. As Dieppe happened, the Americans also invaded Guadalcanal in the Pacific. This started a three-year "island-hopping" campaign which recaptured the vast Pacific island network that the Japanese had established by seizing strategic islands (such as those with airports) while skipping over other islands to cut the supply lines to their Japanese garrisons. The necessary experience in amphibious landings that translated to the invasion of France came not from Dieppe or the unopposed landings in Algeria or Sicily, but the American island-hopping campaign in the Pacific which was nearly two years old as of D-Day.

The first of two major reasons why Dieppe happened was to allay the Soviet Union which was demanding the Allies open up a second front in Western Europe to take some of the pressure off fighting almost the entire Nazi war machine. To put matters in perspective, the Western Allies were only fighting at most 140,000 German troops in North Africa between 1940-43. From the invasion of Russia in June 1941 onward, Germany never had fewer than two million soldiers on the Eastern Front. This is one reason why the German general, Erwin Rommel, who commanded the German Afrika Korps, was constantly asking Hitler for more troops. Hitler treated North Africa as a sideshow whereas Rommel and other German commanders saw the seizing of the Suez Canal as strategically important. Despite the early victories in Russia, a deep undercurrent of opposition to Hitler emerged because of the invasion. German military commanders were not ignorant of Napolean’s campaign in Russia and its role in shattering the continent-wide empire and satellite states he had established. Rommel, the most celebrated German general of the war and an obvious military genius (unlike Churchill or Montgomery) would then join the efforts by a group of officers to assassinate Hitler. He was implicated and committed suicide in October 1944 rather than go to court.

The scale of the Eastern Front cannot be understated. It was indisputably the front upon which the entire European conflagration orbited. Even the Italians had more troops and far higher losses on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1943 than during the North Africa campaign against the Commonwealth armies. When Dieppe happened, the Nazis were at the edge of Moscow and the Battle of Stalingrad had not even started, let alone reached its turning point. It wasn’t until November 1942 that the German armies in Stalingrad were surrounded and another three months before they surrendered. This is the military-political context for the Soviets demanding the Western allies open up a second front. Dieppe, in this sense, was a bloody PR stunt for Stalin.

Dieppe and the Canadian home front

For Canadians, the Dieppe Raid was also about placating an increasingly agitated domestic population. The fall of France happened in June 1940. Canadian troops had been stationed in England since late 1939 and had not seen any action. The public was growing impatient as war raged across North Africa as the only front being fought by the Commonwealth armies in the Western hemisphere. Political decisions had been made to keep Canadian troops together, so they were never committed piecemeal to North Africa like the Australians and New Zealanders had done. By mid-1942, almost four entire Canadian divisions were in England – upwards of 80,000 combat troops. There were thousands more Canadians in England, many of them engaged in the air war, including those in the Sixth (Canadian) Bomber Group in Britain’s Bomber Command who carried out the strategy of Air Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. This strategy was to bomb German civilians targets – and it killed 600,000 German civilians over five years, including 60,000 in Dresden during its infamous firebombing. The extent of the Canadian contribution to the air war is reflected in Canadian casualties. Of the 47,000 Canadian war deaths, 18,000 were of those were members of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

By 1942, two years had passed with no prospect of a second front opening up and the Soviet Union doing all the major fighting. Sympathy in the West, including Canada, for the Soviet Union ran very high. It was not only promoted by the mainstream press and government as a key ally, but the it was still seen by many as a progressive alternative system. Not only did the Communists play a major role in the rising labour movement, and had an MLA elected in Manitoba in 1941, two MPPs elected in downtown Toronto in 1943, and an MP, Fred Rose, elected in a Montreal by-election in 1945.

Labour tensions were also beginning to boil over amidst a regime of strict rationing and a government-enforced culture of suspicion that ranged from the innocuous “loose lips sink ships” rhetoric to the geographic dispersal and internment of Japanese-Canadians and theft of their property. While the home front's popular commitment to the war effort cannot be denied, it was interwoven with a series of deep-seated social grievances, many of which had arose before the war in the depression. At times, these grievances expressed themselves forcefully, explosively.

It’s worth looking at Canada's labour situation in the months leading up to Dieppe. In the middle of wartime austerity and the war itself not going well, labour tensions had exploded over the Kirkland Lake goldminers strike of late 1941 and early 1942. After a few years of relative labour peace - partially enforced by the no-strike pledge of the Communist Party on the grounds that strikes would sabotage the war effort with our Soviet allies - the workers movement across the country was mobilized against federal and provincial government-backed repression of union rights at Kirkland Lake. While the strike went down to defeat, it galvanized a new workers movement that would escalate its struggle through the 1940s and force the government to codify a system of tripartite industrial relations involving unions, employers and the state.

Other political tensions also rose rapidly. In April 1942, the federal government held a plebiscite on conscription in which Prime Minister King sought popular support to flip-flop on his anti-conscription promises made at the outset of the war. Only 25 years earlier, a conscription crisis had gripped Canada and in Quebec, the memory of anti-conscription being shot dead in Quebec City’s streets by Anglophone soldiers was not forgotten. Conscription, even with the plebiscite passing, fuelled significant anger in Quebec. While 83 percent of Anglophones voted in favour of conscription, over 70 percent of Francophones opposed it.

This political opposition to hardship on the home front and lack of progress on the war front was confirmed in a 1942 Gallup poll showing the CCF ahead of both the Liberals and Conservatives with a plurality of overseas soldiers supporting the CCF. This marked a serious and sustained effort by the ruling Liberals of Mackenzie King to begin taking very seriously the need for implementing social reforms to diffuse popular anger and prevent social upheavals like what happened between 1917 and 1919.

Saskatchewan Liberal Party
anti-CCF poster, c.1938. Source

It was this discontent that played a massive role in informing the Canadian government's decision to commit troops to the Dieppe Raid as well as to the invasion of Sicily in September 1943, thus dividing up the Canadian Corps. These domestic divisions and tensions continued through the war, reflected most forcefully in the radicalization and ballooning of a new workers movement alongside a strong Communist Party and most acutely, a huge swing of support behind the still young socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. The CCF became the opposition in BC in 1942, narrowly lost the Ontario election in 1943 and took power in Saskatchewan in 1944. Political polarization was such that Canada witnessed its government and business-initiated Red Scare reach full-steam after the war even before the Americans, amidst one of the most extensive strike waves in Canadian history.

To conclude, let's not make Dieppe something it is not. It did not unite Canadians except in grief. It was a waste of life designed to recover lost political support at home and throw a bone to the Soviet Union. It is not something to celebrate.