The Rise Of The Co Operative Commonwealth Federation Of Canada

Almost a century before the New Democratic Party rode the first "orange wave," their predecessors imagined a movement that could rally Canadians against economic insecurity, win access to necessary services such as health care, and confront the threat of war. The party they built during the Great Depression, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), permanently transformed the country's politics. Past histories have described the CCF as social democrats guided by middle-class intellectuals, a party which shied away from labour radicalism and communist agitation. James Naylor's assiduous research tells a very different story: a CCF created by working-class activists steeped in Marxist ideology who sought to create a movement that would be both loyal to its socialist principles and appealing to the wider electorate. The Fate of Labour Socialism is a fundamental reexamination of the CCF and Canadian working-class politics in the 1930s, one that will help historians better understand Canada's political, intellectual, and labour history.

"The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation government in Saskatchewan, which was elected in 1944, remains the only government with avowed socialist goals to have come to power in Canada or the United States. In 1949, Seymour Martin Lipset wrote Agrarian Socialism, which has since become a classic, a study of the social background that enabled the movement to succeed in the region that it did. The CCF government, however, remained in power for twenty years. So this new Anchor edition contains not only a new introduction by the author, evaluating his earlier research in terms of later developments, but five new chapters by other sociologists who, taking off from the findings in Agrarian Socialism, studied later developments in Saskatchewan..." -- Back cover.

Often remembered for its humanitarian platform and its pioneering social programs, Saskatchewan’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) wrought a much less scrutinized legacy in the northern regions of the province during the twenty years it governed. Until the 1940s churches, fur traders, and other wealthy outsiders held uncontested control over Saskatchewan’s northern region. Following its rise to power in 1944, the CCF undertook aggressive efforts to unseat these traditional powers and to install a new socialist economy and society in largely Aboriginal northern communities. The next two decades brought major changes to the region as well-meaning government planners grossly misjudged the challenges that confronted the north and failed to implement programs that would meet northern needs. As the CCF’s efforts to modernize and assimilate northern people met with frustration, it was the northern people themselves that inevitably suffered from the fallout of this failure. In an elegantly written history that documents the colonial relationship between the CCF and the Saskatchewan north, David M. Quiring draws on extensive archival research and oral history to offer a fresh look at the CCF era. This examination will find a welcome audience among historians of the north, Aboriginal scholars, and general readers.