What was Duff Pattullo's part in Bloody Sunday, 1938?

In brief

1. He arranged the eviction, and said so. The day after, he told the Canadian Press in Vancouver that “he had been the prime mover in securing the Sunday eviction of the men from the Post Office and Art Gallery” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 20 June 1938, p. 1: Premier Pattullo in Vancouver after the eviction). In the Commons that day J. S. Woodsworth said the orders “came from Ottawa; apparently there was some request from the premier of British Columbia,” and the government admitted authorizing the clearing of its post office on 17 June (House of Commons Debates, 23 May, 6 June and 20 June 1938: the Vancouver sit-down and its eviction). His biographer is plain: “believing that subversive influences were at work and that the situation could no longer be tolerated, he arranged with the federal government to have the men forcibly evicted” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 306). The hour, the gas and the clubs belonged to the Chief Constable and the RCMP; nothing yet ties those choices to him. That he arranged the eviction: certain, on his own word and his biographer’s. That he chose its manner: not shown.
2. “British Columbia cannot take care of unemployed from all over Canada” was a bargaining position, not a confession of bankruptcy. The burden was real and unfairly shared, and the province was paying for relief works with borrowed money. But British Columbia had the highest government revenue per head in Canada, and its finance minister expected to meet direct relief that year out of current revenue; the camps closed every spring, as they had in 1937; and what was new in 1938 was a decision about whom to help: no relief for men who had come within the year. Strong lean, about two to one.
3. His quarrel was with Ottawa, and with being defied, more than with communism. He called the protest “organized and premeditated” and wanted “a showdown.” The occupation was organized, by Communists, and he was right about that. But the consistent pattern of his career is a man who fought any organized body that claimed a share of his authority: oil companies, unions, Ottawa, his own caucus, and in 1938 the jobless. Strong lean.
4. The men asked for his own program. Their slogan was “work, not train rides.” His own platform of 1933 began: “Profitable and permanent Employment is the most important question facing our people,” to be met by “a broad programme of constructive and useful wage-distributing public enterprise.” By 1938, his biographer finds, he had given up on it: “the words ‘work and wages’ were scarcely uttered by anyone in the Pattullo government after 1937,” and he now warned on the radio that “sole dependence upon the Government would simply lead to moral decrepitude of the individual.” Whether he withheld his program to make Ottawa pay or had stopped believing he could deliver it, the men got neither. That they got neither: certain. Which it was: open.
5. Ottawa was as much to blame as Victoria. Mackenzie King’s ministers held that BC must not become a “preferred” place for transients, authorized the eviction, and supplied the RCMP. The Province’s verdict the next morning, that “the two governments have been faithless to the unemployed,” stands (Vancouver Province, editorial, 20 June 1938 (excerpt)).
6. It was in character. Rebuked at Dawson in 1905, defied by the jobless in 1938, defied by strikers at Blubber Bay that autumn and by his caucus in 1941, he did the same thing each time: took it personally, refused to bargain, and sought a showdown. In 1938 he won it; in 1941 it cost him the premiership.
7. His “people” had a border. As Minister of Lands he signed the order that made the reserve cut-offs final (1923). As premier he wrote privately of driving “the Japs out of business” and of the day “when all the Japanese are repatriated,” and his letter of 1940 kept Japanese and Chinese Canadians out of military training lest they claim the vote. He deplored public slurs and worked quietly. A deliberate exclusionist, moderate in method, not in aim: strong lean.

Who the men were

The men in the post office were the relief-camp generation. In October 1932 R. B. Bennett’s government, on the advice of General Andrew McNaughton, opened camps for single homeless men under the Department of National Defence. McNaughton was “concerned about the threat of civil unrest and the questionable fitness of future military service among the estimated 70,000 young men who were wandering throughout the west” (Richard Rajala, "Forced Relief," Legion Magazine (2000)). Entry was voluntary, but a man who refused a camp lost his relief. The men got bed, board, work clothes, a doctor and 20 cents a day, and called themselves “the Royal Twenty Centers.” The bunkhouses, of frame and tarpaper with two tiers of straw-filled bunks around a wood stove, were not the worst of it, and the food was decent. The worst of it was what the Vancouver Sun’s Bob Bouchette found touring the camps in 1934: “The present system breeds idleness, a feeling of futility and a smouldering resentment against society.” A federal commission in 1935 put it in the men’s terms: “the absence of an adequate wage,” the sense that they were “a forgotten group,” and “the apparent hopelessness of their position.” Grievance committees were banned, and men who organized were thrown out, often with no way home, and blacklisted.

British Columbia had more of these camps than any province. In April 1935 the men of the BC camps struck, occupied Vancouver for two months, and in June rode the freight trains east, “On to Ottawa,” a thousand and more of them, under the Communist organizer Arthur “Slim” Evans of the Relief Camp Workers’ Union. Bennett stopped them at Regina, where on Dominion Day the RCMP and city police broke up their rally: a city detective, Charles Millar, was killed, and a trekker, Nick Schaack, died of his injuries that autumn (DCB). Pattullo’s government, in office since 1933, had told the camp men’s delegates that the camps were Ottawa’s business, and in 1935 he urged the strikers to go back to the camps while their conditions were investigated.

King closed the federal camps in 1936. In British Columbia they were followed by something better: the Forest Development Projects, run by the Forest Branch of the Department of Lands with Ottawa paying half. The Branch called it “the first programme in Canada designed primarily for forest development, protection, and conservation, and reforestation as a means of alleviating unemployment.” The men earned 30 cents an hour, less board, part of it held back and paid out at $4 a week when they left. They cut trails and fire lines, felled snags, cleared watersheds, prepared the Quinsam nursery and built parks: Mount Seymour, and Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island. There were 2,809 of them in the winter of 1936-37 and 4,005 in 1937-38 (the Forest Branch reports for 1937 and 1938). They were winter camps, open from the autumn to the spring.

The man who led the 1938 sit-down was Robert “Steve” Brodie, 28: born at Falkirk in 1910, orphaned, sent to Canada at fourteen as a farm hand, then a rider of the freights and a camp man who learned his organizing from Slim Evans. He was a Communist, and the Relief Project Workers’ Union he led was the heir of the 1935 union. But by 1938 the Communist line had changed: the party had wound up its own unions and was seeking allies, and the union now played for public sympathy rather than confrontation. Brodie said late in life that the protests were “mostly spontaneous eruptions that the official party could not control,” and he left the party that autumn (Steve Brodie, "Letter to Today's Unemployed" (1996), with a 1938 chronology and his obituary (Livable4All)). The men were Communist-led; most of them were not Communists. They were jobless, single, young, and from everywhere.

The Minister of Lands

Before he was premier, Pattullo spent twelve years, 1916 to 1928, as Minister of Lands, the department that owned British Columbia’s forests. It is the right place to look for his idea of what the province’s land was for.

The verdict of the closest study is unflattering. Stephen Gray found that the province “showed a striking inability, if not unwillingness, to use its potential advantage as owner of the timber resources,” and that “the provincial state, as proprietor, deferred to the perceived needs of the forest companies” (Stephen Gray, "The Government's Timber Business: Forest Policy and Administration in British Columbia, 1912-1928," BC Studies 81 (Spring 1989)). Pattullo’s own words bear it out. His department worked toward a public share of the value of standing timber; then he dropped the bill (his biographer sees the same tack later with health insurance: “bringing in experts to formulate and administer a sound policy but failing to maintain a steady course when the political storms blew against the plan,” Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 309), and told the Laurier Club in 1925 that there was “no more reason why the so-called speculator in timber should be mulcted of his profits any more than the speculator in coal, minerals, real estate or any other natural resource,” because “unless there is left a measure of profit to the individual I cannot see how we can expect much development in the Province.” He was, Gray says, “lackadaisical” about replanting, and when he defended a large pulp sale by arguing that competition had held the industry back, “the argument was ludicrous, if convenient.” To the legislature in 1927: “The people have to live today, and if there were no industry here there would be no people here.”

As premier he was a different animal, but the same species. When the oil companies defied his price board, won nothing in the courts and stopped selling gasoline in 1940, he refused to let the industry become “a sort of gasoline super state,” threatened to put the province into the oil business, and looked to the day it would no longer depend on “foreign gasoline in the hands of insolent companies.” His biographer Robin Fisher judges his government “less the client of big business and more vigorous in its response to the depression than most,” but “Pattullo was patently not motivated by ideology, and his ultimate objective was the preservation of capitalism” (Robin Fisher, "Regulating Fuels in the Depression: The Coal and Petroleum Control Board of British Columbia," BC Studies 66 (Summer 1985)). He had believed in public control of utilities since his Prince Rupert days. And he dreamed big: a highway to Alaska, the Peace River opened to the coast, the Yukon annexed. A thesis on his “northern empire” sums up the vision as “a prosperous citizenry, and a benevolent, omniscient and slightly regal premier” (Daniel John Grant, "T. D. Pattullo's Northern Empire: The Alaska Highway and the Proposed Annexation of the Yukon Territory, 1933-1941" (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 1980)).

The instinct was old. At Dawson in 1901, when the free miners rose against the Treadgold concessions, the young civil servant took the side of the big operators: “the day of the pick and shovel is gone by; modern methods must be introduced,” and it was time, he said, invoking the builders of the Canadian Pacific, to let those with capital venture it (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), pp. 62-63).

So, to the question whether he was a friend of the companies or a guardian of the public domain: in the 1920s, clearly the former. He kept the Crown’s title to the forests and let the companies set the terms. He never wanted to socialize resources. What turned him against business in the 1930s was not principle but defiance: the “insolent companies” who would not obey the province. That is the thread to follow into 1938.

Did the old Minister of Lands design the forest relief camps? No document says so; the Forest Branch’s own reports never name him. It is likely enough that a man who had run the forests for twelve years liked the idea of the jobless building trails and parks [I]. But the forest record suggests where his interest lay: in development, in the work done, not in the men doing it. In 1938 that is how he treated them, as a cost to be shared, not as citizens with a claim.

Spring 1938: the money and the rules

The usual story is that Ottawa cut its relief grants early in 1938 and the province, unable to pay alone, closed its camps. The figures tell a different story. The monthly federal grant for BC’s direct relief fell steadily, from $223,125 in the spring of 1936 to $115,000 by the end of 1937, roughly by half (Canada Year Book, 1937-1939: Dominion grants-in-aid for relief, and provincial revenues); no dated cut in early 1938 has been found. British Columbia’s government took in $42.05 a head in 1937, the most of any province (Ontario’s was $28.86). Its budget for 1938-39 showed a small surplus of $80,182. Relief was left out of the estimates, but the finance minister, John Hart, hoped that “a large part, if not all, of direct relief costs” would be met from current revenue, with borrowing kept “mainly to works projects in connection with unemployment relief”; there would be no “further municipal aid” ("Surplus For Next Fiscal Year is Anticipated, Not Taking Into Account Relief and Part of Sinking Funds," Prince Rupert Daily News, 10 November 1937, p. 1; Fisher reads it the same way, p. 308). The next year the provincial debt fell for the first time since 1933. The Rowell-Sirois Commission later judged that BC’s relief, though heavy per head, weighed less against its income than any Prairie province’s. The forest camps were winter camps and closed every spring; the Minister of Labour, George Pearson, said in July that “this year, as in 1937, the province had arranged with the Dominion to close its camps” (Omineca Herald, 6 July 1938: Labour Minister George S. Pearson on the closing of the relief camps).

What was new was a line drawn through the men. Of the 4,700 in the camps that winter, Pearson said, 1,600 had come to British Columbia only a few months before; only 2,100 had a year’s residence. The province refused relief to the newcomers and offered them free passage home, and Ottawa backed it: the Minister of Labour, Norman Rogers, asked the Commons whether one should “create a preferred condition for transients with respect to works in British Columbia.” There were no passport checks; a man proved residence through the relief offices and the employment service. Pattullo’s case was real: British Columbia’s mild winters and better relief drew the jobless of the whole country, drought and recession on the prairies in 1937-38 drove more of them west (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 306), and one province could not carry them. But it was a case to be pressed against Ottawa, and the men were the pressure.

Thirty days

The occupation of 20 May was a model of what the union wanted it to be. The men marched in by divisions, “like a small army,” a leader of one of them remembered. They told Ottawa, “We assure you that your property is safe in our hands”; the mail kept moving; at the gallery it was agreed there would be “no mutilation of the art.” They slept on newspapers on the stone floor of what they called the Hotel Federal, strung up their washing, and put out a gazette, “not published or paid for by the department of Labor or the Government of British Columbia,” whose “Post Office Flashes” announced: “The commissar department is featuring the Pattullo sandwich this week. Two slices of bread jammed together” (Dorothy G. Steeves, The Compassionate Rebel: Ernest E. Winch and His Times (1960), pp. 117-118 (excerpt)).

Vancouver fed them. “Most Vancouverites were intrigued and sympathetic,” Dorothy Steeves wrote; “women took in food for them and the Mother’s Council which had 17 women’s organizations as affiliates supplied many needs.” Men tin-canned in the streets, collecting coins in cans, and more than a hundred were arrested for it in the first days. The Hotel Georgia’s occupiers left after a day with $500 in relief. The CCF member for Vancouver East told the Commons, “they have the sympathy of the people of Vancouver.”

The tactic at the heart of it was clever. On the first night the Chief Constable, Colonel W. W. Foster, told the men to go home; Brodie answered that if they had homes to go to they would go, and offered to be arrested. The men asked to be arrested from the first day to the last, and were refused. As Steeves put it, “they couldn’t arrest the men, because no crimes had been committed.” Arrest would have given them a trial and a platform; refusing it left the authorities with a peaceful occupation they could end only by force. “Demanding arrest and trial,” Brodie wrote, “is what stalled the attacks for thirty days.” Each side waited for the other to make the first move, and in the end the state moved.

There was no negotiation worth the name. The mayor would not talk until the men left. Ottawa said they had been “induced to remain,” and on 31 May its acting Postmaster General, W. D. Euler, hoped that “instead of perhaps playing into their hands by way of ejecting them by force, the common sense of these men would… lead them to leave the premises voluntarily” (House of Commons Debates, 23 May, 6 June and 20 June 1938: the Vancouver sit-down and its eviction). The province offered train fares. On 15 June the men announced that 500 of them would go to Victoria to see the premier; on 18 June Pattullo answered that he would fly to Vancouver on the 20th instead, “to save the men the trip.”

Sunday morning

On 17 June the acting Postmaster General telegraphed Vancouver that he was “authorized by the dominion government to ask the appropriate authorities of the city of Vancouver to take such steps as they deem necessary to have this federal building vacated by those who are occupying it as trespassers.” The grounds given were not only the law: the occupation was “an increasing nuisance” to the public and “a menace through possible contagion to the health of the occupants and to others” (House of Commons Debates, 23 May, 6 June and 20 June 1938: the Vancouver sit-down and its eviction). At five in the morning of Sunday the 19th, the day the delegation was to sail for Victoria and the day before the premier was to arrive, the police came. At the art gallery the CCF’s Harold Winch, tipped off, talked the men out, and they left through the gas without a fight. At the post office the men were given twenty minutes. At 5:35 they were warned; then came the gas. They broke the windows to breathe and came out through lines of RCMP and city police swinging clubs and quirts. Brodie was beaten unconscious and nearly lost an eye. The men streamed east along Hastings Street breaking shop windows, every pane in the show windows of Woodward’s and Spencer’s department stores among them, some $30,000 in glass, by one count. No one was killed. Some forty were taken to hospital, police among them, and perhaps a hundred hurt. That afternoon ten to fifteen thousand people rallied at the Powell Street Grounds; a crowd of two thousand went to the police station, and Winch climbed on a car to tell them: “We’ve had one riot this morning - we don’t want another one.” At midnight thousands saw a delegation of about a hundred men off to Victoria.

In the Commons the next day, Agnes Macphail wondered “about the Sunday coup… There are not many witnesses.” The Justice Minister, Ernest Lapointe, said the police had been told “to select the best time possible in order to avoid trouble,” that “Colonel Foster was in charge of those operations,” and that if the government was open to attack, “it has been because of the leniency shown.” From the benches came “Work and wages,” and from Angus MacInnis, “What did you offer in 1935?”

Our reading of the timing. The hour was chosen to find the men asleep and the streets empty. We think the day was chosen, by someone, so that the occupation would be over before the delegation reached Victoria and before the premier arrived in Vancouver. Pattullo flew in on Monday “to find the city quiet,” and met a beaten movement, not a sitting one. His biographer’s sequence points the same way: having told the delegation not to come to Victoria and promised to meet the men in Vancouver on the 20th, “in the meantime… he arranged with the federal government to have the men forcibly evicted” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 306). That he wanted it over before he arrived is now probable; that he set the hour, we cannot say.

“Too much sympathy”

On Monday 20 June, in Vancouver, Pattullo told the press that the government “was not going to be frightened into changing its unemployment policy,” and that he had been “the prime mover” in the eviction. He met the union’s leaders, CCF members and a group of city pastors for twenty minutes. “Nobody could be as adamant as Duff Pattullo once he had made up his mind. He refused all pleas for emergency food rations and further action. It was up to Ottawa, he thought. To the ministers he said: ‘There comes a time when too much sympathy can be shown the men. That time had come in Vancouver’” (Steeves, the only source for the remark; Fisher’s account of the meeting does not give it). That evening, told that more men were crossing to the Island, he said: “This is confirmation showing that the whole thing is organized and premeditated. We have got to have a showdown. British Columbia cannot take care of unemployed from all over Canada. It is absolutely impossible” (Prince Rupert Daily News, 21 June 1938, p. 1: "Cannot Take Care of Canada's Unemployed, Pattullo Points Out"). In Victoria his ministers refused the delegation a hearing.

Fisher’s account of the meeting agrees with Steeves on the substance. The men “wanted food and relief right now and the prospect of jobs in the longer term. Pattullo reiterated the point that the two governments would spend more on works projects but absolutely refused to provide any more immediate relief. He now believed that able-bodied single men could take care of themselves during the summer, though he admitted to King that ‘the public does not view sympathetically the bald advice that they should get out and rustle.’” He told Ottawa that “it is not our responsibility to provide for every penniless person who may come here from the rest of Canada, nor can we do so”; sending the transients home would help “legitimate British Columbians”; and on the radio he warned that “a ‘general policy of sole dependence upon the Government would simply lead to moral decrepitude of the individual and the physical decrepitude of our industrial life.’” Fisher, a sympathetic biographer, concedes: “At one level the provincial government seemed more interested in disposing of the problem than in solving it,” and “such talk was a far cry from his vibrant advocacy of state intervention in 1933” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), pp. 306-307). One more thing he did that month shows the other half of the man: he pressed King to build the Alaska Highway, which “would absorb many of the single unemployed and relieve what he called ‘congestion’ in the cities” (p. 315). Work for the jobless, yes, on a grand project of his own design; food for the jobless who had organized, no.

It ended quietly. Mackenzie King, who had agreed to the eviction, was “embarrassed by this resort to force,” his biographer writes, and thought Lapointe had “dealt with the police side of the matter not too effectively”; “but the government was lucky. Nobody was killed in the riot and the unemployed blamed Pattullo rather than the federal government” (H. Blair Neatby, William Lyon Mackenzie King, vol. III, 1932-1939: The Prism of Unity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 265). By July Ottawa had agreed to pay relief to registered transients until they could be sent home, and on 9 July the men’s leaders accepted the transportation the province had offered all along. The union never recovered. The war, a year later, took many of them into the forces; one of the sit-downers, remembered as “Little Mike,” is said to have been killed at Dieppe.

The man

The evidence on Pattullo’s temperament is unusually consistent, and comes from friends, rivals and historians alike:

• Bruce Hutchison, 1933: “His power in the Liberal Party is not the power of the glad hand, but of sheer force of character… he has always been boss without question.”
• Mackenzie King’s diary, 1934: “shockingly egotistical, conceited beyond words and very Bennett-like in his mentality… I greatly fear—and the more so as I saw him drinking cocktails and whiskey tonight—that he will ‘blow up’ one of these days and lose his head altogether.”
• Pattullo himself, 1939: “Even if it sounds egotistical, I tell you this: what I say goes in this province.”
• His thesis biographer: “Pattullo not only governed, he ruled.” He bought his clothes from the best New York haberdashers, and wrote to George VI “direct, and in the first person.” A letter to his brother George of 7 June 1938, in the third week of the sit-down, speaks of a personal “chat” at Hyde Park with “our mutual friend F.D.R.” about the Alaska Highway (as Grant reads it, Daniel John Grant, "T. D. Pattullo's Northern Empire: The Alaska Highway and the Proposed Annexation of the Yukon Territory, 1933-1941" (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 1980)).
• Pattullo himself, in the legislature, 1937-38: “We do not apologise, we simply give reasons for our actions.” His biographer: “This, apparently, was the philosophy that had taken him to the top. It was also the attitude that would play a large part in his downfall.” At his party’s convention at Kelowna in August 1938 he sat by the chairman with “his eye on the delegates, his mouth at the microphone and his foot near the lid,” and talked to them “like a Dutch Uncle” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 303).
• Harold Winch, the CCF member who talked the men out of the art gallery, “saw Pattullo as ‘that fat epitome of capitalism,’ and even years later remembered him as a brutal dictator” (Fisher, p. 305).
• Hal Guest, on the young alderman rebuked by a fire inquiry at Dawson in 1905: “This stinging rebuke did not put Pattullo in his place. Not only did he continue to believe he had done no wrong…” (Hal Guest, "The Political Apprenticeship of Thomas Dufferin Pattullo," BC Studies 58 (Summer 1983)).
• George Abbott, on 1941: “Pattullo was totally convinced of the dangers of coalition and had neither sympathy nor understanding for those who did not share his conviction.” He saw the coalition movement as “a plot… a constant underground agitation against myself personally,” and cast his loyal finance minister, John Hart, “in the role of Judas,” which Abbott calls “completely unjustified.” He distrusted his own colleagues and confided only in King. “Pattullo combined remarkably clear vision in assessing the consequences of coalition with remarkably poor judgement in his handling of the issue” (George M. Abbott, "Duff Pattullo and the Coalition Controversy of 1941," BC Studies 102 (Summer 1994)).

A caution belongs with these. King’s diary is the harshest witness, and Fisher warns that King, “followed by those historians who cannot see beyond the Ottawa sources, tended to lump Pattullo in ‘with all the demagogues working together to overthrow the federal administration’”; unlike Aberhart, Hepburn or Duplessis, Pattullo never fought King in the open (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 317). The portrait here rests on his own words at least as much as on King’s.

Read together, these give a man of real ability and real generosity of intention, with a very large self at the centre of it. Three things follow for 1938.

He was for the people and against their organizations. This is the key to him, and it explains more than anti-communism does. He regulated the oil companies when they defied him. His Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1937 kept “outside” unions from bargaining, in his own words, and the Trades and Labour Council’s leader said it could not have been better drafted by “the most rabid opponents of trades unionism” (Andrew Parnaby, "What's Law Got To Do With It? The IWA and the Politics of State Power in British Columbia, 1935-1939," Labour/Le Travail 44 (Fall 1999)). He fought Ottawa’s centralizers all his career. In 1941 he fought his own caucus. And in 1938 he fought the jobless, the moment they organized themselves and took a public building. His reform politics (he called it “socialized capitalism” in 1934, and argued that “you will never beat Socialism by attempting to unite Liberalism and Toryism”) were a program done for people, on his terms. His health insurance act shows the other side of the same coin: when the doctors organized against it in 1937, he shelved it (Allan Irving, "The Doctors versus the Expert: Harry Morris Cassidy and the British Columbia Health Insurance Dispute of the 1930s," BC Studies 78 (Summer 1988)). He yielded to organized power he needed, and faced down organized power he did not. Fisher, who admires him, puts the labour side most starkly: after the Blubber Bay strikers “defied the legislation,” the act was amended, and “in Pattullo’s mind, industrial conciliation and arbitration was a prelude to outlawing strikes altogether.” Even the oil companies’ refusal to sell gasoline in 1940 offended him as “a very bad example to labour” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), pp. 310, 312).

He took defiance personally. “Organized and premeditated,” “a showdown,” “a plot against myself personally”: the language is the same in 1938 and 1941. The men’s real offence was not their politics but their refusal to be provided for in the way he chose. “Too much sympathy,” if the words are his, is the sentence of a man who believes he is the one who gives, and finds the gift refused; Fisher’s “get out and rustle,” which is certainly his, says the same thing more plainly.

Three months later the pattern repeated, on his own ground. At Blubber Bay on Texada Island the International Woodworkers had struck the Pacific Lime Company in June 1938: “21 white men and 70 Chinese,” the Canadian Press reported, and the union, one historian writes, took pains to have the Chinese strikers vote at its meetings. The provincial police were accused of escorting strikebreakers; after a riot in September, with eighteen arrested, his own Attorney General proposed a judicial inquiry, and Pattullo overruled him. His government, he said, did not intend to “countenance the activities of ‘some very subversive elements at work’,” and there would be no inquiry ("No Inquiry on Labor Rioting: Premier Says Subversive Elements Working at Blubber Bay," Victoria Daily Times, 21 September 1938, p. 1). In the legislature he would not “break down the police morale, by holding an inquiry threat over their heads.” The organized again met the man; the police again had his backing.

He was 65, and they were not. Pattullo’s politics were formed in the 1890s: a Woodstock Liberal newspaper family, patronage, his Yukon post got through Sir Richard Cartwright, his fights carried on in letters over the Commissioner’s head to Clifford Sifton, the Minister of the Interior, and to Prime Minister Laurier. Politics was something done between men in rooms. Brodie, 28, came out of the camps and the freight trains; politics for him was a thousand men marching in step into a public building. The generational reading of 1938, an old man facing a way of protest he did not understand, holds, and the irony is sharp: in Dawson he had been the young rebel, at war with his Commissioner, who learned there to distrust distant authority. In 1938 he was the distant authority. His biographer’s summary of the Klondike’s lesson is apt: the frontier was a place “where people expected the government to deliver services but protested vociferously when it appeared to interfere with their economic objectives” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 80). It taught him what developers want from a government. It did not teach him what the men in the post office wanted from one.

One family curiosity belongs here. Sixty years earlier his uncle Thomas Robson Pattullo (Thomas Robson Pattullo) had gone round the Cariboo with his hat and raised $615 to send one consumptive miner home to Canada, and the camp mourned him as “the poor man’s friend.” His nephew, with a province’s purse, sent the jobless home too, and refused them emergency food. The family’s two best-remembered men met the same problem sixty years apart, one with his own money, the other with the public’s.

The land question

Bloody Sunday showed the edge of Pattullo’s idea of government once, in public. The rest of his record shows it often, and mostly in private. Pattullo’s twelve years at Lands were also the years in which British Columbia settled the Indian reserves, and the settlement went through his department. The McKenna-McBride Commission (1913-16) recommended “cut-offs” of some 36,000 acres from 35 reserves, with additions the Allied Tribes called “of inferior quality”; the agreement of 1912 had required the bands’ consent to any reduction, and the federal Act of 1920 set that requirement aside. The province’s reviewer, J. W. Clark, turned down even the additions his federal counterpart thought reasonable, and their report “mainly proposed further reductions to reserves” (DCB, Ditchburn). On 25 July 1923 Pattullo signed the recommendation that made the whole of it final for British Columbia (British Columbia Order in Council 911/1923: the McKenna-McBride report, as amended by Ditchburn and Clark, approved as the final settlement of the Indian reserves).

Where his own hand shows, he was civil and gave nothing. Pressed that month by Ottawa’s Duncan Campbell Scott to grant a supplementary list of reserves, he “promised on behalf of his Government to have it carefully examined… but he did not give any assurance that any of the additional applications would be granted.” Asked to spare the Penticton band’s bench land, he “put his engineers on that land,” found irrigation too costly, and the cut-off of over 14,000 acres stood (Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons appointed to inquire into the Claims of the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia: Proceedings, Reports and the Evidence (Ottawa, 1927)). No word of his on aboriginal title has been found. The design was McBride’s, and the hard line on title was Premier Oliver’s and Ottawa’s; Pattullo was the minister who carried it out, with no recorded objection. Responsible as its executor, not its architect: near certain.

The people he governed for

Pattullo’s “people” had a border, and on this the record is his own.

Who they were. The Chinese of British Columbia came from a handful of counties in the Pearl River delta of Guangdong, Taishan above all: young men sent abroad, first to the gold rushes of 1858 and the Cariboo, then to build the Canadian Pacific, to earn money for land and families at home. Their wives stayed in China. The head tax ($50 in 1885, $100 in 1900, $500 in 1903) and then the Exclusion Act of 1923 kept it that way: in 1911 there were about twenty-eight Chinese men in Canada for every Chinese woman, and in 1931 still twelve (Canadian Encyclopedia; census of 1931, p. 64). Some married across the line, more often with Indigenous women than white ones: Jean Barman estimates that one Chinese man in six who formed a family in early British Columbia did so with an Indigenous woman (BC Studies, 2013), while in 1921 only ten of 295 Chinese fathers in Canada outside Quebec had a wife of British origin (census study of 1921, pp. 121, 138). The Japanese came later, from villages in Shiga, Wakayama and Hiroshima hit by the rural depression of the Meiji years (Mio, in Wakayama, sent so many to Steveston that it is still called “the American village”). Until 1907 they too were almost all young men. Then the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1908 capped male labourers at 400 a year but let wives come, and 6,240 “picture brides” followed by 1924 (Ayukawa, BC Studies, 1995). By 1931 nearly half of Japanese Canadians had been born in Canada, against about one Chinese Canadian in nine. Pattullo saw the consequence clearly. In January 1938 he told King that the Japanese population was “rapidly increasing, while the Chinese population was decreasing, the reason being that there are comparatively few Chinese females in proportion to the male population” (Pattullo Papers and Premier's Papers, BC Archives: letters to and from Mackenzie King, and other papers, on Japanese and Chinese Canadians, 1938-1940). The law had made Chinatown a society of aging men and Powell Street a community of Canadian-born children, who would one day ask to vote. That was the prospect he set himself against.

The crofters. In February 1924 Pattullo announced that the crofters of the Hebrides, the small tenant farmer-fishermen of Scotland’s western isles, then in real distress, wanted land in British Columbia, and that he had cabled them that it was waiting on the Queen Charlotte Islands. The next day Captain Ian Mackenzie, a Vancouver MLA, put the case in its plainest form: “hundreds of hardy Scotch fishermen from the Hebrides” for the fishing industry “in place of Orientals,” two years after a federal commission chaired by William Duff MP (no relation) had begun cutting Japanese Canadian fishing licences by 40 percent. Pattullo fought for the north, the Queen Charlottes and then Porcher Island, and lost to Vancouver Island; when the scheme’s promoter asked for more money he answered that settlers who could not “make good on a grant of $600 and a tent apiece” had better “stay in the Hebrides”; and the plan died for want of money from Ottawa and London, apparently without a family arriving (Prince Rupert Daily News, February-December 1924: Pattullo's plan to settle Hebridean crofter-fishermen in British Columbia). Michael Vance reads it as “in part” a way to replace the Japanese fishermen (Michael E. Vance, "'Mon – he's a gran' fish': Scots in British Columbia's Interwar Fishing Industry," BC Studies 158 (2008)). In Pattullo’s own recorded words it was a scheme to settle the north. That replacement was part of its appeal: likely. That it was his motive: not shown.

The levers he held. His department enforced a clause, older than his tenure (1902), in Crown timber licences “against the employment of Chinese or Japanese,” and defended it in the courts until the Privy Council upheld it in 1923 as the province’s right to manage its own property (van Ert, 2017). “It has always been the practise of the Department,” his old ministry wrote in 1939, “to refrain from dealing with Japanese in respect to the acquisition of Crown lands and timber.”

His own words. In public in 1938 he was measured: “No one can blame the Oriental for trying to make a living. The mistake has been their admission into the country.” In private he was not. To King, in January 1938: “suggest that no Japs be allowed admission,” adding that he would make a public statement “guardedly.” To the Rowell-Sirois Commission that spring: “Oriental immigration into Canada should be prohibited upon grounds of ethnological differences of race, and as many Orientals as possible should be returned to the land from which they came”; and in August he drafted the exclusion resolution for his party’s convention (Patricia E. Roy, "Educating the 'East': British Columbia and the Oriental Question in the Interwar Years," BC Studies 18 (Summer 1973)). His biographer passes over it lightly: in Fisher’s account of the hearings, “the exclusion of Orientals” is one of the “old British Columbia issues… that lay outside the commission’s mandate” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part), p. 320). To King, marked “Private,” in March 1939: “We would like to take action which would drive the Japs out of business here and would result in many of them having to go back to Japan,” and of the foreshore, “we do not wish to give the Japs any tenure.” In October 1939, after his Fisheries Department refused all licences that year for salting dry salmon and Japan’s chargé d’affaires protested: “I may be prejudiced… but we in British Columbia would like to see the day when all the Japanese are repatriated to their own country” (Pattullo Papers and Premier's Papers, BC Archives: letters to and from Mackenzie King, and other papers, on Japanese and Chinese Canadians, 1938-1940).

The enlistment letter. On 23 September 1940 he wrote to King that he had heard Japanese and Chinese Canadians were to be called up, and “most strongly” urged “that nothing of the kind be done”: it would arm the Japanese, and, “an even more important consideration,” “there will be a demand that they be given the franchise, which we in this Province can never tolerate.” The War Committee of the Cabinet considered the letter on 26 September, and King answered that “instructions are being given not to include Japanese and Chinese citizens in British Columbia in the first call for military training”; in October the exclusion was extended. Of all his acts on the question this one is certain in its effect: men were kept out of the forces of their own country so that they could not earn the vote. A month later he assured King, “we have been co-operating in tangible fashion for many years” (Pattullo Papers and Premier's Papers, BC Archives: letters to and from Mackenzie King, and other papers, on Japanese and Chinese Canadians, 1938-1940).

What can be said for him. He did not stir the crowd. When the Vancouver alderman Halford Wilson attacked the Japanese in 1940 he wrote to the Japanese consul, “I very much deprecate insulting remarks towards groups of individuals within our Province whose intentions may be of the very best,” and said publicly that it was “a great mistake for anyone to recklessly slur as a body those of foreign birth.” He told King that “on one or two occasions I succeeded in preventing resolutions passing the House which would, I thought, be of harmful character.” Patricia Roy finds him readier than most to handle the question quietly with King. And his views were those of nearly all white British Columbia: his own party used the franchise against the CCF in the federal election of 1935 and the provincial election of 1937 (Patricia E. Roy, "Educating the 'East': British Columbia and the Oriental Question in the Interwar Years," BC Studies 18 (Summer 1973)), and the CCF itself, the one party that had called for the Asian vote (J. S. Woodsworth, 1934), joined the demand for the removal of Japanese Canadians in February 1942 (Cohn, BC Studies, 1985). He was out of office by then, and no word of his on the removal has been found.

Our verdict. Was he cruel? Not in the sense of relishing harm, and not a demagogue. Was he merely of his time? Of his place and time, yes, but that excuses less than it seems, because the time offered other positions and he rejected them deliberately: the franchise was not something he failed to imagine but something he wrote that the province could “never tolerate.” Was he pragmatic? In method, entirely: he worked through King, kept the subject out of the House, and deplored slurs that embarrassed the national interest. Was he racist? By his own words, yes: he judged people by race, wanted a racial group expelled from the province, and used the levers he held (Crown timber, foreshore and fishing licences) and his influence with King over the call-up to that end. He was a deliberate and consistent exclusionist whose moderation was of method, not of aim. In public he blamed no one “for trying to make a living”; in private he wished for the day “when all the Japanese are repatriated.” Both were sincere. He held nothing against the individual and everything against the community’s presence, which is the racism of the planner, not of the mob, and the more effective kind. The mob broke windows on Powell Street in 1907; his letter of 1940 kept Japanese and Chinese Canadians out of the forces. Strong lean.

Our judgment

Bloody Sunday was the moment when Duff Pattullo’s two strongest convictions met men who did not fit them. The first was that British Columbia must not be made to pay for the whole country’s failures; the second, that government is something capable men do for the people. The men in the post office were the whole country’s failure, and they wanted to do something for themselves. He chose the province’s case over the men, and his authority over his own program.

As strategy it was coherent, and partly successful: Ottawa did end up paying for the transients’ relief that summer. As government it was wrong. The demand was just, modest and his own; the men had kept the peace for a month and had asked to be arrested rather than resist; and the province could afford to feed them while it argued with Ottawa. Choosing the “showdown,” and claiming the eviction afterwards, was a choice to punish the occupation, not merely to end it. We hold him responsible for that, with King’s government beside him. The violence itself, the clubs at the post office door, belongs to the police who used them.

The other side deserves its due. The occupation was a calculated provocation by Communist organizers, as Pattullo said, and the post office could not be held forever. If we put the question as a ruling, whether the eviction was justified, the honest answer is close to even: some end was needed, and a month is long. Whether this end, at dawn, with gas and without the arrests the men had asked for, was justified, is not close: it was not. And whether Pattullo acted from conviction or from pride is, we think, the wrong question. In him they were the same thing. That is what made him a strong premier, and what brought him down three years later.

The rest of his record does not soften the portrait; it completes it. The jobless in the post office, the bands whose cut-off lands he signed away in 1923, and the Japanese Canadians he wished “repatriated” were handled by the same idea of government: things done for “the people” by capable men, with the people defined by the government, and those outside the definition managed rather than heard. That idea built the Pattullo Bridge and the forest projects, and it was generous inside its border. Bloody Sunday was what happened when men inside the border, white and his own program’s natural constituency, behaved as if they were outside it, by organizing and taking a public building. He treated them, for a week in June, the way he treated the people he had always kept outside.

Not yet known

• “Too much sympathy”: Fisher’s account of the meeting of 20 June (pp. 306-307) does not give it, so Steeves remains its only source.
• Fisher’s endnotes for pp. 306-307 (nn. 23-28): which documents show the arrangement with Ottawa, the letter to King (“get out and rustle”), and the date of the radio address.
• How and when he arranged the eviction: Fisher says he “arranged with the federal government” to have the men evicted; his telegrams and letters of June 1938 to Ottawa and to Colonel Foster, in the Pattullo Papers at the BC Archives, would show how and when.
• Who chose the hour of the eviction.
• The Commons debates of 20 June 1938: Lapointe’s statement (p. 4022) is checked against the page image; the other pages still need it.
• What he said to the Mothers’ Council delegation that met him on 21 June.
• King’s diary for May-July 1938: known only through his biographer’s quotation; the diary is online at Library and Archives Canada.
• Any word of his on aboriginal title, or on the removal of Japanese Canadians in 1942.