Jim Higgins (1907-1982) lived the history of Canadian labour, so it’s fitting that his book, Fighting for Democracy, should launch this Labour Day Weekend, 2020.
Jim came to Canada from England in 1928 at age twenty-one. It didn’t take long for him to experience his first lesson in collective action. He’d arrived with others under the Canadian government’s wheat harvest scheme and while waiting to be assigned to wheat farms across Canada, they stood up to officials who wanted them to stop smoking. (It was a different time!)
Jim paid off his passage that fall by working on a wheat farm in Saskatchewan, then easily found work in his carpentry trade in Regina. He was let go a few months after the stock market crashed in 1929 because, he was told, his job was now reserved “for married men.” In fact, he’d been blacklisted for union organizing.
Unable to work in his trade, Jim joined a road building crew and tried to organize the workers, but was fired for being a “troublemaker.” Frustrated, he used some of his savings to go back to the UK for a visit. After all, according to the politicians, “prosperity was just around the corner.” Six weeks later, he returned to Regina to find a dust storm raging, farmer’s crops destroyed, and no jobs.
In those early years of the Great Depression, Jim took work wherever he found it; mostly on farms, ranches and in logging camps. One chapter in his book tells of how he “gentled” wild horses on one of the biggest ranches in Alberta; another, of his near-death experience as a teamster in a logging camp.
Things only got worse. Jim was resourceful and hardworking and though by now homeless and riding the rails, he did everything from chopping wood for prairie farmers in return for a bed in the hayloft overnight, to painting signs for cottagers and resort owners at Lake of the Woods. Tens of thousands were jumping the freights and doing the same, or else living in hobo jungles.
In 1932, the federal government set up Relief Camps for single unemployed men and it wasn’t long before he became a member of the Relief Camp Workers Union. From the beginning, Jim was identified as a trouble-maker, resulting in his being escorted from many a camp by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
By December 1935, he was at the Dundurn Relief Camp leading an angry inmate group which met with the federally appointed Rigg Committee, whose mandate was to investigate unrest in the camps. Jim’s RCMP file was opened December 21, 1935, when officers removed him from Dundurn, drove him to an isolated spot, and left him to fend for himself in the rain, the cold and the dark.
And, yes, he was in the On-to-Ottawa Trek, and, yes, he was knocked unconscious in the Regina “Riot”—otherwise known as the “use of force to stop the trek” —and, yes, he was an anti-fascist who put his life on the line in Spain to defend her democracy along with almost 1700 other Canadians.
Throughout his life, he remained active with his unions, the CCF, labour councils and the NDP. Even shortly before he died, he was part of a group making a presentation to the federal government in Ottawa, asking it to recognize the contribution made by the Canadians who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
Perhaps Jim’s most impactful experience occurred with the United Reform Movement in 1939 when he chaired the campaign committee for a Presbyterian minister named W. G. Brown, a social justice activist, who ran in a federal by-election and won.
The United Reform Movement was supported by the Saskatoon Labour Council, and brought together the normally competitive political parties on the left, including Social Credit, the Communist Party and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation.
The United Reform Movement is now a blip in Canada’s history, but for Jim, it was proof of what a united left could accomplish.
***
Shortly before my father died in 1982, I started working at the Ontario Ministry of Labour. Over the next few years, I also studied part time at the University of Toronto, eventually receiving a degree in the Sociology of Work and Organizations. One of my courses was Labour Studies taught by Professor Jim Turk.
I was about to do a paper on some subject or other and was discussing it with Professor Turk when I just happened to mention that my late father had been in the On-to-Ottawa Trek and that he’d written about it. Well! The subject of my paper quickly changed. At the time, Prof. Turk advised that, at the very least, my father’s papers should be donated to what is now Library and Archives Canada.
Thirty years later, I tracked him down and sent a note out of the blue asking if he’d be a beta reader for my father’s manuscript which I was finally preparing for publication. I was delighted when he agreed. His response after reading the manuscript left me over the moon.
My former University of Toronto Canadian Labour Studies professor, and now head of the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University, wrote that he’d been “riveted” and that “there are few workers’ memoirs as excellent…engaging, informative and very well written.”
Fingers crossed that others will think so, too, and that Jim Higgins’s book, Fighting for Democracy, besides introducing many to Canada’s labour history, will provide inspiration for workers, unionists and anti-fascists as they face the critical challenges of today.
© Janette Higgins
Fighting for Democracy: The True Story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982), A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War can be ordered here.
Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins is the latest book about the Mac-Paps, Canadians in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, which was part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Other books about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War include Not For King or Country by Tyler Wentzell , Mac-Pap by Ronald Liversedge with David Yorke and Renegades by Michael Petrou.