“Tonight, I want to tell you about what is probably the most infamous story in the history of Ontario; infamous and I warn you almost unbelievable, but every word of it is true, and supported with affidavits which I have beside me right now! It is my duty to tell you that Colonel Drew is maintaining in Ontario, at this very minute, a secret political police, a paid government spy organization, a Gestapo, to try and collect, by secret spying, material that Colonel Drew wants to use to try and keep himself in power. And Colonel Drew maintains his secret political police at the expense of the taxpayers of Ontario—paid out of public funds!” — opening of radio speech delivered by Ontario CCF leader Ted Jolliffe on May 24, 1945
It went down in Ontario political history as the “Gestapo Speech.” As the 1945 provincial election campaign wound down, opposition leader Ted Jolliffe accused premier George Drew of operating a secret OPP branch to spy on members of the CCF and other left-leaning individuals and organizations. These revelations emerged as the CCF faced an intense level of propaganda designed to alarm voters.
The CCF, the predecessor to the NDP, was doing well in the mid-1940s. It had a strong-second place finish in the 1943 Ontario provincial election, benefitting from a Liberal collapse and holding Drew’s Progressive Conservatives to a minority government. In 1944, the party formed its first government, as Tommy Douglas led it to victory in Saskatchewan.
George Drew campaign ad from the May 15, 1945, issue of Maclean's.
These wins frightened the Canadian business community, which looked for ways to scare the public away from embracing social democracy in a post-Second World War world. What emerged was a series of propaganda campaigns designed to look as if they came from independent groups interested in promoting free enterprise and democracy. Among the most prominent was Responsible Enterprise, which was headed by former CBC executive Gladstone Murray.
Through speeches and publications, these groups preached that further electoral success for the CCF at any level of government would lead to a totalitarian state where all businesses would be nationalized and little to no personal freedom would exist. As the Soviet Union was a war ally, the CCF was frequently compared to the Nazis, as the latter were “National Socialists.” The propagandists used anti-intellectual appeals, depicting CCF members as snobs lacking practical business experience. Xenophobia and antisemitism were used to suggest that CCF doctrine was a foreign invader promoted by leaders with “questionable” ethnic backgrounds. Backers of these campaigns included executives from the worlds of banking, communications, manufacturing, natural resources, and retailing.
The most aggressive propagandist was industrial-relations consultant Burdick Trestrail. Born in the United States, he depicted himself as someone who’d come from nothing and made something of himself through hard work and self-reliance. In late 1943, the Toronto Board of Trade employed him to attack CCF-affiliated municipal candidates. His organization, usually known as the Public Information Association, found through polling that a significant percentage of voters could be persuaded not to vote CCF.
Trestrail’s book Stand Up and Be Counted, published in 1944, was filled with false information ranging from outdated CCF policy statements to ideas he’d manufactured — all of them centered around the concept of total “state socialism.” Trestrail asked readers whether they would sit back, admit democracy had failed, and hand over their lives to the totalitarianism of the CCF or “continue as a democracy dedicated to the principle of freedom of opportunity and individual initiative and strive to achieve the objectives of full employment and a higher standard of living for all.”
He directed his fury at CCF national secretary David Lewis, repeatedly referring to his background as a Russian Jewish immigrant. He contrasted Lewis’s intellectual path unfavourably with that of another Russian immigrant to North America, Ayn Rand, whose work was excerpted at the end of the book. Trestrail also insulted the intelligence of women, implying that they were easily misled by political discourse.
Ad for the Gestapo Speech from the May 24, 1945, edition of the Windsor Star.
During the concurrent 1945 federal and provincial elections, Trestrail condensed his book into a tabloid newspaper titled Social Suicide. Mailed to every English-speaking address across the country in May 1945, it included a contest offering prizes between $5 and $1,000 for answering yes or no to questions based on the text. The public was encouraged to send copies to servicemen overseas. Several manufacturers forced copies onto their employees and issued stern warnings not to vote CCF. Copies filled warehouses owned by DeHavilland Aircraft and Simpsons department stores. The material was also condensed for a series of anti-CCF newspaper ads. Trestrail claimed his funding came from citizens who attended speeches in 26 cities across the country, but there were suspicions that business executives helped cover costs.
“For the purpose he had in mind,” Lewis reflected in his memoirs, “it was well written. The man had no scruples but he had intelligence and cunning; he certainly knew how to put his ideas in simple language and how to enliven them with simple, homey experiences of life.”
CCF officials naively believed the public would see through such claims. But candidates in both elections saw their support decline and criticism increase. Voters asked for clarification of party policies, using language that was drawn from Social Suicide. Learning of Trestrail’s plans, Lewis and other party officials unsuccessfully asked the postal service to halt its distribution.
At some point before or during the campaign, Jolliffe received information about a small, secret branch of the OPP dedicated to monitoring leftist political activity. Documents signed by an official identified as
Photo of Ted Jolliffe from the May 25, 1945, Toronto Daily Star. (Toronto Star Photographic Archive, Toronto Public Library, TSPA_0058241F.)
“D-208” claimed that the CCF was financed by Communist-controlled unions, ran candidates with past Communist ties, and wanted to create a state modelled on the Soviet Union or fascist nations. Jolliffe decided to share his discoveries in his May 24 campaign radio broadcast on the CBC.
Crafted by dramatist Lister Sinclair, the speech was designed to shock. The unit, supposedly launched after Drew became premier in 1943, was based in an old police garage near Queen’s Park. D-208 was a supervisor named William J. Osborne-Dempster. Jolliffe claimed that D-208’s reports were received by the OPP commissioner and his deputy and occasionally provided to Attorney General Leslie Blackwell and Drew. The goal was to find Communists and to keep ultra anti-Communist Drew in power. While most of those surveilled were CCF members, politicians from other parties were also targeted, including former premier Mitch Hepburn. He charged that there was a blacklist stretching across many professions and that the information was passed on to those producing anti-CCF propaganda campaigns. He warned that big business had assisted the rise of fascist regimes and that the Canadian business community backed Drew and federal PC leader John Bracken.
Drew refuted the charges and offered to resign if they were true. He claimed in a May 26 radio broadcast that Osborne-Dempster was a Hepburn-era hire and had never had any direct contact with him. He questioned Jolliffe’s timing and declared that his government was honest and acted in the open. He stated that the real issue of the campaign was, echoing the words of Trestrail, “between freedom and state socialism with all its ugly devices to gain power … we want no petty Hitlers here.”
The press, with the main exception of the Toronto Daily Star, backed Drew and ridiculed Jolliffe. A new series of CCF ads appeared, spotlighting the alleged “Drew Gestapo” and fighting back against smear tactics. “A great national movement is being attacked by the most unscrupulous campaign in Canadian history,” one ad began. “Every possible lie, distortion and slander is being used by Big Business and its political parties against the thousands of Canadians who form the CCF. The CCF has not the money to buy enough space to answer all of the misstatements.”
Amid the fight between the CCF and PCs, the Liberal campaign was an afterthought. In the battle between socialism and free enterprise, Hepburn’s brand of populism was irrelevant. Hepburn attempted a political comeback, becoming Liberal house leader in late 1944. But the old fire was gone. Years of hard living, political feuding, and illness had caught up with him. He set aside past conflicts with the federal Liberals and allied with the Labor Progressive Party (the legal form of the illegal Communist Party, which had two MPPs) to combat “reactionary Toryism.” Drew, a former ally of Hepburn, treated him as a joke and occasionally made allusions in the legislature to Hepburn’s drinking problem.
Back cover of Burdick Trestrail's Social Suicide (Toronto Reference Library)
Leading up to the non-confidence vote that defeated Drew in March 1945, CCF and Liberal MPPs proposed a series of coalition-government scenarios that would have made Jolliffe or Hepburn premier. Jolliffe rejected these proposals, believing that the parties and their followers would never support each other.
The media paid little attention to Hepburn. When they did, they pointed out how pathetic he was. Though still capable of pulling in audiences in the north and southwest, his speeches were unfocused and rambling. Alliances were made to back candidates supported by both the Liberals and LPP in Windsor, while the LPP ran their own candidates in most ridings held by the CCF as a vote-splitting measure.
As the controversy over the Gestapo Speech grew, Drew announced a government commission to investigate Jolliffe’s charges. The CCF and Liberals asked for the election to be delayed until a report could be issued, but the PCs insisted that once the election had been called, it couldn’t be stopped.
When the results came in on June 4, the PCs won a majority with 66 seats. The Liberals finished second with 14 seats — which included three joint Liberal-Labour wins — while the LPP retained its two seats. Hepburn lost his seat in Elgin County and retired to his farm. The CCF fell from 34 to eight seats, though its popular-vote percentage matched polling done before the speech. While scare tactics and the Gestapo Speech fallout hurt the CCF, historians have also noted that Jolliffe seemed remote to the public, party finances were weak, and local organization efforts could have been stronger. The day after the election, Drew sued the Toronto Daily Star for libel; it had compared him to former SS leader Heinrich Himmler. The case wound its way through the courts for years and made their relationship frostier. (After the Star won the first round in 1947, Drew successfully appealed. The Star attempted to appeal, but the case was dismissed just after Drew became federal PC leader in 1948. The next year, Drew declined to drag out the case any further.)
CCF ad from the May 26, 1945, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
The inquiry into Jolliffe’s charges was headed by a Liberal, Justice A.H. LeBel. Evidence showed that D-208 had produced 41 reports. Drew testified that he had never seen nor discussed any of them. He also denied discussing propaganda with Gladstone Murray, though the latter’s testimony contradicted this claim. When LeBel issued his report in October 1945, he concluded that, although D-208’s reports were often false and misleading, he hadn’t willfully misrepresented the facts. He believed the business community could have conducted propaganda campaigns on their own, without D-208’s shoddy work. Blackwell was mildly criticized for having glossed over the reports and apparently not bothering to find out who D-208 was. As for Drew, LeBel found no direct connection between him and D-208.
For years, Jolliffe’s motives were questioned. If he’d known about the revelations for some time, why hadn’t he talked about them earlier? Was it a desperate late campaign tactic, or was there something more? When David Lewis and researchers working on his memoirs reviewed Drew’s archived correspondence decades later, they found evidence backing some of Jolliffe’s claims and concluded that Drew might have lied to the LeBel Commission about his connections with Murray and how many of D-208’s documents reached him. Drew’s family then placed tight access restrictions on the former premier’s papers that will remain in effect until his son Edward passes away. These restrictions have long discouraged authoritative biographies of Drew.
On all sides, the tactics employed in 1945 left a bad taste. “We in this country,” a June 2, 1945, Ottawa Journal editorial criticizing Trestraill reflected, “must reject and repudiate and stamp down all these first appearances of hate and violence and cruelty, expressed in name-calling, or in witch-hunting, or in the imputing of motives. Let us have debate and discussion, and the threshing out of honest differences in a free and unfettered way — that is our heritage of freedom. But let us have charity and decency, and sportsmanship in our debates, have respect for the convictions and consciences of others — and for our own.”
Sources: Into the Hurricane: Attacking Socialism and the CCF by John Boyko (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford, 2006); The Dilemma of Canadian Socialism by Gerald Caplan (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973); The Good Fight by David Lewis (Toronto: Macmillan, 1981); The Happy Warrior by Donald C. MacDonald (Markham: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988); Mitch Hepburn by Neil McKenty (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967); Secular Socialists: The CCF/NDP in Ontario by J.T. Morley (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984); “Just Call Me Mitch”: The Life of Mitchell F. Hepburn by John T. Saywell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Stand Up and Be Counted by Burdick Trestrail (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1944); Social Suicide by Burdick Trestrail (location and publisher unknown, 1945); August 1964 edition of the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science; the May 26, 1945, and June 2, 1945, editions of the Ottawa Journal; and the May 28, 1945, and June 2, 1945, editions of the Windsor Star.