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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS 329)." The Liberals, though, not only had to worry about the CCF outflanking them on the left, but they also faced the possibility of losing votes to the newly created anti-conscription party in Quebec, the Bloc Populaire. The Bloc Populaire was gaining popularity among French Canadians in Quebec, and along with the growing popularity of the CCF, posed a grave threat to the Liberals. To prevent either the CCF or Bloc Populaire from winning, it was realistic for the Liberals to have an ‘unofficial’ electoral understanding with parties like the LPP in order to divide the opposition vote." The Communists had their own reasons to see the CCF kneecapped politically too. Communists since the time of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution had both a fear and loathing of Socialists, Social Democrats and other left-wing parties which might compete with them for the support among the working class. If Moscow ordered other Communist parties to form a progressive popular front with other left-wing parties against ‘bourgeois’ or ‘fascist’ parties, it was only because Stalin saw benefits in doing so. The relationship between the CCF and the Communists before and during W WII reflected these tensions.” Canadian Communists disdained especially David Lewis, the CCF candidate in the Cartier byelection. Like Rose, Lewis was Jewish and born in the Russian Empire in 1909 in Svisloch, a town now in Belarus. His family settled in Montreal in 1921, and like Rose attended Baron Byng High School. Lewis, however, followed an academic route to success attending first McGill University in Montreal, then winning a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford in 1932, where Lewis immediately took a leadership role in socialist and Labour circles there. Michael Foot, a future Labour Party leader, who knew Lewis at Oxford, said Lewis was “the most powerful socialist debater in the place... He had a very powerful influence indeed amongst students...” (Smith 161-162). At Oxford, Lewis gained a lot of experience in the Labour Club and in dealing with Communists, who in 1933 “were not yet ready to push for a popular front. The focus was not on co-existing with the Labour Club but on destroying it” (Smith 196). When Lewis returned to Canada in 1935 and took a leading role in the CCF, his experience made him determined by 1942 in “taking on the Communists. 10 King foresaw this when the byelection results in the Quebec ridings of Stanstead (won by the Bloc Populaire) and Cartier came in. King felt the main cause was “the price ceiling policy and restrictions generally...Also bad handling of labour policies, National Selective Services policies, in particular.” King hoped that the four byelection losses would make “some of our people realize that labour has to be dealt with in a considerate way” (Pickersgill 570-571). The CCF benefited by such a strategy in the February 1942 federal byelection in the Toronto riding of York South where the Liberals did not field a candidate to avoid splitting the antiConservative vote, thus defeating King’s former nemesis, Arthur Meighen. The LPP newspaper, Canadian Tribune, in December 1944 stated, “The Social-Democratic ‘parliamentary cretins’ as Lenin called them, failed the working class precisely because they made parliamentary careerism the be-all and end-all of their activities" and then called for "nothing less than repudiation of the CCF by the labour movement and a resounding defeat of the CCF at the polls..." (Smith 303). m E s 168 +
