Battle of Ballantyne Pier - Anticommunist Context

Anticommunist Context

Meanwhile, nearly 2000 relief camp workers flooded into Vancouver on 4 April 1935. These were unemployed men protesting the conditions of the federal relief camps that were set up as a stop-gap solution to the unemployment crisis by the Department of Defence. Camp inmates were also organized under the Workers' Unity League into the Relief Camp Workers' Union. Communist leaders were attempting to merge the two strikes and spark a general strike. The Shipping Federation and the police were aware of this plan, and claimed it was an attempt to start a Bolshevik revolution on the Pacific Coast. Thus, when the waterfront strike finally began, tensions were already high between anticommunists and strikers.

Historians agree that both strikes were driven by legitimate grievances: abyssmal conditions in the relief camps and despatching and other workplace issues on the waterfront. Nevertheless, a massive mobilization that included all three levels of police, with specials attached to each police force, took place in anticipation of an attempted revolution. Specials trained at the Beatty Street Drill Hall under Brigadier-General Victor Odlum and Colonel C.E. Edgett and were coordinated by a group called the Citizens' League of British Columbia, a vigilante organization funded by the Shipping Federation. Militia units based in the Point Grey neighbourhood of Vancouver and in Victoria, British Columbia were also ready to be called to action on short notice. The Point Grey militia, however, consisted of inmates of a specially designated relief camp and many of them eventually joined the relief camp strikers.

The Communist plan to merge the strikes and spark a general strike failed, except for a one-day demonstration commemorating May Day. On 3 June 1935, shortly after the waterfront strike began, the relief camp strikers left the city to begin the On-to-Ottawa Trek in an effort to take their grievance to the nation's capital. Nevertheless, the authorities persisted in conflating the waterfront strike with revolution, perhaps because they were alarmed by the waterfront strike in the United States the previous year that shut down most shipping operations along the American coast and which culminated in a bloody general strike in San Francisco.