1945 "Gestapo" Campaign
In the 1945 Ontario election, Premier Drew ran an anti-Semitic, union bashing, Red-baiting campaign. The previous two years of anti-socialist attacks by the Conservatives and their supporters, like Gladstone Murray and Montague A. Sanderson, were devastatingly effective against the previously popular CCF. Much of the source material for the anti-CCF campaign came from the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP)'s Special Investigation Branch's agent D-208: Captain William J. Osbourne-Dempster. His office was supposed to be investigating war-time 5th column saboteurs. Instead, starting in November 1943, he was investigating, almost exclusively, Ontario opposition MPPs, mainly focusing on the CCF caucus. The fact that Jolliffe knew about these 'secret' investigations as early as February 1944 led to one of the most infamous incidents in 20th-century Canadian politics.
Read more about this topic: Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Ontario Section)
Famous quotes containing the words gestapo and/or campaign:
“I can grouse about the food, and the C.O. and anything I blame please. And that’s more than you with your Gestapo and your storm troopers and your Aryan bourgeois. Ahhh, nuts. What’s the good of talking to you. You can’t even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it.”
—Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988)
“The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)