1951 Election Disaster and Its Aftermath
The CCF's return to popularity was short-lived, due to the prosperity of the 1950s and the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War. This rapid decline in their popularity reduced the party to two seats in the 1951 election and allowed the Ontario Liberal Party to become the Official Opposition. No social-democratic party would be the Official Opposition again until 1975, when Stephen Lewis's NDP displaced the Liberals as the second party in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
Beginning with the 1951 provincial campaign, the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) played an increased role in the Ontario CCF by lending it organizational, personnel and material support. The increasing role of the trade union leadership in the party was unpopular with some activists like MPP Bill Temple. The "Ginger Group" led by Temple, True Davidson and others was formed in the wake of the disastrous 1951 electoral result which they blamed on the "bureaucratization" of the party and its movement away from socialist principles and particularly socialist education, developments for which they held what they saw as the conservative, anti-democratic and bureaucratic influence of the OFL as responsible. At the party's 1952 convention, Temple temporarily ran for party leader but withdrew at the last movement, allowing Jolliffe to be acclaimed leader. Temple did not stop from making trouble for the establishment, when he ran for party president, and almost won. He and Davidson were both elected to the party executive as vice-presidents and the Ginger Group elected a number of its followers to the provincial council. They were ultimately unsuccessful in achieving their goals, however. The increasing role of the OFL in the Ontario CCF proved to be a precursor to the eventual fusion of the national CCF and the trade union movement with the creation of the New Democratic Party of Canada at both the federal and provincial levels in 1961.
Read more about this topic: Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Ontario Section)
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