Origins
The Ontario CCF was indirectly the successor to the 1919–23 United Farmers of Ontario–Labour coalition that formed the government in Ontario under Ernest C. Drury. While United Farmer Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) joined the Ontario Liberal Party, the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO), as an organization, participated in the formation of the Ontario CCF, and was briefly affiliated with the party.
After a meeting in Ottawa on 26 May 1932, that brought together all the Members of Parliament that belonged to the Ginger Group, and some members of the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), the CCF was formed, making J. S. Woodsworth the defacto leader, and giving responsibility for organizing Ontario to Agnes Macphail of the UFO. Macphail, as president of the Ontario Provincial Council, persuaded her fellow delegates at the December 1932 UFO convention to affiliate with the CCF provincial council. After the 1933 Regina convention, the formal name of the party was introduced as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Ontario Section) – The Farmer-Labor Party, though the shorter Ontario CCF was the most commonly used name.
Macphail, served as the first president of the Ontario CCF from 1932 until 1934. As a UFO Member of Parliament (MP) in the Canadian House of Commons, she was forced to officially resign from the CCF after the UFO withdrew from the party after alleging Communist influence in it. She subsequently served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as the CCF Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for York East from 1943 to 1945 and again from 1948 to 1951.
Graham Spry, a publisher and broadcaster who was also a member of the LSR, served as the Ontario CCF's vice-president of its provincial council from 1934 to 1936. He was the first federal CCF candidate in Ontario, running in the 24 September 1934 by-election in Toronto East. Other prominent members were Elmore Philpott, a former Liberal Philpott joined the CCF in 1933 and became president of the Ontario Association of CCF Clubs before resigning from the party and rejoining the Liberals in 1935 over the A. E. Smith affair, that caused the UFO to leave as well. The disagreement was in regards to how much support the fledgling CCF should give Smith, leader of the Canadian Labour Defence League, who had been charged with sedition for claiming that the state had attempted to assassinate imprisoned Communist Party of Canada leader Tim Buck. The CLDC was a communist front group. Woodsworth, along with the Ontario CCF provincial council, opposed the CCF having any formal links with it or any other Communist group. Some individual CCFers ignored this policy as did one section of the Ontario CCF, which was expelled. Nevertheless, Philpott and the UFO saw the Smith affair as evidence that the CCF had been infiltrated by Communists and left. The issue of what relationship the CCF should have with the Communist Party would come to the fore again in 1936 with the party voting to ban any united front with Communists, over the objections of prominent CCFers such as East York reeve Arthur Henry Williams.
The CCF contested its first Ontario provincial election in 1934. It received 7.1 percent of the vote, and won its first seat in the Ontario legislature: Samuel Lawrence elected in Hamilton East. The Ontario CCF failed to win any seats in the 1937 election.
Read more about this topic: Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Ontario Section)
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