Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Letter to Richard Collier Facilitator
Revolutionary Bulletin Board
Over Posted Attacks Personally and Against the CPS by CPC
Member
By: Don Currie
Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism
Editor Focus on Socialism
September 2, 2010
www.FocusOnSocialism.ca
Canadians for Peace and Socialism
www.focusonsocialism.ca
Box 168
Slocan BC
V0G 2C0
September 1st 2010
Phone: 1 250 355 2669
Email: editor@focusonsocialism.ca
Richard Collier
Facilitator, Revolutionary Politics
revolutionarypolitics@yahoogroups.com
Copy: Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada
Central Committee, Communist Party of Canada
Provincial Committee, Communist Party of Alberta
Jason Devine, Zachary Crispin, Johan Boyden, Dave McKee, Sam Hammond, Mike
Lucas, Sean Currie, members CPS.
Dear Rick
I am writing to you and copying those referred to in this communication. I do so as Chair of
Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS).
I will not be sending you any further CPS E Bulletins or CPS communications of any kind for
posting to revolutionarypolitics@yahoogroups.com. If such material appears on your
bulletin board it will not be sent by me. As you know I have never subscribed to the group
and have always sent CPS bulletins to you personally so that you had the option of posting
or not posting. Without fail, you seemed to have considered that our views had merit and
you posted them always with fair comment.
This decision on my part has nothing to do with you or anything you have done. Although
we have never personally met what has passed between us in correspondence has always
been done with mutual respect.
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The bulletin board you manage has become a place where anything can be said. What has
been said about me and my comrades in CPS, living and dead, in one of the recent postings
by a member of the Communist Party, who is also a candidate of the Party and who I believe
may even be a member of the CC of the CPC is deeply perturbing and completely
unacceptable.
If this is what the members of the Communist Party are permitted to say, and to say publicly,
it should be of deep concern to all as to where the CPC is at, at this time, and where it is
headed. I want nothing to do with this type of discourse. It does not serve any useful
purpose for the cause of peace and socialism and I believe does a disservice to the
Communist Party of Canada.
Because of what was said by a public spokesperson of the Communist Party about me, CPS,
the USSR, Tim Buck all of it purporting to be said in the name of the Communist Party a
response for the record is required.
I am now entering the second half of the seventh decade of this mortal coil. My loved ones
and contemporaries are passing away. What lies ahead tends to focus the mind. When one
reaches this point, there is little left to those of us who shared the same road, but our
dignity and integrity as Communists.
I fully intend to defend mine and those who shared the same struggle.
For the record…
I joined the Communist Party (LPP) in 1953 when I was nineteen years old. My wife and
comrade for 52 years Sylvia Bradley joined at age 18 a full year before me. During those
twenty‐five years, we were members in good standing of the Party organizations of Thunder
Bay (Port Arthur‐Fort William), Toronto Ontario, Winnipeg Manitoba and Regina
Saskatchewan.
Sylvia and I were active members with our dues fully paid up until 1978 when the CEC in
violation of our constitutional rights ordered the then leader of the Communist Party of
Alberta Bill Tuomi to block our membership transfer from Regina to Calgary. Bill complied.
Sylvia, who was never charged with any violation of Party discipline in her entire life, was
also refused a transfer. She was the wife of an alleged transgressor and being a mere
woman, was denied her rights by reason of association.
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Sylvia who at this time was thoroughly inured to such events, responding as she always did
when such things arose, retained her calm and in her usual dignified manner simply said, “If
they won’t let you on the wagon. Why hang onto it…”. Indeed…
Since we were not called to Party meetings in Calgary we stopped paying dues and went to
work and became active in those movements that would welcome us for who we were, not
who we were alleged to be.
During our twenty years in Calgary we for a time led the Calgary Peace Council and were
active in the Canada USSR Society. We organized public meetings and film showings at the
Calgary Public Library, went door to door petitioning during the time of the cruise missile
issue, marched in peace demonstrations and publicly supported other campaigns of the
Canadian Peace Congress and the Canada‐USSR Society. We publicly participated in hosting
Soviet delegations to Calgary including appearing on cable TV with our Soviet friends, and
worked with Mike Lucas and Lillian Aikens and others in Calgary in the best way we could to
promote Canada‐USSR Friendship. The Calgary Peace Council often met in our home
including one meeting attended by then leader of the Congress Gordon Flowers.
During the 25 years I was a member of the Communist Party I was active at all levels of the
Party organization, from the rank and file, as a youth organizer of the NFLY and the Socialist
Youth League (SYLC) later the Young Communist League (YCL) and later, after returning
from the Lenin Higher Party School in Moscow, 1959‐60, for 12 years as a full time Party
functionary at both the provincial and national levels of Party responsibility.
During the period of my membership in the Communist Party I was a candidate in federal,
provincial and municipal elections. I was given responsibility to author briefs and lead
delegations on behalf of the Party to both municipal and provincial levels of government. I
was repeatedly elected as delegate to provincial and national Conventions and was a
member of Party delegations to international meetings and Congresses. Sylvia and I
represented the Communist Party of Canada at the 150th Anniversary Celebrations of the
Birth of Karl Marx in Berlin in 1958. We both attended the WFDY sponsored Moscow Youth
Festival in 1957 where I was the official delegate representing Canada at the World Assembly
of the WFDY. Sylvia’s role in organizing the Saskatchewan delegation to the Moscow Youth
Festival was exemplary. That is a separate and remarkable story and the record of that work
has been preserved and will be published as time allows.
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From 1958 or thereabouts, memory fails me at the moment I was repeatedly elected at
National Conventions as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
Canada. I was a member of the CC even after I resigned as Manitoba Provincial Organizer in
1973. After resigning as a full time functionary of the CPC I continued to be a member of the
CC, the Manitoba PC and continued to be a public activist at the rank and file level for the
Party accepting and carrying out various public duties assigned to me to the best of my
ability. During this period Sylvia and I were active in organizing several youth camps, public
educationals, schools and seminars. Sylvia was likewise a member of the Manitoba PC and
while working full time as a wage earner, and a mother and playing a leading role in her club,
the Norman Bethune Club, she accepted the assignment as public spokesperson, leader and
organizer of the most active committee in the entire country in the public campaign to Free
Angela Davis.
The full account of our life in the Party during those years is presently being written. I have
neither the time nor inclination at the moment to verify what I have just said but it is all a
matter of public record.
In 1968 or 69 (I can’t remember the exact date) I was elected at a national convention of the
CPC to the CEC and at the personal invitation of Bill Kashtan, we moved to Toronto with our
son Sean where I was appointed National Organizer. After a short time working as an office
worker in Toronto, Sylvia was invited by Mark Frank, Manager of Progress Books to work on
staff. She fulfilled that role with her usual meticulous attention to her duties that she was
noted and respected for by co‐workers and friends in the progressive movement. Sylvia
Bradley was always and everywhere, from the earliest days of her activity in the Communist
youth movement to the day she died, noted for her calm bravery, her wit, her generosity,
her kindness, her sense of proletarian culture and for her studious attention to Marxism. Her
memoir is partially written and will soon be published.
In the early spring of 1970 I took up my duties as National Organizer and fulfilled that
function until the fall‐winter of 1971. While fulfilling my duties as National Organizer of the
Communist Party I was a member of the three‐person Secretariat of the CEC, comprising
General Secretary Bill Kashtan, Org Secretary Alf Dewhurst (I can’t recall his exact title) and
myself, National organizer. In that capacity I was privy to much of the internal workings of
the CPC. As national organizer I was sent on two national tours, and attended, along with Bill
Kashtan and Jeanette Walsh as a member of the official Canadian Communist Party
delegation to the 24th Congress of the CPSU. Following the 24th Congress I was asked by Bill
Kashtan to go to Hungary and meet with Party representatives and report back on the
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progress that was being made in the construction of socialism in that country at that time. I
was also entrusted by the CEC with the duty of attending an international seminar on anti‐
communism where I presented a paper on behalf of the Party which was subsequently
published and circulated internationally.
I was given other important assignments, the most notable being to help organize the 100th
Anniversary Celebrations of the birth of Lenin and to assist Dr. McFadden with the re‐
establishment of the Young Communist League and its re‐founding convention in Toronto in
1970. I was given many writing assignments for the Canadian Tribune, participated actively in
all pre‐convention discussions and had many writings accepted for publication in the Party’s
theoretical journals.
To that point in our lives in the Party Sylvia and I were not aware of any public criticism of
our loyalty and adherence to the line and discipline of the Party, its program and its
constitution or had any reason to believe that we had anything other than approval of our
public role as Communists and our personal conduct.
In 1971, Bill Beeching, editor of the Canadian Tribune, and Dr. Charles McFadden, General
Secretary of the YCL and I were accused by the CEC of acting as a faction promoting a left
opportunist deviation from the united front policy of the CPC, in particular as it applied to
healing the split in the labour movement between communism and social democracy. The
definition of a faction is a group that has its own internal discipline and works outside
democratic centralism of the Party Constitution to organize opposition to the Party line. The
evidence provided by the CEC to the CC that we had acted as a faction was the fact that on
several key questions we had expressed our opposition and voted against the majority
position in meetings of the CEC. No other evidence was provided because there was none.
The charge of factionalism was spurious and trumped up and came as shock to Sylvia and I
who had never experienced anything like that in our entire life in the Party.
Bill Beeching, Dr. McFadden and I each vehemently denied the charge of factionalism,
upheld our political views on the matter of the united front, each presenting their own
individual understanding of that policy, and did so in individual written documents to a
meeting of the CC. The CC rejected our standpoint. In addition to us Mark Frank also voted
against the majority. I believe there were some abstentions.
The CC suppressed the position papers we had presented, adopted a resolution that was
circulated to the membership from coast to coast that we had been censured. What was
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emphasized in the CC document and discussed at report back meetings was not that
legitimate differences had arisen in the CEC, nor what the substance of those differences
were about, but that we had acted as a faction. That canard continues to be promoted by
some veteran members of the CC to this day.
In protest, I resigned as National Organizer and in the winter of 1971 returned to Winnipeg
where Sylvia and Sean joined me later. I was reappointed to the position of Manitoba
Organizer of the Communist Party. Sylvia with her usual stoicism went back to work as a
wage earner and rank and file party activist.
Bill and Elsie Beeching also returned to Regina, where Bill was promptly re‐elected to the
leadership of the Communist Party of Saskatchewan. Dr. McFadden and his wife Karen left
for the east coast, where both subsequently launched distinguished careers as educators.
The events of 1970‐71 are briefly recorded in the official history of the Communist Party. This
is not the time to recount the full details of those differences which were rooted in differing
assessments over what policies and actions the Party should adopt during the War Measures
Act October Crisis of 1970. Our point of view on that history is presently being written and
will be published.
In 1973 I voluntarily left the position of Manitoba organizer and went back to work in
industry as a welder in the steel fabrication and construction industry. We moved to Calgary
in 1978 where I worked part‐time in industry while attending technical school and Sylvia in
accounting offices. After achieving a diploma in technology I worked as a welding inspector
and was eventually hired to the staff of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT)
where I worked as an instructor until my retirement in 1997. Sylvia retired in 1995 after 43
years as a bookkeeper office worker. We then retired to Slocan BC. While in Slocan we both
were active in the Nelson Peace Coalition and played a role in the struggle to re‐establish the
Canadian Peace Congress. We were part of the Canadian delegation to the World Assembly
of the World Peace Council in Caracas Venezuela in 2008. Following that event I was a
delegate to the re‐founding Convention of the Canadian Peace Congress in Winnipeg which
elected Dave McKee its new President.
Sylvia died in April 6, 2009. I continue to live in Slocan, work on behalf of CPS, follow closely
the work of the CPC and the International Communist and Peace movement and do what I
believe useful for the cause of peace and socialism.
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This brings me to the Committee of Canadian Communists and Canadians for Peace and
Socialism.
In 1978‐79 the entire Saskatchewan Committee of the Communist Party was removed from
their positions, their office and funds placed under receivership. An appointee of the CEC,
Gordon Massie, who recently died at age 81, was flown in to administer what was left of the
Saskatchewan Party organization.
The charges against the Saskatchewan PC were that they supported Bill Beeching,
Saskatchewan Provincial Leader of the Communist Party in defiance of a CEC edict that he
was to cease work on the publication of the memoirs of Tim Buck, “Yours In the Struggle.”
Bill refused to do so, explaining that he intended to honour a pledge that he had made to
Tim Buck, while Tim was dying in Mexico, that no matter what the consequences, he would
see to it that Tim’s memoirs (CBC taped interviews) would be edited and published. Bill
honoured that pledge and paid for it with his expulsion by the CEC from the Party, for life,
and without the right of appeal, a gross violation of the Party Constitution and his rights as a
life‐long Communist, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, veteran of WW2, and respected
leader of the Communist Party of Saskatchewan from 1953‐54 to 1978. As an aside I would
like to mention that while we were in Caracas attending the WPC World Assembly, a left
wing NDP veteran and former member of the Blakeney Cabinet in Saskatchewan was also
there. We struck up a conversation and the topic of the role of Bill Beeching in
Saskatchewan labour and farm struggles arose. The NDP veteran said in the presence of all
those attending, “Bill Beeching towered over all of us and we knew it.”
The book “Yours In the Struggle” today is circulated at Party gatherings and is widely read
by members and supporters alike, many of whom know nothing about this history, and read
and study it, strictly for its insightful historical importance and for what was intended by
Tim, an important memoir by the longest serving and noteworthy leader of the Communist
Party to that point in time. I happen to believe Tim Buck remains the most influential
Marxist‐Leninist ever produced by the Canadian working class. His legacy lives on.
After being forced out of the Party in 1978‐79 and with nowhere to go but back into the
struggle, those who supported Bill Beeching helped him to organize the Committee of
Canadian Communists (CCC). Following Bill’s death in 1990 CCC was led by Ed Lehmann then
John Beeching and now by me.
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We changed our name to Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS) after evaluating the
struggle waged by the CPC under the leadership of Miguel Figueroa, General Secretary, to
maintain the legal status of the CPC in the face of an attempt by the state to emasculate the
party and its rights. We were motivated to change our name from CCC to CPS so as not to
leave any doubt, that we former members of the CPC, now members of CCC not only hailed
that Party victory for its rights, but were also not intent on forming another Communist
Party, hence the name change. Everything said here is on the record in writing much of it
posted to the website of CPS and hs been communicated and is well known to the present
leadership of the CPC.
In all of that time, CCC, CPS and I personally have been called many things. We have been
severely criticized by members and leaders of the CPC. At the same time there are also many
instances when CPS members and CPC members have worked collaboratively together, and
still do, in particular in the movements for peace, with the most notable achievement being
the re‐establishment of the Canadian Peace Congress. Occasionally People’s Voice have
published our statements and continues to accept our May Day greetings. The CPS website
www.focusonsocialism.ca provides links to the CPC, the YCL, People’s Voice, Solidnet and
the Canadians Peace Congress and to the best of our ability we publish the statements of
the CPC, support the fund raising campaigns for its press and promote its federal and
provincial elections campaign materials.
What we do not do, is provide knee jerk, uncritical support to all of the policies, statements,
programmatic positions of the CPC some of which we consider as weak and in need of more
work. We have expressed those critical views publicly and in the pre‐convention discussion
of the Communist Party in the lead up to its 34th Convention. We attended that Convention
as observers. Our contributions to the 35th Preconvention Discussion of the Communist
Party were suppressed. After the suppression of our contributions during the last
preconvention discussion we saw little to be gained either for the Party or ourselves by
requesting to attend as observers.
In the last federal election I was called at my home in Slocan by the election manager of the
Communist Party of Canada’s candidate in my constituency asking to meet with me. I of
course readily agreed. Two young people, Johan Boyden and Zachary Crispin showed up. I
met them at the local grocery store and introduced them to all present by name, identifying
them as the candidate of the Communist Party in our constituency and his campaign
manager who at that time was also the General Secretary of the Young Communist League.
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We spent the afternoon together. At the time there were members of my family visiting. I
gave the CPC canvassers a donation as did my relatives. I agreed to post a Party election sign
on our front lawn where it remained throughout the campaign. I accepted Party election
campaign literature and gave it to neighbours that visited our home. I directed the young
people to use my name as an introduction to the editor of the local regional newspaper, for
which I was Slocan correspondent at the time. They did so and if memory serves me
correctly the interview was published. I also attended the public meeting of the CPC
candidate in Trail and took my granddaughter to her first Communist Party meeting. The
Provincial leader of the Communist Party was the main speaker at the meeting. I did not
participate but listened with great interest. My recollection of that meeting and my views
about what was said there was published to our website.
I considered the young men who represented the Party in my constituency to be examples
of what I believe young Communists should be. They were well groomed, clean and
modestly and neatly dressed. They were open and courteous, good natured and well
informed. They graciously accepted and shared a meal and fulfilled every expectation one
could have about what a public spokesperson of the Communist Party should be. I was
pleased to introduce them publicly to friends. Their campaign efforts in that election were
held up in People’s Voice as exemplary and I agree with that assessment.
None of what is said here is that remarkable for anyone who has been and remains a
member‐supporter of the CPC. We all have our personal journeys and I do not consider mine
to be any more or less significant than any other of my generation who voluntarily joined the
struggle for socialism. I have the utmost respect for those who publicly step forward on
behalf of the Party, give their all, and do it out of conviction and without expectation of any
reward.
In that entire journey I have been called many things. I accept that as the price one pays for
having convictions and advocating them. However, I have searched my mind and I cannot
remember ever having been publicly called a liar by friend or foe and certainly to my
recollection never by a Communist. What has been said behind my back I have no control
over and doesn’t concern me.
I repeat, I see no useful purpose either for CPS or the CPC to participate in that type of
discourse.
That is why I will no longer send material to you for publication.
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What the CPC leadership does is their affair.
Respectfully
Don Currie.
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