Дэвид Льюис: Канадский политик и юрист

Canadian labour lawyer and social democratic politician (1909–1981)

David Lewis (born David Losz; June 23 or October 1909 – May 23, 1981) was a Canadian labour lawyer and social democratic politician. He was national secretary of the Co operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1936 to 1950 and one of the key architects of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961. In 1962, he was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP), in the House of Commons of Canada, for the York South electoral district. While an MP, he was elected the NDP's national leader and served from 1971 until 1975. After his defeat in the 1974 federal election, he stepped down as leader and retired from politics. He spent his last years as a university professor at Carleton University, and as a travel correspondent for the Toronto Star. In retirement, he was named to the Order of Canada for his political service. After suffering from cancer for a long time, he died in Ottawa in 1981. Lewis's politics were heavily influenced by the Jewish Labour Bund, which contributed to his support of parliamentary democracy. He was an avowed anti communist, and while a Rhodes Scholar prevented communist domination of the Oxford University Labour Club. In Canada, he played a major role in removing communist influence from the labour movement. In the CCF, he took the role of disciplinarian and dealt with internal organizational problems. He helped draft the Winnipeg Declaration, which moderated the CCF's economic policies to include acceptance of capitalism, albeit subject to stringent government regulation. As the United Steelworkers of America (USW)'s legal counsel in Canada, he helped them take over the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill). His involvement with the USW also led to a central role in the creation of the Canadian Labour Congress in 1956. The Lewis family has been active in socialist politics since the turn of the twentieth century, starting with David Lewis's father's involvement in the Bund in Russia, continuing with David, and followed by his eldest son, Stephen Lewis, who led the Ontario NDP from 1970 until 1978. When David was elected the NDP's national leader in 1971, he and Stephen became one of the first father and son teams to simultaneously head Canadian political parties.

David Losz was born in the Russian Empire sometime after Svisloch's first snowfall in October 1909 to Moishe Losz and his wife Rose (née Lazarovitch). His official birth date of June 23 was the one he gave the immigration officer when he arrived in Canada. Lewis's political activism began in the shtetl he lived in until 1921. Svisloch was located in the Pale of Settlement, the westernmost region of the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus. After World War I, it became a Polish border town, occasionally occupied by the Soviet Union during the Polish Soviet War of the early 1920s. Jewish people were in the majority, numbering 3,500 out of Svisloch's 4,500 residents. Unlike many of the other shtetls in the Pale, it had an industrial economy based on tanning. Its semi urban industrial population was receptive to social democratic politics and the labour movement, as embodied by the Jewish Labour Bund. The Bund was an outlawed socialist party that called for overthrowing the Tsar, equality for all, and national rights for the Jewish community; it functioned both as a political party and labour movement. The Bund's membership, although mostly ethnically Jewish, was secular humanist in practice. David would bring this philosophy to the Co operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and New Democratic Party (NDP); in clashes between the parties' "ideological missionaries and the power pragmatists when internal debates raged about policy or action", he was in the latter camp. When the Polish army recaptured Svisloch on August 25, 1920, they executed five Jewish citizens as "spies". Unsafe under either regime and with his family's future prospects bleak, Moishe left for Canada in May 1921, to work in his brother in law's Montreal clothing factory. By August, he saved enough money to send for his family, including David and his siblings, Charlie and Doris. David Lewis was a secular Jew, as was Moishe. However, his maternal grandfather, Usher Lazarovitch, was religious and, in the brief period between May and August 1921 before David emigrated, gave his grandson the only real religious training he would ever receive. David did not actively take part in a religious service again until his granddaughter Ilana's Bat Mitzvah in the late 1970s. In practice, the Lewis family, including David, his wife Sophie, and their children Janet, Nina, Stephen, and Michael, were atheists.

The family came to Canada by boat and landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Autumn 1921. A Welsh teacher at Fairmount Public School, where Lewis was a student, helped him learn English but also passed on his Welsh accent. Lewis entered Baron Byng High School in September 1924. He soon became friends with A. M. (Abe) Klein, who became one of Canada's leading poets. He also met Irving Layton, another future prominent Canadian writer, to whom he acted as a political mentor. Baron Byng High School was predominantly Jewish because it was in the heart of Montreal's non affluent Jewish community, and was ghetto like because Jews were forbidden from attending many high schools. Besides poets, at high school, Lewis met Sophie Carson, who eventually became his wife. Klein, their mutual friend, introduced them. Carson came from a religious Jewish family. Her father did not approve of Lewis, because he was a recent immigrant to Canada, and in Carson's father's opinion had little to no possibility of success. After high school, Lewis spent five years at McGill University in Montreal: four in arts and one in law. While there, he helped found the Montreal branch of the Young People's Socialist League. He gave lectures sponsored by this anti communist socialist club, and was its nominal leader. One of his favourite professors was Canadian humorist, and noted Conservative party proponent, Stephen Leacock, whom Lewis liked more for his personality than for his discipline, economics. In his third year, Lewis founded The McGilliad campus magazine. It published many of his anti communist views, though the December 1930 issue included an article he wrote expressing his approval of the Russian Revolution and calling for a greater understanding of the Soviet Union;

Lewis first ran for the CCF in the 1940 federal election in York West. He placed a distant third, receiving 8,330 fewer votes than the second place Liberal candidate, Chris J. Bennett. Despite his poor showing in his first election, the party asked Lewis to run in the 1943 by election in the Montreal, Quebec, federal riding of Cartier, made vacant by the death of Peter Bercovitch. Lewis's opponents included Fred Rose of the communist Labor–Progressive Party. It was a vicious campaign, immortalized by A. M. Klein in an uncompleted novel called Come the Revolution. The novel was broadcast in the 1980s on Lister Sinclair's Ideas programme on CBC Radio One. Rose won and became the only (as of 2013), Communist, to sit in the House of Commons. Lewis placed fourth. The sizable Jewish vote mostly went to Rose. The leftist "common front" punished Lewis by supporting Rose, who was seen to be of the community; Lewis lived in Ottawa at the time. It took Lewis many years to recover from this campaign, and its reverberation coloured Lewis's decision on where to run.

The Canadian federal and the Ontario elections of 1945 were possibly the most crucial to Canada in the 20th century. diminished the CCF's initially favourable position: the September 1943 Gallup poll showed the CCF leading nationally with 29 percent support, with the Liberals and Conservatives tied for second place at 28 percent. By April 1945, the CCF was down to 20 percent nationally, and on election day it received only 16 percent. It guaranteed a split in the left of centre vote. Lewis ran in Hamilton West instead of the CCF friendly Winnipeg North riding that had elected CCF and Labour Party candidates since the 1920s and had a substantial Jewish population. Historians and activists disagree on Lewis's reasons for doing so, but Caplan suggests that the shock of the Cartier election probably made him reluctant to fight another intense campaign against a Jewish Communist candidate.

The 1945 defeats were partially the result of an alliance between the Liberals and the communist Labor–Progressive Party (LPP). The LPP focused in on CCF held seats, deliberately splitting the vote, and declared a "Liberal–Labour" coalition on May 29, 1944. They declared open warfare on the CCF in 1944, with spokesman John Weir stating in the LPP's Canadian Tribune newspaper that "a resounding defeat of the CCF at the polls must be [their] the main objective." The Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) supported the CCF, but the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) refused to officially endorse them. This lack of unity between the two main Canadian umbrella labour organizations hurt the CCF, and was part of the Liberal–Communist alliance: TLC president Percey Berough was a Liberal, and vice president Pat Sullivan was a Communist. In the Ontario provincial election, the communists urged trade union members to vote for the right wing Conservative George Drew rather than the CCF. Their first target was the Sudbury, Ontario, CCF riding association and its affiliated International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) Local 598. However, Local 598 was not under Communist control: out of 11,000 dues paying members, fewer than 100 were communists. Over the next twenty years, a fierce and ultimately successful battle was waged by Millard's United Steel Workers of America (USW) to take over Local 598. The attacks on the Sudbury CCF were even more costly, at least in terms of voter support. Sudbury's Bob Carlin was one of the few CCF Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) to survive the Drew government's 1945 landslide victory. Carlin had been part of Ted Jolliffe's team that had orchestrated the CCF's 1943 breakthrough but was first and foremost a union man. He was a long time labour organizer, going back to 1916 and the predecessor to the Mine Mill: the Western Federation of Miners. Carlin was loyal to his union, in whose service he had spent ten years, and to the men and woman who helped build it, regardless of their political affiliation; this made him unpopular with the CCF establishment in both Toronto and Ottawa. Millard, Jolliffe, and Lewis did not directly accuse Carlin of being a communist. Instead, they attacked him for not dealing with communists in Local 598, which was built by both communists and CCFers (with the latter firmly in control of the executive). Lewis and Jolliffe made the case to expel him from the Ontario CCF caucus at a Toronto special meeting of the CCF executive and the legislative caucus on April 13, 1948. It was not until the CCF became the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Mine Mill versus USW war was over, in 1967, that another social democrat – Elie Martel in Sudbury East – was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from the city. Lewis and Millard's crusade to limit communist influence received an unexpected boost from the Soviet Union, in Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalinism. In his "Secret Speech", On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his cult of personality and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality". When the excesses of Stalin's regime were exposed, it caused a split in the communist movement in Canada and permanently weakened it. By the end of 1956, the LPP's influence in the trade union movement and politics was spent.

Lewis resigned as national secretary in 1950 and moved to Toronto to practise law in partnership with Ted Jolliffe. He became the chief legal advisor to the USW's Canadian division, and assisted them in their organizing efforts and battles with the Mine Mill union. Lewis focused on his law practice for the next five years. In his first year, he paid more in income tax than he had earned annually as CCF National Secretary. After four years of comparatively limited involvement with CCF internal politics, Lewis became the party's national chairman, by winning the election to replace Percy Wright. He, along with Lorne Ingle, the person that replaced him as national secretary in 1950, became the main drafters of the 1956 Winnipeg Declaration, which replaced the Regina Manifesto. The lead up to the August 1956 CCF convention had Lewis working full time in his labour practice, including work on the merger of the Canadian Congress of Labour and the Trades and Labour Congress to form the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), and putting in long hours organizing the committee that wrote the Declaration. He collapsed in his office in May 1956; after administering several tests for a possible cardiac condition, the doctors concluded that Lewis collapsed of exhaustion. He stayed in bed for a week and recovered enough to help the Declaration pass ten weeks later. The Winnipeg convention was the CCF's swan song. Even with the Declaration's modified tone, which removed state planning and nationalization of industry as central tenets of the party's platform, the CCF suffered a crippling defeat in the 1958 federal election, which became known as the "Diefenbaker sweep".

In 1958, Lewis worked closely with the CLC's president, Claude Jodoin, and the CLC's executive vice president Stanley Knowles to merge the labour and social democratic movements into a new party. Coldwell did not want to continue as the party's national leader, because he lost his parliamentary seat in the election. Lewis persuaded him to stay on until the new party was formed. Lewis was elected party president at the July 1958 convention in Montreal, which also endorsed a motion for the executive and National Council to "enter into discussions with Canadian Labour Congress" and other like minded groups to lay the groundwork for a new party.

Two days after the end of the NDP's 1961 founding convention, Tommy Douglas wrote a letter to Sophie Lewis, David's wife, telling her that David must run in the next election. Lewis decided to run in his home riding of York South, which was concurrently held provincially, in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, by the NDP's Ontario leader, Donald C. MacDonald. Diefenbaker's government had to call an election sometime in 1962, so there was time to plan Lewis's campaign. He had two campaign managers: his son Stephen and Gerry Caplan. One of their main strategies was to gain votes in the riding's affluent Jewish enclave in the Village of Forest Hill. Lewis, however, was perceived by the Jewish community as an outsider because he did not take part in community events or belong to a synagogue. His opposition to the creation of the state of Israel, a result of his Bundist politics, also did not sit well with the mostly Zionist community. It took extra effort on Stephen's and Caplan's parts to convince community members that David was a legitimate Jewish voice and that he would not harm their businesses. He called the province's doctors "blackmailers" for suggesting such a strike. He appeared on the national CTV Television Network with Walter Pitman to present the NDP's platform on a planned economy, in a conversation style election broadcast. Since Tommy Douglas lost in his seat, Lewis was considered the front runner to become house leader until Douglas entered the house in an October by election. Lewis lost in Forest Hill, as his support among its Jewish community evaporated and returned to the Liberals, who were seen as best able to contain the Social Credit Party, which was perceived to be anti Semitic. This was only a temporary set back. With Diefenbaker in opposition (and unlikely to resurrect the coalition in Quebec that gave him his majority in 1958) and Social Credit a diminished force, Lewis returned to the House of Commons in the 1965 general election. He was re elected in the 1968 election, and became the NDP leader in the House of Commons after Douglas lost his seat. At the 1969 Winnipeg National Convention, Douglas announced that he intended to step down as leader by 1971, which meant that Lewis became the de facto leader in the interim. The Act, enacted previously only for wartime purposes, imposed extreme limitations on civil liberties, and gave the police and military vastly expanded powers for arresting and detaining suspects, usually with little to no evidence required. Although it was only meant to be used in Quebec, since it was federal legislation, it was in force throughout Canada. Some police services, from outside of Quebec, took advantage of it for their own purposes, which mostly had nothing even remotely related to the Quebec situation, as Lewis and Douglas suspected. They took much grief for being the only parliamentarians to vote against it. About five years later, many of the MPs who voted to implement it regretted doing so, and belatedly honoured Douglas and Lewis for their stand against it. Stephen was elected leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party. During the early to mid 1970s, the father and son team led the two largest sections of the NDP. In February 1968, Stephen Lewis, as a supposed representative of the Ontario NDP legislative caucus, asked the 63 year old Tommy Douglas to step down as leader so that a younger person could take over. Donald C. MacDonald stated that Lewis was not representing the caucus, but acting on his own. Though Douglas was taken aback by the suggestion, his defeat in the ensuing election bolstered Stephen's case and on October 28, 1969, Douglas announced that he would step down as leader before the NDP's 1971 convention. David Lewis ran to succeed Douglas as national leader. The 1971 leadership convention was a tumultuous affair. A new generation of NDP activists known as The Waffle proposed many controversial resolutions, including nationalization of all natural resource industries and support for Quebec Sovereignty. Laxer had been prominently featured in media coverage leading up to and during the convention. as had his involvement in most of the CCF and NDP's internal conflicts during the previous 36 years. Many members who had felt his wrath as party disciplinarian plotted their revenge against him. He also warned the party's Quebec wing that they could continue to theorize about possible self determination resolutions, but that come election time they must pledge themselves to the party's newly confirmed federalist policy. David Lewis led the NDP through the 1972 federal election, during which he uttered his best known quotation, calling Canadian corporations "corporate welfare bums", a term also used in the title of his 1972 book Louder Voices: The Corporate Welfare Bums. This election campaign also employed the first dedicated plane for the NDP leader's tour, dubbed "Bum Air" by reporters, because it was a slow, twin engine, turbo prop driven Handley Page Dart Herald. In previous campaigns, the party's leader, Tommy Douglas, had to use commercial Air Canada flights to get around during the election, with few people in his entourage. In hindsight, Lewis's no win evaluation of the situation appears correct: the party would not be rewarded for its efforts by the electorate.

Lewis became a professor at the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa during this time. In 1978, as a travel correspondent for The Toronto Star, Lewis visited Svisloch one last time, and noted that, "not one Jew now lives there." He is the father of Stephen Lewis, a former Ontario NDP leader and was the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa post political career. His other son, Michael Lewis, was a former Ontario NDP Secretary and a leading organizer in the NDP. He is also the father of Janet Solberg, president of the Ontario NDP in the 1980s. His other twin daughter is Nina Libeskind, the wife and business partner of architect Daniel Libeskind. Stephen's son, broadcaster Avram (Avi) Lewis, is his grandson. In 2010, his granddaughter in law Naomi Klein, gave the inaugural David Lewis Lecture, sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In December 1976, Lewis was named as a Companion of the Order of Canada and was invested into it on April 20, 1977. He was appointed to the highest level of the Order of Canada in "recognition of the contributions he has made to Labour and social reform and the deep concern he has had over the years for his adopted country."

Held in Ottawa, Ontario on April 24, 1971. + Delegate Support by Ballot Candidate 1st ballot 2nd ballot 3rd ballot 4th ballot Votes cast % Votes cast % Votes cast % Votes cast % LEWIS, David 661 38.9% 715 42.5% 742 44.1% 1,046 63.1% LAXER, James 378 22.3% 407 24.1% 508 30.2% 612 36.9% HARNEY, John Paul 299 17.6% 347 20.5% 431 25.6% Eliminated BROADBENT, John Edward (Ed) 236 13.9% 223 13.1% Eliminated HOWARD, Frank 124 7.3% Eliminated Total 1,698 100.0% 1,692 100.0% 1,681 100.0% 1,658 100.0%