Ted Jolliffe

Edward Bigelow Jolliffe (March 2, 1909 – March 18, 1998) was a Canadian social democratic politician and lawyer from Ontario.

He was born at the Canadian Missionary hospital in Luchow, near Chunking on March 2, 1909.

He was home-schooled in China by his mother until his early teens.

When his family returned to Ontario, he attend Rockwood Public School and then went to high school at Guelph Collegiate Institute.

He was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto's Victoria College, the United Church College.

He became the head of the Victoria Student Council, and was a member of the Hart House Debates Committee.

He was a Rhodes Scholar in the mid-1930s, and came back to Canada to help the CCF, after his studies were complete and being called to the bar in England and Ontario.

After politics, he practised labour law in Toronto and would eventually become a labour adjudicator.

In 1930, he won the Maurice Cody scholarship, and then became one of Ontario's Rhodes Scholars that same year.

He attended Christ Church, Oxford University for three years.

As a member of Oxford's Labour Club, he met David Lewis, the club's leader and a fellow Canadian.

Together they fought the Communist Red October club and fascists such as Lord Haw-Haw–William Joyce.

His Oxford experiences made him a socialist and he joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation shortly after it was formed in 1932 during his summer vacation.

He helped form an overseas branch of the CCF at Oxford that year.

He was called to the bar in England, and was the first Canadian to win the Arden scholarship.

Both he and Lewis planned a 'silent' protest at Joyce's February 1934 speech at Oxford.

They carefully made sure that enough members from the Labour Club attended the meeting, and then in groups of two or three, strategically walked out of the speech, across the creaking wooden floors, effectively blotting out Joyce's speech.

The Blackshirts in the audience then caused riots in the street after the meeting and Jolliffe and Lewis were in the thick of it.

He was a candidate in the 1935 Canadian election in the Toronto riding of St. Paul's, placing fourth.

When Jolliffe permanently returned from Oxford, he worked as the CCF's Ontario organizer and was called to the bar in Ontario and practised law in Toronto from 1938 onwards.

He was the first leader of the Ontario section of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and leader of the Official Opposition in the Ontario Legislature during the 1940s and 1950s.

He ran again in the 1940 federal election, this time in the York East electoral district.

He was noted for calling out the former federal Conservative government for neglecting World War I soldiers on their return home, and that this time, "proper measures be taken to protect the future of Canadian soldiers and their dependents."

He countered that a C.C.F. government would stop war profiteering and the protect the interests of the country's soldiers and "small taxpayers."

He was soundly defeated, like every other Ontario CCF candidate, placing a distant third.

He became the first leader of the Ontario CCF in 1942.

The following year, he led the party to within five seats of victory with 34 seats and 32% of the vote in the election of 1943 that elected a Conservative minority government under George Drew.

He won the York South seat, and became its Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP).

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.

In the 1945 Ontario election, 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.

As can be discerned from the previous description, the 1945 campaign was anything but genteel and polite.

Jolliffe replied by giving a radio speech (written with the assistance of Lister Sinclair) that accused Drew of running a political Gestapo in Ontario.

In the speech excerpt below, Jolliffe alleged that a secret department of the Ontario Provincial Police was acting as a political police – spying on the opposition and the media.

In retirement, he moved to British Columbia, where he died in 1998.

His family had lived in Ontario for generations.

His parents, the Reverend Charles and Gertrude Jolliffe, were missionaries for the Methodist Church of Canada, and were living near what was then known as Luchow, China.