Whither Canada?

Herb Frid’s war

At the onset of the Second World War, Herbert Percival (H.P.) Frid was already a deeply accomplished Hamiltonian. Indeed, by that point, the 51 year-old had already spent much of his life eagerly building, not just a business, but the city itself. For all that he had done up until the point that war clouds gathered over Europe, there was much more he would yet do. By the time he died in 1966, Frid’s contributions to Hamilton included the construction of several buildings at McMaster (earning him both a seat on the university’s Board of Governors and an honourary doctorate), years of service on the Hydro Electric Commission, and personal supervision of both the YMCA’s and YWCA’s expansion during Hamilton’s post-war glory days (his obituary would implore people to donate to the YWCA in lieu of flowers). All that was in addition to being the ever-supportive father of Jonathan Frid, the great Canadian Shakespearian actor who earned international fame as the star of the campy 1960’s soap opera Dark Shadows.

One of seven children born to west Hamilton bricklayer George Frid and his wife Margaret, H.P. had graduated from the University of Toronto just before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. He rose through the ranks of the Canadian Engineer corps during the First World War to become a major, and returned home to transform the family’s modest brick operation into one of the city’s largest construction firms. These efforts allowed H.P. to run in all the city’s best circles - the Hamilton Club, the Golf and Country Club, the Thistle Curling Club - and secure a striking estate on Queen Street South, only a few doors down from the Beckett Drive mountain access and less than 2 kilometres to the east of the road that bore his family name.¹

In 1933, Frid was one of seven men appointed to manage an ambitious new scheme by Hamilton’s Liberal-affiliated (and labour-sympathetic) mayor John Peebles. As the Depression dragged on and unemployment remained high, Peebles and the city’s leaders sought to implement programs that would both alleviate suffering and ease the burden on a strained and cracking municipal government. Among these programs was one copied from a local business that had, the year prior, purchased land for the use of its employees so they could grow their own produce. With the backing of the Board of Control, Peebles announced the creation of a citizen’s committee - made up of Frid and six other prominent community members - that would oversee the expansion of the program to all Hamiltonians.

The new Community Garden Plot Committee, working as a kind of ad hoc venture between council and the Chamber of Commerce, would survey the city’s vacant lands to find suitable space, prepare the plots, provide seeds, and accept applications from unemployed married men. The goal was to provide the jobless with a meaningful activity, reduce what we today would call “food insecurity”, and ease the burden on the city and charitable organizations whose case loads had ballooned in the years since the market crashed in 1929. Within a year, the program was allocating land to around 5,000 Hamiltonians, the committee expanded to include representatives of Stelco, Dofasco, and Westinghouse, and there were plans to create a “farming colony” in Wentworth County of 40 families who so excelled at the program, there was little doubt they could make it as farmers on their own.²

***

The success of Hamilton’s community gardens was measured in declining participation. As the economy began to rebound, fewer residents needed access to the plots, and the committee saw a shrinking program as a positive. But then came another war and the need for community-based alternatives.

As the program’s stalwart chairman, Frid was tasked with the responsibility of revamping the Community Garden Plot Committee into a crucial cog in the machinery of civil defence in 1939. Within weeks of Canada joining the war, Frid announced a massive expansion of the program for the 1940 growing season. Speaking with the Spec, Frid said that participants in Hamilton’s community garden program would “fight the Nazis with ploughshares.”³ At the same time, Frid entertained a suggestion that the program take on a new name: Victory Gardens.

The program ended abruptly in 1941 after all remaining unemployed residents entered the service or were hired by the city’s industrial firms, which were desperate for workers so they could fill wartime contracts and quotas. But it returned in 1943 as the “Hamilton Victory Garden Committee”, albeit with a different focus. Instead of just focusing on vacant lands, the new committee “expected” every Hamiltonian to cultivate their own yards as well. Communal plots would be established for those without land and those with even modest lawns were recruited to raise their own food. “Rakes, hoes, spades will be the weapons of war wielded by thousands of Hamiltonians this season along a city-wide front when patriotic citizens become gardeners as part of the effort to crush Hitler,” the Spec proclaimed with propagandistic enthusiasm. And, once again, H.P. Frid would lend his expertise to the garden committee, this time recruited into service by Tory mayor William Morrison.⁴ By the end of that year’s growing season, the Victory Garden Committee announced that, in spite of poor summer weather, Hamilton’s gardeners had grown an estimated $350,000 worth of produce (equivalent to $6.1 million today) - enough to feed 40,000 residents.⁵

The program continued for the next few years, with residents farming across the city on their own properties, as well as on nearly every available piece of land around town. There were 10 acres farmed by the employees at National Steel Car, four acres maintained by students and neighbours at Westdale High, three acres farmed alongside the Hamilton and Dundas Highway (now Cootes Drive), and an acre tended by the Kiwanis Boys’ Club on Beach Road. Residents would advertise property they had as available to rent and “suitable for Victory Gardens”. Robinson’s Department Store - Hamilton’s shopping centre just steps from the intersection of King and James - even dedicated a whole department to Victory Gardens, proclaiming that “health insurance grows in your victory garden!” alongside ads detailing their wide range of garden products.

As the war wound down in 1945, the gardens appeared resilient enough to remain a part of our civic landscape into peacetime. “Mayor Samuel Lawrence has made an appeal for all Hamilton citizens to be as self-sufficient as possible in foodstuffs,” The Spec reported two weeks after the Allied defeat of the fascist menace.⁶ A year later, Lawrence continued to push for local self-sufficiency as the clean-up in Europe dragged on, encouraging, in his trademark clunky way, “every householder putting his shoulder to the wheel or, more specifically, the spade.”⁷

***

From 1946 onward, though, there would be fewer and fewer shoulders to spades. As Canadians enjoyed the prosperity of the post-war world, their focus shifted from community resiliency to individual fulfilment. The post-war compromise had set people’s minds on getting theirs amidst a world of people doing the very same. Interest in community gardens dwindled as grocery stores consolidated and ballooned in size, became car-dependent, and filled up with year-round produce trucked in from far-away locales. But the embers of community gardening were still there.

A few gardens remained, mostly in rural neighbouring municipalities, through the 1950’s and 1960’s. In 1975, the Hamilton Region Conservation Authority brought back community gardens at Mount Albion (the Spec announced the fifth season of the gardens with the punny opening line: “They’re plotting to get you.”) and, in 1986, Neighbour to Neighbour opened a community garden - dubbed the “Garden of Hope” by The Spec’s Denise Davy - in the southeast mountain’s Butler neighbourhood.⁸ Today, there are around 80 community gardens in the city maintained by volunteers, gardeners, and local agencies, as well as the 3 acre McQuesten Urban Farm at Melvin and Woodward that works to combat local food insecurity and teach community members the basics of urban agriculture.⁹

While Hamilton’s community gardens of today can trace their lineage back to hundreds of small, local agriculture and sustainability initiatives from around the world, they owe a lot to Frid and the war-time community gardeners of our very own past. And, of all H.P. Frid’s legacies, Hamilton’s community gardens have the most potential to inspire us in this moment.

It is not difficult to imagine Frid, a veteran of World War One, feeling a sense of responsibility as the head of the Community Garden Plot Committee. In 1933, the committee was given its own task in the long and arduous mission of economic reconstruction. And, in 1939, the community gardens and local gardeners did their part while Canada was under attack, facing what was, at the time, one of the most serious threats to our democratic institutions and our country’s freedom.

With his one, small, specific committee, Frid was able to rally Hamiltonians, pull people together, and enlist everyday residents in the fight against economic collapse and, later, against authoritarianism. Frid’s weapons were more than just carrots and tomatoes and lettuce; he led an effort that encouraged Hamiltonians to be more self-sufficient, to use the land for good, to be mindful of their consumption and their waste, to work in their communities to the benefit of their communities, and to pull together in times of crisis.

The present moment

This is a moment of profound crisis in Canada.

Slightly under half of the two-thirds of Americans who bothered to vote cast a ballot did so either in full support of, or willfully ignorant to the machinations of, a far-right demagogue who has assembled a team of authoritarian-aficionados and billionaires dedicated to the cause of techno-feudalism. They have moved with lightening speed to reorganize the American state to suit their needs, much of which is happening behind closed doors and away from the supposed “disinfecting light” of contemporary journalism. Ill-equipped to carry out their agenda in 2016, they have, this time, more dutifully stuck to Steve Bannon’s mantra: politics exists downstream of culture, culture is advanced by the media, and the media can be distracted when you “flood the zone with shit.”

Another way to put it is how sociologist Jennifer Walter did in a lengthy post on Threads on January 22, 2025. Blending the theories of Naomi Klein and Marshall McLuhan, Walter said that the current American government is employing a variation of the “shock doctrine” to disorient the people and pacify the opposition so they can pursue their agenda without pushback. Put yet another way (lifting the slogan of the weirdos who helped create this moment), they’re moving fast and breaking things.

Canada is part of this onslaught. Our country’s viability has been judged - and deemed to be lacking - by a foreign despot who knows nothing of our traditions or history or political system or hopes or people. American media is now pumping out pieces that outline how Canada could be forcibly absorbed by the United States, but the hurdles to making that happen are so high, there is absolutely no possible way they would be cleared before the current president is technically forced to vacate the Oval Office at 12:00 noon on January 20, 2029, save by way of a forcible invasion of our country.

That, itself, would be preposterous. Professor Aisha Ahmad from the University of Toronto recently came out with a buzzy piece that went so far as to say that, thanks to Canada’s geography, our antipathy toward the idea of annexation, and our general ability to switch on when threatened (see: War of 1812, World War 1, World War 2, Korean War, War in Afghanistan, etc.) that Canadians would, upon an invasion, initiate “a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States.” Fun!

Yes, Canada is now in the sad position of being shrunk down and placed beside Panama and Greenland and Gaza on a billion news infographics to momentarily draw the eyes of otherwise cartographically illiterate viewers learning, in real time, about their administration’s new colonial ambitions. But it is important to remember that this threat is merely that: a threat. For all the current American regime’s bluster, it knows that it cannot quickly and quietly take Canada.

***

There are a couple of reasons why the current American government is chattering on about this, all of which are interconnected.

There’s the idea that Canada has minerals and water and oil that America needs. Rather than have to deal and negotiate and trade, why not just take them? Sure, that’s blatantly expansionist and self-interested, but that’s the ethos behind the current president’s political movement. It checks off two boxes at once! America - the main character in the story of the world - gets to be the big manly macho man that takes what it wants and it gets to relive its glory days when it conquered, claimed, and controlled other parts of the world.

The American administration is talking about this now for two reasons. One, the current rhetoric is aimed at normalizing the idea that Canada should be part of the United States. It won’t happen in the next four years, but it may be the case that pursuing annexation becomes a loyalty test for the next Republican presidential candidates. It is not hard to imagine a future primary debate where J.D. Vance and Ron De Santis and Glenn Youngkin and Donald Trump Jr. are all on stage yelling back and forth about their plan to take over Canada while hapless CNN anchors smile blankly into the void.

Two, it’s further adherence to the Bannon mantra: so thoroughly distract an increasingly inept media with unrealistic chatter about annexing countries all over the place that the government can push through other unpopular legislation without critique and/or sanitize otherwise awful policies through an endless loop of talking heads bantering back and forth about it to fill time between ads.

The Damoclean sword that is “tariffs” is a central part of the whole strategy. It doesn’t matter that tariffs would fundamentally harm American consumers who, apparently, voted the way they did because they were upset about one of the bleakest phrases ever coined: the “cost of living”. It doesn’t matter that implementing widespread tariffs would tank the global economy and spur on one of the largest recessions in modern history, if not a new global depression that would be hard to get out from under. It doesn’t matter if the reasoning for tariffs - drugs and irregular migration - were flimsy at best. None of that is the point. The point is that America is the greatest, it takes what it wants, and no one can stop it.

***

Canadians have responded with some fairly surface-level stuff. There’s been a push to buy Canadian, watch Canadian, and vacation Canadian, but simply staring at labels trying to figure out what “Product of Canada” and “Made in Canada” mean won’t save us. There’s no ethical consumption under the threat of annexation. And, of course, we’ve been subject to a smattering of undergraduate pedantry about how the Canadian state has engaged in vaguely similar behaviours in the past. Who needs real ideas when we have Tumblr diplomacy from someone who half paid attention through a cultural studies class? Helpful, thanks.

Beyond that, we’ve seen a varied response from Canada’s public thinkers and politicians.

Among the silliest proposals has been a push for Canada to join the European Union. The EU grants membership to “any European state” which meets a list of criteria like “promoting human dignity” and “respect for human rights” and “protecting minorities”. There is no definition of “European”, but they did once reject Morocco for not being European enough, so that should give some indication as to who they consider to be “like them”. Tethering Canada to a political project like the European Union would mean turning away from America, a country traveling down the path of far-right authoritarianism, and toward a loose federation traveling down the path of far-right authoritarianism. In last June’s EU elections, the social democrat, liberal, and green blocs lost a combined 46 seats while the fringe far-right gained 49 seats. France, Austria, Czechia, Italy, and Germany are all swinging to the extreme right with such passion, it is entirely possible they will follow the UK into the abyss and the EU will cease to exist in the next decade.

Expectedly, there’s been a steady slide toward anti-Americanism among some in the commentator/influencer class. In a particularly incendiary piece in the Vancouver Sun, a commentator said his goodbyes to everything and anything American - from corned beef sandwiches and Maker’s Mark bourbon to Mark Twain and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - including his American friends, whom the author decided to cast off because he would rather be “an enemy” than “a vassal”.¹⁰  So long, baby; this bathwater is getting chilly.

In a slightly less melodramatic piece, a trio comprised of professors and military leaders penned an op-ed for the Globe and Mail calling for a return to Sir John A. MacDonald-ian patriotism and a rejection of “continentalism”. They call on Canada to refocus on trade with mother Britain, promote inter-Canadian oil and gas distribution, pursue punitive measures on American services, engage in a rapid expansion of domestic resource development and manufacturing, and make a firm commitment to “The Canadian national dream”, which is, in their words: “east-west trade united by a railroad [and] where we could grow, cut, drill, dig and manufacture the majority of what we needed.”¹¹ Theirs is a vision of Canadian independence that would sit well with Canada’s National Post corporate class: maple-flavoured capitalism, colonialism, and small-c conservatism. A vision of Canada straight from the Family Compact.

Canada’s modern-day Conservatives, on the other hand, have maintained their commitment to giving in to the worst of human nature by cynically updating their messaging in a desperate bid to stop their ever-shrinking polling lead. While once they hoped to make the next federal election about Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax, now that their targets are on their way out, they’ve decided to become the party of “Canada First”. This small minded tit-for-tat kind of response is a meaningless platitude at the exact moment we need real ideas. All the Tory rebrand has done is remind us that Poilievre is not the man for this moment and is just another ineffective and self-interested politician, perpetuating the same kind of politics that has dispirited people to the point that they now willingly turn to demagogues and wannabe despots.

On the other side of the ideological divide, the federal NDP has oscillated between being absent and merely echoing the proposals of other parties. In response to the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum, party leader Jagmeet Singh has called for retaliatory tariffs. When the US President mused about applying tariffs to “Canadian-made” cars being sold in America, Singh called for the reintroduction of a small electric vehicle rebate for Canadian consumers. Faced with one of the most pressing threats to our sovereignty since the War of 1812, the most the leader of the federal NDP has been able to say is “I’m going to fight for you and your families.”¹²  Okay, but how? It is no wonder why the Toronto Star ran an opinion piece this week (albeit one written by a former Conservative Party candidate) calling on the NDP to realize they need a new leader or face electoral oblivion - an opinion I have heard echoed by many past and present supporters of the party in my own circles.¹³

***

Outside Parliament, Canada’s progressives have offered a noticeably different response to the threats posed at this moment. In early February, writer and podcaster David Moscrop posted about his embrace of “reluctant nationalism”: a kind of love of place pierced through with veins of critical analysis. Put simply, Moscrop’s “reluctant nationalism boils down to thinking there’s something good here that could be made much better.”¹⁴

Moscrop’s essay leads into a pitch for The Pledge for Canada, a committee backed by, among others, outgoing MP Charlie Angus, John Cartwright, Esi Edugyan, Craig Scott, and Mark Tewksbury. The Pledge committee, on their website, establishes some of the movement’s basic principles:

• develop a pan-Canadian response that includes Indigenous people and both linguistic communities while rejection regionalism;

• assert Canadian sovereignty in our democracy, economy, and culture while rejecting malicious foreign actors, both public and private;

• reduce dependency on the United States by diversifying trade and strengthening our collective tools and institutions;

• assert Canadian control over our own lands and waters while simultaneously protecting nature and acting on the climate crisis; and

• building a democratic alliance of countries facing similar threats and working to build networks between those countries committed to democracy, humanitarian responses to suffering, and welcoming of those seeking shelter.

The Pledge is backed by well-respected Canadians of all backgrounds. Cindy Blackstock, Kim Campbell, Sarah Harmer, Vincent Lam, Dan Mangan, Noah Richler, Ron Sexsmith, Kathleen Wynne…the list goes on. Reflecting their commitment to democracy, the group has made it so that you, too, can sign on to what might possibly be the start of a new political movement in Canada.

The Pledge for Canada has its roots in other progressive attempts to build movements that safeguard Canadian democracy and ensure our independence that came at other times when the country was under threat.

Canada’s chance

The year Frid’s farms reappeared as Hamilton’s “Victory Gardens” was the same year two ambitious intellectuals published a groundbreaking examination of Canada’s economic situation. Both were brilliant scholars with a deep commitment to social change, owing in part to their backgrounds: David Lewis was the Belarussian-born child of Yiddish-speaking tanners who settled in Montreal and Frank Scott was the son of an Anglican priest and poet in Quebec City who advocated for an early variation of the Social Gospel.

Both Lewis and Scott were influential in the early days of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the grand experiment that brought together farmers and labourers and intellectuals under the idealized banner of democratic socialism. Scott had a leg up on Lewis, having founded the League for Social Reconstruction - the preeminent socialist think-tank in Canada - in 1932 while Lewis was still a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (Scott having finished his own time as a Rhodes Scholar a decade prior). But, by the 1940’s, both men were leaders in the CCF, with Scott serving as National Chairman and Lewis employed as the party’s National Secretary.

Their 1943 book, Make This Your Canada, presented the reality of the Canadian economic situation after a decade of the Depression and four years of war. “Our post-war national objective must reach far beyond the negative ‘freedom from want’, which may mean a mere subsistence for the masses of our people. It must aim at building a dynamic, progressive society,” they implored.¹⁵ Indeed, their words would be echoed by Moscrop these 82 years later, though I doubt they would have labeled their philosophy reluctant by any stretch of the imagination: “We have the basis for a great country in Canada, and much has been achieved already. But just because things could be worse is no reason for not making them better.”¹⁶ Canada may have a murky history, but we can only grapple with that history if we maintain basic freedoms. Canada may have inequality, but we can only tackle inequality by working together. Canada may not be perfect, but perfection need not be the enemy of good.

Their program for improving and strengthening Canada meant ending monopoly capitalism and giving economic power back to small firms, massively expanding Canada’s network of cooperatives, improving both formal and everyday education across Canada, building stronger bonds between English and French Canada, creating national bodies that could direct investment to community-led projects, building hospitals, ensuring food security, guaranteeing employment, housing Canadians…a host of serious and targeted reforms to save democracy and improve the country. And, underpinning this theory, was one of unconditional equality of people no matter their identity. “Perhaps in no respect do our modern democracies violate their principles more than with regard to the practice of equality…It has been well said that ‘fascism finds democracy vulnerable precisely where democracy ceases’.”¹⁷

It was a program that sought to smother the fascist threat once and for all. Give people hope by addressing inequality, injustice, and corporate consolidation. Strengthening democracy, our resiliency, and our country.

***

For a brief moment, it seemed like their message resonated. The Ontario branch of the CCF earned 32% of the vote in the 1943 election, forming the official opposition and coming within a few seats of winning the election. And it wasn’t just in Ontario; people across Canada seemed hungry for change. Polling from that year indicated 71% of Canadians desired substantial social and economic reforms in the country after the war and, for the first time ever, the CCF led national polls with 29% support, one percent higher than both the Liberals and Tories.¹⁸

Two years later, the party’s fortunes had changed. A snap provincial election in the late spring of 1945 saw the Progressive Conservatives embark on a scorched-earth campaign that attacked the labour movement, toyed with open anti-Semitism, and effectively tied the CCF to communism. That was on dramatic display when the PC candidate in Hamilton West, McMaster history professor Chester New, railed against the CCF at a public meeting by cherry-picking quotes from Make This Your Canada and implying the party would nationalize or close small local businesses.¹⁹ The Ontario CCF was humiliated, losing 26 seats and falling to third-party status in the Legislature.

And, as soon as the war was won in Europe, the Liberals called a federal election and pointed toward the Soviet Union as a cautionary - if not exaggerated - tale if Canadians embarked on an experiment with the CCF. The federal party lost half its support from 1943 and captured just 15.6% of the national vote in the June election. Lewis himself would fight hard for a seat where he thought the electors would be willing to give the CCF a shot - Hamilton West - but would earn only 23.6% of the vote and lose to the Commandant of the Hamilton Garrison, Colin Gibson.

***

By 1969, the CCF had become the NDP, and was in the midst of a divisive internal battle. At that year’s convention, a radical faction within the party led by academics Mel Watkins and James Laxer - under the name “The Waffle” - was making a bid to push the party to the left and capture the rebellious spirit of the times. The centrepiece of their project was a resolution called “For an Independent Socialist Canada”.

The document reads like an updated edition of Make This Your Canada, with one obvious distinction: by ‘69, Lewis had been branded a moderate and was working to reduce the Waffle’s influence over the party.

A less apparent distinction is that the Waffle’s manifesto more explicitly addressed American corporate interests. “The most urgent issue for Canadians is the very survival of Canada…[and] The major threat to Canadian survival today is American control of the Canadian economy,” the resolution read. While Lewis and Scott focused on rebuilding after the war and defeating fascism once and for all, Watkins and Laxer aimed their attention at the American Empire. But more than simply being anti-American, the Waffle wanted the NDP to be explicitly pro Canadian:

To the Waffle, American corporations had eroded our country’s sovereignty and “reduced [us] to a resource base and consumer market within the American Empire.” To prevent Canada from becoming another American “colony”, the Waffle echoed much of what Lewis and Scott raised in Make This Your Canada, albeit with some then-contemporary additions and more radical proposals: stronger bonds between English and French Canada and strong unions, nationalization of the resource, finance, and “strategic” sectors, “more and better housing, a really progressive tax structure, a guaranteed annual income…democracy at those levels that most directly affect us all - in our neighborhoods, our schools, and our places of work.”²⁰

The resolution, as should be apparent, did not pass. And, at the 1971 party convention to select a new leader after the resignation of Tommy Douglas, the Waffle waged its last battle and lost; Laxer lost the party leadership to Lewis by 29 percent. The next year, Lewis’s son Stephen - the leader of the Ontario NDP - purged the last remnants of the group, though the Waffle’s leadership would eventually return to the party in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

***

Progressives have, in the past, developed ambitious programs that would help reduce Canadian reliance on the United States and build the kind of fair and equitable economy necessary to tackle the the staggering inequality that has created a fertile breeding ground for far-right populism. Lewis and Scott finished Make This Your Canada by warning Canadians: “Unless we advance to the co-operative commonwealth, we may be forced back into fascist darkness.”²¹

But these programs were not realized. So maybe there’s some value in considering alternative ways of advancing a program by taking some lessons from some of the people on the front lines of fighting fascism.

Radical lessons

A year after Mussolini’s takeover of Italy, the German Marxist leader Clara Zetkin advanced a motion at a meeting of the executive committee of the Communist International that called for a direct and immediate response to the threat of fascism. Zetkin - a teacher, journalist, and politician - knew that any approach would need to be holistic and all-encompassing.

Zetkin’s motion was extremely ambitious. It called for an education campaign that made clear the fascist threat, as well as cooperation between everyone on the left, coordinated electoral campaigns, serious efforts to get leftists elected and appointed to organizations across society, neighbourhood-level support committees, media campaigns, demonstrations on the street, boycotts of goods from fascist states, and efforts to send assistance to (or help in the relocation of) people under threat in fascist states.²²

Despite her best efforts, Zetkin’s appeals were hindered by Stalin and his centralizing (and paranoid) proclivities that rendered community-based responses impossible.

But she had a point. A political project can’t just be one thing. If you want it to succeed and grow, it has to be multifaceted and ambitious. It has to build resiliency, connect to people’s everyday lives, give people a chance to change things by being hands-on, and provide people something in return.

Kind of like a community garden.

***

Let’s be abundantly clear: Canada is in danger. Even if this threat passes, the way things are simply isn’t working. As long as Canada remains controlled by a small group of uncaring companies, beholden to other markets for basic goods necessary for our survival, not just allowing but enabling a massive gap between the ultrawealthy and everyone else, then Canada will continue to be in danger. The economic and political corner into which we have backed ourselves has made us vulnerable. But all is not lost.

First thing’s first, we need to change how our political parties work. Just as Zetkin implored her comrades to do, we need to pursue a holistic political project. Parties cannot simply be stale organs dedicated to fundraising and messaging. In fact, its only recently that parties have become dull bureaucratic machines that seem to only be capable of sending out a daily fundraising email.

In the years before the CCF was formed, Hamilton was home to one of the most active branches of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a group that coordinated labour political activities and organized social events to make working people feel like they were part of a community. For decades, the ILP ran candidates for city council and the school board, but they didn’t stop organizing when elections were over. There were ILP soccer and softball teams, dances and socials, picnics and lectures. In 1911, the Spec reported that the ILP “seem to have more [soccer] players than any other club in the city.” In 1920, the ILP capped off a successful softball season with a lively picnic where the party organized foot races for children and adults alike. In 1934, as the ILP was considering a merger with the CCF, the group’s members in the Village of West Hamilton still maintained an active social schedule; in February of that year, the West Hamilton CCF met for a lecture and discussion about charity one night, had a party and card game the next, and made their way into the city for a gathering with their urban counterparts the next.²³ The ILP wasn’t just building community - they were building capacity. The capacity to act when action was needed.

Imagine we had parties like that in this moment. Imagine a political party that had built strong enough bonds between people so that, at a moment’s notice, it could spring into action. They could hold lectures on what tariffs really mean, organize protests in front of the American consulate, distribute guides on union-made or co-op produced goods, coordinate letter-writing campaigns to local papers, and make sure that their electoral efforts were coherent, professional, and inspiring. Punctuate all that with a weekly euchre night, pub social, evening jogging group, mid-day knitting circle, or weekend curling draw and you have a real community movement.

Parties with that kind of organization would be strong enough to advance the ideas in Make This Your Canada or For an Independent Socialist Canada and hope they become a reality. Lewis and Scott and Watkins and Laxer focused on the theory, which is absolutely necessary, but isn’t nearly as strong as it should be without the movement behind it. Lewis and Scott’s ideas came at a time when community was shifting and individualizing. Watkins and Laxer’s push happened at a moment when that drive toward individualization was solidifying. The flaw wasn’t in their ideas, but in trying to plant those seeds in salted ground.

This is where the folks behind The Pledge for Canada have a real opportunity. People are starved for community. We are so atomized and isolated that we are ready for a truly holistic movement. A party that commits itself to being a community-focused movement that adopts the basic principles of The Pledge can, in these turbulent times, go far.

***

All of these declarations of Canadian independence are worthwhile.

Lewis and Scott were right: we do need to strive for more than just “freedom from want” and instead focus on real economic freedom. Instead of handing power to giant corporations, we need to focus on small, local businesses and co-ops. We need to bridge cultural divides while celebrating what makes us unique. And the role of the state should be to direct public investment and offering baseline services while facilitating the success of small businesses and employee-owned ventures.

Watkins and Laxer were also right: economic freedom means not allowing Canada to be controlled by American corporate interests. We need to focus on local economic development while guaranteeing housing, implementing a universal basic income, and democratizing our workplaces and schools.

And the folks behind The Pledge are right: we need a pan-Canadian response that includes Indigenous perspectives, a focus on building resiliency and tackling climate change, and an orientation of our international efforts toward those countries that respect democracy and on groups within other countries fighting for the same values.

These ideas just need to be paired with the vehicles that can propel them forward. They need passionate advocates who are willing to stand up for the cause they believe in because they’re treated like members of a community, not just given a dry smile while being asked to hand over their credit card number. They need community-based political movements that pair action with theory, real-world results with ambitious goals, socialization with mobilization. Indeed, they need joyful, human-centred politics to succeed.

***

That’s why I’ve been thinking so much about H.P. Frid and Hamilton’s early community gardens. The idea of a community garden ties all these disparate strands together. The gardens were born from a crisis, represented a tangible project that both made people feel like part of a community and provided locally-produced goods when other such items were scarce.

When faced with a threat, we pulled together, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work forging our own path. In 1939, Frid told the Spec that the gardens would be just one way for us to fight fascism, just with ploughshares instead of swords. Maybe they can serve a similar purpose right now.

Community gardens, worked by people in your neighbourhood, aiming to reduce our dependence on imported goods, tackling food insecurity and the climate crisis, all while giving folks a goal to work toward.

This is a moment of profound crisis in Canada. But we’ve met challenges like these before. And we’ll meet them again. All it will take is a few more shoulders to spades, the ambition to try something new, and the wisdom to know that, though our individual contribution may be small, it’s part of a grander whole.

1  _{“Herbert P. Frid Dies After Long Illness” Hamilton Spectator, September 22, 1966 (Spec archive link); Mark McNeil. “Namesakes: Frid Street” Hamilton Spectator, September 17, 2012 (Spec link).}

2  _{“Garden scheme to be extended” Hamilton Spectator, March 18, 1933 (Spec archive link); “City may establish colony in country” Hamilton Spectator, August 12, 1933 (Spec archive link); Garden plot scheme to be started soon” Hamilton Spectator, February 16, 1934 (Spec archive link).}

3  _{“Plan to double number of plots next year” Hamilton Spectator, November 7, 1939 (Spec archive link)}

4  _{“Victory Garden Committee Maps City-Wide Campaign” Hamilton Spectator, March 5, 1943 (Spec archive link); Frid would merely be a member of the committee this time, as the leadership was handed to James Morris, a key figure in Morrison’s “East Hamilton Conservative Machine”, who also served as a school trustee and the city’s “chief air raid warden” during World War 2.}

5  _{“Produce Worth $350,000 Grown in Victory Gardens” Hamilton Spectator, September 9, 1943 (Spec archive link)}

6  _{“Victory gardens patriotic work” Hamilton Spectator, May 23, 1945 (Spec archive link)}

7  _{“Victory garden idea is boosted by mayor to-day” Hamilton Spectator, March 22, 1946 (Spec archive link)}

8  _{“Garden plots available again,” Hamilton Spectator, April 26, 1980 (Spec archive link); Denise Davy. “A big crop of self-esteem” Hamilton Spectator, June 15, 1993 (Spec archive link)}

9  _{Neighbour to Neighbour & Hamilton Community Food Centre. “Hamilton Community Garden Networking Program 2023 Annual Report” (Link)}

10  _{Pete McMartin. “Opinion: Farewell to my American friends. It's over.” Vancouver Sun, February 3, 2025 (Link)}

11  _{Peter Jones, Philippe Lagassé, and George Petrolekas. “Canada: Now is our time to be strong and free” Globe and Mail, February 8, 2025 (Link)}

12  _{Kate Otterbein. “‘We must fight back’: NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh discusses tariffs, EVs” CTV News, February 10, 2025 (Link)}

13  _{Mark Johnson. “The Liberal Party is not the only party that needs a new leader” Toronto Star/Hamilton Spectator, February 10, 2025 (Spec Link)}

14  _{David Moscrop. “Confessions of a Reluctant Nationalist” David Moscrop’s Substack, February 2, 2025 (Link)}

15  _{Lewis, David, and F. R. (Francis Reginald) Scott. 1943 (reprint 2001). Make This Your Canada : A Review of CCF History and Policy. 2nd ed. Winnipeg: Hybrid Pub. p. 23.}

16  ^{_{Ibid. p. 50-51.}}

17  ^{_{Ibid. p. 160.}}

18  _{“Public Opinion Polls.” 1943. Public Opinion Quarterly 7 (4): 736–64. (Link)}

19  _{“Ontario election holds limelight at present time” Hamilton Spectator, May 26, 1945 (Spec archive link)}

20  _{The Waffle. 1969. “For an Independent Socialist Canada” Socialist History Project (Link)}

21  _{Lewis and Scott, 1943 (2001), p. 161.}

22  _{Zetkin, Klara (eds. Michael Taber, and John Riddell). 2017. Fighting Fascism : How to Struggle and How to Win. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. p. 72-74.}

23  _{“Local Soccer Siftings” Hamilton Spectator, October 18, 1911 (Spec archive link); “Mount Hamilton Softball League” Hamilton Spectator, May 20, 1920 (Spec archive link); “Premier Drury Defends Action of Government” Hamilton Spectator, August 23, 1920 (Spec archive link); “West Hamilton” Hamilton Spectator, February 9, 1934 (Spec archive link)}