#brantford

31,000 members of the National Campers and Hikers Association camp out in Brant Park 

Ontario

Michelle Charles says she has worked six days a week at the Metro grocery store in Brantford, Ont. for the last 19 years.

Earlier this year, while Metro made record profits, Charles said, to make ends meet, she had to sell her home, where she lived for 27 years. 

"I can't afford to shop at Metro," she said. "It's ridiculous that I had to sell the house...honestly, I needed about $200 or more a week, and I probably could have kept the house."

In 2022, Metro's net earnings were $922 million, the highest profits the company has ever recorded in its history.

Charles, a single mom of two children in their twenties, said when she lost financial support from their father earlier this year, she sold their home in June and found a more affordable place. [...]

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In Ontario, police stormed the offices of several of the banned organizations, seizing correspondence, books, and pamphlets, and arresting dozens of people in Toronto and other, smaller communities. Eighteen Finnish-Canadian militants were arrested in Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. In Brantford, the local police chief, testifying at the trial of Andra Tretjak, a young Russian immigrant found guilty of conspiracy, claimed that the town was “the headquarters of Bolshevik advocates in Canada,” the centre of a vast distribution network of seditious literature. The police enjoyed fear-mongering about alleged conspiracies; the previous summer they had uncovered a nest of Russian conspirators in Windsor, Ontario, who, they told the newspapers, were at the centre of “a continent-wide plot to overthrow lawful authority and establish a similar regime to that instituted in Russia by Trotzky and Lenine.”

In Toronto, police descended on the offices of political and ethnic organizations across the city, arresting dozens of people, all of whom were alleged to be “active Socialists and Bolsheviks.” They carted away stacks of mail, flyers, pamphlets, books, and magazines. Among the twenty-two arrestees at the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party on Queen Street West were Isaac Bainbridge, secretary of the SDP, and Alfred Manse, the circulation manager of both the Industrial Banner and the Canadian Forward, the party newspaper. Bainbridge, who was a thirty-eight-year-old stonemason and the editor of the Forward, was all too familiar with this kind of harassment. During the previous year and a half, he had been arrested three times on charges of sedition and spent a total of four months in jail for promoting ideas that were considered anti-conscription.

Detainees appeared before magistrates, several of whom took very seriously their self-appointed role as the last bastions against Bolshevism. In Stratford, Ontario, where police arrested twenty-two militants, the case of Arthur Skidmore, a machinist and a member of the local trades council, attracted the most notoriety. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail and a fine of $500 for having in his possession a copy of the Forward. Following appeals to the government from his fellow union members, he was released after twelve days. Magistrate Makins, who had sent Skidmore to jail, chided the government for overruling his decision. “Skidmore’s release is having the effect of making these men very bold and defiant,” Makins told the Toronto Daily Star. “I feel that a stand will have to be taken in the near future against just such men.” And in Toronto, Magistrate Kingsford handed out a three-year prison term in the Kingston Penitentiary to Charles Watson for distributing a variety of books and leaflets that three months before had been perfectly legal. As a large deputation from the Carpenters’ Union massed in the street outside the court in protest, Kingsford declaimed from the bench:

Free speech has always been and is the birthright of every British subject; but free speech is not license [...] Sedition will not be tolerated [...] Persons of British birth or descent above all should not forget the orderly traditions of their race. It would be a disgrace if they associated themselves with the propaganda of foreign cut-throats.

Kingsford went on in his condescending manner:

Theoretical discussions about Socialism may do no harm even if, in the hands of uneducated men, they lead to erroneous ideas of political economy. But when they are publications which advocate in so many terms, robbery, plunder, and other crimes against public order and safety, they become a menace and must be dealt with accordingly.