William Kardash (1912-1997)
William Kardash of the Communist Party was elected in 1941 as one of Winnipeg's ten MLAs (elected through proportional representation). He was elected as a Workers' Candidate, as the Communist Party was banned.
At the time many Communists were interned in detention camps.
In a piece entitled Election Handbills of a Spanish Civil War Veteran by Kaarina Mikalson (an attachment to the Wikipedia article "William Kardash" article), Mikalson noted:
"According to the Columbus Centre, Kananaskis Internment Camp #130 was built in 1939 as a work camp for “enemy aliens.” Prisoners included German merchant marines, German Canadians, Italian Canadians, and Canadians belonging to the Communist Party. The War Measures Act allowed the Canadian Government to classify 31,000 Italian Canadians as enemy aliens, and 600 of these citizens were interned for the majority of the war (Pier 21). Forty-eight Italian Canadians were interned at Camp Kananaskis, but in 1941 they were all released or moved to Petawawa Internment Camp #33 in northern Ontario. German Prisoners of War took their place at Camp Kananaskis."
Kardash campaigned for the release of the interned members of the Communist Party. With the Soviet Union coming into the war in 1941, the attitude of the Communist party to the war, and the Canadian government's attitude to the Soviet Union, shifted 180 degrees. So after the 1941 change the way opened for the release of the interned Communist Party leaders. That many of them were not released until 1942 showed that it was not apprehension of their attitude to the war but instead government and Big Business apprehension of the Communists' effectiveness at labour and grassroots organizing that caused their internment.
(Note that both the Communist party an the Canadian government had pivoted their views of Germany and of Communist Russia from 1936 to 1942. The government, along with other powers, had pretty much given Hitler free hand in Spain. Canada had discouraged its citizens from fighting to defend the democratically elected government of Spain in 1937, while Communists were active in the Mackenzie-Papineau battalions of foreign volunteers fighting against the fascist rebels led by General Franco. Then in 1939 both had shifted their positions. The Government, being newly anti-German (if still not truly anti-fascist) had declared war on Germany. The Communist, echoing the sentiment of Soviet Union to avoid conflict with Germany, went soft on the war. Then in 1941, with the Soviet Union invaded and in the war, the Communist Party was all-out for war, and the Canadian Liberal government then was happy to be seen in the company of Communists. The Party's ties with ethnic communities gave it influence when the war effort (formerly dominated by xenophobic True-Blue-Conservative British-Canadian stuffed shirt types) needed spies and organizers to drop into Occupied Europe.
The "Canada and the Spanish Civil War" website has reproductions of three pieces of Kardash's 1941 election campaign literature:
"Elect a True Champion of People's Democracy.. Restore Democratic Rights..Tax profits, not wages.. For workers' representation, not sell-out and coalition" (four-page pamphlet),
"Who is Kardash?" (four-page pamphlet); and
"Mothers and Wives of Winnipeg" (3-page pamphlet).
("Canada and the Spanish Civil War" website has reproductions of these documents.)
Kardash was re-elected in 1945. He ran under the banner of the Labour Progressive Party (cover name for the Communist Party). In 1949 and 1953, he was re-elected in the new four-member district of Winnipeg North.
When Manitoba elections were switched to First Past The Post in 1955, Kardash did not retain his seat. Fellow Communist MLA Joe Zuken did represent that thought in the Legislature until 1982.
(I'll probably add more to this blog later.)
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