British Columbia was
full of seething susceptible elements, regarded by some of the Reds
across the border as the real centre rather than Winnipeg, of the One
Big Union idea. The mines of Alberta were dominated by swaggering
foreigners who owed no allegiance to the British or any other flag
except the Red emblem. Long ago under the influence of the clergy and
the Archbishop of Montreal, Quebec had created a Canadian Labour
movement intended to cut Canadian labour away from the American
Federation. This was a phase of the Nationalism that had its
headquarters in Quebec, but had spread in various strange guises to
other parts of the country, when none of the clergy or intellectuals
behind the movement dreamed that the One Big Union insurgent against
the A.F.L. would be the most theatrical result. Once get the O.B.U.
idea rampant in Quebec with its scores of big industries and its
thousands of poorly educated workers, and the Red movement was due to
spread faster than the United Farmers' programme had ever done.

In the propagation of the Red programme Ontario, and especially
industrial Toronto, was regarded as the buffer state. But if the
Soviet had succeeded in Winnipeg and further West, then the whole
weight of that success marching upon Ontario, with Quebec bringing up
the eastern end, would form a sort of nutcracker device from which
Ontario would have had a hard time to escape.

This was the dazzling formula propounded at a time when every nation in
the world was in a state of ferment, and when the vast loose-jointed
nation known as Canada was in a condition of instability unknown since
it became a Confederation. The apostles of the Red programme had all
the advantages of being able to sling the paint on to the canvas of the
future without caring overmuch about the drawing. Men in large numbers
everywhere seemed ready to grasp at and embrace the unusual. People
who for years had been ground down by high prices for the commonest
necessities, considered seriously the question of the "salariat"
joining forces with organizing labour under a banner that might be red.
Civilization, physically shattered by the war and hysterically
stampeded by the doctrine of self-determination of peoples--a high form
of Bolshevism--stood ready to inquire whether the theories being tried
in Russia were not, after all, right, no matter what butchery might be
perpetrated in working them out.

Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.