10) MAURICE RUSH MARKS 100TH BIRTHDAY

    One of the most significant leaders in the Communist Party of Canada’s history, comrade Maurice Rush reaches his 100th birthday on December 4th. Born in 1915 in Toronto, Maurice was one of nine children in a Jewish family which had escaped from Czarist oppression in Poland.

    The Rush family moved to Los Angeles in 1923, and then to Vancouver the following year. He attended his first Communist public meeting at the age of 14, and left school soon after to find work. Seeking better opportunities, the family moved to Kamloops in 1930, but economic conditions became worse as the Depression deepened. In January 1934, he and several other activists established a Kamloops club of the Communist Party, determined to organize the unemployed and fight for social justice. Working in a local cannery, Maurice helped lead a strike for better pay and working conditions.

    By early 1935, the struggle of the Relief Camp Workers Union against Tory Prime Minister R.B. “Iron Heel” Bennett’s slave labour camps was gaining momentum. As the 19-year-old secretary of the Young Communist League club in Kamloops, Maurice was tasked with organizing billets and meals for about 70 RCWU delegates at the historic March 1935 conference which voted to take the demands of the unemployed to Vancouver. This was the origin of the On to Ottawa Trek later that spring.

    Maurice was soon a key leader of the YCL and the Communist Party in British Columbia. He was involved in the famous 1938 Vancouver post-office sit-down strike by unemployed workers, and later served as an artillery instructor in the Canadian military from 1942-1944. He fought Hitler’s fascists in Holland and Germany, where was taken prisoner in February 1945, and later liberated by British forces. Upon his return to Canada, he became the Party’s provincial organizer, and later served as the BC labour secretary, Vancouver regional organizer and the national education director. In 1960, he was appointed associate editor of the Pacific Tribune, and then became the editor in 1970. In 1977, he became the BC provincial leader, a position he held until retirement.

    Over the post-war decades, Maurice was deeply involved in labour activities, campaigns against the arms race, the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), and many other movements. He travelled overseas to various socialist countries on behalf of the Pacific Tribune and the Party, including to the USSR, the German Democratic Republic, Vietnam, and China. When a section of the leadership tried to liquidate the Party in the early 1990s, Maurice was among those who remained loyal to the Party and to its ideology of Marxism-Leninism. After the Party’s 30th Central Convention in December 1992 restored control to the membership, he became a frequent contributor to People’s Voice, which carried on the traditions of the Pacific and Canadian Tribunes. In 1995, Maurice published his political memoir We Have a Glowing Dream, and he continued his participation in the North Shore Club CPC as long as his health allowed. Today he is a resident of the Silver Harbor seniors’ centre in North Vancouver.

    On the occasion of his 100th birthday, the Central Executive Committee and BC Provincial Executive Committee of the CPC send our warmest greetings to comrade Maurice Rush and to his family. We salute Maury’s many decades of contributions to the cause of the working class, and his powerful revolutionary spirit, which have been an inspiration to new generations of Canadian Communists!

(The above article is from the December 1-31, 2015, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)