09) DORISE NIELSEN: CANADA'S FIRST COMMUNIST MP

By Kimball Cariou

     A few years ago, one of Canada's pioneering radical women received long-overdue attention with the publication of Faith Johnston's biography, A Great Restlessness: The Life and Politics of Dorise Nielsen.

     Born in 1902, Dorise Nielsen emigrated in 1927 from Britain to the Meadow Lake area of northern Saskatchewan, where she married a homesteader and worked as a teacher. She eventually became immersed in the life of the community, and her progressive outlook became more radical during the Depression. Moving leftward, she joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1937, while continuing to work closely with the CCF which she had initially joined in 1934.

     Nielsen and other Communists and left-wing CCF members in Saskatchewan put the "popular front" concept into action, campaigning together for a wide range of progressive policies, from higher wheat prices to social programs for the rural population. This unity met with disapproval from the CCF leadership; the Meadow Lake CCF riding association was dissolved in 1939 because of its support for a popular front with the Communists.

     Despite this opposition, Communists and CCF members continued to cooperate, and Nielsen was elected to Parliament from North Battleford in March 1940, as a "United Progressive" candidate. She was just the third Canadian woman elected to Parliament, and the first to hold office while still raising young children.

     Nielsen arrived in Ottawa during a period of political repression, made more difficult by the complications of arranging for the care of three children. The Communist Party was banned in June 1940, and the Liberal government correctly suspected that she was a "Red." Maintaining contact with Montreal‑based leaders of the Communist Party who had escaped internment, Nielsen became a popular advocate for the party's views through her speeches in the House of Commons. She was widely known as a militant voice for women's equality and the interests of poor farm families.

     When the Labour Progressive Party was formed as a legal party in 1943 by the Communists, Nielsen declared her affiliation with the LPP and was elected to its national executive. She was joined in the Commons by Fred Rose, elected as an LPP candidate in a byelection in the riding of Montreal-Cartier. (Rose defeated David Lewis, for the CCF leadership never forgave the Communists.)

     Nielsen ran for re-election in 1945, but placed third with 13% of the vote. She went to work for the LPP, drawing large crowds across Canada as a speaker on the issues which she had championed as an MP. As Faith Johnston says, "she was a dazzling, charismatic speaker, and no one who heard her speak ever forgot." However, the rising Cold War attacks against Communists had a sharply negative impact on the LPP, which declined from its post-war peak of some 20,000 members.

     In 1957, Nielsen left Canada for the People's Republic of China, where she lived until her death in 1980, working as an editor for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing.

(The above article is from the March 1-15, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist 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.)