Effie Jones almost pulled off an upset by fighting against B.C. Electric
Peter McAllister never got elected to civic office. But it wasn’t for lack of trying — he ran for Vancouver mayor twice, and for council four times.
His first run for mayor was in 1947, and featured a daring proposal: to ban “gas-driven autos” off Vancouver streets.
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“Under the McAllister plan, all gas-driven autos would be required to detach their gas tanks when they entered the city,” The Province reported on Dec. 4, 1947. “The tank would be placed in a rack and could not be put back on the car until the auto left town.”
But the proposal was scant on details.
“Mr. McAllister was loath to explain how cars would operate without gas tanks,” said the Province. “Detailed explanation of too many things ‘might cost me votes,’ he remarked.”
McAllister also wanted to eliminate Vancouver’s “motorized fire department” and have firemen walk the beat like policemen, “ready to jump into a burning building as soon as a fire started.”
His most radical proposal was to “divert part of the Fraser River down Commercial Drive and possibly run gondolas down a man-made canal.”
His daring proposals didn’t go down too well with the masses. He finished third out of three candidates, with a mere 1,456 votes to the 24,135 notched by the winner, the Non-Partisan Association’s Charles Jones.
The surprise of the election, though, was the strong showing by Mrs. Effie Jones, a retired teacher who got 19,218 votes. This was only 5,000 less than the candidate of the powerful NPA, the party that insisted it wasn’t a party.
Her strong showing was over public anger over a raise in streetcar fares from seven to 10 cents. She argued to keep it at seven, hence her nickname, Effie “Low Fare” Jones.
At the time Vancouver’s streetcar system was run by B.C. Electric, a private company. B.C. Electric’s streetcar operators went out on strike Oct. 20, 1947, and the head of B.C. Electric, Dal Grauer, announced if the company caved to the union demands it would have to raise.
The Street Railwayman’s union said B.C. Electric had forced the strike so that it could claim economic hardship in order to raise fares. It went out a 29 day strike before accepting a 15 cent an hour pay increase.
Effie Jones was originally going to run for Vancouver council, but decided to run for mayor over the fare issue. On Dec. 8, 1947 Sun columnist Jack Scott visited her headquarters, which was run out of “bleak second-storey offices, just a stone’s throw from the main buildings of the B.C. Electric Co.”
“The headquarters is unlike any I ever saw before,” wrote Scott.
“In place of the usual portly, cigar-chewing gentlemen who populate politicians’ lairs, Effie’s home base is peopled with motherly looking ladies busily answering phones and dashing about, rose-cheeked and with their hair in slight disarray, for all the world as if they were in the midst of a heavy Monday washing.
“‘Goodness gracious,’ one of these ladies cried with delight when I introduced myself. ‘We are just as busy as one-armed coat hangers.’”
But Effie Jones was no political rookie: she’d been active in left wing circles for years, and run for civic office several times. Scott first met her when he’d covered a sit-down strike at the Post Office in 1938.
Her political foes accused her of being a member of the Labour Progressive Party, which Canadian Communists had founded when the Communist Party was outlawed during the Second World War.
Her other platforms included low-rent housing, a graduated business tax “to relieve small businesses of unfair, high licenses” and a “plan to build our city” with new bridges, community centres and “sewer extension to provide standard sanitation to every neighbourhood.”
When she was defeated she vowed to run again, and did in the 1948 election. But she was routed by another NPA candidate, Charles Thompson, and gave up trying to become mayor.
Thompson became the NPA candidate after Charles Jones died on Sept. 1, 1948. He was the second Vancouver mayor in a row to die in office — Gerry McGee had died on Aug. 11, 1947.
Peter McAllister ran for mayor in 1948 as well, but lost. One of his platforms was “providing the city with more slaughterhouses, so there will never be a meat shortage.”
jmackie@postmedia.com
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