“Quietly Communist” Harry Rankin

Quietly Communist

Photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward gives a quick summary of his assignment to photograph Harry Rankin:

“In September 1987 Alderman Rankin was running for mayor against Gordon Campbell. Equity Magazine’sEditor, Harvey Southam, thought Campbell the better man to keep the status quo so he hired right-wing columnist and writer Doug Collins to write a profile. I was dispatched with the instructions to use my green filter, b+w technique on Rankin. I told Rankin that the green filter was going to make him look older. His retort, “Go ahead shoot, I don’t give a f….”. When the magazine appeared in October I was amazed to see my two-page spread with the huge banner, Quietly Communist on top.”

Harry Rankin Obit by Doug Ward

Source: Vancouver Sun. Monday, March 11, 2002, Page B3.

Rankin service honours
‘working class hero’

More than 1,000 gather to remember Harry Rankin’s character and contributions

By Doug Ward

Only Harry Rankin could get a crowd of more than 1.000 people — including a former B.C. Supreme Court chief justice, some of Vancouver’s top trial lawyers, labour leaders, octoge­narian ex-Seaforth Highlanders. Communists and ex-Commu­nists, poverty and peace activists — to stand for a rousing version of the Internationale.

The great socialist anthem was sung by a choir at a memorial service Sunday for Rankin, the veteran lawyer who served as a city councillor for 24 years, and passed away Feb. 26 at age 81. Rankin died of cardiac arrest while recovering from quintuple heart bypass surgery.

Rankin was described by those who paid tribute to him at the Croatian Hall as a loving if cur­mudgeonly grandfather, a quixot­ic trial lawyer more interested in justice than his fee, a fallen com­rade, a socialist people’s champi­on, a tireless tribune of Vancou­ver’s East Side, a working class hero, and as someone who intro­duced new swear words into the English language. On display in the back of the

[Text missing]

“That was the moral compass that guided Harry before dawn in the morning, when he jogged, till after sunset in the evening at the late public hearings at city council.”

John Fitzpatrick, of the Vancou­ver and District Labor Council, told the memorial that without Rankin Vancouver would be a city “without a social conscience, a city without affordable housing, a city without employment equity … a city without a Gastown or a Downtown Eastside.”

Elspeth Gardner, a longtime friend, said that Rankin’s political activism went well beyond city hall. Rankin believed that social­ism must replace capitalism, said Gardner, and he counted among his friends “many socialists and Communists.” She recalled how Rankin was grilled by the Law Society over his political views after graduating from law school.

Libby Davies, NDP MP for Vancouver East and former city councillor, recalled meeting reg­ularly with Rankin decades ago at a downtown cafe for breakfast at 6:30 am. “Harry would go into the kitchen and tell the cook how to make the porridge because it had to be done just right. And then he’d eat it in one gulp.”

Davies suggested that city hall name part of the Stanley Park Seawall after Rankin — fitting legacy considering the thousands of times he walked its course.

Eleven members of the Seaforth Highlanders, who fought alongside Rankin in the Italian campaign during the Sec­ond World War, came to the memorial service.

[Text missing.]
 

Source: CanadaFreePress.com, November 18, 2002.

Communists reclaim municipal
government in Vancouver

In the dying days of last week’s Vancouver municipal election campaign, the Nonpartisan Association (NPA) unleashed a series of negative ads against the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE). In their 11^th-hour ad campaign, NPA members tried to link COPE to the former provincial NDP.

What a joke! For as bad as the British Columbia NDP is, it is not communist, and communism is what COPE is all about.

The landslide victory of Mayor Larry Campbell and his party, which all but wiped out NPA on council, is a throwback for democracy.

COPE won eight of 10 city council seats and also swept the park and school boards.

When COPE — originally known as Committee of Progressive Electors — was in its heyday in the early ’80s, a huge public outcry, led by a Jewish rabbi, forced the news media to identify COPE for what is was, Communist.

Up until the public outcry, major media outlets referred to the group as left of centre.

In describing the COPE victory on the Globe & Mail’s Internet site on Sunday, reporter Jane Armstrong describes the party as “a left-of-centre party that has been shut out of power at city hall since its inception in the 1960s”.

No mention from Ms. Armstrong that Committee of Progressive Electors is now Coalition of Progressive Electors.

No mention of COPE’s romp through the polls in the 1980s, or of its association with Toronto Councillor Jack Layton.

The re-emergence of COPE as a victor did not come without a touch of irony. Harry Rankin, COPE’s founder died last Tuesday, following heart surgery, at age 81.

Rankin, who signed up with the Seaforth Highlanders in World War II, took advantage of a federal program for war vets and attended the University of British Columbia at the end of the war.

“That,” according to Allen Garr of the Vancouver Courier, “is where he joined the Communist Club and entered law.

Says Garr: “When he (Rankin) started running for city council, the province and the city were run by white guys of mostly British ancestry. The Socreds under W.A.C. Bennett were in Victoria and their soulmates, the Non-Partisan Association, represented by West side aldermen, ran the city for the benefit of the developers.”

Rankin ran 11 times before he won in 1967. His intervention in Vancouver politics ultimately led to the creation of what is now the Police Complaints Commission.

Campbell, who entered a COPE-backed race, vowed to help the drug addicts of Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside. A plank of his campaign was a promise to set up so-called safe injection sites where addicts can shoot up in a clean, supervised setting.

The resurrection in Vancouver is not the Communists’ only Canadian success story. Three avowed communist members are currently represented on the Toronto District School Board.