When John Allan Sullivan, 53, president of the Red-led Canadian Seamen's Union, was bedded by a heart attack a few months ago, he had some time to think about his politics and his job. What he thought made him so mad that last week "Pat" Sullivan walked right out of the C.S.U. and slammed the door. The slam was heard all over Canada.
Sullivan, who is also secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Trades & Labor Congress, had nothing against unions. What angered Sullivan, Irish-born and onetime Roman Catholic, were the Communists in the unions. This was an eye-opener because Sullivan had long been a party-liner and, everybody felt pretty sure, a party member. In his roar of rage, Sullivan confirmed these suspicions. He said he had joined the Communist Party two years after he began organizing the C.S.U. in 1935. He led C.S.U. in its first successful strike in 1938, built up membership to about 5,000 in Great Lakes, river and coastal ports.
Sullivan announced that he was quitting the union, the party and the Canadian Trades & Labor Congress. While he was abed he had reached the same conclusion shared by anti-Communist unionists, that "the interests of organized labor are being subverted by the agents of Communism to their own ends. ... I am now convinced that in the interests of Canada . . . their activities should be exposed."
Pat Sullivan was tattling at this late date because he had finally come to "realize what a wonderful country" Canada is. Communists began to join the Canadian Seamen's Union, he said, soon after it was born. Some of them, he said, came from the U.S., and were not seamen at all. Before long, "it became the policy to make sure that any [new union employee] was either a party man or at least sympathetic. ... In the national office, the Communist Party, of course, has taken full control." When Sullivan at first protested, he was told that "Communist Party discipline does not allow for individual thought, and party orders must be obeyed."
Hope & Hiding. Now, said Sullivan, "Things have gone from bad to worse . . . every month new people are being placed on the [union] payroll without consulting anyone." Communists ostensibly on union work are really on party work. Organizers are running all over Canada, and the seamen are "footing the bills."
The 1943 Montreal police strike, said Sullivan, was "secretly financed by the Communist Party, [which] furnished $9,000." In the current Cartier by-election campaign in Montreal (to select a Member of Parliament to succeed Communist and traitor Fred Rose), "all available forces of the C.S.U. in Montreal are being thrown" behind the Communist candidate.
Nor is Communist activity confined to the Seamen's Union alone, Sullivan charged. "The same [applies to] quite a large number of unions throughout the country. . . . One does not know whom to trust. The Communist Party has many secret agents in different places, including the Government service."