Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians; Chapter 27, Part Three by Dave Jaffe

    This Man Was A Communist; Part Three


     All across Canada in the 1940's and 1950's, the iron hand of the state came down hard on left wing groups. Abe Heller got away from Canada. He became a sailor. He sailed on ships that carried goods across the Pacific Ocean to NATO forces fighting communists in the Korean War. "It was the only job I could find," Heller said later, because he didn't agree with the NATO forces being used in the Korean War. The ships which were often small boats would travel north following the Canadian coastline then turn south to get across the Pacific Ocean. "We couldn't sail straight across the Pacific," Heller points out. "We'd never have made it."
     In winter especially, huge winds blew across the Pacific. The sea seethed with massive waves and swells. Many ships went down in this dangerous environment and many people died in the Pacific. To compound the problems in the sailors' lives, many of the ships' captains were pure tyrants.
     After his stint on the Pacific Ocean, Heller came back to Canada and stayed for a while in Quebec. Yet the Quebec government of Union Nationale premier Maurice Duplessis loathed communists. His government passed the Padlock Law that allowed the authorities to padlock any residence that was occupied by communists. Often many communists and others couldn't get into their own houses.
     Once again Heller was on the move. He sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and ended up in Australia where men who'd promised to help him gave him nothing. It was on this journey that he ended up on the Horn of Africa. After leaving Australia by boat, he travelled to Britain and worked for a time in the British movie industry in Ellestree near London. Then he came back to Canada in the early 1960's. He refused to take any welfare. "There's no way I'd do that," he said. "It's too demeaning."
    For the next 40 years Heller lived and worked in and around Vancouver. He worked as a sailor going up and down the Pacific Coast and then got a job in a power plant. He remained a devoted communist and joined rent strikes, anti-war protests and progressive political rallies. He got a Bachelor of Arts degree but failed to get an M.A. in political science, perhaps because his efforts were sabotaged by an unsympathetic professor.
      In the early 1990's disaster struck the communist parties all over the world. Mikhail Gorbachev took over the leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1980's and ruled the union for a short time. Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Union but he failed. As a result, the union split into 15 separate countries and the formerly communist ruled lands of Eastern Europe threw off their communist rulers and allied themselves to the western NATO countries. It seemed that communism was history. Yet Heller stayed with a now very shrunken Canadian  communist party. He did not give up his politics.