Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 36, Part One. A True Believer.

    A True Believer. Chapter 36, Part One by Dave Jaffe


     Many years later, as he was dying of cancer, Matt Dodge recalled his childhood days. When spring came along, he'd sit in a small chair in his mother's back garden. In this small garden of  a compact house in Vancouver's Kitsilano district, his mother had planted roses, laurel bushes and flowers. There was also a small apple tree that the young Matt Hodge liked to sit below. Here, he'd listen to the twittering of birds and gaze upwards to ther tree's big white blossoms that flowered in the spring.
     One spring day in 2014, Hodge hobbled slowly  into the back garden. The apple tree was still there though it had grown a lot in the last sixty years. Hodge had had it trimmed many times. Hodge's mother Hazel was long gone.
  Soon, Hodge realized he'd be gone too. Liver cancer was pushing him to his death at the age of 67. "I miss my mother," Hodge told his partner Caroline. "She joined me up in the N.D.P. you know." Caroline knew this quite well for Hodge had told her this fact several times before."
       In fact, Matt's mother Hazel had enlisted her son in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or the C.C.F. as it was called when Matt was only 13. Later he spent over 50 years in the C.C.F.'s successor, the New Democratic Party. "You were an orange diaper baby," a man he met in the N.D.P. in the 1970's joked with Matt. "I didn't wear orange coloured diapers," Matt replied. "But I could have." Orange was the official colour of the N.D.P. It was as if nature was following or showing off Matt's politics because his hair was an orangy red colour when he was young.
      A single mother, Hazel watched her son and only child, grow up into a big muscular man. Matt went to the University of British Columbia where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the social sciences.
He then worked for a while in a rice factory hauling 50 pound rice sacks around. Then he found a job as a postman and ended up walking a postal route not far from where he lived. This was his lifetime job.
   Yet Hodge also walked the political path too. He became friends with activists and politicians in the New Democratic Party. He first canvassed for the N.D.P. in the 1963 provincial election that was won yet again by the Social Credit Party and its beaming leader William Andrew Cecil Bennett, or "Wacky" as he was called. Hodge favoured Tom Berger the lawyer and leader of the N.D.P. in the late 1960's. Hodge was heartbroken when Berger led the N.D.P. to yet another trouncing by W.A.C. Bennett in the 1969 B.C. election. He was also dismayed when the cheerful social worker Dave Barrett took over as leader of the N.D.P. when Tom Berger stepped down from politics.
    "Back in those days," one former New Democrat recalls, "there were two main groups in The N.D.P." One group, this lady said, were followers of Tom Berger. After Berger retired from politics, Berger's supporters swung towards Dennis Cocke, the intense Member of the Legislature from New Westminster and his wife Yvonne Cocke. This group, the lady points out, was called "The Cocke Machine". The other group in the N.D.P. were staunch supporters of Dave Barrett.
     "These two groups didn't like each other, period," the woman said. "Still, they worked together to keep the N.D.P. as a strong opposition party and both sides buried their feelings towards the other group when they faced the public or the Social Credit government."