Arthur Puttee

Arthur W. Puttee (August 25, 1868 – October 21, 1957) was a British-Canadian printer and politician. Puttee was the first

Labour Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of Canada

, sitting as Winnipeg MP from 1900 to 1904.

Puttee was a printer by training. Born in

Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1891. He helped found the local trade union council, the Winnipeg Labour Party (WLP) and a left-wing newspaper called The Voice, which he edited from 1899 until 1918.^[1] He was also a founding member of Winnipeg's first English-language Unitarian

Church.

When Winnipeg's

seat in a by-election

(which was finally held on January 25, 1900). The trade union council agreed, and with resources promised from local unions, selected Puttee to be its candidate, to run against Liberal E.D. Martin.

Puttee's campaign benefitted from a serious division in the local Liberal ranks. Martin had been nominated by a minority faction in the party rebelling against

Conservative

candidate in the race; the Conservative organization in the city supported Martin.

Puttee ran on a platform promoting public ownership of "all natural monopolies" and other reformist measures. The basic issue of the campaign was whether labour had a right to have its own representatives in parliament.

In a narrow two-way contest, Puttee prevailed by a margin of eight votes (2431 to 2423). Puttee ran for re-election later that year in the 1900 election and won by a margin of 1,200 votes. Puttee again received unofficial Liberal support against Martin, who ran as an independent with Conservative support.

Puttee remained in Parliament until the 1904 election, when he was defeated. There were several reasons for this setback.

As an MP, Puttee came into contact with

Socialist Party of Manitoba

, which had a much more radical program than Puttee's broad-based WLP.

A second reason for Puttee's defeat was the loss of Liberal support, as the Sifton loyalists succeeded in nominating their candidate, D. W. Bole. The

Conservatives ran William Sanford Evans, later a leader of the provincial Conservative Party

.

The Liberals made strenuous efforts to appeal to the working class through the dispensation of patronage among leading trade unionists, and by attacking the trade union council as being radical and uninterested in the needs of ordinary workers. Puttee was painted as a dangerous "revolutionist" backed by "assassins". Bole won the election; Puttee finished in third place.

Out of office, Puttee returned to his newspaper and continued to agitate for independent working-class politics. He became chairman of a new party, the

Independent Labour Party, based on the British model. This ILP proved to be short-lived, collapsing in an internal feud after some of its members attempted to define the party as "socialist

".

In 1910, Puttee endorsed

Dominion Labour Party

, which was intended to consolidate labourist activities in various cities throughout the country.

Ultimately, Puttee's conservatism sidelined him as the labour movement came under the influence of

socialist ideas. He opposed labour militancy and the Industrial Workers of the World

in particular. In 1918, the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council withdrew its patronage of the Voice due to the paper's moderate tone, and began publishing a new weekly, the Western Labour News, effectively ending Puttee's influence over the labour movement.

By the time of the

Independent Labour Party

. The DLP ceased to be an effective organization after this time.

Puttee ran for the Manitoba legislature in the

Single transferable voting