James Litterick

James Litterick (born 15 July 1901; date of death unknown) was a politician in Manitoba, Canada, and was the first member of the Communist Party of Canada to be elected to that province's legislature.

Biography

Early life Litterick was born on 15 July 1901, in Glasgow. He studied at Clydebrooke and Glasgow, (his father was also a lifelong socialist). He was jailed for his role in a rent riot at Clydebank in 1920, and joined the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain the same year. and initially worked as a miner in Alberta and British Columbia. In 1926, he became the district secretary of the Communist Party of British Columbia. He moved to Montreal in 1930, and became an organizer for the Workers Unity League, a Communist trade union umbrella designed to build a revolutionary trade union movement in Canada. When Communist Party leader Tim Buck was arrested in 1931, Litterick moved to Toronto to take over some of his responsibilities. Litterick subsequently was required by the party to retract this position, and to oppose the war as an imperialist venture, in light of the Soviet Union's neutrality in the conflict at the time. (Later the CPC put their support behind the war after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.)

Later life He was expelled from the Manitoba legislature in 1940, after the Communist Party was declared an illegal organization. He had already gone into hiding, apparently the subject of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police manhunt.

Information about Litterick's whereabouts after 1940 is limited. He appears in a photograph of Canada's wartime Communist Party leaders, apparently taken in Montreal in 1942. He surrendered to the RCMP in Toronto in 1942 and was interned in the Don Jail. In 1943, it was reported that he was working at a garment factory in Toronto.