The disorganized rabble swept across Parliament Square and swarmed up the steps to the main entrance. The protesters forced their way past security and into the building.
The mass raced through the corridors shouting their battle cry and accompanying it with catcalls and piercing whistles.
This didn’t happen yesterday in Victoria, nor in late January in Ottawa. It doesn’t even refer to Washington, D.C., in early 2021.
It was on April 29, 1947, that about 200 kids stormed the B.C. legislature.
They accosted every adult they came across — MLAs, staffers, journalists and janitors.
“What,” the protesters demanded, “are you going to do about the cost of candy bars?”
Five days earlier, youngsters up Island woke up to find the cost of a chocolate bar had jumped as much as 60 per cent overnight.
“Chocolate bars were not worth six cents, but at eight cents we think we are being robbed,” one Chemainus teenager was reported as saying in The Daily Colonist.
Prices were rising all around at the time. The Second World War had ended two years earlier. Men who had fought in the war had returned home and taken up the jobs they’d put aside. The women who’d worked in those jobs while the guys were away were back in the kitchen.
Wage and price controls that had been put in place in Canada to ensure a continued supply of food and materials to support the war effort and the homefront were being rolled back, and regular market forces were having their way.
The result was shortages of foods and goods and inflation at levels not seen for years — something we can relate to today.
Back then, housewives throughout B.C. were gathering for rotating “butter strikes” — protests against the shortage and exorbitant cost of butter.
To kids, however, the 1947 increase in the price of chocolate bars was one step too far.
Even the U.S. president seemed to agree. When the chocolate bar boycott was first reported in The Daily Colonist, the story appearing next to it began “ ‘Halt Rising Prices, or Invite Depression…’ was the grim warning issued by United States President Truman to business, labor and farmers recently.”
The youngsters likely thought rising candy costs would indeed lead to depression.
Chemainus’s Wigwam Café was the bonbon boycott epicentre. Another protest was set up in Ladysmith.
“The buyers’ strike against eight-cent chocolate bars is in full swing,” a Daily Colonist reporter wrote from Ladysmith on April 25. “Pickets were in front of all confectioneries after school, and large banners printed by children were prominently displayed. Chocolate bar sales fell off sharply.”
The demonstrations spread. Over 10 days, protests took place in cities and communities across Canada. Five days after the B.C. legislature was stormed in Victoria, 700 kids marched down Quadra, Pandora and Douglas streets to protest candy bar prices.
Most adults saw the strike as an amusing but profound metaphor for their own struggles with the postwar economy. Generally, they supported the kids, signing petitions, helping them make signs and banners, and allowing even their three-year-olds to walk in protest parades.
Mrs. L.J. Caldwell, of the Lakeside Store at Prospect Lake, bowed to pressure and placed chocolate bars on sale at six cents each.
“I am not depriving children of candy,” she said.
A Lake Cowichan merchant returned a consignment of bars to the wholesaler when he found nobody would pay eight cents. A Chemainus shop rolled back prices to five cents — for children only and for only as long as stocks lasted.
The excitement came to an abrupt end a few days later. A Toronto newspaper with known right-wing ties ran a front-page story claiming communist groups had infiltrated the protests.
“Indignant students innocently parading with their placards demanding a five-cent candy bar have become another instrument in the communist grand strategy of ‘the creation of chaos,’ ” the article ran, citing “the most reliable source” — a source that the paper didn’t see fit to name.
In those Red-scared postwar years, the story was picked up and reported across Canada.
One organization with some members affiliated with the Communist Party was later found to have been involved in only one of the demonstrations, in Toronto, but the bizarre and unsubstantiated accusation was enough to finish the campaign.
With the candy boycott tainted “red,” parents wouldn’t let their kids take part in further protests.
The boycotts ended, and the eight-cent candy bar remained.
keiran_monique@rocketmail.com
