Margarette Rae Morrison Luckock
On May 22, 2026, a provincial plaque was unveiled at the Arthur and Area Community Centre, in Arthur. The plaque was then permanently installed on the northwest corner of George Street (Highway 6) and Francis Street.
The bilingual plaque reads as follows:
MARGARETTE RAE MORRISON LUCKOCK 1893-1972
Raised in Arthur, Margarette Rae Morrison Luckock had a radical vision of a better society, advocating for women’s equality, improved education, workers’ rights and disarmament. She persistently ran for school trustee in Toronto five times before succeeding in 1943. That same year, Luckock became one of the first two women elected to the Ontario legislature, serving as a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation member of provincial parliament for Toronto’s Bracondale riding from 1943-45. She called for universally accessible education and improved rural education. Women, Luckock urged, deserved equal pay for equal work, and she fought for women to stay in the postwar workforce. She advocated for daycare for working mothers, and that women’s essential work as mothers and homemakers deserved greater recognition. After the Second World War, as the Housewives Consumers Association’s co-founder, Luckock led a campaign for price controls to ensure the economic security of working-class families. During the 1950s, as president of the Congress of Canadian Women, she became a champion of disarmament and peace. As fear of communism during the Cold War intensified, Luckock received opposition and criticism for her work. Her efforts to create a more egalitarian, fair and compassionate society paved the way for generations to continue breaking barriers and forged a path for a brighter future of equality and progress in Canadian politics.
MARGARETTE RAE MORRISON LUCKOCK 1893-1972
Élevée à Arthur, Margarette Rae Morrison Luckock cultive une vision radicale d’une société meilleure, prônant l’égalité des femmes, l’amélioration de l’éducation, les droits des travailleurs et le désarmement. Elle fait preuve de persévérance en se présentant comme conseillère scolaire à Toronto à cinq reprises avant de décrocher le poste en 1943. La même année, elle devient l’une des deux premières femmes élues à l’Assemblée législative de l’Ontario, où elle siège comme députée sous la bannière de la Fédération du Commonwealth coopératif pour la circonscription de Bracondale, à Toronto, de 1943 à 1945. Elle promeut l’éducation accessible à tous et l’amélioration de l’éducation en milieu rural. Elle milite pour l’égalité des femmes en défendant le principe du salaire égal pour un travail égal et le droit des femmes à rester sur le marché du travail après la fin de la guerre. Elle plaide en faveur des garderies pour les mères qui travaillent et d’une reconnaissance accrue du rôle essentiel des femmes en tant que mères et femmes au foyer. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, à titre de cofondatrice de la Housewives Consumers Association, elle mène une campagne pour le contrôle des prix afin d’assurer la sécurité économique des familles de la classe ouvrière. Dans les années 1950, en qualité de présidente du Congress of Canadian Women, elle milite en faveur du désarmement et de la paix. Alors que la peur du communisme s’intensifie pendant la guerre froide, son travail fait l’objet d’opposition et de critique. Les efforts qu’elle déploie pour créer une société plus égalitaire, juste et bienveillante aident les générations suivantes à continuer d’éliminer les obstacles et tracent la voie vers un avenir plus radieux, axé sur l’égalité et le progrès dans la politique canadienne.
Historical background
Overview
Margarette Rae Morrison Luckock (1893-1972) was raised on a farm in Wellington County, Peel Township, near Arthur. She was the daughter of Margaret (nee Blyth) and James (J.J.) Morrison. Her father James was the son of an Irish newcomer who cleared land settled by immigrants, most from the British Isles. Before the treaties and land agreements, the land had been occupied by Indigenous peoples. J.J. took over the family farm in 1900, after attending business college and working as a foreman at a factory in Toronto. Married in 1888, Margaret and J.J. had four children in Toronto and five more after returning to Arthur.1
J.J. Morrison was a formidable influence on his family and community through his public service and advocacy for farmers, particularly his involvement in the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO), founded in 1914. An influential orator and organizer, Morrison was credited with the early success of the UFO,2 and after their election victory in 1919, was offered the premiership, though he declined in favour of E.C. Drury. He continued to wield considerable political influence as Secretary-Treasurer of the UFO and the United Farmers' Co-operative Company, even after the UFO’s electoral defeat in 1923.
Although another daughter worked as J.J. Morrison’s secretary, his political influence on his daughter Margarette Rae Morrison, who went simply by Rae, was one of personal example, character and predisposition, rather than specific issues. Rae’s political reputation grew out of urban left-wing politics, though rural women’s organizations existed, aiding the UFO and other farm organizations.3 Rae embraced her parents’ commitment to temperance and maintained an interest in rural affairs. In the 1940s, she called for better rural education and urged farmers and labour to "co-operate" to oppose their common foe — middlemen and profiteers.4 She did not share J.J. Morrison’s focus, however, on farmer government. She would have embraced Drury’s different strategy of "broadening out"5 the UFO, making common cause with labour.
Nonetheless, Rae imbibed lessons from her early years. The Morrisons did not have the resources to send Rae to high school, though they highly valued education. She knew the sacrifice that politics entailed — she remembered working "overtime, milking the cows and doing the chores" to free up her father for political work, as well as the meetings and correspondence that built the UFO that was "[organized] from our kitchen."6 She spoke of her political work as public service. Her stalwart commitment to principles that she believed to be right, in the face of opposition, also suggested the influence of J.J. Morrison.
The Depression and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF)
On June 10, 1914, Rae married Richard Luckock, a British immigrant and tool and die maker. She continued to help with the farm but soon moved to Toronto to Richard’s house on Crawford Street. Three children — Warren, Keith and Fern — followed within six years. In the 1920s, Rae worked for Simpsons as a millinery designer and seamstress while Richard had a small engraving business.
The family’s precarious economic security evaporated during the Depression. Rae lost her employment, Richard’s business dried up, and they were once forced to apply for welfare, or "relief." They made do with his intermittent work and by cashing in an earlier investment, but the effect of the Depression on working-class Canadians like the Luckocks was profound. They saw the economic system failing and unemployment skyrocketing, and relief was often dispensed with a heavy dose of condescension, shame and surveillance. Rae also suffered a devastating personal tragedy as her youngest daughter, Fern, caught polio, resulting in a disability that affected her ability to walk. Scarlet fever, a kidney condition, and eventually pneumonia claimed Fern’s life at age 12. The loss weighed heavily on the family in the context of stresses of the Depression.7
When she was elected to the legislature years later, Rae credited her decision to join the newly formed CCF in 1932 to her experience teaching Sunday school at the Baptist Church, especially the influence of "New Testament" teachings.8 Although it is common for politicians to explain their politics with a singular event, it is more likely that Rae joined the political fray for multiple reasons: her family background, experiencing the Depression and the appeal of the CCF — a new and exciting socialist experiment, with a "heterogeneous"9 membership and ideals.
Regional socialist, labour and farmers’ movements already existed, but the creation of the federal CCF in 1933 inaugurated a new socialist possibility, precisely when many disaffected Canadians felt that "the capitalist system was simply crumbling before us."10 While the original CCF was later misinterpreted by historians as solely a social democratic, reformist alternative to the revolutionary Communists,11 the "labour socialists" at its core often had working-class roots, organizing experience, and a thorough-going, radical critique of capitalism, believing that collective needs must trump private property and liberal individualism. Its members were influenced, variously, by "Marxism, British Fabianism, labourism, ethical or Christian socialism, and theosophy."12 This amalgam of radical ideas appealed to the Luckocks. Rae and Richard Luckock took their enthusiasm for the CCF on the road. Rae and Richard accompanied Lorna Cotton-Thomas, a prominent CCFer, on a speaking tour of Northern Ontario to drum up support for the party.
In Ontario, the CCF was initially an uneasy organizational alliance of the UFO (which left after a year), labour and socialist parties and movements, and CCF clubs. There was bound to be contention. A major conflict in Toronto in 1936 over whether CCF members should participate in a May Day parade that included Communists resulted in rebel members from Toronto CCF Women’s Joint Committee being disciplined or expelled. The prominence of these women in the party suggested another reason Rae was drawn to the CCF.13
Admittedly, the CCF reflected the prevailing sexism of the time: women’s equality was not a key concern, and they were often relegated to fundraising auxiliaries or to "secondary" domestic and maternal issues.14 In comparison to other mainline parties, however, it offered a more welcoming space for women and sometimes a veneer of concern with women’s equality.
Rae Luckock was undoubtedly influenced by outspoken CCF women. Rose Henderson, a prominent critic of imperialism, militarism and capitalism, was a school trustee in Rae’s neighbourhood.15 After Rose Henderson’s death in 1937, Rae ran to replace her in Ward 5. Rae initially concentrated her electoral hopes on the school board. She ran five times before succeeding in 1943. Her interest in education fit with a long tradition, since the 19th century, of suffragist and socialist women’s activism. They focused on local politics and often made the case that education touched on women’s responsibility for children and the family. Socialist women added their criticisms of a system that perpetuated class inequality and discrimination, paid women teachers less, and promoted jingoism and militarism.
Representing Bracondale
The 1943 Ontario election was a watershed in CCF history. George Drew’s Conservatives won the election, but, for the first time, the CCF formed the official opposition with 34 (up from 0) members. Rae’s election in Bracondale — a riding that ran in a north-south strip, west of the city’s core, with a substantial working-class electorate — can be attributed to her years of local political involvement, but also to the unusual context. CCFers were swept into the legislature on a wave of political discontent and hope for a different future.
Across the country, CCF membership was growing, with polls indicating that they were more popular than the Liberals or Conservatives. The CCF slogan, "conscript wealth," reflected many voters’ suspicions that wartime profits were soaring for a few, while working people were making the most sacrifices. Working-class voters did not want to return to Depression conditions, and the union movement was gaining strength. The Ontario CCF’s commitment to wealth redistribution, equality and the "social ownership" of all resources appealed.16
Rae Luckock was celebrated as one of the first two women elected to the legislature. An often-told story involved the other woman, Agnes Macphail. In order to give Agnes Macphail a "double first" as the first female MP and first Ontario MPP, Rae Luckock was asked by the party to be sworn in after Agnes Macphail (foregoing the usual alphabetical order). Rae agreed, but her generosity was not reciprocated by Macphail, who was openly dismissive of Rae.17
For women politicians in general, isolation, dismissiveness and sexism were part of the job. Welcoming Luckock to the legislature, Liberal Harry Nixon linked her politics to her father, and recounted Morrison’s role in encouraging him to run for office in 1919.18 Interviewed by the Toronto Daily Star, Luckock felt obliged to reassure the public that her husband would not be "washing the dishes." She would be doing "both jobs" of homemaking and politics.19 The press routinely trivialized women politicians, writing about their clothing rather than their ideas. The Globe and Mail mused on the need for "powder rooms, tastefully decorated," for Luckock and Macphail,20 while fellow MPPs consigned them socially to the luncheon for MPPs’ wives.21
Rae Luckock voiced her idealistic hope that the CCF would usher in a "new dawn" with "people … given a just share of the worlds goods in return for their toil."22 In the legislature, her interventions reaffirmed the CCF’s ethical and labour socialism. The working classes, she stressed, needed justice, dignity and security. Discussing a constituent who was injured at work but could not get workmen’s compensation, she called for a more compassionate society: "I think human beings are much more important than money … money is not nearly as valuable as the work people do … and [we] must look after one another."23
Luckock favoured measures that were ahead of her time, including environmental protection through reforestation, lowering the voting age, and free university education for all; she also denounced ethnic and racial discrimination.24 As education critic, she offered a transformative blueprint for provincial education, including free education at all levels, "so the best minds can be developed," smaller classes, better science and physical education equipment, routinely replaced textbooks (chosen by teachers, not by politicians and publishers), decent and spacious buildings, and outside play space.25 She lamented the state of rural education, with teens forced to leave home to go to regional high schools. Moreover, education did not exist in a vacuum; it would never be equalized until the low wages of parents, lack of clothing and inadequate health care were also addressed. After the war, she called for noon meals for school children in working-class neighbourhoods and daycare for working mothers.26
In the legislature, Luckock also addressed women’s role in postwar Canada, stressing their vital labour both outside and inside the home. Luckock emphasized the "complementary" roles of men and women but also pointed out that "women have been citizens in a world controlled by men made laws." She urged men to "sacrifice" some of their "inordinate" power to create a truly "democratic" society. Women had proven their "equal brain power," their ability to do all jobs, and some would want and need paid employment after the war.
Homemakers needed economic security too, including laws giving them a share of family income after expenses were paid. Luckock intimated that some mothers might chafe at full-time homemaking, a "solitary, boring repetitive and exhausting existence." Still, women should be valued for their "special function." "Maternity, rearing children, care of the home" had to be recognized as work "of inestimable value to the nation."27
Consumer and left-wing activism
Although there were two conservative candidates splitting the vote in Bracondale in the 1945 election, Rae Luckock was defeated. The CCF vote in general collapsed; the party was reduced to eight members. Despite some acknowledged mistakes in their campaign, a key factor was a massive, co-ordinated, well-funded, anti-CCF operation, involving disinformation and manipulated news, far exceeding previous anti-socialist efforts. Constructed by wealthy, right-wing activists and business groups, aided by the mainstream media and some religious leaders, the anti-CCF operation28 status quo, ironically, the party was locked in a fierce battle with the communist LPP.
Rae Luckock shifted her focus back to the Housewives Consumers Association (HCA), which she had joined in the late 1930s. She served briefly as the Toronto president in 1943-44 and, in 1948, became national president. The federal Wartime Prices and Trade Board announced in 1946 that price controls were ending, though the majority of Canadians favoured their extension. While some HCAs existed before the war, postwar inflationary pressures led to their revitalization and expansion. Price increases on staples such as milk, bread, meat and heating were outpacing wages, which was only exacerbated by a housing crisis. The Toronto HCA attempted to build a grassroots movement, using petitions on street corners, local conferences, demonstrations, targeted buyers’ strikes and lobbies for government food subsidies and controls.
Much of the HCA focus was on federal price controls. Rae Luckock spoke on radio and to the newspapers, describing the issue with clarity, precise examples, humour and a dose of moral outrage. Luckock combined two key messages — first, that profits for corporate Canada were increasing, while working-class households were hurting, and second, that homemakers tasked with shopping, budgeting and cooking needed to take up this29 political cause since it impacted their important work of family care.30
The HCA’s success in publicizing the issue increased government surveillance of the organization. In 1948, Rae Luckock led a large protest to Ottawa, "The March of a Million Names," with over 700,000 signatures on a petition. If the HCA hoped that emphasis on their domestic roles would shield them from charges of communism, they were wrong.31 There were some known communists involved, as well as left-wing unions and ethnic associations sympathetic to the LPP. The HCA, however, had a broader membership and claimed non-partisanship. Nonetheless, the HCA was increasingly labelled "Red propagandists" as the Cold War intensified.32
The state’s hostile surveillance of communism was not new, but the scale of repression deepened. The CCF supported price controls but joined efforts to discredit the HCA. The party summarily purged members even suspected of co-operating with communists. By joining this indiscriminate Cold War, historians argue, the CCF helped to create a political atmosphere that ultimately reinforced "conservatizing … forces of wealth and power" and "undermined" opposition to them.33 In the labour movement, Cold War fears bolstered "patriarchal" ideas, suppressed "radical thinking" of all types, and inhibited organizing, including on gender equality issues.34
In 1949, Rae Luckock was ordered by CCF leaders to leave the HCA or be expelled. She opted for the latter. She likely believed in the stated "non-partisan" aims of HCA and, having worked with communist women, she was sympathetic to some of their policy goals. Luckock remained a national presence in the HCA, though it steadily lost support. In 1950, she was elected the first President of the Congress of Canadian Women (CCW), a left-wing organization that included the HCA and other groups, though it was more clearly aligned with the LPP.35 The CCW, however, offered Luckock an opportunity to advocate for women’s equality, childcare and homemaker activism. It also entailed collaboration with the Canadian Peace Congress, another organization similarly labelled as "communist" peace activists were responding to a new, terrifying nuclear world, but Luckock, President of the Toronto Peace Council, had supported the peace movement for some time.
Luckock faced blacklisting. She and other peace activists were prohibited from using Toronto schools and church halls for peace meetings, and she was once barred from entering the United States to attend a meeting at the United Nations.36 Through the CCW’s connection to communist countries and the Women’s Democratic International Federation, a left-wing, global organization embracing nations from the global south, Luckock found her voice on new issues. She stressed anti-colonial struggles, especially women’s role in those movements. In her report on her last major international trip to "Red China" in 1956, she praised their "re-education and rehabilitation" of women, and China’s social and economic progress more generally.37
The China trip was her last abroad. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s, she spent her last 14 years hospitalized, until her death in 1972. A small death notice in the Toronto Star was her only epithet. More than one historian has justifiably claimed that Luckock was "ghosted" and airbrushed out of CCF history.38 Though one author compares her to forgotten feminists, it was her association with communists and the Cold War that led to her exclusion from, and belittling in, CCF histories. Her feminist and socialist views and activism, often ahead of their time, should now be recognized.
Acknowledgments
The Ontario Heritage Trust gratefully acknowledges the research and writing of Dr. Joan Sangster in preparing this paper.
© Ontario Heritage Trust, 2025
1 Library and Archives Canada, James J. Morrison fonds, MG 27 III D3 C-1350 [hereafter J.J. Memoir].
2 Charles M. Johnston, E.C. Drury, Agrarian Idealist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). On the UFO, see also Kerry Badgley’s Ringing in the Common Love of the Good: The United Farmers of Ontario, 1914-1916 (2000).
3 Morrison’s memoir recalls his strong support for the United Farm Women of Ontario, and he credited the UFO’s 1919 victory in part due to women’s votes. There is no evidence, however, that he was an early advocate of women’s suffrage, nor does he mention his wife’s participation in farm women’s organizations. Of course, she and the children helped run the farm while he was away on UFO business. On farm women’s organizing, see Margaret C. Kechnie’s, Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario, 1897-1919 (2003), Linda Ambrose, For Home and Country: The Centennial History of the Women’s Institutes in Ontario (Erin, On: Boston Mills Press, 1996).
4 Rae Luckock letter to the editor, "Urges Cooperation," Toronto Daily Star [TDS] 10 May 1946, p. 6.
5 Johnston, E.C. Drury, p. 65.
6 "Teaching Sunday School Started her in Politics," TDS, 5 Aug. 1943, p. 16.
9 James Naylor, The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Socialist Future (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 6.
10 CCFer Sophia Dixon quoted in Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920-1950 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), p. 94.
13 John Manley, "Women and the Left in the 1930s: The Case of the Toronto CCF Women’s Joint Committee," Atlantis, 5/2 (1980): p. 101-120.
14 Sangster, Dreams, chapter 8.
15 In the interwar period, former suffragists like Henderson shifted their allegiance to labour and the CCF, promoting a hyphenated socialist-feminist politics: Peter Campbell, Rose Henderson: A Woman for the People (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 2010).
16 "CCF Convention Meets," The New Commonwealth: the CCF Paper, 22 April 1943, p. 1.
17 Negative comments were perpetuated by others in the CCF, including Macphail biographers Margaret Stewart and Doris French, Ask No Quarter: A Biography of Agnes MacPhail (Toronto: 1959). On Luckock’s view of the CCF and Macphail’s antipathy towards her, see Michael Dawber, After You Agnes: Mrs. Rae Luckock, MPP (Tweed, Ont.: Quinte Web Press, 1994). Dawber’s book is the only account that draws on interviews with the family. For a more positive account of Macphail, see Terry Crowley, Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1990).
18Hansard, 29 Feb 1944, p. 172.
19 "Teaching Sunday School," p. 16.
20 "Powder Rooms at Queens Park Seen as Probable Innovation," Globe and Mail [GM] 24 Dec. 1943, p. 10.
21 "Wives of Members Luncheon Guests," GM, 24 May 1944, p. 10.
22 "Comments From Winners," GM, 5 Aug. 1943, pg. 5.
23Hansard, 4 April 1944, p. 2113-4.
24Hansard, 26 Feb. 26, 343; Hansard, 3 March 1945, 2111; Hansard, 1 March 1945, p. 597.
25Hansard, 4 April 1944, p. 2113-4.
26 "Seek Noon Meal in All Schools," GM 12 Nov. 1947, p. 5.
27Hansard, 3 March 1945. 2111-2119.
28 John Boyko, Into the Hurricane: Attacking Socialism and the CCF (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishers, 2006), p. 62. The "mistakes" included the CCF charge that the Conservatives were using the Ontario Provincial Police to spy on their opponents.
29 John Boyko, Into the Hurricane: Attacking Socialism and the CCF (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishers, 2006), 62. The "mistakes" included the CCF charge that the Conservatives were using the Ontario Provincial Police to spy on their opponents.
30 Joan Sangster, "Consuming Issues: Women on the Left, Political Protest, and the Organization of Homemakers, 1920-1960," in Sharon Cook, Lorna McLean, Kate O’Rourke, eds., Framing Our Past: Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 2001). pp. 240-248.
31 On RCMP surveillance, see Julie Guard, Radical Housewives: Price Wars & Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).
32 "Cabinet refuses to See Women." TDS, 14 April 1948, 1; "Housewives Group Said Propagandists for Reds," GM, 15 April 1948, p. 1.
33 Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. xi.
34 Joan Sangster, Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2010), p. 104.
35 Guard, sympathetic to the HCA, writes that the CCW was more of a "women’s wing" of the LPP. Radical Housewives, p. 197.
36 "Peace Brings Wrangling to School Board Session," GM, 17 March 1950, 5; "U.S. Denies Visa to Mrs. Luckock For Trip to UN," GM, 19 April 1953, p. 1.
37 The report is reproduced in Dawber, After You.
38 Dean Beeby, "A woman erased from history: The ghosting of Rae Luckock," 12 Dec. 2022.