Ginger Group (Canada)

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For the fashion manufacturer called Ginger Group, see Mary Quant.

The Ginger Group was not a formal political party in Canada, but a faction of radical Progressive and Labour Members of Parliament who advocated socialism. The group is said to have taken its name from Ginger Goodwin, a United Mine Workers organizer. Ginger was shot dead outside Cumberland, British Columbia by company hired private policemen on July 27, 1918. His murder sparked Canada's first general strike. The term ginger group also refers to small group with new, radical ideas trying to act as a catalyst within a larger body.

The Ginger Group formed within the caucus of the declining Progressive Party in 1924, and was made up of United Farmers of Alberta MPs George Gibson Coote, Robert Gardiner, Edward Joseph Garland, Donald MacBeth Kennedy and Henry Elvins Spencer as well as United Farmers of Ontario MP Agnes Macphail. The group was later joined by Labour MPs J.S. Woodsworth, William Irvine, A.A. Heaps and Angus MacInnis, independent MP Joseph Tweed Shaw and Progressive MPs Milton Neil Campbell, William John Ward W.C. Good and Preston Elliott.

Members of the Ginger Group played a role in forming the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in 1932, with Woodsworth becoming the new party's leader.

Since 2002 a group of "New liberals" including left-liberal intellectuals such as Tom Kent and John Polyani have been holding a series of conferences using the name "[Ginger Group]".

The name Ginger Group was also used to refer to a group of Conservative MPs who, in 1917 opposed Prime Minister Robert Borden's use of the Military Service Act to introduce conscription during the Conscription Crisis of 1917.

Ginger Group (Canada)

See also