A Great Restlessness: The Life and Politics of Dorise Nielsen

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

Dorise Nielsen was among the first women to serve in the House of
Commons and played an active role in political life on the Prairies in
the 1930s and 1940s. Yet she is virtually unknown today. Thanks to this
extraordinary work by Faith Johnston, an independent scholar, it is
clear that our ignorance of this politician results from her active
involvement in the Communist Party of Canada, even when serving in
Parliament between 1940 and 1945. (Indeed, she was the first Communist
to sit in the Commons. although she ran under the “United
Progressive” label.) The heyday of Canadian Communism was during this
period and many feared its activists. Despite Nielsen’s status as an
MP, the Mackenzie King government investigated her activities, although
it never prosecuted her as it did some comrades.

The author is even-handed in her treatment of Nielsen’s political
affiliation: she makes clear that she followed orders from the party
even when she personally opposed them and that her belief in the
Communist movement was as much religious as political.

Despite her defeat in the 1945 election, Nielsen continued to lead an
active life and Johnston devotes half of the book to this period of
Nielsen’s life. Nielsen paid a high price for her political
allegiance, as did her family (three children, a husband, and two
lovers). Despite Khrushchev’s revelation of Stalin’s crimes and the
Sino–Soviet split, her faith in Marxism–Leninism never shattered,
although it changed over time; she had the devotion and sense of
self-sacrifice of any nun. Personal happiness never counted much for
her; she never lost her English stiff upper lip. Her personality did
mellow in old age, reaching out to her children from her home in
Beijing.

As demonstrated by hundreds of footnotes and a lengthy bibliography,
Johnston has spent years working on this important biography. Readers
benefit from her extraordinary research. This book is a key acquisition
for any collection of Canadiana.