The author experienced the Depression with the deprivations of unemployment and life in the work camps. He helped organize the B.C. Relief Camp strike, and later participated in the On to Ottawa Trek, which ended in a confrontation with the federal police in Regina.

Ronald Liversedge, born 1899 in Bradford, England, twice wounded in WWI, emigrated to Canada in 1927. Already a committed Communist, he immediately took part in the resistance to unemployment and the relief camps. After Spain he lived most of his life working as a logger on Vancouver Island. He died in 1974.

Ronald LIversedge is the author of Recollections of the On-To-Ottawa Trek (Macmillan, 1974), the classic account of that watershed event in Canada's social history. Mac-Pap has been edited and annotated by retired BC labour lawyer David Yorke.

David Yorke was born in 1945. A fourth generation Vancouverite; schooled in Vancouver and North Vancouver; growing up in a left-wing family, he knew and worked with a number of Mac-Paps. He earned a degree in Canadian History from SFU in 1970 and finished Legal Training at UBC in 1975. His 30 year legal career has involved representing unions, and in particular the BC Teachers' Federation for which he was staff counsel for twenty years. In retirement David continues to have an interest in labour and left wing history and is currently a Director of the On-To-Ottawa Historical Society and active in labour history projects. He lives with his wife Pat Sexsmith in Burnaby.

Ronald Liversedge's profile page