Murray Cotterill

Who was Murray Cotterill?

Murray Cotterill was a Canadian trade union activist and organizer for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.

In the 1930s, Cotterill was one of the organisers of the Co-operative Commonwealth Youth Movement. In the 1940s he was a CCF municipal candidate in Toronto and, in 1942, ran for the leadership of the Ontario CCF, losing to Ted Jolliffe. He was also an aide to Charles Millard in organizing the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and was active in rooting out Communists in the fledgling Steelworkers union and was the union's public relations director for many years. Cotterill was also president of the Toronto Labour Council of the Canadian Congress of Labour in the late 1940s. He worked as a labour relations specialist for the Canadian Congress of Labour and its successor the Canadian Labour Congress and was for a time in the 1940s and 1950s the director of the CCL's national Political Action Committee, a position he used to encourage closer ties between the labour movement and the CCF. Cotterill was also the leading force in the OFL's Political Action Committee which helped create an informal alliance between the CCF and the labour movement that later led to the formation of the New Democratic Party as a formal CLC-CCF project.