Philpott joined the Canadian military during World War I and was badly wounded – he needed two canes to help him walk for the rest of his life.
Philpott became the president of the Ontario Association of CCF Clubs, one of the key leaders of the party in the province, and a popular stump speaker for the socialist cause.
After twenty months of intense work in the party, including leading a purge of communists, Philpott suddenly resigned in March 1934 as president of the Ontario CCF clubs, ostensibly because he was the UFO candidate for Halton in the upcoming federal election and the UFO had left the Ontario CCF over the purported influence of Communists.
[1] In March 1935, he announced he was rejoining the Liberal Party of Canada[2] and was nominated as the Liberal candidate in the riding of York South for the 1935 election and proceeded to claim there was a "sinister conspiracy" to merge the CCF and the Communists with Communist Party head Tim Buck as leader of the new socialist party,[3][4] a claim that Ontario CCF organizer Ted Jolliffe decried as a "fantastic fabrication".
Philpott returned to journalism and moved to British Columbia in the 1940s where he became a reporter and then a columnist for the Vancouver Sun.