Book Review

Canada and the United States

In May 1919, Winnipeg, Manitoba was convulsed by a bitter struggle between workers and the combined forces of employers, an elite Citizens' Committee, and the state. A six-week standoff involved around 30,000 strikers determined to win better wages and conditions but also the right to collective bargaining. Whether this general strike and other sympathetic and general strikes across the country represented a threat to established government has been the subject of decades of debate within Canadian history. This collection of essays, edited by Craig Heron, contains seven essays that provide a synthesis of revisionist views on this key controversy in Canadian history. The collection centers on the crucial years when the war machine's needs created a boom that fed on scarce labor followed by postwar years of economic slowdown. The editor and authors argue that in Canada, as elsewhere in the industrialized world, World War I acted as a crucible for labor militancy and revolt.	1
In the Canadian case, the Winnipeg General Strike of May-June 1919 was initially described by Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden as an attempt to overthrow government. As Heron notes, this view was contested by historians in the early 1970s who viewed the Winnipeg strike as the logical extension of a campaign for workers' rights that characterized the western provinces of Canada. This "western exceptionalism" thesis was in turn challenged by scholars convinced that there was a national debate on the impossibility of reforming capitalism and the need for a radical transformation of Canada's economy and the polity. Furthermore, as new research discovered, these developments were confined neither to the west nor to skilled, Anglo-Celtic male workers.	2
The first essay, by Heron and Myer Siemiatycki, presents the national context for understanding the relationship among the war, the state, and working-class responses. Canada's ties to Great Britain and the empire fed both English Canadian nationalism and French Canadian opposition to conscription, also characteristic of debates in the labor and socialist movements. Despite early opposition to the idea of war in Europe, many labor and socialist supporters ended up enlisting, although some later opposed the idea of military conscription, arguing instead for the conscription of wealth. Equally, opposition from the left attacked press censorship, the use of sweeping state coercion to outlaw many ethnic and political groups, and the profiteering of war producers. The rising cost of living and the inadequate provisions made for soldiers' families also figured prominently in the labor revolt. The authors argue that tensions between fighting for democracy abroad and oppressive conditions at home gave strength to a broad-based anticapitalist workers' revolt (p. 27). The combined forces of capital and the state, however, developed "more powerful, centralized mechanisms for combating radicalism than had ever existed in pre-War Canada" (p. 36). How this was manifested across the country is the subject of the regionally based essays that follow.	3
Essays on the Maritimes, Quebec, and Ontario essentially raise new perspectives on the supposed conservatism of the workers' movements in central and eastern Canada. One of the most interesting and analytical pieces covers the "invisible" labor revolt of the Maritimes, a region customarily characterized as fundamentally "conservative." Ian McKay and Suzanne Morton argue persuasively that uneven development, paternalism, and gender inequality explain the particular patterns of the Maritime orientation to "labourism." The latter drew not only on labor politics but also contributed to a "movement culture" that promoted solidarity within communities and appealed to miners' wives, for example, as well as the miners themselves. Although there were notable incidents of working-class militancy in the Maritimes between 1917 and 1920, the regional economy based on agriculture and resource extraction as well as the experience of rapid deindustrialization in the 1920s spelled ultimate defeat.	. . .