Although there is perception that Labour's power and bargaining strength increased during WWI, there is evidence that the opposite is true.
Historian Margaret Mitchell touched on this point in her talk this morning (Remembrance Day 2020) on CBC radio. In response to the moderator quoting former Prime Minister Harper as saying that Canada was forged (born) during WWI, she said that she would not agree. Canada, she averred, was shaped by WWI but forged by many factors other than WWI.
Of course Harper is of the ilk who think Alberta only joined Confederation in 1905. This leaves out the fact that what is now Alberta became part of Canada in 1870. This leaves out the 35 years that followed when Alberta gradually changed from a place where Indigenous people made up the majority of the population and were seen as critical to the local economy to become the different place that Alberta was in 1905, when Indigenous people had become a forgotten people, spurned and betrayed.
Mitchell went on to say that WWI shaped Canada in that it gave Labour more power as it was necessary to the hard-pressed war industrial complex. This may be true in Ontaio - Mitchell is a Toronto professor - but there was very little added industries in western Canda during this war. Unemployment and business closures had risen and land prices crashed just before the war as many major projects had wrapped up. These include landmarks of the city today - the Legislature Building, The High Level Bridge, the Macdonald Hotel and also intercontinental railways. Many joined up to the army at the war's outbreak in order to get a bed and three square meals a day.
Many fled Edmonton to eek out a living on old homesteads in the bush. The city's population was not to increase much for the next 30 years.
Labour's power was not much under those circumstances. And it was reflected in its ability to maintain the earning power of workers.
Warren Caragata, author of Alberta Labour A Heritage Untold, presented this catalogue of the result:
"conscription, rising prices, a government that sided with the employers, companies that used every trick in the book to defeat trade unions, harsh working conditions, low pay and broken promises."
For leftists, simple survival was a triumph in those days. To stay out of the army and to avoid being shot by police shooting at draft dodgers were big achievements in those days. Labour organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot while eluding capture as a draft-dodger. His death evoked a one-day general strike in Vancouver on August 2, 1918. The one-day general strike would be used again in 1978, as a protest against Pierre Trudeau's wage and price controls, which were revealed to be merely wage controls.
Inflation was also an issue during WWI. Wages for those who were working went up during the war, but not at all in step with the inflation in consumer prices.
Labour's fortunes did not improve at the end of the war, when Canada's 600,000 soldiers returned home, looking for work.
But with the end of war, wartime constraints on strikes were (mostly) lifted, and strike action was no longer regarded as being pro-German.
It was then that major strikes started.
The Winnipeg General Strike, which started on May 15, 1919, lit the flame to the accumulated grievances of labour in centres across the country. And separate general strikes were held in cities from Victoria to Amherst, Nova Scotia.
Edmonton's started on May 27, lasted a week strong and almost a month in all. It ended at the same time as Winnipeg's, on June 26.
Victoria started out of outrage at the brutal fashion in which the Winnipeg strike had been put down.
It was then that the federal government established a royal commission and went across the country soliciting input on Labour's discontent.
And a fuller reckoning followed. In the 1921 federal election neither of the two old-line parties - Liberals or Conservatives - took many seats in the west. In Alberta only Labour and Farmer MPs were elected. (But of course there were many wasted votes when First Past The Post is used to elect representatives in single-member districts so whether Conservatives or Liberals or farmers or Labourites are elected under such a system, there is a great proportion of voters who are not represented.)
Calgary Labour MP William Irvine used what personal persuasion he could muster to push the government to examine the power of private banks. This started the first major discussion of Social Credit in Canada At his invitation, George Bevington, who farmed just west of Edmonton and was a self-taught expert on the subject, addressed a royal commission on the topic. As did Major Douglas, later to be mentor of William Aberhart, as he ascended to the premiership of Alberta in 1935 using a form of social credit of his own invention.
Things lead to other things, as they do - but war seldom gives more power to workers and the political Labour movement.
Thanks for reading.
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This year:
*Alberta is celebrating 150 years in Confederation 1870-2020
*100th Anniversary of proportional representation first being used to elect legislators in Canada -- Winnipeg MLAs first elected through Single Transferable Voting (STV) in 1920
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