Reacting to the Worker's Revolt: The Lakehead and Winnipeg General Strike

...Despite the region’s importance in the turbulent histories of the One Big Union (OBU), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and Communist Party of Canada (CPC), scholars all too often neglect the Lakehead. Between 1917 and 1925, when mentioned at all, it is usually treated as an appendage to the Winnipeg situation in 1919 or western radicalism in general, and its contribution to the larger workers’ revolt spreading across the country at the time is ignored.5 While the underlying motivation of events at the Lakehead in 1919 was symptomatic of the larger national trend, research indicates that the issue at hand for workers in the area was whether or not to support their Winnipeg comrades. Historians have long presumed that labour in Port Arthur and FortWilliam, known throughout the pre-War period as part of one of the most unsettled regions of the country, supported the Winnipeg strikers without question. Yet no sympathy strike of any kind occurred. Considering the radical ideas and labour violence that characterized the pre-war socialist experience at the Lakehead and which marked the last years of the war, this apparent non-response in itself should be viewed as remarkable. It would be wrong to believe, however, that the absence of any labour action was synonymous with a lack of support for the Winnipeg strikers, or that the Lakehead was somehow immune from workers’ unrest that existed across the country. This article tells the story of working-class politics at the Lakehead, Northwestern Ontario’s metropole and a hotbed of labour radicalism, during the unrest of 1919. --From author's introduction