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In the early years of the Great Depression, thousands of unemployed homeless transients settled into Vancouver’s “hobo jungle.” The jungle operated as a distinct community, in which goods were exchanged and shared directly, without benefit of currency. The organization of life was immediate and consensual, conducted in the absence of capital accumulation. But as the transients moved from the jungles to the city, they made innumerable demands on Vancouver’s Relief Department, consuming financial resources at a rate that threatened the city with bankruptcy. In response, the municipality instituted a card-control system—no longer offering relief recipients currency to do with as they chose. It also implemented new investigative and assessment procedures, including office spies, to weed out organizational inefficiencies. McCallum argues that, threatened by this “ungovernable society,” Vancouver’s Relief Department employed Fordist management methods that ultimately stripped the transients of their individuality. Vancouver’s municipal government entered into contractual relationships with dozens of private businesses, tendering bids for meals in much the same fashion as for printing jobs and construction projects. As a result, entrepreneurs clamoured to get their share of the state spending. With the emergence of work relief camps, the provincial government harnessed the only currency that homeless men possessed: their muscle. This new form of unfree labour aided the province in developing its tourist driven “image” economy, as well as facilitating the transportation of natural resources and manufactured goods. It also led eventually to the most significant protest movement of 1930s’ Canada, the On-to-Ottawa Trek. Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine explores the connections between the history of transiency and that of Fordism, offering a new interpretation of the economic and political crises that wracked Canada in the early years of the Great Depression. --Publisher's description

As a window into contemporary debates about the concept of experience, this essay examines 1934's Vancouver Through the Eyes of a Hobo, which may have the distinction of being the only extant book about hoboing in Depression-era Canada written by a self-identified transient, Victor Wadham Forster. Forster mapped for his readers a dialectic: Nature -- an antimodern pastoral refuge where hoboes lived in freedom -- stood against the City -- a wholly modern capitalist nightmare, home to economic exploitation and its attendant moral degradations. Yet, the author also articulated his desire to destroy this way of life -- and the foundation of his claims to authority as a writer -- in order to effect his and every hobo's reintegration with society. Casting off his avowed allegiance to tramping, Forster divined for his readers a third social formation, a new kind of capitalism infused with a Christian ethos of brotherhood and cooperation, and propped up by an unbounded white supremacy and a rigidly patriarchal division of labour. Herein lies the tragedy of Vancouver Through the Eves of a Hobo: to save the hobo required the destruction of the hobo way of life.

The article reviews the book, "Labour before the Law: The Regulation of Workers' Collective Action in Canada, 1900-1948," by Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker.

This article reviews the book, "Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History," by Bryan D. Palmer and Gaétan Héroux.

Single transient homeless men are one of the archetypal figures of the chaotic decade known as the Great Depression. They are also a misunderstood group, commonly associated with a degraded and hopeless existence. This thesis focuses on homeless men, both on the road and in Vancouver, in the period from the fall of 1929, with the collapse of North American stock markets, until the spring of 1932, with the breakdown of the provincial government's relief camp scheme. It argues that those involved in the relationships of charity provision, whether homeless recipient or government bureaucrat, characterized the world of relief with the same terms they used to understand the normalized world of the capitalist economy. Homeless transients flocked to Vancouver by the thousands. Many became the rank-and-file backbone of Communist-led protest movements. Consistently, these movements demanded relief at union rates, challenged the gendered, racial and national categories that divided the unemployed, and rejected outright the oppressive relief measures accorded transients. In response, the municipal government sought to introduce Fordist methods of business management, rationalizing the processes of relief provision with an eye to efficient administration and surveillance. Relief was not a one-sided transaction-a gift from one party to another-but an exchange. When offering the poor food, shelter, fuel and clothing, public and private charities became involved in commercial relationships with the city's service industries. Businesses across Vancouver clamoured to get their share of relief money, hoping to translate some of the money spent on the unemployed into profit. With state-run relief camps, governments created one of the sharpest contradictions of the 1930s, unemployed workers who worked for a living, but for substandard rates of relief. Officials seized upon the crisis to initiate a program designed to develop British Columbia's economic infrastructure. The work of the jobless would thus pay dividends by enabling an increased rate of economic growth once the crisis had passed. In these ways, relief became an industry. The hundreds of people who wrote about tramps during the 1930s twinned the objectification and the commodification of transiency. Whether espousing a humanitarian or a hateful view of hoboes, these authors almost unanimously agreed that the tramping life had to be destroyed. Hoboes would vanish from the Canadian landscape because their lives were without value. For their part, the hoboes who put words on paper ranged across a host of subjects pertaining to life on the road and life in the city. While some cried out against what they saw as the oppressions of transient life and envisioned a future in which they would be reintegrated into society, others lauded the camaraderie and mutuality amongst tramps. For this group, the hobo life was an end in itself, valued because it enabled them to live free from the exploitation that was the lot of wage workers.

The article reviews and comments on "The Tramp in America" by Tim Creswell, "Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America" by Todd DePastino, and "Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930" by Frank Tobias Higbie.

In April 2017, more than 100 people gathered at the Halifax North Memorial Library for the official launch of the Lynn Jones African-Canadian and Diaspora Heritage Collection, housed at Saint Mary's University. ...This is a personal archive whose creation was an intentional act. At the tender age of eight, Lynn Jones began cutting out articles from the Truro newspaper, preserving stories pertaining to Black life in Nova Scotia and around the world. One of ten children, Lynn kept busy documenting the many activities of generations of the Jones family, from those who fought with the Black Battalion in World War I to those active today. Along the way, she added numerous documents – many of them not found elsewhere – and correspondence related to organizations such as the Black Working Group and the Public Service Alliance of Canada (psac) and individuals like Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). The result is eighteen boxes, with talk of more to come. While the collection stretches from the 1960s to the 2010s, the bulk of material pertains to the 1980s and 1990s. -- Introduction

Discusses the anti-Chinese racism surrounding the No. 1 Mine disaster of 1887, when Chinese miners were unfairly blamed for the tragedy. A sign and plaque were unveiled in 1999 at the disaster's site in Nanaimo, BC, where 53 of the 150 miners killed were Chinese.

Working-class history is the story of the changing conditions and actions of all working people. Most adult Canadians today earn their living in the form of wages and salaries and thus share the conditions of dependent employment associated with the definition of "working class." -- Introduction

Introduces the second of the two-part series in the journal on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Making of the English Working Class" by E.P. Thompson. Articles include: "The Lost Causes of E. P. Thompson" by Dipesh Chakrabarty; "Class Formation, Politics, Structures of Feeling" by Geoff Eley; "Comrade Thompson and Saint Foucault" by Todd McCallum; "Exploitation: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?" by James Epstein; "Looking Back and Ahead" by August Carbonella; "The Making dans les eaux troubles de l’historiographie québécoise : réception hésitante d’un livre en avant de son temps" by Robert Tremblay; "Who now reads E.P. Thompson? Or, (Re)reading The Making at UQAM" by Magda Fahrni; and "Individual Statements on E.P. Thompson" by, respectively, Jesse Lemisch, Alice Kessler-Harris, and June Hannam.