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This volume documents the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's surveillance activities during 1935 and contains informants', agents', and operatives' perspectives on developments within the Communist Party of Canada on labour unions, and on unemployed organizations. It includes coverage of the 1935 federal election, the successes of red unions, and the development of popular front strategies. The introduction by historian John Manley provides a considered overview of the events. The volume is fully indexed. --Publisher's description

This volume is a continuation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Bulletins series on the Depression. The RCMP Security Service reported in these Bulletins on security and intelligence matters to Cabinet and other government officals. Those for 1936 contain much material on labour and the left. --Publisher's description

These Bulletins show that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's continued fascination with the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) was broadened to include the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1937. The RCMP believed the CPC's fingerprints were all over the CIO. Other topics examined in the bulletins include reports on the Spanish Civil War, municipal elections, ethnic newspapers and strikes. --Publisher's description

This volume completes the Depression Years Series and, for the time being, our publication of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Bulletins, John Manley examines the RCMP fascination with the CPC and how the CPC coped with the Popular Front and the Nazi-Soviet pact. Manley concludes that the CPC's anti-war line was a disaster, claiming that "undoubtedly..., the Comintern was the RCMP's best friend"(29) --Publisher's description

This volume completes the series of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Bulletins for World War II, following on the War Series, Vol. 1, 1939-1941. These Bulletins allow us to see not only the nature of RCMP Security concerns but also the underlying ideology of the Security Service. The volume also contains a critical introduction by the editors. --Publisher's description

First published in England in 1958, this book is a bitter, critical reassessment of the moral and cultural values of Canada. Levine's account of his three-month journey from Halifax to Ucluelet, a fishing village on the west coast, is an unconventional portrait of Canada's underbelly. The book ends with the words: `I wondered why I felt so bitter about Canada. After all, it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life. But no one ever mentioned the price one had to pay; how much of oneself you had to betray.' Canada Made Me was regarded as so controversial that it did not appear in a Canadian edition until 1979. Critical opinion, however, has slowly swung around to the point the book was recently described in the Globe and Mail as a `laconic classic'. For this new edition Norman Levine has written an introduction which traces the book's publishing history and reputation.

This innovative collection of articles approaches American Indian history and culture from a Marxist perspective. The contributors, from the United States and Canada, have jumped the boundaries among the social sciences to consider issues of macroeconomics and intercultural conflict. The result is a stimulating and substantial contribution that will interest any reader concerned with policy affecting North American Indians. The contributors are particularly attentive to process and change. They show the relationships among the historical periods characterized by the fur trade, land cessions, and the reservation education system. They expose the collusion among agencies of the dominant society and how Indian people reacted, reorganizing themselves and their institutions to face every new, changed situation. --Publisher's description

Fishing rights are one of the major areas of dispute for aboriginals in Canada today. Dianne Newell explores this controversial issue and looks at the ways government regulatory policy and the law have affected Indian participation in the Pacific Coast fisheries." "For centuries, the economies of Pacific Coast Indians were based on their fisheries. Marine resources, mainly salmon, were used for barter, trade, ceremony, and personal consumption. This pattern persisted after the arrival of European and Asian immigrants, even during the first phases of the non-Indian commercial fishing industry when Indian families were depended upon for their labour and expertise. But as the industrial fishery grew, changes in labour supply, markets, and technology rendered Pacific Coast Indians less central to the enterprise and the aboriginal fishery became legally defined as food fishing. By the late 1960s, rigid new licence-limitation policies were introduced and regulations transformed the processing sector." "The result was reduced participation for fishers and shoreworkers, and the opportunities for Indian men and women declined dramatically. Government programs to increase or even stabilize Indian participation ultimately failed. Newell concludes that the governments of Canada and British Columbia have historically regarded the aboriginal fishery narrowly and unjustly as a privilege, not a right, and have in fact moved against any changes that might put Indians into competition with non-Indians. Recently, BC Indians won a Supreme Court victory in Regina v. Sparrow (1990) that will make it easier to change federal fisheries policies, but aboriginal fishing rights remain before the courts and under federal government investigation. --Publisher's description

During the mid to late 1840s, dramatic riots shook the communities of Woodstock, Fredericton, and Saint John. Irish-Catholic immigrants fought Protestant Orangemen, with fists, club, and firearms. The violence resulted in death and destruction unprecedented in the British North American colonies. This book is the first serious historical treatment of the bloody riots and the tangled events that led to them. Scott See shows mid-century New Brunswick roughly awakened from the slumbering provincialism of its post-Loyalist phase by the stirrings of capitalism and by the tidal wave of Irish immigration that followed the potato famine. His main focus is the Loyal Orange Order, the anti-Catholic organization that clashed with the immigrants, many of them impoverished exiles. See presents an extraordinary profile of the Orange Order and concludes provocatively that it was a nativist organization similar to the xenophobic groups active at the time in the United States. Unlike other recent works on the Order, his book emphasizes the importance of the organization's specifically North American concerns, and questions the significance of its connections to Old World sectarianism. --Publisher's description

Suffragists predicated that women's participation in politics would reform society and lead to a new day for Canadian women. In this highly original and important book, Veronica Strong-Boag examines the lives of girls and women in the post-suffrage decades and argues that the new day did not dawn quite as expected. The author traces the life courses of women in English Canada in the interwar years. Six richly detailed chapters on childhood, paid work, courtship and marriage, domestic work, motherhood, and aging capture the essence of what it meant to be a female in Canada between the wars. --Publisher's description

Frances Swyripe here presents the interpretive study of women of Ukrainian origin in Canada. She analyses the images and myths that have grown up around them, why they arose, and how they were used by the leaders of the community. Swyripa argues that ethnicity combined with gender to shape the experience of Ukrainian-Canadian women, as statelessness and national oppression in the homeland joined with a negative group stereotype and minority status in emigration to influence women's roles and options. She explores community attitudes towards the peasant immigrant pioneer, towards her daughters exposed to the opportunities, prejudice, and assimilatory pressure of the Anglo-Canadian world, towards the 'Great Women' evoked as models and sources of inspiration, and towards the familiar baba. In these stereotypes of the female figure, and in the activities of women's organizations, the community played out its many tensions: between a strong attachment to canada and an equally strong attachment to Ukraine; between nationalists who sought to liberate Ukraine from Polish and Soviet rule and progressives who saw themselves as part of an international proletariat; between women's responsibilities as mothers and homemakers and their obligation to participate in both Canadian and community life. Swyripa finds that the concerns of community leaders did not always coincide with those of the grassroots. The differences were best expressed in the evolution of the peasant immigrant pioneer woman as a group symbol, where the tensions between a cultural ethnic consciousness and a politicized national consciousness as the core of Ukrainian-Canadian identity were played out in the female figure. --Publisher's description

The autobiography of Fred W. Thompson - socialist, Wobbly, organizer, soapboxer, editor, class-war prisoner, educator, historian, and publisher. This book is an important contribution to the understanding of working-class radicalism in twentieth-century North America. --Website description

Sisters & Solidarity provides a clear and well-researched overview of the position of women in relation to the labour movement across Canada. After surveying the development of the labour movement at the turn of the century, the author traces the increasing influence of women members in the Canadian labour movement. Sisters & Solidarity considers not only what unions have negotiated with employers, but the position of women inside the union movement itself. Based on interviews with unions and labour centrals across the country, Julie White examines the representation of women in union executives, committees, conventions and staff. She describes the development of women's committees and examines the responses of unions to demands for change concerning family responsibilities, harassment, and union education. Using new data the author analyzes who are the unorganized, where they work, and why it is difficult to organize them. Three case studies examine the attempts to unionize homeworkers and cleaners and new labour relations legislation in Ontario. Sisters & Solidarity also considers the position of racial minorities, disabled persons and gays and lesbians in the Canadian union movement and the steps unions and labour centrals have taken to meet the needs of these workers. --Publisher's description

In the wake of the continuing recession and destabilized global economy, theorizing about the industrial peace that reigned after World War II through the 1970s has undergone considerable revision. In this path-breaking discussion of Canadian labor relations, Charlotte Yates shows how the state-centered European theories of political economy did not fit the Canadian and United States experiences and treated them as anomalies. Through a case study of the Autoworkers Union in Canada (a branch of the UAW until 1984), Yates subjects this theorizing to critical scrutiny. Using extensive archives of union political activities, Yates describes how unions were demobilized in their relationships with the state, employers, and political parties as Fordist regulatory structures and practices forced unions to accept the constraints of responsible union behavior. She argues that the Canadian Autoworkers' collective identity and internal organizational structure counteracted these demobilizing tendencies. This historical legacy laid the groundwork for the Autoworker Union's return to militancy in the 1980s and 1990s and has shaped its responses to the pressures of economic globalization and heightened competition. From Plant to Politics demonstrates how continued union militancy in resisting concessions from employers and other attacks on unions has placed the union in a position of strength from which it now hopes to negotiate the Canadian path to a restructured economy. This study of the internal dynamics of a major union contributes to an understanding of unions as complex organizations engaged in strategic activities that have a definite impact on the national political economy. --Publisher's description

J.K. Bell was one of the finest labour leaders of his time. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the turn of the century, Jimmy Bell headed down the proverbial road to Toronto to find work as the depression years began. When war broke out, he returned to Saint John, New Brunswick and went to work at the dry dock where he founded a local of what would become the Maritime Marine Workers' Federation. For many years, Bell was ostracized by the labour movement because of his leftwing views. As the Cold War whipped the country into hysteria, Bell was "purged" from the provincial labour federation in 1949, and didn't succeed in being re-elected until 1965. Nonetheless, he managed to play a key role, and in this book, he remembers the events and recalls the characters with fondness and humour. --Publisher's description

Contents: Adjustment and restructuring in Canadian industrial relations: challenges to the traditional system / Richard P. Chaykowski and Anil Verma -- Industrial relations in the Canadian automobile industry / Pradeep Kumar and Noah M. Meltz -- Industrial relations in the Canadian steel industry / Anil Verma and Peter Warrian -- Industrial relations in the Canadian mining industry: transition under pressure / Richard P. Chaykowski -- Industrial relations in the construction industry in the 1980s / Joseph B. Rose -- Industrial relations in the clothing industry: struggle for survival / Michael Grant -- Industrial relations in the Canadian textile industry / Terry Thomason, Harris L. Zwerling, and Pankaj Chandra -- Restraint, privatization, and Industrial relations in the public sector in the 1980s / Mark Thompson and Allen Ponak -- Industrial relations in elementary and secondary education: a system transformed? / Bryan M. Downie -- Canada's airlines: recent turbulence and changing flight plans / E.G. Fisher and Alex Kondra -- Industrial relations in the Canadian telephone industry / Anil Verma and Joseph M. Weiler -- Canadian industrial relations in transition / Richard P. Chaykowski and Anil Verma

This book describes how business, labour and government have organized the production of goods and services in Canada since 1945. Daniel Drache and Harry Glasbeek focus on the industrial relations system and how it works. They call for fresh thinking on the economy and offer proposals for the reorganization of production. --Publisher's description

In the first half of the twentieth century, many of Toronto's immigrant Jews eked out a living in the needle-trade sweatshops of Spadina Avenue. In response to their expliotation on the shop floor, immigrant Jewish garment workers built one of the most advanced sections of the Canadian and American labour movements. Much more than a collective bargaining agency, Toronto's Jewish labour movement had a distinctly socialist orientation and grew out of a vibrant Jewish working-class culture. Ruth Frager examines the development of this unique movement, its sources of strength, and its limitations, focusing particularly on the complex interplay of class, ethnic, and gender interests and identities in the history of the movement. She examines the relationships between Jewish workers and Jewish manufacturers as well as relations between Jewish and non-Jewish workers and male and female workers in the city's clothing industry. In its prime, Toronto's Jewish labour movement struggled not only to improve hard sweatshop condistions but also to bring about a fundamental socialist transformation. It was an uphill battle. Drastic economic downturns, hard employer offensives, and state repressions all worked against unionists' workplace demands. Ethnic, gender, and ideological divisions weakened the movement and were manipulated by employers and their allies. Drawing on her knowledge of Yiddish, Frager has been able to gain access to original records that shed new light on an important chapter in Canadian ethnic, labour, and women's history. --Publisher's description

Le syndicat des employé(e)s de magasins et de bureaux de la SAQ a organisé la première grève dans le secteur public. Pierre Godin rend hommage à ce syndicat d'avant-garde en commémorant son évolution. --Résumé de l'éditeur

Helena Gutteridge was a socialist and feminist whose vision helped to shape social reform legislation in British Columbia in the first decades of the twentieth century, and also one of the first women there to hold high public office." "She was born in England in 1879. A militant suffragist, tutored by the Pankhursts, she learned the politics of confrontation early. Emigrating to Vancouver in 1911, she found the suffrage movement there too polite and organized the BC Woman's Suffrage League to help working women fight for the vote. And she kept on organizing. As a journeyman tailor she was a power in her union local, and as the only woman on the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council - their 'rebel girl' - she championed the rights of workers and organized women to fight for themselves. In the 1930s, as a member of the feisty new political movement, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, she joined in the struggles of the unemployed for work and wages. Then, in 1937, as the first woman ever elected to Vancouver City Council, she led the fight for low-income housing." "As was typical for women of her class and time, Helena did not keep personal records, nor did organizational records exist to any extent. Irene Howard made it her task, over a period of years, to search out and assemble details of Helena's life and career, and to interview old comrades who knew Helena and the turbulent times in which she lived. Herself a miner's daughter, the author brings to her subject an affectionate regard and sympathy qualified by the larger view of the scholar and researcher. The result is a lively biography, shot through with humour and pathos, that pays homage to Helena Gutteridge and to many of the people who have been inspired by a cause and who have taught us about the politics of caring."--Publisher's description