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Through a historical account of the Pro-Canada/Action Canada Network (PCN/ACN), this dissertation examines coalition formation among social movements. It argues that the complex process of cross-sectoral coalition formation and thus the potential for convergence of social movements can best be understood by combining elements of different analytical frameworks. This dissertation draws on elements of the two dominant paradigms for the study of social movements, resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory. Specifically, it utilizes the formers' attention to the specifics of organization and structure and the latter's focus on the discursive formation of identities. Both are then combined with the uniquely Canadian but theoretically underdeveloped concept of the popular sector and a neo-gramscian perspective on social formation and mobilization that draws on political economy and class-analytical traditions. With its formation in 1988 around opposition to the Canada - U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the PCN/ACN was an early example of a broader trend for trade and investment to become key arenas for social and political contention at the turn of the century. This dissertation challenges the assumptions of most analytical frameworks concerning the limits to coalition formation and argues that the nature of the unifying issue is an important determinant of the potential for the growth and deepening of social alliances. After reviewing the historical conjuncture in which the PCN/ACN emerged, this dissertation traces the history of key sectors and member organizations - labour, women and ecumenical justice - paying specific attention to their approach to political engagement and the issue of free trade. As a result, it establishes the necessary background to understand both the initial basis for unity and the Network's progression beyond a lowest common denominator alliance around a single issue, to a broader mandate. This dissertation provides empirical evidence on which to judge the potential of social movements to displace other discourses and agencies on the left. Given the contemporary interest in the role of social movements, NGOs and civil society, this dissertation provides some essential signposts for two types of practitioners: academics seeking to understand outcomes and activists hoping to determine them.

Traditional architectural histories of Canada have tended to define the Ukrainian architectural presence only in terms of the sacro-religious or the rustico-picturesque. The more complex reality—that of the community's secularity, urbanity, and proletarianization throughout its history—is demonstrated by a third building type, the chytalnia or reading room, of which a Labour Temple is a socialist/pro-communist variant. These institutions were often found in urban centres where they were frequently located in industrial vernacular houses. Their study therefore confounds conventional notions of Ukrainian piety and rusticity, of a historical geography that consists exclusively of rural Prairie settlement, and of formalist paradigms regarding architectural form. Similarly, the architectural history of Ottawa has been predicated upon monumentality and picturesque settings to the neglect of regional vernacular forms, as well as upon a bilingual/bicultural ethnoculture that negates the polyethnic nature of the city. This study posits the Ottawa Ukrainian Labour Temple as a case study for exploring the limitations of traditional historiography regarding vernacular architecture, Ukrainians in Canada, and industrial vernacular housing in Ottawa.

In 1923, after nearly three decades of class conflict on the Vancouver waterfront, the Shipping Federation of British Columbia, an umbrella organization of shipping, stevedoring, and warehousing interests, undertook a far-reaching agenda of welfare capitalism. Drawing on wider currents of progressive reform which were cresting in the interwar period, and inspired by the example set by its counterpart in Seattle, the Shipping Federation created new joint political structures, adopted a range of paternalist initiatives, and decasualized the waterfront workplace. From its vantage point, this was a "good citizens" policy, and it was designed to: build bridges across the class divide, gain greater control of the work process, stave off the intervention of unions and the state, and, in the end, mould a more efficient and compliant waterfront workforce. The creation and implementation of this reform agenda, the ways in which white and aboriginal waterfront workers negotiated the politics of paternalism and labour market reform, and the long-term ramifications of this dynamic are at the core of this thesis. -- Welfare capitalism shaped patterns of life and labour on the waterfront significant ways: informal ways of regulating the workplace atrophied; labourism was revived; and some waterfront workers acquired a reasonable standard of living. The trade-off at work, here, was this: only those employees who divested themselves of more radical political sensibilities, and adhered to waterfront employers' broader vision of an efficient, decasualized workplace, could hope to secure a living wage and fulfill their obligations as breadwinners, husbands, and citizens. For aboriginal longshoremen, most of whom were from the Squamish First Nation, this bargain was especially difficult to negotiate for it came freighted with the additional challenges associated with being "Indian" in a white society. Unlike their white counterparts who passed muster, they were marginalized from the waterfront during this time as decasualization's new time-work discipline conflicted with their more traditional sensibilities and ongoing need to work at a variety of tasks to ensure material and cultural survival. -- Straddling labour history, aboriginal history, and the burgeoning literature on law and society, this thesis rejects conventional interpretations of welfare capitalism that conceptualize it as either a failed experiment in industrial democracy, or a drag on the emergence of the welfare state. In doing so, it re-positions welfare capitalism in the context of the wider return to normalcy following the Great War, and the powerful reform impulses that took aim at family, citizen, and nation. Rather than forestalling the welfare state, this citizen-worker complex--which manufactured a new sense of entitlement amongst white waterfront workers--was part of a broader cultural shift that would, after the trials of the Great Depression and challenge posed by the Communist Party of Canada, eventually underwrite the state's very expansion. On a broad level, then, this analysis illustrates how the prevailing liberal-capitalist order was successfully rehabilitated after the Great War and 1919, and how, in the long-term, it successfully contained, by consent and coercion, those forces which were antithetical to the prevailing economic and political status quo.

In 1933, an American entrepreneur offered the people of St. Lawrence, a small town on the south coast of Newfoundland, the prospect of escaping rampant unemployment and meager public relief by starting a mine to extract the area's vast deposits of fluorspar, which is used in the manufacture of steel, aluminum, and various chemical products. Coming in the context of the Great Depression and the collapse of the fishing industry, the mining industry was eagerly embraced by residents of St. Lawrence and surrounding communities. Several mines were subsequently established, by both the original American company, the St. Lawrence Corporation of Newfoundland, and later by the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan). The fragile prosperity that accompanied the industry from the 1930s until closure of the last Alcan mine in 1978, however, exacted a heavy price. Many St. Lawrence workers lost their lives to industrial diseases caused by dust and radiation in the mines. -- This thesis explores the history of industry, labour, and health and safety at the St. Lawrence mines. This study focuses on the struggle by workers and their union for recognition of workplace hazards, improved working conditions, and adequate compensation for industrial disease victims and their families. The thesis argues that, rather than being passive victims of an unavoidable tragedy, workers at St. Lawrence were aware of the adverse health impacts of their work from the very early years of mining, and fought constantly over several decades to have their concerns addressed. Furthermore, the thesis argues that the disaster which ultimately unfolded at St. Lawrence was primarily the result of industry and government authorities ignoring or downplaying legitimate concerns and thereby shirking their moral and legal responsibilities.

Constitutional reform dominated the Canadian public policy agenda during the 1980s and early portion of the 1990s. As a pressure group operating within a federal system, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) has been unable and unwilling to confront the issue of constitutional reform. The CLC's confederal structure, combined with its political relationship with the New Democratic Party (NDP), has prevented the CLC from acting as a progressive force for positive constitutional change. Ideological and philosophical differences between the Quebec Federation of Labour and the NDP convinced the CLC to remove itself from the patriation debate in the early 1980s. Labour's short-sighted non-involvement in the process of patriating the Constitution eliminated the possibility of having collective rights enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Subsequently, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the right to strike and bargain collectively were not constitutionally protected. The Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords provided organized labour with a renewed opportunity to promote a pro-union, class-based, constitutional rights discourse, but the CLC's internal cleavages over language, region, and identity, once again, proved too powerfiil a force to overcome. The Canadian labour movement's vision of social justice and economic equality has been obstructed by its unwillingness to adequately confront divisive constitutional issues. However, in an era of rights discourse and neo-liberalism, constitutional reform may provide organized labour with the best opportunity to have its voice heard.

The period between 1935 and 1945 was a key one for the Communist Party of Canada [CPC or CP] due to the tumult of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Women were key players in the success that the CPC had during this period, one in which Communist and other left-wing movements grew and were more 'respectable' than they were during the Cold War that would follow. Yet women were secondary players in the Communist movement in Vancouver. While CP women played crucial roles in raising money for the Party, setting up fighting organizations such as the Vancouver Housewives league, and supporting the Allied war effort, CP members of both sexes pushed Party women into more traditional 'feminine' roles of wives, mothers, and ornaments. The Vancouver Communist Party offered a substantial challenge to Canada''s liberal state and the CP provided radical women with an outlet to channel their abilities against capitalism. In the end, however, the CP failed to alter substantially the fundamental division of labour between radical men and women. Communists upheld the mainstream doctrine of "separate spheres": they believed that men were workers, labour organizers, and producers while left-wing and working class women were domestic, passive, and consumers. This thesis concludes that while we cannot expect radical organizations to be completely separate from the gender ideals of the period in which they existed, the CPC did little to challenge traditional gender roles.