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The Canadian State’s Attempt to Manage Class Conflict, 1900-1948

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Social Welfare 1850–1950

Abstract

It is very often asserted that those political laboratories, the Colonies of Great Britain, shrink from no experiment the object of which is to regulate and improve the condition of the labourer. This assertion is but partly true... Two of the knottiest questions which humanitarian social reformers have endeavoured in our time to solve, are confessedly the conflict of organised capital with organised labour, and the necessity of securing a minimum of comfort for the humbler class of workers. Among 11 self-governing British colonies two only have made any serious attempt to cope with the second of these problems, and only one has made any determined effort to grapple with the first. (William Pember Reeves, London, 1900)1

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NOTES

  1. William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (London, 1902).

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  2. Henry Demarest Lloyd, Newest England: Notes of a Democratic Traveller in New Zealand with Some Australian Comparisons (New York, 1900).

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  3. Laurel Sefton MacDowell, ‘Remember Kirkland Lake’: The Gold Miners’ Strike of 1941–42 (Toronto, 1983), and ‘The Formation of the Canadian Industrial Relations System during World War II’, Labor/Le Travailleur, No. 3 (1978) pp. 175–96; H. Clare Pentland, ‘The Canadian Industrial Relations System: Some Fortmative Factors’, Labor/Le Travailleur, No. 4 (1979) pp.9–23; and Jeremy Webber, ‘The Malaise of Compulsory Conciliation: Strike Prevention in Canada during World War II’, Labor/ Le Travail, No. 15 (1985) pp. 57–88.

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  4. Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, From Consent to Coercion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms (Toronto, 1985).

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  5. Gregory S. Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867–92 (Toronto, 1980) chapter 8.

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  6. Ibid.

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  7. Ibid., chs. 8 and 9, and Leslie Wismer (ed.) Proceedings of the Canadian Labour Union, 1873–77 (Montreal, 1951) passim.

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  8. Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1902 (New York, 1982) chapter 9.

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  9. Ibid., pp. 399–400.

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  10. Gregory S. Kealey (ed.) Canada Investigates Industrialism (Toronto, 1973) P. 3.

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  11. Ibid., pp. 8–58.

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  12. Ian McKay, ‘By Wisdom, Wile or War: The Provincial Workmen’s Association and the Struggle for Working-Class Independence in Nova Scotia, 1879–1897’, Labor/Le Travail, No. 18 (Fall, 1986).

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  13. Reeves, State Experiments.

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  14. Eugene Forsey, Trade Unions in Canada, 1812–1902 (Toronto, 1982) chapter 16.

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  15. Reeves, State Experiments.

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  16. R. McGregor Dawson, William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1874–1923 (Toronto, 1980).

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  17. Ibid. For a more criticial approach see H. S. Ferns and B. Ostry, The Age of Mackenzie King (London, 1955) and Paul Craven, ‘An Impartial Umpire’: Industrial Relations and the Canadian State, 1900–1911 (Toronto, 1980).

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  18. Department of Labour (Canada), Annual Reports, 1900–7.

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  19. Craven, ‘An Impartial Umpire’, passim.

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  20. Department of Labour (Canada), Annual Reports, 1900–7.

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  21. Ibid., 1901–3.

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  22. Forsey, Trade Unions, chapter 16. See also Robert Babcock, Gompers in Canada (Toronto, 1974).

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  23. King, William Lyon Mackenzie, Diary, 2 and 3 January 1903.

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  24. Ibid., 17 January 1903.

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  25. Ibid., 19 November 1901.

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  26. Ibid., 10 January 1902.

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  27. Ibid., 10 May 1903.

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  28. Ibid., 6 May 1903.

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  29. Ibid., 15 May 1903.

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  30. ‘Report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes in the Province of British Columbia’, Department of Labour (Canada), Annual Report, 1903.

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  31. Babcock, Gompers in Canada.

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  32. King, Diary, 1–3 January 1907.

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  33. MacDowell, ‘Remember Kirkland Lake’.

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  34. For the Ford strike see David Moulton, ‘Fort Windsor 1945’, in Irving Abella, On Strike (Toronto, 1974); on Hamilton, see Craig Heron and Robert Storey, ‘Work and Struggle in the Canadian Steel Industry, 1900–1950’, in their On the Job: Confronting the Labour Process in Canada (Montreal, 1986).

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  35. King, Diary, 15 May 1903.

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Authors
  1. Gregory S. Kealey
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, United Kingdom

    D. C. M. Platt (Professor of the History of Latin America) (Professor of the History of Latin America)

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© 1989 D. C. M. Platt

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Kealey, G.S. (1989). The Canadian State’s Attempt to Manage Class Conflict, 1900-1948. In: Platt, D.C.M. (eds) Social Welfare 1850–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10343-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10343-0_8

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-10345-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-349-10343-0

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

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