The Movement towards Labour Unity in Canada: History and Implications

Abstract

One of the marching songs of the labour movement on this continent is “Solidarity Forever!” But in Canada, its exhortation has sometimes been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. At intervals over the last half-century and more, Canadian trade unionism has been “by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distrest.” In 1902, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (T.L.C.) threw out the Knights of Labor and national unions which were “dual” to international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.). The twenty-three expelled organizations promptly formed the National Trades and Labour Congress. In 1908, this became the Canadian Federation of Labour, a name which has kept cropping up in Canadian labour history ever since. In 1919, just after the Winnipeg strike, and partly as a result of it, a considerable number of western unionists left the T.L.C. to form the One Big Union (O.B.U.). Between 1901 and 1921, small local Roman Catholic unions sprang up in the province of Quebec, and in 1921 these formed the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (C.C.C.L.). In 1927, the Canadian Federation of Labour and other national unions formed the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (A.C.C.L.). In 1936, some of the officers of the A.C.C.L. seceded to form the present Canadian Federation of Labour, which is no longer even mentioned in the Department of Labour's annual Report on Labour Organization in Canada (and has not been since the 1950–1 edition), and which the orthodox union movement never considered a genuine labour organization at all. (About ten years ago, a secession from the Canadian Federation of Labour formed the National Council of Canadian Labour, which —in spite of its grandiose title, and the faint air of respectability imparted to it by inclusion in the Department of Labour's report, which gives it 42 locals and 5,640 members—is also beyond the pale of orthodox unionism.) In 1939, the executive of the T.L.C. suspended the Canadian unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.) in the United States. These unions formed a Canadian C.I.O. Committee.