Perspectives on the Atlantic Canadian Labour Movement and the Working-Class Experience

Aluin Gilchrist is a Vancouver-based Canadian government civil
litigation lawyer.

This book is a collection of lectures delivered in February 1985. Richardson, Secretary-Treasurer of the New Brunswick Federation of Labour, says that anti-labour “repressive” laws and inequitable socioeconomic policies raise serious moral questions and ignore the longer term.

Professor Kealey sees the Socred government of British Columbia as engaged in a “virulent offensive against working people” in this, the last of five periods in the history of the working class. He classifies the five periods as follows: to 1850, primitive accumulation; 1850-1890, initial proletarianization; 1890-1914, homogenization (labourers instead of craftsmen); 1914-1970, segmentation (white collar instead of blue); from 1970, deindustrialization. Professor Kealey ends with, “It is the task of the labour movement today to pose a socialist alternative... to capitalist forms of restructuring. It certainly should again be clear that capitalism simply does not deliver the goods.” Nowhere does he even hint that it might be to the common benefit of capitalists and workers to produce.

Senator Forsey was constitutional expert of the Canadian Congress of Labour when it petitioned Canada to use the constitutional powers of reservation and disallowance. A threat from Canada stopped Prince Edward Island’s awful 1948 amendment to its Trade Union Act.