Profiles in Dissent: The Shaping of Radical Thought in the Canadian West

William A. Waiser is a professor of history at the University of
Saskatchewan, and the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History
of Prince Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of
Western Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946.

When a general strike paralyzed Winnipeg in the spring of 1919, the
Borden government chose to blame foreign agitators, and crushed the
movement with unprecedented force. There was to be no Bolshevik
revolution on Canadian soil. But the labor activists who orchestrated
the strike, as this book highlights, were actually Canadian citizens or
recent British immigrants. And what made them radical was their desire
to provide laboring men and women with some control over their working
lives.

Profiles in Dissent examines the events of the Winnipeg General Strike
through a series of biographical sketches of the labor elite—people
such as Helen Armstrong, Fred Dixon, William Ivens, John Queen, Bob
Russell, and J.S. Woodsworth. It’s a somewhat old-fashioned approach,
but collectively, the profiles provide some broader perspective on the
event. Readers not only learn what became of the major players in their
later years, but also come to appreciate that there was no single
solution to labor’s woes in the aftermath of the Great War.

The Gutkins go too far, however, in claiming that the strike marked the
beginning of a new era in Canadian labor history and that it was
instrumental in the eventual establishment of the welfare state. Not
only were the 1920s remarkable for their calm on their labor front, but
the men and women who led the strike immediately turned to the political
arena in a determined effort to bring about meaningful change. Three of
the strike leaders, for example, were elected to the Manitoba
Legislature in 1920—while still in jail.