This is a timeline of labour issues and events in Canada.
1700s
1799 – After establishing fur trading post Greenwich House at Lac la Biche, workers refuse to proceed to Lesser Slave River because of lack of provisions. First known strike action in Alberta.[1][2]
Early-mid 1800s
1803 – Seven men working for Peter Fidler at Lake Athabasca refuse to stay on job unless wages increased.[3]
ca. 1812 – Dock workers in St. John (NB) and Halifax organize a union.[4]
1835-1845 - Shiners' War Irish labour unrest at Bytown (today's Ottawa). [5]
1842 – In Quebec, T.M. Moore begins to publish People's Magazine and Workingman's Guardian, the first labour-oriented reform newspaper.[6]
1872 – Nine Hour Movement - labour activists call for nine-hour day and 54-hour workweek.[8]
1872 – March 25, the Toronto Typographical Union goes on strike against their employer, the editor of The Globe. Liberal Party leader George Brown demands a nine-hour workday. Union activity then being a criminal offence, 24 members of strike committee jailed for conspiracy. John A. Macdonald's Conservative government passes Trade Unions Act on June 14, legalizing trade unions.[9]
1872 – April 15, the Toronto Trades Assembly organizes the country's first significant workers demonstration.
1872 – September 3, Ottawa unionists hold a 10,000-person-strong parade through the city. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald joins and gives a speech where he promises to abolish the sort of laws that had put the Toronto printers in jail. Canadian Parliament names Labour Day (first Monday in September) a holiday in 1894, and now it is a world-wide holiday.[10]
1886 – Mutiny among North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) constables at Edmonton over poor food and overcrowding. Mutineers arrested, taken to NWMP headquarters at Regina, are punished and/or driven from the force.[13]
1889 – Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital The commission, chaired at first by James Sherrard Armstrong, notes the many workplace injuries and deaths, and condemns working conditions in many workplaces. The commission recommends several changes to improve working conditions (the federal government does not act on them).[9] In a hearing before the commission, Olivier-David Benoît makes a strong case about the conditions faced by workers in the boot and shoe industry.[14]
1898 – Canadian Socialist League (CSL) founded in Montreal. Garners strong support in BC. Its views published in Lardeau Eagle, whose publisher, 23-year-old Richard Parmater Pettipiece, goes on to be prominent BC socialist and labour official.
1900s
1900 – Parliament passes the Conciliation Act and establishes the federal Department of Labour[9]
1906 – Thomas Belanger and Francois Theriault shot to death during strike at Maclaren Company pulp mill at Buckingham, QU.[20]
1906 – Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), formed in Chicago in 1905 and then came to BC. Founding convention of BC branch in 1906. Western Federation of Miners (WFM) instrumental in its early efforts.[21]
1906 – IWW Lumber Handlers Union No. 526, composed primarily of Tsleil-Watuth First Nations people of Burrard, strikes in opposition to demands of longer hours and lower pay. First IWW strike in western Canada. Strike largely unsuccessful; only victories are in getting jobs back and having scabs fired.[22]
1906 – Thunder Bay - the first strike at the Lakehead begins. Again and again, area workers band together to fight for wage increases, job security and non-discriminatory hiring practices.[23]
1907 – Quebec Bridge, still under construction, collapses, killing 75.[16]
1907 – IWW achieves majority control of the AFL-CIO unions in Nelson.[24] (Just a couple of years later, it becomes Nelson's largest union and leads a successful fight for the 8-hour day and higher wages for city workers.)[25]
1907 – August 28, at Cobalt (Ontario), an IWW member killed when scabs overload a charge at the mine.[26]
1907 – Rise of industrial unionism pre-World War I involves the IWW and other workers as well. In Quebec in 1907, workers in the textile sector, predominantly Francophone or Jews, organize industrial unions and conduct strikes.[27]
1909 – Prince Rupert (BC) - 123 IWW men walk off sewer construction worksite.[30]
1909 – Victoria IWW branch signs up 300 men employed in street construction and leads them out on strike. That same year, Victoria IWW calls for a general strike to demand release of McNamara brothers, arrested for the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building.[30]
1909 – Vancouver Free Speech Fight, wherein the IWW, supported by the Socialist Party of Canada, refuses to give in to demands by mayor and police that labourites not hold open-air rallies and meetings. Prominent U.S. leftist speakers Lucy Parsons and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also assist.[31] (Vancouver Free Speech Fight re-fought in 1911 and 1912.)
1910s
The Winnipeg general strike in 1919
1911 – Vancouver Free Speech Fight is re-fought in 1911 (and again in 1912). 1911 result: outdoor meetings allowed on certain streetcorners.[32]
1911 – December 23, at Nelson, BC, John LeTual and Caleb A. Barton murdered while organizing for Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).[26]
1912 – IWW, assisted by Socialist Party of Canada, conducts successful fight for free speech in Vancouver. R.P. Pettipiece, former Alberta/BC newspaperman and now prominent BC labour radical, arrested. IWW calls for a general strike and advocates "direct action up to and including sabotage".[32][33]
1912 – Edmonton sewer ditch diggers, organized by IWW, strike for fair wages.[34]
1912–1914 – Great Coal Strike on Vancouver Island, aka Vancouver Island War,[35] Miner Joseph Mairs sentenced to 18 months prison term, dies in jail of internal illness, having received no medical attention. He is 21 years of age. A memorial cairn stands in Ladysmith, British Columbia.[36]
1913 – Thunder Bay (Port Arthur and Fort William) - conductors and motormen of the civic railway (streetcar service) go on strike. Violence on both sides. The 1913 strike is the last major outburst of labour violence in Thunder Bay prior to World War I.[23]
1914 – The Workmen's Compensation Act, the first social insurance legislation in Canadian history, is adopted by the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.[37]
1914 – July 1, in Lac La Biche, Alberta, outspoken socialist and Wobblie Hiram Johnson killed in brutal knife and axe attack. He had written how his neighbours abhorred his politics. His murder is pinned on James Rowan and W.E. Barrett, two IWW organizers active in Edmonton who discovered Johnson's body. Their legal defence depletes the resources of the Edmonton IWW. The charges are eventually dropped, and the two men are instead sentenced to six months hard labour for vagrancy. Rowan goes on to write The I.W.W. in the Lumber Industry (1919).[38][39][40]
1914 – August 20, in Vancouver, Clarke Wallace Connell (of the IWW) dies from abscess on the brain while in police custody.[26]
1918 – Ontario machinists strive for common wages, eight-hour day, and improved work conditions across the province. Hold first provincial convention of machinists in Toronto in July 1918.[43]
1918-1925 – Canadian Labor Revolt, series of strikes aimed at revolution, at least in theory, sweep across Canada.[44]
1918 – Protection Island (BC) mining disaster; 16 are killed when the hoisting cable frays on a mine shaft elevator.[16]
1918 – Dominion Labor Party (DLP) is founded as a successor to the moribund Canadian Labour Party (CLP). DLP becomes a powerful political force in Alberta and Manitoba.
1919 – Western Labour Conference in Calgary votes to found the One Big Union on June 4.[46]
1919 – General strikes in Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria, Brandon, Amherst (NS). The 1919 Vancouver strike, in sympathy with Winnipeg, is the longest general strike in Canadian history.[45]
1919 – United Farmers of Ontario-Labour Party coalition government comes to power in Ontario. (not re-elected in 1923).
1920s
1920 – Labour scores wins in Manitoba. STV is adopted to elect Winnipeg MLAs and city councillors. Four labour-oriented MLAs elected in Winnipeg 1920; 3-5 Labour councillors victorious in the 1920 city election. Nine DLP MLAs elected across Manitoba.[48]
1920 – Angus McDonald, a carpenter, elected in Temiskaming (northern Ontario) as Independent. Proponent of revolutionary industrial unionism (One Big Union).[49] Re-elected in 1921. Riding abolished prior to 1925 election.
1921 May – Communist Party of Canada is founded. It is the most important single force in the labour movement throughout the 1920s.[51]
1921 – Canadian Labor Party revives under James Simpson. (Dominion Labor Party remains its counterpart in southern Alberta.)
1921 – Canadian federal election elects two important labourites -- J. S. Woodsworth in Winnipeg under the Independent Labor Party label and William Irvine in Calgary under the Dominion Labor Party label. (Irvine was popular among both city workers and UFA voters.)[52] Calgary also elects Joseph Tweed Shaw (backed by both the UFA and the DLP). Woodsworth, Irvine and others participate in the Ginger Group, a leftist caucus in House of Commons.
1922 – Raid on Dominion Coal Company's store at Sydney, NS. Thirteen men sentenced to two or three-year prison sentences. (A company store was similarly pillaged in the 1995 film Margaret's Museum.)[53]
1922-1925 – Cape Breton Labour Wars for recognition of the United Mine Workers of America as miners' bargaining agent.
1924 – Woodsworth, Irvine, UFA MPs and other progressive MPs form the Ginger Group in the House of Commons to fight on behalf of labour and social advances.
1925 – New Waterford, Nova Scotia - Company police kill coal miner Bill Davis and wound many others at a demonstration during a major strike at the British Empire Steel and Coal Company (BESCO). Davis Day is established in memory of Bill Davis. About 2000 soldiers are deployed against the strike, the largest peacetime deployment of the Canadian Militia for an internal conflict since the North-West Rebellion of 1885. "Battle of Waterford Lake" occurs on June 11, 1925. The defeat of the New Waterford strikers is said to end the labour revolt that started in 1918.[54]
1926 – Labour elects four MLAs after Alberta adopts proportional representation (STV) to elect MLAs in Edmonton and Calgary. CLP's Lionel Gibbs is elected in Edmonton; DLP's Fred White and Independent-Labour candidate Robert Parkyn elected in Calgary. Use of STV to elect Edmonton MLAs produces election of a Labour Party or Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) MLA in every election from 1926 to 1955, except 1935 and 1940. In Calgary under STV, a Labour/CCF MLA elected in 1926, 1930, 1944 and 1948. After change to first-past-the-post voting in 1956, no CCF/New Democratic Party (NDP) MLA is elected in Edmonton until 1982, in Calgary not until 1986.[55]
1932 – Edmonton Hunger March in December. A demonstration by struggling workers and farmers is repressed by billyclub-wielding police, some on horseback. Subsequently, police raid the Hunger March headquarters. 27 leaders and activists arrested.[61][62]
1933 – Stratford General Strike. Members of the Workers' Unity League are prominent. Military units equipped with machine guns and armored cars (or tanks) arrive to face off against the picketers.[63]
1935 – On-to-Ottawa Trek, protest march by unemployed from Vancouver eastward. It is stopped at Regina and dispersed on July 1, 1935, with mass arrests and loss of life (Nick Shaak beaten to death by club-wielding RCMP).[65]
1936 – Corbin Mine strike, southern BC near Alberta-BC border. Several strikers sentenced to prison terms. One of them, David Lockhart, dies of cellulitis while in prison.[66]
1938 – Bloody Sunday, culmination of "sitdowners' strike" in Vancouver (unemployed workers' protests)
1938 – Blubber Bay (Texada Island, BC) strike. Workers belong to recently founded International Woodworkers of America (IWA). Local union leader William Gardner dies after receiving savage beating and kicking from BC provincial policeman.[67][68]
Female shop stewards at the Burrard Drydock, North Vancouver, British Columbia. The company hired more than 1000 women during World War II, all of whom were dismissed after the war to free up jobs for the men returning from armed service.
1949 – Asbestos Strike in Asbestos, QU. 5000 miners on strike for three months against a foreign corporation at Asbestos and Thetford Mines. They are supported by the bishop of Montreal, the newspaper Le Devoir, and several prominent intellectuals. It is said to be one of the longest and most violent labour conflicts in Quebec history, and to have laid the basis for Quebec's Quiet Revolution.[71][72]
1951 – Oil Workers International Union's Neil Reimer conducts unionization drive at Edmonton British-American (now Gulf) refinery. Manning's Social Credit government delays union certification and changes labour law so that signatures of majority of workers are no longer enough. When unionization vote held, it loses by ten votes.[75]
1958 – Vancouver - Second Narrows Bridge disaster - bridge still under construction, collapses, killing 18. A diver drowns while searching for bodies. Bridge later renamed Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Bridge.[16]
1960s Canada adopts the 40-hour work week -- five days/eight-hour day schedule.[77]
1961 – The New Democratic Party (NDP) is founded as the successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and establishes a formal relationship with the organized labour movement.[78] A non-union affiliate of the NDP, the Woodsworth-Irvine Socialist Fellowship, based in Edmonton, carries on socialist education from 1962 to about 2000.[79]
1963 – Reesor Siding Strike in Northern Ontario. Picketline-crossing log suppliers shot eleven strikers, three were killed.[81]
1963 – The Canadian Union of Public Employees is formed from the merger of the National Union of Public Employees and the National Union of Public Service Employees. [82]
1965 – Wildcat postal strike leads to the extension of collective bargaining rights to the majority of the public service.[9]
1967 – The international Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers merge with the United Steelworkers. Local 598 in Sudbury, Ontario is the only Mine Mill local in the world to reject the merger, instead continuing operations as an unaffiliated union organization until 1993.
1968 – Air Canada agents in British Columbia begin work-to-rule over a dispute over the industrial relations department's bargaining methods.[83]
1969 – Murray-Hill riot, Montreal police force on strike. FLQ, taxi drivers, and others take radical action.
1971 – Owner of La Presse (Montrel newspaper) locks out workers. Solidarity rally of 15,000 met with tear gas and beatings. University student Michele Gauthier, who suffered from asthma, dies of suffocation.[84]
1976 – Canadian general strike: Day of Action (October 14) one-day general strike against Trudeau's anti-inflationary wages and price controls. More than one million workers stay home.[9][87]
1978 – September 15, the Inco Strike of 1978 begins in Sudbury, Ontario. Workers remain on strike for almost nine months, until June 7, 1979.
1981 – At Hibernia oilfield near Newfoundland, Ocean Ranger—an offshore oil platform—sinks, killing all 84 workers on board.[16]
1983 – July-August, "Women Against the Budget" is formed to fight the 1983 BC budget and other actions taken by Bill Bennett's Social Credit government against working people. The broad-based umbrella organization of activist women helps create the BC Federation of Labour's Operation Solidarity and Solidarity Coalition. On August 10, 40,000 rally at Vancouver's Empire Stadium to protest the BC government. In the face of a threatened general strike, the government backs down on its plans for mass layoffs of its employees.[91][92]
1983 – July-August, members of the BC Government Employees’ Union (BCGEU) hold a three-week occupation of Tranquille Institution in Kamloops, after learning the provincial government is planning its closure. Due to the occupation, the institution is allowed to function until 1985.[93]
1984 – The Canadian Auto Workers Union (properly the National Automobile, Aerospace, Transportation and General Workers Union of Canada) is founded. Bob White, an official of the United Auto Workers, encourages the Canadian membership of the U.A.W. to split away and form a separate union. White is C.A.W.'s first president. (split covered in NFB film Final Offer)
1986 – Alberta NDP takes 16 seats, a record until 2015, and becomes Official Opposition (Brian Mason is elected as MLA - he will be an NDP cabinet minister in 2015).
1986 – Six-month-long strike at the Gainers meatpacking plant in Edmonton.
1998 – Teenagers Jennifer Wiebe and Tessa Lowinger successfully unionize a McDonald's franchise in Squamish, British Columbia. However, the union is decertified in July 1999.
2000s
2000 – November 22, a McDonald's restaurant in Montreal is unionized. The location is closed down on August 31, 2001, with the owner claiming economic pressures due to a rent hike. This is later documented in the film Maxime, McDuff & McDo.
2001 – September 11, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) union suspends a planned national strike action in order to return to work and help Canadians.[94]
2006 – Ontario province-wide strike of college staff. Ontario College Professor John Stammers is fatally injured while trying to stop car from crossing picket line.[95][96][97]
2007 – Supreme Court of Canada rules that collective bargaining is a constitutional right protected by The Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The specific ruling was that the BC government's Bill 29 violated Charter rights by limiting activities of unionized health-care and social services employees.[9][98]
2009 – July 13, workers at Vale's operations in Sudbury embark on a year-long strike over contract concessions.[99]
2010s
2010 – July 5, a tentative resolution of the Vale strike in Sudbury is announced.[99]
2012 – February 2, in Halifax, Amalgamated Transit Union goes on strike, crippling the city's public transportation.[100] Transit workers had been denied salary or compensation increases due to a reported $3M deficit.[101] The strike ended March 14, 2012.
2012 – September 11, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and the Liberal party pass Bill 115 'Putting Students First Act 2012', thereby eliminating the rights of all teachers in the province to go on strike for the next two years. Bill 115 also freezes wages, grants ten sick days per year (down from twenty) and eliminates banked sick days from previous years. Unions state that this bill is a violation of their members' rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that the bill violates the Ontario Labour Relations Act of 1995.
2019 – Sheet Metal Workers' International Association ICI (Industrial, Commercial, Institutional) members go on strike in Ontario for 8 weeks in May and June, first strike in 30 years for that organization.
2021-2025 – Vancouver airport hotel strike begins in May 2021. UNITE HERE Local 40 and the PHI Hotel Group do not settle until March 2025, making it the longest strike in Canadian history.[105]
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