Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900–35 by Michel S. Beaulieu (review)

The great majority of Canadians know little about northwestern Ontario. This is rather less true of Canadian labour historians, although the combined knowledge about A.T. Hill, Harry Bryan, Alf Hautamäki, Frederick Urry, and Fred Moore would not fill many pages. In Labour at the Lakehead Michel Beaulieu jumps feet first into their fascinating story. Thankfully, someone forgot to tell him that nobody does labour history anymore!

In his introduction Beaulieu acknowledges that his book is primarily an institutional history, it being necessary to establish this history before shifting the focus to “cultural topics and personal biographies” (11). The rationale is sound, although Beaulieu does not do himself justice. He does, in fact, provide fascinating portraits of little-known Lakehead labour leaders and leftists. That said, important figures such as Maurice Spector, Sam Scarlett, Malcolm Bruce, and Fred Thompson are not given their due, nor are the historians who have written about them. In addition, the biographies he includes are virtually all of men, the exception being Mary Gilbert. Attention paid to the important role of women in the work of Ian Radforth, Joan Sangster, Varpu Lindström, J. Donald Wilson, and Samira Saramo receives scant acknowledgement.

The first chapter, on the 1900–14 period, is fascinating but leaves the reader a bit at loose ends, not really sure what it all adds up to. In part it may be because Beaulieu is too deferential, making brief references to events other historians have written about without integrating them and their significance into his own narrative and analysis. He passes up opportunities to provide his own explanation for why major events in the history of the Lakehead, such as the deaths of eight workers in the 1909 strike of Fort William freight handlers, have not received more attention from Canadian historians.

Beaulieu’s chapter on the period of the First World War is lively and informative and makes a major contribution to one of the most debated aspects of Canadian left-wing history. It has often been noted that an order-in-council passed in September 1918 banned more than a dozen left-wing organizations, but not the Socialist Party of Canada. Beau-lieu reveals that in June 1918 “wealthy Montreal lawyer and notorious alarmist” C.H. Cahan was appointed by the federal government to look into labour radicalism, specifically in the Lakehead region (59). What Cahan found was the prominence of Finnish, Ukrainian, and Russian leftists in the area. It has long been speculated that the Social Democratic Party was banned because of the greater role played by “ethnic workers” in the organization than in the Socialist Party of Canada. The spc was essentially moribund at the Lakehead at the time of Cahan’s investigation; Finnish radicals were gravitating to the Industrial Workers of the World, and radical Anglo-Celts had already tried out the spc and rejected it. The omission of the Socialist Party makes sense once the Lakehead context is incorporated into our understanding of events.

Debatable is Beaulieu’s assertion that the One Big Union (obu) failed at the Lakehead “more because of it own internal wrangling than because its enemies defeated it” (65). As Beaulieu himself points out, the obu arrived at the Lakehead at roughly the same time that surveillance and repression of the Industrial Workers of the World was swinging into high gear. The obu was attempting to establish itself while the Mounted Police and Ontario Provincial Police, working with American intelligence officers, “flooded the region” (76). Not only the state, but the Communist Party, social democrats, and the Trades and Labour Congress too had a stake in destroying the obu. Internal wrangling there was in abundance, but as Beaulieu himself points out, the obu had “a vast potential to unite workers from many cultures . . . across ideological barriers” (88). Much was invested in many quarters to ensure that it did not succeed.

Beaulieu demonstrates...