The Workers' Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada (review)

When I was growing up in downtown Toronto, there seemed to be only two annual parades of significance, and my brother and I used to sit on the curb and watch them go by. One was the Santa Claus Parade, with its promise of seasonal abundance and good cheer, and the other was the Labour Day Parade, a much less colourful, even plain spectacle – a few bands and floats, and long lines of marching men, sometimes women, representing the range of union workers in the city and usually giving pride of place to workers engaged in a particularly difficult struggle, who would then be recognized by applause from the sidewalks. As in so much cultural history, significance depended on the context, and I can still imagine what it might have been like for an earlier generation of children to stand and watch the Knights of Labour march in the same parade in the 1880s. In this study of one of Canada's oldest public holidays, historians Craig Heron and Steve Penfold provide a fascinating exploration of the changing face of Labour Day, which as it turns out is a complicated story: 'a holiday of many voices that at once reinforced and competed with each other, subject to shifting configurations of class relations, political culture, public celebration, and popular leisure that transcended the particular history of trade unions.'

Officially, Labour Day has been with us since 1894, when it was added to Victoria Day and Dominion Day as one of the new Dominion's statutory holidays. But it had started with the early unions, and its original meaning was shaped by a tradition of local labour days that celebrated craft pride and the working-class contribution to social progress in late Victorian Canada. From the beginning Labour Day was a ritual both of social solidarity and of social protest. As a moment of self-expression on the part of organized labour, it helped move unions from the margins towards the centre of public life, a process sanctioned by formal recognition and the enactment of occasional reforms. As a statutory holiday, Labour Day was also bound up with the quest for increased leisure time and recreational opportunities for workers and their families. Meanwhile, various groups within the society, including civic leaders, politicians, businesses, and churches, attempted to use Labour Day to serve their ends as well. Appeals to class solidarity were regularly eclipsed by celebrations of patriotism, religiosity, productivity, and consumerism. Alternative labour days emerged too, promoting conservative, nationalist, and leftist messages. In the 1930s, for instance, there was direct contention between Labour Day and May Day, the latter a less ambiguous day of protest that seems to have been first marked in Canada in 1906. By the 1970s, International Women's Day had also emerged as a separate feminist celebration. The story continues, and the authors could also have noted the proclamation of an annual Day of Mourning on 28 April by the Canadian Labour Congress in the 1980s, which in some places is having the interesting effect of renewed attention to the proximate May Day.

Conceptually, Heron and Penfold draw on an international literature concerning public traditions, parades, discourse, and space, which is flexibly applied to the diverse and uneven history of the Canadian experience. They write in a clear and vigorous style that establishes a long-range narrative and conveys choice local detail. Indeed they draw so casually on a wealth of evidence from all parts of the country that it is easy to forget that this kind of history represents a huge research achievement and cannot be written in a hurry. It is also good to report that the authors make serious use of contemporary cartoons, banners, engravings, and photographs; the shift in the representation of women is only one of the themes that emerge strikingly from this visual evidence. The book design features a generous selection of these illustrations, which helps make this...