Resistance and rebellion: A people’s history of the Canadian state study series 

Sundays – 2pm eastern | 12pm pacific

Resistance Bookroom

427 Bloor St W. Tkaranto and on zoom

Mainstream Canadian history emphasizes slow gradual changes, where Canadians have come together to surmount changes and build a better country for all. That myth is no more true here than in any other country. The lands claimed by the Canadian state have a long history of resistance to Canada and the 1% that its institutions protect. Indigenous nations have long resisted Canada’s genocide against them, and within settler communities workers have united to fight against the attacks from our ruling class.

Today, we are asked to support CEOs and bankers to defend “Canada,” at the same time we see worker and student uprisings around the world. It’s important to understand the long history of the fight against Canada and its 1% by settlers and Indigenous nations to better prepare us for the resistance and rebellion to come.

Join us for a study series of a people’s history of the Canadian state.

October 18 – The Winnipeg General Strike – 1919 | Zoom link

On May 15th, 1919, in solidarity with striking construction workers, two-thirds of Winnipeg’s population walked off the job. The strike lasted six weeks and is arguably North America’s largest labour action ever. It only ended after police attacked the strikers and their supporters, killing two and injuring dozens.

Workers shut down the city and ensured the distribution of milk and bread for citizens, while at the same time fending off the attacks by media, city government and the Citizens Committee, a group of 1,000 business leaders, intent on breaking the strike and the threat of Bolshevism in the streets of Winnipeg.

This strike was a part of the general upheaval and rebellion inspired by the successful workers revolution in Russia in 1917. Come and share in a discussion about how workers organized then and how we can organize today to fight the same forces that confronted the Winnipeg strikers.

Suggested readings

The Winnipeg General Strike - Wikipedia

What Socialists Learned from the Winnipeg General Strike - Ian Angus

1919: The Canadian Labour Revolt - Gregory S. Kealey

In person at 427 Bloor St W. Tkaranto or register for the zoom link here.

November 1 – The Red Power Movement – 1960s and 1970s

What does liberation mean when the promise of equal citizenship threatens to dissolve collective rights? Join us on November 1 to explore Red Power in Canada, focusing on Indigenous struggles over land and self-determination in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Drawing on the Native Alliance for Red Power’s Eight Point Programme and selections from Citizens Plus (the 1970 Red Paper), we will examine distinct visions of Indigenous control and resistance to assimilation. The film You Are on Indian Land and a contemporaneous socialist intervention by Dick Fidler will inform a 30-minute opening presentation, followed by discussion.
Together, we will ask what these struggles demanded, and what solidarity requires of socialists committed to supporting Indigenous movements’ authority to determine their own aims.

Readings and supplementary text: NARP’s Eight Point Programme and Citizens Plus, sections B.1, B.2 and B.6; supplemented by Dick Fidler’s Red Power in Canada.
Watch You Are on Indian Land (1969) — supplementary viewing.
Advance reading is encouraged, but no prior knowledge is required.

In person at 427 Bloor St. West, Tkaronto or register for the zoom link here.
 

November 15 – War Measures Act & Quebec Common Front Strikes – 1970 -72

Quebec public sector negotiations in 1968-1970 with the Quebec government made it clear that only unity could defeat the employer strategy to stall with the strongest groups so that the weakest groups of workers were forced to set the pattern for all. In January 1970 representatives of all federations and unions of the public and broader public sector convened to set up a Common Front.

Then, in October 1970, the armed occupation of Quebec by the federal Canadian state played a role in pushing the need for unity between unions even further. Ottawa had invoked the War Measures Act, which suspended civil liberties, supposedly in response to the kidnapping of two political officials by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). But in fact, thousands of ordinary Quebecois were surveilled and arrested, and union activists and leftists were especially targeted.

Meanwhile, throughout 1970 and 1971, the union rank and file membership was extremely active: not only strikes but street blockades, riots and demonstrations were everywhere in Quebec in 1970-71. But the most historic was in April and May of 1972: what had started as a legal public sector strike became a raging wildcat strike that spread to the private sector and led to the takeover of 9 towns, including radio stations and newspapers.

The paper L’Avenir was owned by Canadian media boss Conrad Black, then a young millionaire who owned several Quebec papers. He woke up one morning to a panicked phone call from his publisher in Sept-Iles, a small remote Quebec town. “They’re taking over the paper, they’re seizing control!” Suddenly, a new voice came on the line informing Black that his anti-union paper was about to be dismantled. Black shouted into the phone: “Comrade, be reasonable.” Finally, the workers’ committee agreed not to dismantle the plant.

This is a story about how a new Quebec working class rose up against both its oppression as a nation within the federalist Canadian state and against its own capitalist employers. And had a real moment of trying to run things differently, for and by themselves, under workers' control. The slogan? “We can only count on ourselves.”

November 29 – Operation Solidarity – 1983

In 1983 a general strike movement, Operation Solidarity, swept British Columbia. Months of protests against the provincial government coalesced into a general strike involving 85,000 workers, more than one in ten workers in the province. This was the first wave of planned walk outs that would have lead to a total shut down of the province. The strikers were demanding that the government withdraw proposed legislation that would have slashed the public service, ended tent controls, fired many public school teachers, increased tuition fees, and gutted the human rights act. 

Instead of proceeding with the strike, the union leadership called off the strike in return for almost no concessions from the government. The government’s massive attack on living standards and union rights would proceed unhindered. 

Join us for a discussion of the inspiring story of Operation Solidarity, and the how and why of its betrayal by the union leadership.

Suggested readings

How Operation Solidarity became Operation Soldout by Thom Quine

How do we build a fighting labour movement? by Michelle Robidoux
 

December 13 – Wetʼsuwetʼen Strong & Shut down Canada – 2020

January 10 – Black liberation in the Canadian state

February 7 – Movements that shook governments in so-called Canada and Quebec

February 21 –  What would a revolution look like in Canada today?