Monday, January 18, 2021

UAlberta Faculty of Law Margaret Crang (Class of 1932), the first woman law graduate to serve on City Council in Edmonton

OFFICIAL CITY OF EDMONTON BIO

https://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/PDF/Crang_Margaret_-_Updated_Bio.pdf

ANOTHER IMPORTANT RADICAL CITY COUNCILLOR AND MY FAVORITE, MARGRET CRANG SHE WAS THE SECOND WOMAN ON CITY COUNCIL AND THE YOUNGEST

I DISCOVERED HER WHEN I WAS DOING MY BIOGRAPHIES OF LABOUR REPRESENTATIVES ON CITY COUNCIL. LABOUR OMNI VINCINT

UAlberta Faculty of Law's List of Firsts: Margaret Crang (Class of 1932), the first woman law graduate to serve on City Council in Edmonton

Article by Paula Simons (Edmonton Journal)

Katherine Thompson - 16 July 2013

Margaret Crang, as a young woman, in front of her family home in Garneau. The picture is from the collection of her nephew Robert Allin of Banff.

Margaret Crang, city's youngest elected official finally gets her name on a little piece of Edmonton (by Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal)

EDMONTON - "As a young girl in my teens, I found myself rather addicted to spasms of conviction. Like all adolescent youth, I was given to the projection of desperate ideals of personal and social perfection. The fact is that I really believed that I had a mission to save the world, and what is worse, I knew exactly how the thing was to be done. I was out to mould the world in conformity with the heart's desire."

Margaret Crang, "Where My Convictions Have Led Me"

Lawyer, journalist, teacher, politician, social activist. The youngest person ever to serve on Edmonton city council. A beautiful woman who turned down three marriage proposals, and who was rumoured, by some of her younger relatives, to have been Dr. Norman Bethune's lover. An eccentric aunt who grew marijuana on her windowsill, hoarded books and magazines, and spent her days in a ratty housecoat.

Margaret Crang, who died in 1992 at the age of 82, dedicated her life to causes she believed in, from women's rights to labour rights to anti-fascism. Whether in the courtrooms of Edmonton or the battlefields of Civil War Spain, she never hesitated to fight for her principles - even when her idealism was her political undoing.

She was one of the most intriguing, exasperating, and ultimately tragic public figures Edmonton has ever produced. Yet Edmonton has no memorial of her extraordinary life and adventures.

That could soon change. Last month, the city's naming committee approved a plan to name a road for Crang in the new southwest subdivision of Cavanagh. They also propose to name a park in the new district, south of Ellerslie Road and west of Calgary Trail, in her honour.

Finally getting her due

City’s youngest elected official will finally have her name on a little piece of Edmonton

Edmonton Journal
15 Jun 2013
Paula Simons

Simons: An extraordinary Edmontonian will finally be honoured by the city.

“As a young girl in my teens, I found myself rather addicted to spasms of conviction. Like all adolescent youth, I was given to the projection of desperate ideals of personal and social perfection. The fact is that I really believed that I had a mission to save the world, and what is worse, I knew exactly how the thing was to be done. I was out to mould the world in conformity with the heart’s desire.” — Margaret Crang, “Where My Convictions Have Led Me”

Lawyer, journalist, teacher, politician, social activist. The youngest person ever to serve on Edmonton city council. A beautiful woman who turned down three marriage proposals, and who was rumoured, by some of her younger relatives, to have been Dr. Norman Bethune’s lover. An eccentric aunt who grew marijuana on her windowsill, hoarded books and magazines, and spent her days in a ratty housecoat.

Margaret Crang, who died in 1992 at the age of 82, dedicated her life to causes she believed in, from women’s rights to labour rights to anti-fascism. Whether in the courtrooms of Edmonton or the battlefields of Civil War Spain, she never hesitated to fight for her principles — even when her idealism was her political undoing.

She was one of the most intriguing, exasperating, and ultimately tragic public figures Edmonton has ever produced. Yet Edmonton has no memorial of her extraordinary life and adventures.

That could soon change. Last month, the city’s naming committee approved a plan to name a road for Crang in the new southwest subdivision of Cavanagh. They also propose to name a park in the new district, south of Ellerslie Road and west of Calgary Trail, in her honour.

“Her story just seemed really fascinating,” says Jeff Nachtigall, who chairs the committee. “She was a very unique individual who had a major influence here.”

Crang first entered public life in 1933, when she ran for Edmonton city council.

It was a typically bold decision.

Although several prominent women had run for and won seats in the Alberta legislature, only one had ever been on Edmonton city council before; Izena Ross, elected in 1921, served a one-year term.

Crang was just 23, an accomplished track star, swimmer and competitive diver. She’d already earned a bachelor of arts and a teaching degree, and she was a fresh graduate of the University of Alberta law school, so fresh she’d not yet been called to the bar.

She’d grown up Garneau, in a political family, one of the six children of Dr. Frank Crang and his wife Margaret Bowen.

Dr. Crang, a former bricklayer who went back to school to train as a physician, encouraged his daughter’s interest in social justice.

please turn here and h “While accompanying my father on his rounds, I saw the distress among the poor people,” she later told the Toronto Star.

The politics of equal opportunity for all, she said, “were our family topics of conversation, morning, noon and night.”

Father and daughter ran in the 1933 election on the same Labor slate, she for city council, and he for school board.

Crang’s election handouts featured a photograph of a young lady in her graduation gown. Despite her three university degrees, she scarcely looks old enough to be out of high school.

“With thousands of women and children vitally interested in the action of the city council, it is essential to have a woman on the Council,” read the flyer. “Miss Crang is peculiarly well fitted to fill this position.”

On Nov. 8, 1933, in the depths of the Depression, Crang was elected, still the youngest person ever to have served on Edmonton city council.

The Edmonton Journal was well-pleased with her victory.

“Extremely quiet in personality, Miss Crang articulates her ideas with amazing clarity and swiftness and a remarkable singleness of purpose concerning her ideas which augers well for balanced action,” said the paper.

Dan Knott, elected mayor that same night, was asked by the Journal whether he would “treat his girl alderman nicely.”

That he promised to do — although he bemoaned the fact that councillors would have to stop smoking during their meetings.

No one was more shocked by her unexpected victory than Crang herself.

“I can scarcely believe it,” she told the paper. “It makes me feel very serious. I will try to do my utmost to stand up for the principles for which I think I was elected.”

That she did. Over the next decades, Crang dedicated herself to fighting for her principles — even when her idealism was to her political disadvantage.

She ran successfully for reelection in 1935, and served on council until 1937.

She ran three times — always unsuccessfully — for the Alberta legislature. She advocated fiercely for the rights of Chinese and Sikh immigrants, fought to raise the “relief” rates, fought to maintain Edmonton’s streetcar system, and championed the rights of women, including advocating more liberal divorce laws. She took legal cases pro bono for clients would couldn’t pay.

She wrote passionate newspaper articles and delivered thundering radio addresses and public lectures on the dangers of fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

And she criss-crossed the province, making speeches to high school classes, union meetings, service clubs and political rallies.

“I campaigned all over Alberta in the provincial elections in August for the Labor Party,” she wrote to a cousin in Saskatchewan in late 1935. “No sooner was I through with this work than the Federal Election was upon us. I spoke and worked hard for the CCF candidates in and around Edmonton. This was no sooner through than I began a strenuous Civic campaign for re-election to the aldermanic board. Many times I was about to write to you at my office, when the phone would ring or a visitor arrive to talk CCF or a legal client would be waiting for me.”

In September 1936, while still an alderman, she travelled to Spain to witness first-hand the impact of the Civil War between the loyalist Republicans and Francisco Franco’s fascist rebels. Four months after the war began, and a year before the famous Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion was formed, “Margarita” Crang travelled to Barcelona, Madrid and Toledo, dodging sniper bullets and enrolling as a member of the Battalion of Young Guards, writing a series of articles for the Edmonton Journal when she returned about the atrocities she had witnessed.

She outraged many across Canada when she boasted of firing a gun “in the general direction” of the rebel forces. The Vancouver Sun called her “beastly” and “unwomanly.” The Montreal Gazette dubbed her a Communist. The Toronto Star pointed out that Crang had originally gone to Europe as a peace activist, a delegate to a conference in Brussels on war prevention.

“What justification could there be for a peace delegate’s participation in a civil war?” the Star asked.

Though Crang always insisted she hadn’t shot at any actual people, the resulting controversy may have contributed to her loss at the polls when she ran again for council the following year. Then again, it was a bad election for Labor candidates: no incumbents won their seats, and even Crang’s father, a 25-year trustee, lost his own re-election campaign.

While family legend suggests that Crang and Norman Bethune began their rumoured relationship in Spain, that can’t be true. Bethune, the radical leftist doctor, didn’t arrive in Spain as a volunteer with the International Brigade until November 1936, by which time Crang was already back in Canada, writing and speaking about the Loyalist cause. But the two did finally meet when Bethune came on a western Canadian fundraising trip in July 1937, six months before he left to join the Communist cause in China. They travelled together to Medicine Hat and Swift Current, on a joint speaking tour. Bethune was divorced and it was certainly a dramatic breach of 1930s etiquette for a single lady and gentleman to travel together. But whether the two shared anything more than a podium is unclear.

Despite the communist label, Crang’s actual political allegiances weren’t always easy to pin down. While she was prescient when she used her speeches and articles to warn Canadians about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the links between Spanish fascism and that in Germany and Italy, some of her other political ideas were much murkier. She decried anti-Semitism — yet didn’t hesitate to blame Canada’s economic woes on a cabal of evil bankers. She flirted with communism, was an active member of the CCF, then later became enamoured of William “Bible Bill” Aberhart and his Social Credit monetary policies.

When she ran for a seat in the legislature, that lack of rigid ideology came back to haunt her. She attempted to run as a compromise candidate, appealing to both CCF and Social Credit voters. Instead, she ended up splitting the left-wing vote, and disillusioning labour supporters

She advocated fiercely for the rights of Chinese and Sikh immigrants, fought to raise the “relief ” rates, fought to maintain Edmonton’s streetcar system, and championed the rights of women, including advocating more liberal divorce laws.

who were baffled by her new Socred leanings.

Frustrated politically, she left Edmonton and worked as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette. Privately, she was fighting a very different battle. In her 1930s, she was diagnosed with a severe case of Cushing’s syndrome, which affected her pituitary and adrenal glands. The condition sapped her energy, and led to depression. According to Crang’s nephew, Edgar Allin, a retired doctor, it also caused severe osteoarthritis, hunching her spine. From a height of five-foot-seven, she shrunk to less than five feet.

“She went from being quite an attractive woman to a much modified, less attractive individual,” he says.

The condition became so severe, Crang’s family feared for her life. They finally took her to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where George Thorn, the world’s leading authority on diseases of the adrenal gland, was physician-in-chief. There, Crang bravely became a pioneer of a different sort. Allin says his aunt became the first person to survive a bilateral adrenalectomy — the removal of both glands. The surgery saved her life, but she never truly regained her health or energy — or as she later complained, her libido.

For a time, she lived with her older sister, Florence, and her family back in Garneau.

“She was hard to live with and rather messy,” her niece Shirley Moen recalls. “She lived in her housecoat. We’d be having guests over and she’d come downstairs to join us in her ratty old dressing gown, even though my mother had given her nice dressing gowns.”

But Edgar Allin, Moen’s brother, has fonder memories of their aunt and the stories she told about her love affairs and her Spanish adventures.

“Margaret had a rather bad temper and I don’t think she was very fond of children. But I had some very interesting conversations with her when I was a teenager. She was very uninhibited in what she would talk about.”

Crang spent her later years in Vancouver, where she remained passionately interested in politics, especially the politics of China. And she never quite lost her ability to shock. In about 1973, Moen remembers taking her own children to Vancouver to visit their greataunt. Crang offered Moen’s 14-year-old son a beer. When the startled teen declined, the mischievous Crang offered him some pot, from the marijuana plants she was growing on her kitchen windowsill.

But despite such flashes of puckish humour, the beautiful athletic woman, the unstoppable firebrand, was gone forever.

“Once, she told me, she went for a walk in Vancouver. She looked over on her right and saw this odd, gnome-like little person walking beside her. Then she realized it was her reflection,” says Allin.

Yet the real reflection of Crang’s life is the society she helped to shape. Today, there are four strong women on Edmonton city council. The premier and the leader of opposition are women. Female law students outnumber their male classmates. And many of the radical policies Crang championed — welfare, universal health care, equal rights for Asian immigrants — have become core Canadian values. Some of her political enthusiasms, to be sure, have not withstood the test of history. Yet without Crang, and her generation of social revolutionaries, we would not have the country we have today.

Still, her family is surprised and pleased to learn the city is proposing to name a park for their remarkable aunt and cousin.

“I think she would have been delighted. And so am I,” says nephew Edgar Allin.

It will be some time before Margaret Crang Park comes to be. Its location still needs to be approved by city council, the subdivision still has to be built. In the meantime, Nachtigall, chair of the city’s naming committee, is delighted to see Crang’s story being told.

“We in Edmonton need to know our characters. It’s good when people dig into things and find out these stories. It’s good to dig into our past. These stories are little treasures, that help us to understand more about our history.”

Certainly, with a new civic election season upon us, it’s a perfect time to remember the importance of city councillors with convictions, who fight with passion to make this a better city. psimons@edmontonjournal. com Twitter.com/Paulatics Paula Simons is on Facebook. To join the conversation, go to www. facebook.com/ EJPaulaSimons or visit her blog at edmontonjournal. com/Paulatics edmontonjournal. com To see more archival photos and to read the original text of Margaret Crang’s fiery 1934 radio address, courtesy the Provincial Archives of Alberta, go to edmontonjournal.com/insight

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March 08, 2016

Edmonton City Councillor with an Edge: Margaret Crang

Happy International Women’s Day!

To celebrate the United Nations’ recognition of women and their achievements, today’s post discusses a remarkable Edmontonian and University of Alberta (“U of A”) Faculty of Law alumnus, Margaret Tryphene Francis Crang. We are grateful for the opportunity we recently had to speak with Ms. Crang’s niece, Phyllis Crang, and her great-niece, who helped inspire this biographical post. Her great-niece, Catherine A. Crang, also graduated with a law degree from the U of A and is a partner at a prominent Calgary law firm.

Margaret Crang earned three degrees by the age of twenty-three at the U of A: a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Law, and a School of Education diploma.[1] She was a keen athlete, excelling in track and swimming. Her photo is included in the Faculty of Law’s graduating class of 1932. In that ninth graduating class, she and Ms. H.K. Craig were the only women in their class of eleven, and only six women had graduated before them. Ms. Crang was well respected by her peers and sat on the student executive committee along with well-known members of the Edmonton legal community, Wilbur Fee Bowker and William Ogden Parlee.

In 1933 Ms. Crang became Canada's first female city councillor.[2] She remains the youngest person to ever serve on Edmonton City Council.[3] Her tenure on council lasted only four years, despite topping the polls in the 1935 civic election.[4] By 1937, the conservative Alberta politics ousted many politicians with more leftist ideals, and even her father lost his twenty-five-year seat on the school board to a more conservative candidate.[5] Some argue that her idealism, and particularly one controversial event in Spain as outlined below, prevented her from being re-elected in 1937.[6]

Ms. Crang was called “council’s chief defender of the unemployed and their organizations”.[7] She was raised by liberal parents, including her physician father who, as a member of the Canadian Labor [sic] Party, advocated for the unemployed, the ill, the young, and the poor during Alberta’s poor economic conditions in the 1920s.[8] Ms. Crang’s idealism was deeply rooted as a product of her upbringing; she is quoted as having said:

As a young girl in my teens, I found myself rather addicted to spasms of conviction. Like all adolescent youth, I was given to the projection of desperate ideals of personal and social perfection. The fact is that I really believed that I had a mission to save the world, and what is worse, I knew exactly how the thing was to be done. I was out to mould the world in conformity with the heart’s desire.[9]

As a socialist, a pacifist, and a staunch anti-fascist, Ms. Crang attended the United Peace Conference in Brussels in 1936 along with nine other delegates from Canada.[10] She was the national representative of the Edmonton Branch of the League against War and Fascism and a member of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (a political coalition of progressive, socialist, and labour groups).[11] That same year, the Spanish Civil War had recently broken out. While in Europe, Ms. Crang seized the opportunity to sneak into “war-ravaged” Spain through a tunnel on the French border.[12] Luckily, Ms. Crang had this opportunity less than a year before the Canadian government criminalized involvement in the Spanish Civil War.[13] Ms. Crang and nine other delegates connected with some milicianas, the republican Spanish women who battled fascists, who took them on a tour of Madrid and a battle front. Feeling a sense of connection with her female comrades and an overwhelming sense of justice for the Spanish government forces, she picked up a rifle and fired two shots in the direction of the fascist guards.[14]

Newspapers across Canada, including the Edmonton Journal, reported on her anti-pacifist, “unwomanly” act when she returned home.[15] Despite there being no legislation to criminalize her act, the conservative attitude in Canada during this time destroyed her socialist political career. After her city council term ended in 1937, she was unable to secure re-election and three efforts to break into provincial politics were also unsuccessful. Instead, she practiced as a lawyer on the west coast of Canada in support of the rights of refugees and immigrants and enjoyed a career as a journalist in Montréal for the Montréal Gazette. She eventually relocated to Vancouver to be closer to her parents, and passed away in 1991.[16] To recognize her contribution to the Edmonton community, the City of Edmonton has named a park in the southwest after Ms. Crang.

Ms. Crang’s remarkable story is timely - in the spirit of celebrating International Women’s Day, we honour pioneer women in law and politics who both benefitted from the rights to vote and hold office, and who contributed to the women’s equality movement in Canada.

[1] City of Edmonton Archives, “City Government”, Chapter 18 - Biographies of Council Members (online):

<http://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/Chapter_18_-_Biographies.pdf> [City].

[2] Katherine Thompson, UAlberta Faculty of Law's List of Firsts: Margaret Crang (Class of 1932), the first woman law graduate to serve on City Council in Edmonton, University of Alberta Faculty of Law News (online): <https://lawschool.ualberta.ca/news/main-news/2013/july/margaretcrang-firstwomanlawgraduatetoserveonedmontoncitycouncil> [Thomspon].

[3] City, supra note 1.

[4] Larry Hannant, “‘My God, are they sending women?’: Three Canadian Women in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939”, Journal of the CHA 2004, New Series, Vol 15 (online): <http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/012072ar> [Hannant].

[5] Ibid.

[6] City, supra note 1.

[7] Edmonton Public Library, City Councilor [sic] Margarent Crang, City of Edmonton Archives, EA-267-534 (online): <http://www2.epl.ca/edmontonacitycalledhome/EPLEdmontonCityCalledPhotosSingle.cfm?id=1648> [Library].

[8] Brief Biography of Margaret Crang, Old Alberta, 12 June 2013 (online): <http://oldalberta.blogspot.ca/2013/06/brief-biography-of-margaret-crang.html> [Brief].

[9] Thompson, supra note 2.

[10] City, supra note 1; Hannant, supra note 4.

[11] Hannant, ibid.

[12] City, supra note 1; Hannant, ibid.

[13] Dougal McDonald, “How Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act Criminalized the Anti-Fascist Volunteers”, 75th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War (online): <http://www.cpcml.ca/Tmlw2011/W410045.HTM> [McDonald].

[14] City, supra note 1; Hannant, supra note 4.

[15] Hannant, ibid.

[16] Brief, supra note 8.

Margaret Crang

Profession:

Lawyer, member of Edmonton City Council, 1933-1937, on a Labour ticket

Hometown(s):

Edmonton, Alberta

Education:

University of Alberta, law school

Political affiliation:

Canadian Labour Party; Cooperative Commonwealth Federation

Approximate date arrived in Spain:

1936-08-00

1938-00-00

Unit:

Geneva World Youth Congress: Youth Delegate

Final status:

Survived

Other:

Crang visited the front lines in Madrid and fired two shots at the fascist lines, which may have damaged her political career in Alberta

Sources:

Petrou; Ancestry; Hannant, "My God, Are They Sending Women Now?"

PROTEST AND PROGRESS

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay, Margaret Crang... three Edmontonians who stood up and fought for the working people of their city through the dark days of the World Wars, the fragile prosperity of the 1920s, the grinding poverty of the Dirty Thirties and Cold War repression.

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay and Margaret Crang did not win all their battles but they made a difference in the history of the city, the province and the country.

PROTEST AND PROGRESS Quantity Selection - Provincial Archives Of Alberta

Edmonton elected its first female councillor 100 years ago. A new project examines why so few have followed in her footsteps

Izena Ross looks out from the frame of the undated, black and white photograph, her eyes behind a pair of round, dark-rimmed glasses. Her expression is neutral. She wears a fur collar and a necklace with a large jewel, her hair in a wavy bob.

© Provided by Edmonton Journal Izena Ross, first woman city councillor. (Supplied photo)

The image is one of the few surviving photos of the first woman to serve on Edmonton city council. Elected in 1921, Ross served a single, year-long term and has largely been forgotten. The only public recognition of her historic achievement is a sliver of green space on Fort Road officially called Izena Ross Park.

One hundred years after Ross’s election — and months before Edmonton’s next civic contest — a group of women are using Ross’s story to highlight the longstanding gender imbalance at Edmonton city hall.

Ross is one of just 31 women to have been elected to Edmonton city council in the city’s history, said Katherine O’Neill, CEO of YWCA Edmonton. Only one woman, Jan Reimer, has ever been mayor. Municipal voters have never elected an Indigenous woman or a woman of colour. Only two of Edmonton’s current 12 councillors are women.

Last February, O’Neill was headed to an event hosted by Parity YEG, a group focused on gender parity in politics. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’ve been around this city a long time … who was the first female councillor?'” O’Neill said in an interview. “And so I just do this simple Google search. And like, really, nothing comes up about this woman.”

“I realized quite quickly, a lot of people didn’t know this story.”

Izena Ross.

Next week, Parity YEG, the YWCA and current and former councillors begin a year-long campaign called the Searching for Izena Project, which will document the history of female representation at city hall in a monthly podcast.

O’Neill began their ongoing research into Ross’s story last year, and found little in the city archives. As far as she can tell, Ross has no surviving family or descendants. She eventually turned up a photo of Ross in the Edmonton Public School Board archive. “The city didn’t have one, the city archive didn’t have one, the Alberta archive didn’t have an original photo of her.”

Ross ran with the goal of “putting women’s issues and girl’s issues on the agenda at city hall,” O’Neill eventually learned. She was one of three women to run in 1921 — shortly after white women won the right to vote in Alberta. Ross was the only woman to win her seat.

One of the earliest stories about Ross’s time on council dealt with worries among male aldermen that they wouldn’t be allowed to smoke in the presence of a lady. It appears Ross obliged them. A newspaper headline from her term reads: “City Fathers Still Retain Ancient Right: Smoking in Committee of Whole Continues by Permission of Mrs. Ross.”

Newspaper clipping.

Ultimately, Ross wasn’t able to leave much of a mark. She lost reelection in 1922. She later served as a school trustee, and died in 1945.

Relatively few women have followed in Ross’s footsteps.

One is Olivia Butti, who at 82 is Edmonton’s oldest surviving councillor. She served from 1974 to 1986.

In an interview, Butti said she became interested in politics after founding the community league in her neighbourhood, Rosslyn. The two issues that first interested her were public safety and transportation — particularly a troublesome railway crossing near her community.

Butti initially didn’t expect to win her first race — she ran to generate name recognition ahead of a run the following election, by which time her kids would be out of school. Instead, she was elected, which forced her to juggle council responsibilities with raising a family. “This is why I think a lot of women don’t run,” she said.

Olivia Butti, former Edmonton city councillor, attends a meeting at Edmonton City Hall on Aug. 31, 2016, concerning the future of Northlands.

Eventually Butti served on the council that launched the first LRT line. She was on the police commission and played a role in establishing a Crime Stoppers program.

“It’s a very gratifying experience, knowing you can do something to make it a better place,” she said.

O’Neill hopes by telling the stories of people like Ross and Butti, other women will be encouraged to run for council. She said the aim is to produce a document for the city that will chart the history of women on council and identify barriers to gender parity — with a special focus on women from communities that have never been elected to council.

“We’re a city of more than one million people and representation matters,” she said. “When you have a council that looks like the city you’re representing, you’re going to have better decisions, you’re going to have better outcomes.”

Alberta’s next municipal elections are scheduled for Oct. 18, 2021.

jwakefield@postmedia.com

Senator Paula Simons
14 hrs

I’m very pleased to be playing a small part in this very cool project. I’ll be a guest on the second episode, speaking about Margaret Crang, the second woman to serve on Edmonton’s city council. We record that episode this coming week.

Izena Ross looks out from the frame of the undated, black and white photograph, her eyes behind a pair of round, dark-rimmed glasses. Her expression is…

Remember/Resist/Redraw #19: Revisiting the Workers’ Revolt in Winnipeg

April 19, 2019

2019 marks the centenary of the Winnipeg General Strike, which took place between 15 May and 26 June 1919. In anticipation of the centenary, the Graphic History Collective released RRR poster #19 this week by David Lester and the GHC. The poster critically examines the strike’s important lessons and legacy.

We hope that Remember | Resist | Redraw encourages people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for social change. Learn more about how you can support the project on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Revisiting the Workers’ Revolt in Winnipeg

Poster by David Lester
Essay by the Graphic History Collective

In 1919, 35,000 workers in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation, staged a six-week general strike between 15 May and 26 June. Workers from various backgrounds withdrew their labour power—they went on strike—to demand higher wages, collective bargaining rights, and more power for working people. One hundred years later, the Winnipeg General Strike remains one of the largest and most important strikes in Canadian history.

The Winnipeg General Strike is part of the longer history of colonial conflict, capitalist development, and class polarization in Western Canada. By the early 1900s, a number of aggressive businessmen—including some who participated in the Government of Canada’s violent efforts to dispossess Indigenous communities of their land in 1869–1870 and 1885—had come west to pursue industrialization. Over time, they shaped the development of Winnipeg for their benefit. The city became increasingly divided along class lines, with capitalists pitted against workers.

The situation worsened during and after World War I. Many working-class men went off to fight in the fields of Europe while capitalists stayed home and profited from wartime production. Soldiers hoped to enjoy a more equal and democratic society when they returned home. Instead, they faced high rates of unemployment and inflation. Employer indifference to these issues and refusal to recognize unions and bargain with workers further fanned the flames of discontent. When Winnipeg’s building and metal trades workers went on strike on 1 May, other unions in the city decided to join them in a general sympathetic strike.

The Winnipeg General Strike began with 11,000 unionized workers, but the number of strikers soon swelled to 35,000 as thousands of non-unionized workers also walked off the job. Many of them were women and recent immigrants living in the city’s North End. As the city ground to a halt, as the phones went silent, the streetcars stopped, and the lights turned off, workers demonstrated the power and potential of labour solidarity.

But divisions still existed. Some strikers reinforced notions of white supremacy by advancing their demands as the rights of white, Anglo-Saxon, and loyal British subjects. Strikers also failed to make connections with the struggles of other dispossessed and exploited groups, such as the Anishinaabe community of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, who were experiencing a major land loss due to the construction of the Winnipeg Aqueduct at the same time. This was a missed opportunity to build strong relations of solidarity amongst different groups to fight, win, and leave no one behind.

The Winnipeg General Strike lasted for six weeks but ultimately ended in defeat. Employers and state officials worked to contain the strike, undercut the strike leaders, and pit working people against each other. They labeled the strikers “enemy aliens” and “foreign radicals” and even arrested many of them on dubious charges and tried to have them deported. Finally, on June 21—a day that has come to be known as “Bloody Saturday”—state officials authorized violence. Special constables and the Royal North-West Mounted Police attacked strikers and their supporters during a peaceful demonstration. The strike was called off a few days later, ending officially on June 26. The events of Bloody Saturday are a stark reminder that to crush resistance to capitalist development and colonial expansion, the state is not afraid to bloody its hands. Indeed, less than 35 years separated the state’s attack on strikers in Winnipeg and its violent suppression of Métis, Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux communities in the North-West in 1885.

On the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike, it is useful to revisit the workers’ revolt to introduce new generations to the many lessons it holds for today. Although the Winnipeg General Strike ended in defeat, it was not a failure. In the years afterwards, new leaders and political groups tried to build on the strike’s momentum and carry on the struggle for a better world for workers in Winnipeg and elsewhere. Understanding the power of working people and the strike and building new relationships of solidarity can help reenergize our efforts to build a better world.

[Image Description: The top of this poster says The Winnipeg General Strike in large letters over a red and yellow painted background. Below this is a black line drawing of police on horses. A large fist rises up on the right. On the bottom a black and white line drawing of a crowd from 1919 watching a women speaking.

The poster says: In May and June 1919, 35,000 workers in Winnipeg, Manitoba staged a six-week general strike. Workers from various backgrounds struck for higher wages and collective bargaining rights and to demand more power for working people. Ultimately, the strike was violently crushed by police acting on the orders of politicians and the city’s capitalists. Although the strike ended in defeat, it was not a failure. It demonstrated the power of working people and inspired new generations of workers to carry on the struggle to build a better world.]

David Lester is the guitarist in the underground rock duo Mecca Normal. He is author/illustrator of The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism and the graphic novel The Listener. He has contributed to several GHC projects, including Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle, Direct Action Gets the Goods: A Graphic History of the Strike in Canada, and 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike. He is currently working on a graphic biography of Emma Goldman.

The Graphic History Collective is a group of artists and writers interested in comics, history, and social change. We produce accessible projects to educate people about the historical roots of contemporary social issues. Our comics show that you don’t need a cape and a pair of tights to change the world.

Further Reading

Bumsted, J.M. The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919: An Illustrated History. Winnipeg, MB: Watson & Dwyer, 1994.

Graphic History Collective, and David Lester. 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2019.

Heron, Craig, ed. The Workers’ Revolt in Canada, 1917–1925. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Horodyski, Mary. “Women and the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.” Manitoba History, no. 11 (Spring 1986): 28–37.

Penner, Norman, ed. Winnipeg 1919: The Strikers’ Own History of the Winnipeg General Strike. 2nd ed. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1975.

Perry, Adele. Aqueduct: Colonialism: Resources, and the Histories We Remember. Winnipeg, MB: ARP Books, 2016.

Remember/Resist/Redraw #26: 1995 Calgary Workers Laundry Strike

November 20, 2020 No Comments

Earlier this month, the Graphic History Collective released RRR #26 to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1995 Calgary Laundry Workers Strike.

The poster by Mary Joyce and Alvin Finkel outlines the importance of rank-and-file militancy, much of it by immigrant women of colour, in the fight against austerity and privatization in places like Alberta. This poster is particularly pertinent because the Provincial Government of Alberta is today, 25 years later, launching new attacks on health care workers in the midst of a global pandemic.

1995 Calgary Laundry Workers Strike

Poster by Mary Joyce
Essay by Alvin Finkel

In 1993 and 1994, the Alberta Progressive Conservative government of Ralph Klein eliminated tens of thousands of public sector jobs and cut wages and benefits of remaining workers. Within two years, Klein had chopped Alberta program spending by over 21 per cent, and he began a massive contracting out of public services. The trade union movement seemed paralyzed by the government’s recklessness. In 2019 and 2020, a similar scenario appeared as Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP) announced plans to cut public services and wages while privatizing public services whenever possible. But the earlier Klein cuts had put the union movement on alert and the workers’ response was far more militant.

In 1995, when the Calgary Health Authority furthered the privatization agenda by announcing a contracting out of hospital laundry workers’ jobs, it expected compliance from the affected workers. Their jobs would go to K-Bro Linens in Edmonton. Most were Caribbean and Asian immigrant women. They had taken a 28 per cent cut in the previous round of bargaining to preserve their jobs: strenuous, dangerous jobs handling blood, body parts, and contagion in the linens they laundered. They were furious when they learned that they would be fired despite their earlier sacrifices.

The first to respond were 60 laundry workers at the Calgary General Hospital, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Their union representatives warned that a wildcat strike would be illegal and could result in them being fined and the union being decertified. But, as Barbadian-born worker Yvette Lynch, an 11-year veteran of the laundry, said: “People were prepared … they just can’t ask us to take cutbacks and then decide to take away our jobs from us just like that.” They called in sick on 14 November 1995. The next day the same scenario occurred at the Foothills Hospital where laundry workers were members of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

Within ten days about 2,500 workers in six hospitals and nine nursing homes were wildcatting and hundreds of other healthcare workers were working to rule. Trade unionists and non-unionists alike inside and outside the health sector demonstrated solidarity with the strikers on their picket line and in public rallies. Growing calls for a general strike scared Premier Klein. He offered the unions a delay in contracting out of 18 months, long enough for most of the workers to find other jobs, plus paid retraining and severance payments. The striking workers were divided on an offer that would not make their jobs permanent. But faced with threats of legal action by the government, which had banned strikes in the health sector, a majority accepted the 18-month offer. “Tough guy” Ralph Klein had blinked, and it was a group of mainly immigrant women workers who had provoked that. The courage displayed by the laundry workers inspired a wave of strikes and job actions by other healthcare workers; licensed practical nurses and general support service workers repeatedly took part in some of the largest walk-outs in Alberta’s history during the closing years of that decade.

While the laundry workers’ victory was a partial one, the events it set in motion marked a victory for all Alberta working people. The Klein government put back a portion of funds they had cut from medical care and other public services, responding to accusations during the wildcat that they had cut too much, and that it was workers whom they had hurt in the process. Privatizations slowed though the government shuttered the Calgary General Hospital in 1998. The Klein years overall were a wasteland for Alberta working people but they would have been much worse if the laundry workers had not inspired a large section of the Alberta working class to demonstrate that they would not accept further cuts and privatizations. Yvette Lynch put it this way: “It made us feel good, it made us feel strong, like we did something that we were supposed to do, that they can’t walk over the little people.”

Long-time executive secretary of the Calgary and District Labour Council Gord Christie said of the laundry workers: “in times of struggles, the real natural leaders came forward … Some of the people within the laundry workers had never been to a union meeting, never held positions within the union. They were the strongest leaders … It was fabulous how those people came forward and said, ‘we’re going to do it and we’re so proud and we’re going to make it happen.’” Similarly, in 2020, rank-and-file militancy across the public sector persuaded union leaders that the fight against the UCP had to be in the streets and immediate rather than a lot of talk while waiting for another election in which the UCP might be defeated.

[Image Description:“The poster depicts a Black woman in front of mountains and a blue sky. She is wearing red and green, holding a white sheet in one hand and a sign in the other that says: “On Strike! Laundry Workers of CGH! To Stop Cuts and Privatizing. For Right of all to Universal Healthcare.” She is behind a orange and white building and a large crowd of people. In front of the crowd are four different women with their arms up in the air.”]

Mary Joyce lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta, producing art for exhibition, sale, and commission. Thirty-five years a studio artist, she makes work that celebrates our ongoing upsurge of political mobilization and citizen engagement with vigour, immediacy, depth, and sensuality. Active in the collection of McMaster University’s German expressionist art collection while a young student, her philosophical and aesthetic foundation is serving her community well. As an award-winning printmaker and painter, she transposes techniques from one medium to another, discovering in the interplay meaningful juxtapositions. Her oeuvre includes paintings, prints, and installations with large fabric or paper elements. She has shown work throughout Canada and Europe. She is university-educated in Art History, Literature, Studio. Her work and publications are in public and private collections. http://www.maryjoyceart.com.

Alvin Finkel is a founding member and current president of the Alberta Labour History Institute. He is professor emeritus of history at Athabasca University. A prolific historian, he has published textbooks on Canadian history and many works on Canadian labour and social policy history. He is the editor of Working People in Alberta: A History and the author of Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History. His latest book and his magnum opus is Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy. https://twitter.com/alvinfinkel.

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The Workers’ Revolt in Edmonton

June 19, 2019 No Comments

Mikhail Bjorge

With rail construction largely completed and mechanization lessening the need for iterate agricultural labour, mass unemployment had become the norm in Edmonton, Alberta by 1914. At this time, Carl Berg, a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), relocated to the city. Here he started working with Sarah Knight in the Federal Labourers Union and in the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC). Edmonton SPC member and leader of the Carpenters Union Joseph Knight worked tirelessly to promote a national general strike in the event of war. This was a hopeful but fruitless endeavour; and later Edmonton saw few strikes in the early war years.

By 1918, the labour situation had become explosive. High inflation, war profiteering, a growing cognizance of the realities of war, and intense domestic repression all merged to make Canada a particularly strike-bound place. In Edmonton, this manifested most clearly in the firefighters’ strike of 1918, which successfully demanded an inside hire for chief. Later that year, the Edmonton Trades and Labour Council (ETLC) voted to approve a general strike in support of both the postal workers and the running-trades actions in Calgary. Activists learned that even the threat of a general strike was effective.

It is important to note that the ETLC was hardly a den of radicals. But even they were dismayed by the conservatism of the mainstream labour movement. As such, the ETLC supported the organization of a regional conference in March 1919 to address the unique concerns of western workers and to plan a way forward in the postwar period.

Edmonton’s union members were well represented at the conference and were partially responsible for expanding its original and limited mandate. After calling for a turn towards revolutionary socialism, they voted to withdraw their members from international and craft unions in order to form the One Big Union (OBU). While virtually every western Canadian miner was in favour of the OBU, the rest of the labour movement was almost exactly split. Those who had voted to join the OBU nevertheless carried on, planning to organize a regional general strike for 1 June with the six-hour-day as their core demand.

Some on the ETLC perceived the OBU as an existential threat. At an April meeting, they voted 20 to 19 to expel OBU sympathizers from their ranks. Berg, the Knights, and other militants were ejected but remained in control of their unions. At the same time, red-baiting was on the rise in Edmonton. Both the labour and popular press printed anti-communist screeds, a student sympathetic to the SPC was attacked at the University of Alberta, a talk by Sarah Knight was violently broken up, a meeting of Ukrainian socialists advocating for their interned comrades was deemed treasonous, and the Royal North-West Mounted Police (RNWMP) raided and sacked the SPC headquarters.

The SPC newspaper, The Soviet, 6 March 1919.

OBU plans for a western general strike were superseded by the Winnipeg General Strike. The ETLC immediately pledged their support of the Winnipeg strikers and voted to hold a city-wide labour meeting on 21 May. Worried about credibility with their membership, all expelled unions were extended invitations. Taking the floor at the Labor Hall, Berg moved that all unions hold an open vote to join the general strike. The vote was 1,676 for and 506 against. Some non-unionized workers, including Chinese launderers, joined later.

The Edmonton General Strike began on 26 May at 11:00. The strikers quickly organized sub-committees to handle urgent matters, which included everything from staying in contact with Winnipeg to propaganda and health and safety. The RNWMP mustered, accustomed their horses to the sound of gunfire, and ensured that their machine guns were in working order. Meanwhile, in a 74-4 vote, the police force declared that it was “ready to act at the call of the strike committee.” The defection of the police was a galvanizing factor in the local elite organizing a Citizens’ Committee. While they engaged in minor strikebreaking, their major role was in failing to convince the mayor to break the strike through force. The Edmonton Free Press, which was affiliated with the ETLC, advocated for its readers to return to work. Other newspapers said far worse.

The General Strike Committee controlled power and electricity, the telegraph system, and the trains. Berg, who had been elected to the executive, ensured that the theatres remained open with permission of the strike committee. Though restaurants were closed, milk remained available. City Hall, however, was shuttered. Water pressure was lowered so that only the hospital and the first story of any given building had water. By late May, the teamsters, taxi drivers, carpenters, bricklayers and masons, boilermakers, plumbers, painters, railway carmen, yardmen, freight handlers, machinists, express messengers, steam shovel operators, metal workers, rail maintenance workers, railway clerks, and blacksmiths were all still on strike. To add to the tally, nearly every miner and rail worker in the province of Alberta was out as well.

Even though 36 out of 49 unions were still officially on strike, by the middle of June there was a sense of near normalcy in Edmonton. The strike committee still met, but the influence and potential of the general strike had waned. By 28 June, all sympathetic strike action had come to an end. After Bloody Saturday in Winnipeg, on 21 June, the strike committee met only to hear reports from delegates sent to personally ascertain the situation. After learning of what had transpired in the streets of Winnipeg, the Edmonton strike was called off.

Mikhail Bjorge is an historian who teaches labour studies and history in Toronto.

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