DAY OF PROTEST, 14 OCTOBER 1976, SAINT JOHN: King Street is filled as the demonstration moves down the hill from King's Square to City Hall.
At the beginning of the 1970s, organized labour in Canada seemed to be gaining ground. In one major breakthrough, workers in the public sector had won the right to collective bargaining. More than one million new members joined unions in the 1970s, and the overall rate of union membership was rising sharply. In 1972 a new Canada Labour Code proclaimed the constructive role of unions in Canadian society in ensuring workers a fair share of Canada's economic prosperity.
But the 1970s were also the years when the real incomes of working people stopped growing and unemployment rates rose higher than at any time since the end of the Great Depression. As usually happens in times of economic crisis, workers would be the first to pay for the failures of the economic system. Ideas about the distributive justice of Keynesian economics were being abandoned, and inflation was increasingly targeted as the most important issue for the Canadian economy.
On the Thanksgiving weekend in 1975, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau went on television and announced his intention to fight inflation through the enforcement of a three-year programme of wage and price controls, a strategy he had ridiculed in the previous year's federal election campaign. The prime minister had long regarded himself as a friend of the unions, and at an earlier stage in his public career he had identified the right to free collective bargaining as an essential element in the functioning of a democratic society. For many Canadians who had hoped that the 1970s would be a decade of forward advance towards the Just Society promised by Trudeau, the events of 1975 represented a sudden stop.
The announcement of wage controls in October 1975 was the beginning of a long year of confrontation between organized labour and the government. Workers objected that prices were not being controlled and that wage controls protected business profits at the expense of workers. As collective agreements negotiated between unions and employers were rolled back by the government's newly created Anti-Inflation Board, the results produced unfairness and inequalities, especially among workers who were relying on their unions to catch up with rising costs and overcome regional disparities.
In Saint John, the controls had a large impact and there was an especially forceful response led by the Saint John District Labour Council. At a critical moment in 1976, 35-year-old labour activist George Vair became president of the Labour Council. As older unionists retired from the scene, Vair and others of his generation were being pushed forward into positions of leadership. Barbara Hunter from Canadian Paperworkers Union Local 30, Michael Haynes and Larry Hanley from Canadian Paperworkers Union Local 601 and Jim Orr from International Longshoremen's Association Local 1764 were among the activist members of the Wage Control Committee who took up the challenge.
The militancy of affiliates and activists in communities such as Saint John helped push the Canadian Labour Congress towards endorsement of a larger campaign. This culminated in the mass protest sponsored by the Canadian Labour Congress on 14 October 1976. It was a mobilization that brought workers off the job and into the streets all across the country on the same day around a common cause. It is estimated that more than one million workers stayed off work in support of the Day of Protest. In New Brunswick there were public demonstrations in Moncton, Fredericton, Newcastle, Campbellton, Dalhousie and Edmundston. The largest and most effective protest was in Saint John. In one of the most successful demonstrations of labour solidarity in the country, workers marched from four corners of the town and effectively shut down the city for the day.
The struggle against wage controls was a success. Unions demonstrated non-compliance by insisting on bargaining as if the controls did not exist and then regularly appealing and sometimes evading adverse decisions. The mobilization educated Canadians to the importance of workers in the country's economic life and showed that they would insist on defending collective bargaining as a democratic right. The controls were already discredited when they were abandoned in 1978. The Prime Minister who had introduced them went down to electoral defeat in the 1979 election and prepared to go into retirement.
In retrospect, the imposition of controls was a turning point in Canadian labour history, situated at the middle of a decade that introduced a new Canada Labour Code (1972) but ended with a Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) that offered uncertain protection for union rights. There would be more attacks on unions in the years to come, as governments and employers engaged in various kinds of economic and political restructuring that undermined workers' rights and promised free trade and economic integration at the expense of workers' standards. The struggle against controls in the 1970s was a demonstration of solidarity that helped prepare organized labour in Canada to play a more active part in the next wave of struggles.