Seven Oaks Magazine.

The approaching destruction of the liberal consensus in Canada actually reflects a more historically consistent picture of the relations between the state, capital and working people than many commentators have suggested.

For British Columbians, there have been no governments in living memory more committed to the dismantling of the social contract than the current Liberal regime. To find the last government in B.C.’s history as committed to union busting as the current Liberal regime takes a little digging.

Certainly, comparisons can be drawn to the agg ressive austerity measures of the Socreds in the early 1980s, but the combination of tax cuts openly benefiting the rich, the tearing-up of existing union contracts and a twenty-five percent reduction in the minimum wage demonstrate that this government is the ideological grandchild of older regimes. Like the Conservative governments of the early part of the twentieth century, the Liberals no longer use the welfare state as a cover for their allegiances. Instead, they trumpet them from the pages of their election platforms, promising a business-friendly administration committed to cutting taxes and breaking unions.

Just as B.C.’s government and employers are drawing on an eighty-year old model of labour relations, the B.C. labour movement should be prepared to explore older methods of organizing. The modern Canadian labour movement has largely been focused on the example of its post-war predecessors for the last thirty years, focusing its organizing in manufacturing and the public sector and pushing for parliamentary reforms instead of reform in the workplace. It’s time to consider using the example of labour activists who have faced the combined power of the state and employers in the past, and recently, some labour leaders are pointing the way.

In January of 2004, Richard Goode spoke at a memorial service commemorating the life and death of a coal miner named Joseph Mairs, Jr. Goode, the head of Local 2 of the B.C. Ferries and Marine Workers union, drew on Mairs as an example of a labour activist willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for what he believed in. Like Goode himself, who had risked imprisonment in the B.C. Ferry workers’ strike the month before, Mairs had risked his livelihood and abandoned legality when he knew that his cause was just. His example is an important one for a labour movement once again facing an open alliance between government and business.

Goode is not the only one who has looked to Mairs as a teaching tool to understand this renewal of open warfare on the part of the government. The Centre for Labour Studies (CLS) at Simon Fraser University recently completed a website dedicated to Mairs’ memory, collecting the documents surrounding his unusual death. (In the interests of full disclosure, it’s worth noting that I worked on this project). Mairs was a Scottish miner, who moved with his family to Ladysmith on Vancouver Island in 1910. In 1912, when a third major attempt to organize the mines on the Island led to the blacklisting of two union activists in Cumberland, Mairs joined his fellow miners in striking against the Island coal industry’s major employer, Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) limited.

Originally founded by the infamous Robert Dunsmuir, after 1910 the mines were owned by Donald Mann and William Mackenzie, more famous for their involvement in the Canadian Pacific Railway. The mines were extremely dangerous, despite a series of bills establishing safety standards passed by governments under pressure from socialist candidates elected from mining districts. When the union activists, Oscar Mottishaw and Isaac Portrey, reported to authorities that the mines at Extension contained unsafe levels of explosive methane gas, they were dismissed from their positions and blacklisted, banned from mining on the Island. With no governmental support forthcoming, Mottishaw joined Joseph Naylor and Ginger Goodwin in calling for a one-day holiday in Cumberland, to discuss the issue of his blacklisting and safety in the mines in general.

When they returned the day after the holiday, the miners found themselves locked out of the mines. That night, they declared that they would not return to work until their union, the United Mine Workers of America, was recognized as their collective bargaining agent. The day after the Cumberland miners were locked out, the miners in

Ladysmith joined them on the picket lines. The strike lasted two years, and ultimately led to a riot in Ladysmith in August 1913. Mairs was a participant in the riot, and in the aftermath was put in jail for his role –undoubtedly marginal at best –in the events.

While incarcerated at Oakalla work farm in Burnaby, Mairs died of tubercular peritonitis, or a ruptured bowel. Several factors contributed to his death, but critics at the time and since have often pointed to a government that not only opposed the miners’ cause, but also maliciously undermined their efforts at every turn. Mairs’ untimely death could have been presented, had there been a government that protected workers’ rights and safety, a responsible justice system that did not punish young men for their politics, or a prison system that treated inmates in a more humane manner.

Ultimately, Mairs became a symbol of the privation that the miners suffered at the hands of the mine owners and the government, and his death offered a clear example of the actual disregard that the government of the time had for working people.

The Centre for Labour Studies at S.F.U. has continued this analysis with the website on Mairs. Intended as a teaching tool for classes at the university, the website also offers a unique look at the making of labour history. It allows both casual observers and those avidly interested in the history of B.C.’s working class to read about and analyze an important event for themselves. The CLS, like Richard Goode, clearly recognizes the power of past struggles in informing new campaigns. The Liberals in B.C., and their neo-con counterparts in other parts of the country, are motivated by an agenda with no contemporary equal. Their malicious attacks on workers and the poor have no precedent in the last two generations of governance in this province. A broader view, however, reveals that what appears to be a bold new frontier is simply a return to an older social order.

Joseph Mairs, Jr. was a victim of a government that saw the world in much the same way as today’s B.C. Liberal government does, and his story offers important lessons for those of us struggling to prevent the destruction of our standards of living.