Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2019

The Current Transcript for May 15, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I've been stigmatized like too many times. People think that like you know oh she's crazy like some people were scared of me. Some people were didn't want anything to do with me.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She has struggled with mental illness since her late teens and been diagnosed with eight psychiatric disorders. Over time she's been prescribed 24 different medications and suffered through their side effects and all she really wants is to be recognized as a human being. To be accepted, not stigmatized. When the diagnoses includes schizophrenia, it's even more difficult. In half an hour you will meet a woman who ignores the stigma to build friendships among the severely mentally ill. Also today, we're cycling back 100 years.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It wasn't so long since there had been the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. There's absolutely no doubt that Ottawa was convinced that this was the beginning of a revolution.

AMT: That is historian and writer Charlotte Gray commenting on one of the most important strikes in Canadian history that began May 15th of 1919. Despite government suspicions, it was not a Bolshevik revolution, but it did lead to massive change. The creation of the RCMP, the NDP, collective bargaining and one hundred years on, a former union leader says the labour movement has gone to sleep. Hear the details and the discussion in an hour. But we're starting with the revelations that led to the exoneration of Vice Admiral Mark Norman.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I am confident that at all times I acted with integrity, I acted ethically and I acted in the best interest of the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Forces and ultimately the people of Canada.

AMT: That is exactly why we have a national affairs panel on a Wednesday. We must discuss. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Mark Norman, SNC-Lavalin controversies may hamper Liberal election run: reporter

Guests: Tonda MacCharles, Richard Warnica, Kady O’Malley

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There are many occasions where this government proved that they were going to great lengths to prevent the truth from coming out, including coaching witnesses and departmental officials using code words to avoid Access to Information laws. Does the Prime Minister believe that this is normal behaviour for a government when a decorated vice admiral is fighting for his career, his reputation and his personal freedom?

AMT: In question period yesterday, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was in battleship mode, taking aim at the prime minister. His ammunition was the case of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman who was suspended from his post as the second in command of the Canadian military in January of 2017. Then in early 2018 he was charged with one count of breach of trust for allegedly leaking Cabinet information relating to a multi-million dollar shipbuilding project. That charge was suddenly stayed last week. The story however is not over. And yesterday was the first time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared in the House to answer questions about his government's role in the criminal case. The opposition has been making accusations of political interference, something Mr. Trudeau, as well as the Director of Public Prosecutions and the prosecutor involved, all deny. Here's the prime minister yesterday.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The decision to suspend Vice-Admiral Norman was taken independently by the Chief of Defence staff. Any accusations otherwise are simply absurd. We fully respect the independence of the processes in place.

AMT: Our Wednesday National Affairs panellists here with some thoughts on how this case is reverberating through Parliament Hill and beyond. This week we're joined by Tonda MacCharles, senior reporter for The Toronto Star's Ottawa bureau. Richard Warnica, reporter for The National Post and Kady O'Malley, a freelance parliamentary correspondent who writes for iPolitics. Tonda and Kady are both in Ottawa. Richard is here with me in our Toronto studio. Hi everyone. Welcome.

TONDA MACCHARLES: Hi there.

KADY O'MALLEY: Hello there.

RICHARD WARNICA: Good morning.

AMT: Tonda, let's start with you. And I'm just wondering where we start because I said we just had the Prime Minister clip there, but he actually left yesterday before the vote. There was an apology yesterday and the prime minister left the House of Commons?

TM: Well the Wonservatives had given a heads up to the Liberals that they were going to be immediately after question period, calling for a vote in the House of Commons, a unanimous consent for a motion that the House of Commons apologize to Mark Norman for his legal ordeal and the impact on his family. Prime Minister Trudeau and Defence Minister Sajjan left before that happened. So it happened immediately after question period and it took everyone by surprise and surprisingly the house all consented. I mean this is one of those things where you know you have to shout out nay and then it would be defeated, but not one Liberal spoke up. But interesting that the prime minister was not in the room at the time nor was the defence minister.

AMT: So what do you read into that Tonda?

TM: Well I don't think they want to be cornered on it. I mean I think that you know truth be told, this government is still struggling with the fallout of this leak that happened on one of their first acts in government and I think that they're still, they you know they were reeling when they first came into power and one of their first Cabinet discussions you know very quickly appeared was reported by the CBC. And the ship yard itself that was at the heart of these discussions knew all about what was going on in Cabinet. So they're still struggling with that.

AMT: Kady O'Malley what kind of narrative has the opposition been trying to build about what unfolded in this case?

KO: Well what's so interesting to me is if you actually go back, now it's fair to say the Conservatives have been this has been an issue for them ever since, actually I believe it's in the suspension of Vice-Admiral Norman and they've been talking about at ever since of course that you know it would sort of ebb and flow in terms of how high it was on their priority list, but I did notice within in the last say five or six months, they really seemed to be drawing the comparison first of all between what was going on in the sort of pre-trial proceedings with Vice-Admiral Norman's defence team and the crown and this is the question of was the crown withholding documents? Were they refusing to turn stuff over? But you also had things like you know some of the prime ministers now, former senior aides being subpoenaed to testify. The Conservatives were really putting this front and centre in terms of how they were suggesting that this was going to be finally a trial on what they are trying to portray as kind of almost a pattern of interference with the justice system by the Liberals. Now I'm again I have to, I always try to step back and try to look at the patterns and I think that Mark Norman's defence team was particularly effective at linking that case to the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the revelations there and really putting the two together in the spotlight. And I think that that's really where the narrative took off and that's what we kind of saw leading into the decision to stay charges last week. It'll be interesting once they've kind of moved beyond the immediate revelation, to kind of go back and figure out exactly how much of this was related to these allegations of political interference on the Norman case that is and how much was just you know issues with the RCMP investigations, issues with information and evidence not being provided to the crown. I think there's a lot of threads to pull here.

AMT: Richard Warnica tease this out for us a little bit, so we can understand. What was the alleged basis for the charge against Vice-Admiral Norman in the first place?

RW: So effectively one of the first things that the Liberals did when they came into power was put a hold on a large contract to build a supply ship for the Navy and this was basically an interim measure. We were desperately in need of a supply ship to supply our battleships et cetera out at sea. And the Conservatives had done a sole source contract with a Quebec shipyard called Davie Shipyard.

AMT: Sole source means what?

TM: Non-competitive.

RW: Exactly it doesn't go to tender. And so at that point as soon as the Liberals come into power and there's an early cabinet meeting and under what we understand to be pretty heavy pressure from other shipbuilding companies, the Liberals decide to put a hold on that. Almost immediately that's ends up at the CBC, that ends up at James Cudmore reporting that and the Liberals are apoplectic that this cabinet secret's been leaked. And this is one of the most interesting things to me because Ottawa leaks all the time like and every new government is furious, but almost always if you end up going to the RCMP, it comes back on you. I mean this is to me the cardinal error of this for the Liberals is not just saying, darn it, this is horrible, let's find out who did this. Let's deal with this internally. By putting this into the RCMP, by making this a criminal process, they made sure they lost control of the process and that's what's come back to haunt them.

AMT: So that that was their choice to say the RCMP has to look into it.

RW: I think they referred it to the RCMP, yes.

TM: It was the Privy Council Office actually that referred it to the RCMP and very early on the Privy Council Officem which is the keeper of government secrets, was also responsible for keeping the Conservative government's secrets prior to the Liberals taking power. And so the whol change, there were last minute changes to government regulations on contracting, the contract itself was actually only signed on election day. Does anybody remember that? No. October 19th, 2015 the Conservative government, the outgoing Conservative government, inked the contract that would give this, it was a refit actually, not building a whole new supply ship, refitting an old cargo ship, to Davie shipyard in Quebec. And the Privy Council Office, when this leak appeared was the one that then did an internal investigation and turned it over to the RCMP. So in part we're getting to the heart of what the Conservatives now are trying to paint as a politically tainted investigation. They say that it was Justin Trudeau, it was the Prime Minister's office that directed the RCMP. You know that fudges things. It was actually the Privy Council Office and the Conservatives are trying to make the case that having been angered at a leak, then targeted Mark Norman and only later to learn that there were actually several other people who knew this information and that even before Mark Norman was involved in disseminating information, there were other people that had already spread it around. So the Conservatives are targeting the government, the Liberal government for not just calling in the investigators, but then refusing to release the documents that Mark Norman needed to defend himself.

AMT: So and then there's this other twist, which is that we find out that Jason Kenney and Peter MacKay, both former defence ministers, have spoken to the defence. How does that fit into all of this?

TM: Well two things. I mean first of all, it speaks to why didn't the RCMP and the Crown prosecutors for that matter, speak to these people who were in the Conservative government prior to the Liberals taking over. Marc Norman's defence team actually laid it all out in their own court filings last fall when they were seeking all the documents and trying to get a court order to get the documents produced. Laid out their whole theory ito rebut the Crown's theory in this to say Mark Norman was authorized by the previous government to talk to Davie Shipyard, to pursue this contract. He wasn't doing unauthorized leaks. They laid it all out there. Why the RCMP and the crown didn't investigate that, I don't really know. The RCMP says they were unaware of any new information that came to the defence team's notice.

AMT: Tonda, did the defence department know if Mark Norman was authorized to speak or like isn't there a carryover of cabinet business? Nothing?

TM: The Defence Department, the role of the Defence Department in this is very interesting. You know look, buying ships or planes or fighter jets or anything is a massive effort by government, right and it's amazing how often it goes wrong. But there are civil service bureaucrats involved, there's military leadership involved and then there's political direction. And in this case, yes, you're right. I mean there were a lot of people in the know about what was going on and Mark Norman was the lead negotiator for this project. But there seems to be quite a disconnect between who was doing the political government's bidding. In other words, you know there were within government people who disagreed that that contract should have been sole sourced and Mark Norman was, according to Jason Kenney, clearly behind the project to give the ship refit to Davie. It was also don't anyone forget, this was in the lead up to a federal campaign. The Davie Shipyard was in Steven Blaney, a Conservative cabinet minister's riding. And so look there were politics, there's procurement, disagreements in this, there's huge bucks and there's benefits for workers.

AMT: So Richard, this really isn't solely about leaks to the media. This is like layer after layer after layer.

RW: Yeah I mean it kind of goes back to basically the oldest kind of political scandal in Canada, which is the new guys come in and business goes to a different part of the country. And in a way I think that's why it's so damaging for the Liberals because they won the 2015 campaign by selling themselves as something completely new. By selling themselves as we're not the old guys, this is a fresh new day, look at dower angry Stephen Harper, look at bright, happy Justin Trudeau. And I think what is so tremendously damaging about this in the lead up to a federal election is I don't know what they sell. I don't know what the line is, what the narrative because this isn't just a sort of murky weird procurement thing that I think it seemed and bubbled along for a long time, I think it goes to the fundamental difficulty and anger and suspicion that a lot of people have about politics, which is oh it's the exact same. Oh this is you know the same thing that's always been happening, why should I even bother go out and vote?

TM: There's no question this has eroded further. The the Liberal government claimed to be open and transparent, accountable, ethical, run a clean government, have respect for the rule of law. The Conservatives have leapt on it to further erode and undermine that claim and you know you're going to see this show up in political ads in the next campaign time and again and part of you know the exercise we're seeing in these dying weeks of this Parliament with the Conservatives holding ministers to account in the House of Commons, demanding apologies, demanding committee inquiries, it's building to that narrative, that political narrative and we've already heard the slogan that the Trudeau government is not as advertised. The Liberals will have a hard time pushing back against that right now.

AMT: Kady, what do we need to know then?

KO: Well I think there's a whole heck of a lot of questions that we've just touched the surface here. One thing that kind of gives me pause sometimes is when we say things like this has eroded the Liberal credibility, this has done that. Well it hasn't, we're almost taking ourselves, the media, out of that context because honestly it's been a lot of the coverage of the way the trial unfolded and the specific focus of how we looked at it that I think caused perhaps some people to think that there was a different. What the Liberals were being accused of and what they may actually be guilty of in this case is a little different than you know not to borrow the Conservative line, as advertised because it sounds as though to be honest, the only person who wasn't politically interfering in this file is possibly Vice-Admiral Norman, himself. The Conservatives absolutely could have gone to the RCMP earlier on in this process, as opposed to or to the Crown prosecutors and said, hey, you know let's stop this right here. Here is the reason why we believe that Vice-Admiral Norman was acting entirely appropriately, when he talked perhaps if you talked to Davie Shipyard what was going on in cabinet. It's also worth noting that there's nothing inherently sinister or nefarious about the initial decision, which they eventually went back on to put a hold on the contract and to look at whether or not it should have gone to competition. So in a sense the way the case is played out, some you know some of the coverage has simply because this government is so inept at presenting its own counter message, has really accepted the defence and the Conservative line unchallenged. I think that's caused the erosion to a certain point.

TM: Where I would disagree with that is that I think that the media coverage has reflected the statements at trial, the struggle by the defence to get the documents, but also the clear sort of struggle that the prosecution had as well. The prosecution did not have access to the documents. The Privy Council turned it all over to the judge and the judge was going through all the redactions, for listeners that's you know what parts should be blacked out.

AMT: Because they are talking national defence, right? Security.

TM: That's right. And so the Privy Council that's the you know the department that's the central department that supports the Prime Minister, was saying look you know this reveals cabinet talks, this reveals this secret, that secret, this has to be redacted. And so huge huge process and you're right, but the coverage has reflected you know a very effective defence narrative that they built, which actually one of the things we haven't touched on is that defence narrative wasn't just slamming the Liberals, it was saying that Mark Norman was an apolitical military leader caught in the middle of both a Conservative government, an outgoing Conservative government in election mode and an incoming Liberal government in get up, stand up government mode.

KO: One thing that it actually reminded me of and this is I'm sure Tonda will empathize with this because she also was at the courthouse for the Mike Duffy epic saga, is I started to think sort of hearing the post announcement, after announcing this day of the charge and sort of reading the statement from the federal prosecutors and watching that scrum, I started to wonder if perhaps there was you know a moment of revelation amongst the prosecution team, where they suddenly thought to themselves, my gosh do we want to be the next Mike Duffy prosecution team? Do we want to be the ones that go into court and spend who knows how many months under sort of extreme high profile, only to lose it all when it kind of goes to a verdict? So I have to wonder if that might have played a role as well, as they saw this new information coming in, it became more and more clear to them that realistically there was just no shot at actually convicting on this.

AMT: So what's the average Canadian supposed to think? I mean you read a lot of opinion pieces that you know some say this is not SNC-Lavalin 2.0. Others say this is just more of the same. Where Richard, help us navigate that.

RW: Well I think SNC's the keyword because I think if this had happened absent SNC, I don't think it's one tenth the story it is right now. I don't think it's getting one tenth the coverage. I don't think it's getting one tenth the sort of public resonance. And I think the reality is that the average person sort of consumes news more and a bit more of a muddle than we like to pretend in the news media. And I think what the Conservatives are banking on and I think they've got a good chance at this is that SNC and Mark Norman just ends up in sort of one big news swirl above people's heads that feeds into a larger narrative.

AMT: And is that narrative correct?

RW: I think as Kady said earlier, I think they're different cases and I think that if we want to really break down what happened here, we don't actually know as much as we should know abd partially because it hasn't gone to trial yet to say, OK what are the problems here? And if we really want to breakdown okay what's the actual public policy issue here, I think it goes back to why do we continually have so much trouble building military procurement in this country? I mean this goes back to a Paul Martin government decision in 2004 to build your naval supply.

AMT: What's the answer to that Richard?

KO: Yes tell us Richard.

RW: Let's clear the floor for me so I can solve Canada's military procurement issues. I shall bring out my briefing books right now.

TM: No I think he's right that we don't know as much as we should. A lot of people tune out when they hear ship procurement or fighter jet procurement, but I also don't know where we're going to learn the truth of either you know this particular case or and what went awry or more broadly in this particular contract, there is another prosecution going on. So that may explain and certainly that's what the justice minister says yesterday and last night in the House of Commons. There is another case going on, another criminal case, related to the same sort of you know events in the early days of the Liberal government, another civil federal civil servant is charged with making you know leaking the same documents that Mark Norman was charged with.

AMT: What's it, remind us, do we know what that is?

TM: It's another civil servant, Matthew Matchett who is alleged to have leaked information also to Davie. Look it was this, there were six leaks of that same information the Privy Council later determined. Who knows who leaked what to whom. I don't think all leaks are created equal. The part of the concern for the government now is are there no enforceable standards for when there is a leak of unauthorized information? Some leaks the government wants to get out there, some they don't.

AMT: And leaks is how Ottawa does business.

TM: Not always. Not always, but sometimes. I mean like I say, they're not all created equal. I don't think any government, Conservative or Liberal or NDP, wants it to be open season on secret cabinet deliberations. But how do we get to the bottom of this? I don't see this coming out of a committee inquiry.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you all of you.

KO: Thanks so much.

TM: Thanks.

AMT: Tonda MacCharles, Toronto Star. Kady O'Malley, iPolitics freelance correspondent and Richard Warnica, National Post. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

You can help people with schizophrenia by looking past the delusion, says writer

Guests: Susan Doherty

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, one hundred years ago today in a very different Canada, workers in Winnipeg went on strike. The Winnipeg General Strike, as it became to be known, felt to many like the start of a revolution and a century on, its impacts can still be felt. I will speak with a trio of historians about the fascinating history of that strike. Plus, Labour leader Sid Ryan on its impact today. That's in half an hour. But first the Ghost Garden.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I've been stigmatised like too many times. People think that like you know. Oh hello girl. She's a crazy girl. And then they would be like kind of like scared of me. I don't know. Some people were scared of me. Some people were didn't want anything to do with me.

AMT: That's a woman in Montreal and we're calling her Anne. We're not using her real name because of the stigma she's talking about. It is something she has faced for more than a decade living with severe mental illness, including psychotic symptoms.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It started when I was 17, when I got this theory in my head about God, which I started like thinking about because I was scared because of like the bombings in London on the subway and I'm like oh no I'm scared of death and I thought I figured it out the whole thing you know, but I was a bit psychotic and then when I was 19 I'm like I've got to tell this to the whole world. This is I'm a genius. Like well I've got to save everybody. Back then I was just like so messed up and then I just got this horrible depression. I started seeing black holes, I was so depressed. Like they were kind of, it was like these black containers in my head that threatened to lock me inside them and it was kind of like what I feared would happen to me, where I wouldn't be able to get out of my head, you know. I've had eight and a half psychiatric and psychological diagnoses. Eight and a half because I have bipolar type 1 and bipolar type 2. So that's like kind of like a half. I've been prescribed 24 different psychiatric medications, not all at the same time, but some of them were, some of them like they cause side effects, so then I had to take medication for the side effects. And I was suffering from side effects where half of your muscles want to stand up, the other half want to sit down and you're back and forth, back and forth, stand up sit down, stand up sit down. Back and forth back and forth in pain and you're pacing and you're twitching and you're shaking a lot. I see it as a lot better now. I don't know what I would be like if I went off my meds. I originally tried to to fight having to be an activist. I'm like why should I have to be an activist just to stand up for myself and others and like now I enjoy it, you know. People just see like the diagnosis even. They don't even see the symptoms sometimes, let alone the person underneath. I want them to understand you know don't stigmatize others, don't dehumanize others. Realize that everybody is a sentient being, an equally sentient being as everybody else and it's just different obstacles that we have. We should just accept everybody and I know it's cliche, but we should all just have a love fest and peace fest and all that. Yeah.

AMT: The voice of a woman we're calling Anne, speaking with our Montreal producer Susan McKenzie. About 1 in 100 people deals with symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia. That includes hearing voices, delusional ideas and constant feelings of being watched. Though Anne may be sharing her story and advocating, people with severe mental illness still live for the most part in the shadows of our society. Writer Susan Doherty has spent the last decade volunteering with patients with severe mental illness at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal. She profiles many of the people she's made in her new book, The Ghost Garden: Inside the Lives of Schizophrenia's Feared and Forgotten. Susan Doherty joins us from Montreal. Hi.

SUSAN DOHERTY: Hi Anna Maria. Thank you for having me on your show.

AMT: There's so much for us to talk about. Let's start with the woman we just heard. Listening to Anne, as we call her, talk about her God theory and how she had felt she had to save the world. How have you learned to talk to people who can be delusional or paranoid?

SD: If you dismiss the delusion and look for the emotion that's underneath the delusion, you can reach anybody. A lot of people have these crazy ideas they think that there's been an implant in their brain or they see and hear things that we don't and so if you just look beyond that to to find the fear or the anger or the loneliness then you start with the connection.

AMT: And that's where she's talking about that humanity that we all have. It's there too, you just have to find it through the other things that sometimes we don't see. So she talked about all her diagnoses, but the first time you volunteered at the Douglas, you were not told the diagnosis of the person you were going to meet with Why is that?

SD: You know the labels of mental illness. I mean it puts people in a box. When we say someone has the symptoms of schizophrenia. We make these assumptions and they're incorrect. We think that people who have schizophrenia are violent that if you're with them they're going to pull a knife out of their back pocket and stab you. And we are so misinformed as a society about what schizophrenia really is.

AMT: Tell me about your impressions of the ward the first time you went to volunteer at the Douglas Institute.

SD: I was invited to come up to CPC3, which is the psychotic disorders unit to meet a woman named Camilla. And I was very nervous. It's a locked unit. The people that are living on that unit can't leave you know the elevator door opened and you know I saw a lot of people in their pyjamas and wearing slippers and of course I had those same preconceived ideas that everyone else has. I met Camilla and I was told nothing about her just that I was to befriend Camilla and that's what we did. It was truly a profound experience for me to hear that someone could have a life like that. She has three siblings. Their mother was unable to care for them and they were all put up for adoption. Her three siblings were adopted and she wasn't. She went to live in a convent when she was 20. She was raped and became pregnant and she approached her mother in the last few weeks of her pregnancy to see if she could live in her mother's apartment and her mother said no. And she. Had a complete psychotic break down and the baby was taken away from her. So she boarded a Greyhound bus and came to Montreal. She's been on disability ever since. In and out of psychiatric hospitals, in and out of group homes and she and I became really close friends. It was a beautiful thing.

AMT: You describe a traumatic life. Does not trigger something that might exist in the shadows in a person or does it create it?

SD: Well it's a good question because there's a real range. Camilla for example, I think that her terrible life precipitated a breakdown. But there are other people who are very high functioning they're at university. Their lives seem to be completely on track. And then something derails and they have their first psychotic episode. But once you are psychotic it's a recipe for ongoing trauma because the hearing voice experience and delusions are so scary and so frightening that you don't even want to reach out to other people and tell them what you're thinking.

AMT: Well I want to ask you about Caroline because she does dominate the book. You follow her right through and we learn a lot about her family as well. And again we're not using real names. There's a specific incident that brings her situation to a crisis point and you introduce us to her this way. What happened?

SD: She'd left the psychiatric unit having met a woman named Hillary on the unit and she and Hillary agreed to become roommates. She almost immediately was overwhelmed by by living in an apartment again. And she began to hear a voice that told her that the devil was living inside of Hillary and she boarded a bus and took herself to an Ottawa Hospital and presented herself to emergency knowing that she had these terrible thoughts. And unfortunately she was turned away by a nurse or whoever was the admitting staff member at the hospital and she walked back home and poured boiling water in her roommate's ear.

AMT: And Hillary we should say had severe burns and lost some of the hearing. But you make the point that it's not common for people with psychotic symptoms to end up in trouble with the law.

SD: The rates of violence amongst psychotic individuals is the same as the general population. I guess what I want to say about Caroline and her violent moment is that these are preventable. We don't have a good enough mechanism to help these people before there is an incident that is so calamitous that affects so many other people that just perpetuates the fear mongering.

AMT: You do make the point that Caroline had dealt with psychotic symptoms for years. She was ill. She lost custody of her two children. She went through a lot of trauma. Give us a sense of what she had gone through.

SD: Well I met her in 1967. We went to elementary school together. In high school she started having delusions about some of the boys in the class and of course we all laughed it off as you know lies. We just thought oh she's being silly or crazy. We we didn't know anything about delusions back then. Rosalind and Peggy and myself we we didn't know that what was happening was that she was already breaking down.

AMT: And just the other names you mentioned are the names that you give her sisters.

SD: Right.

AMT: Because she comes from a large family.

SD: She's one of 10 children, but yeah there were a long string of behaviours that you know we can now look back and say they were psychotic moments when her son was in day-care. She accused the day-care of sexual abuse of her son. And of course there was an investigation. They jumped up into the sky to look into it. But it was a delusion. It was a psychotic moment and she has had breakdown after breakdown.

AMT: Many of her breakdowns happened when she stopped taking her medication. Going off their meds is a phrase we hear a lot. Why do people do that?

SD: Well the side effects are untenable. Lethargy would be a big one. Weight gain, erectile dysfunction, constipation, dry mouth or you can have excess of salvation. Lack of motivation, but then lack of motivation is also one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. The second thing I would say is if people don't see an improvement in their lives, they flush the medication down the toilet.

AMT: Does taking prescriptions as directed necessarily mean someone won't have a psychotic symptom?

SD: There are people that I work with on CPC 3 at the Douglas right now who take medication and are still fully psychotic. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. It's so much of trial and error. And on top of that there are people that just do not respond to the drugs.

AMT: She goes in and out of hospitals because of her mental illness, talking about Caroline again here. When people leave the hospital or a locked ward, where do they go?

SD: Finding suitable housing is the task of the social workers and the psychologists and the team that are working with the person who's been on the unit. Group homes, there's lots of subsidized housing apartment buildings, but it's quite problematic. The group homes that I've worked in in Montreal here there's not a lot to do so it's just a recipe for lack of purpose. And you know there is one man that I profile in the book whose name is Sydney. He had a truly incredible group home experience so I don't want to dismiss them all although I have seen some pretty terrible ones for Sydney. A good group home experience really saved his life.

AMT: You know you say and you make the point that the system's not really able to help people, but it's not always easy to help them. And we see that in your story as well.

SD: Lack of insight is the term that psychiatrists use when a person does not know that they have psychotic symptoms or are delusional. And in Caroline's case what was so difficult for the family was that she she resisted treatment. She resisted going to the hospital. She constantly flushed her medications down the toilet. When you do not see yourself as il,l how are you ever going to accept treatment?

AMT: And that becomes the problem for her, right? I mean because she thinks that by getting rid of the medication, she'll be, she's better with herself, but then all of these things go wrong. You describe several, one point she goes halfway across the country to meet somebody who's she's deluded herself into thinking wants to meet with her, but other times I mean you describe a terrible scene where she's literally naked in her own apartment and she's on her menstrual cycle and there's blood all over the apartment and her sister walks in and has to convince her that she needs her help. Like it's horrific. It's so heartbreaking.

SD: Yeah it is. You know one of the things we can't underestimate is the toll it takes on family members, especially family who stuck by Caroline through thick and thin. It's we need more resources for family members because burnout is a factor. And family members do walk away. You know Caroline's mother, Isabel, I consider myself her sixth daughter. I mean I truly loved Isabel. She burned out. She was verbally abused so many times by Caroline that she had to shut the door and protect herself. I don't want readers to judge any family member who walks away because it's just so difficult.

AMT: But the idea that we cannot, that we shouldn't judge, obviously cannot, you know I don't think anyone's comfortable with the idea that anyone would judge and that we we must look beyond the stigma. At the same time you describe a situation where families can't get beyond the stigma. And it really does create that dilemma of and how do you help someone who won't be helped? And is it good to hospitalize them? Is it good to medicate them? Or is it good to see them choosing to live very dangerous, by any standard, not just by some bourgeois societal standard, but by any standard puts them at greater risk. Like how do we balance that? Like what are we doing wrong?

SD: Well I guess the role of the volunteer is critical because the family does burn out. Even social workers burn out an end group home. It takes a Mother Theresa mentality to run a group home. So the nonmedical personnel such as myself like the volunteer we can carry that load. I can be the fairy godmother and I can spend a couple of hours with someone and just share the load.

AMT: You write about a man you call Gary, who had severe psychotic symptoms, but who nevertheless stayed married and living with his family. How did they all manage that?

SD: He was married to a woman from South America who just had the idea that you marry, you marry for life and he continued to live at home. He spent time in jail. He had many psychotic breakdowns, but his wife she just said, daddy has this illness and they have two children. She stuck it out and also Gary's parents and his two sisters were really instrumental in helping him shift from being a highly intelligent businessman to have a different purpose in life. And it's that acceptance of the symptoms of the illness that allow a person to actually live in recovery. Like here Gary was, had his MBA. Brilliant, brilliant man. Speaks four languages and now you know he teaches English as a second language. He takes painting. His parents have made room for those changes.

AMT: And his wife has too. And we get to the point though where one must sacrifice themselves to do that.

SD: Yes.

AMT: And that's the discomfort. In order for him to go on and live a fulfilling life she has has to decide that I'm going to stay married to him no matter what.

SD: Right.

AMT: I'm going to not look at what's possible in my own life.

SD: Yeah. You know I've tears down my cheeks every time I read that vignette because I know the sacrifices that she has made. But she did it not only for Gary, she did it for her two children and they have seen firsthand that nobody gets left behind.

AMT: And so when you go for coffee or you go out to a store with the people that you volunteer with, what do you see around you? How do you see people treating them?

SD: I saw a lot of stigma firsthand. I try very very hard to normalize every situation. They are my friends. They deserve to be treated the way I am treated. I've been in a million wacky situations, especially with a man named Alex. Alex is the one person that I've met in the last 10 years who's broken my heart the most profoundly. He just has said to me so many times, why am I here? Is this my life? And the only thing that I can say to him to offer him any comfort is that you know he's here to teach us tolerance and acceptance. If we are tolerant and accepting of him then perhaps that will help him feel less left out, less lonely.

AMT: You say lonely. You've heard a lot about loneliness from the people you worked with.

SD: Well you know their symptoms are so extreme sometimes that you know you see a man talking to a mailbox and all we see is crazy. We don't see that there's a human being underneath the symptoms. You know as a society we're afraid of people like that. We just need to do a better job of understanding what mental illness really looks like.

AMT: What would you like to see change in the system then where you have people in and out of institutions? You have a lot of people medicated, you have people who without the medication end up back there or in trouble with the law, how do we move forward? What do we need to do as a society?

SD: Better housing would be the first step. Like if we just don't even talk about the first episode and where to go, if you do have your first breakdown and calling 9-1-1 and showing up at a hospital, but once you've stabilized and once you have a psychiatrist, if you do have an extreme psychotic disorder, like where do you live? You know CAMH in Toronto has a new facility that will open in a year. There are medical professionals nearby, but it's in a neighbourhood. It's an attempt to integrate into a community. You know living with purpose is something that I really stress a lot of the group homes that are tucked away in small little neighbourhoods, where they're not close to anything, it's just a recipe for sitting on the stoop and smoking cigarettes.

AMT: What do you get from this volunteering?

SD: I have seen broken people who are mended by friendship. I guess I look at them as my friends now. I've spent so much time with them. It's been an amazing experience. I'm the conduit to tell these stories, to share with as many people as possible that there is a human being underneath the terrible symptoms of extreme mental illness.

AMT: You're crying.

SD: I am. I'm sorry. No it's OK. Why Susan?

AMT: I've just seen, I've seen so much heartbreak. I just want to reach out and fix everybody and that's the hardest thing for me. I can't do that. I'm one little person. And every once in a while I get overwhelmed by the responsibility that I have that there are so many people out there who are by themselves and they're disconnected from family. You know Caroline was lucky. Her sisters never left her side. You know Rosalyn and Peggy are are the real heroes of this book.

AMT: And you certainly show us their compassion and their concern for their sister. And you also very compassionately talk about the rest of the family and Caroline's deep hurt that she couldn't see her mother. And her mother's deep hurt that every time she saw Caroline, they couldn't be close because of Caroline's illness. There's so many cracks to fall through still.

SD: You know like for Caroline, her relationship with her mother and it was the same relationship with her sons, it was like a a blessing and a curse. I mean in her moments of great insight you know she was horrified at how she treated her mother and horrified how she treated her sisters. And then you know she would have a psychotic incident and she would verbally abuse her mother and her sisters and push them away. It's that terrible reconciliation of you know living with guilt for all the things that you've done to your family and the things that she did to her sons. I mean not being able to mother them and then on the flip side, having those two boys gave her a reason to leave the hospital. She didn't commit suicide because she had those two boys in her life.

AMT: And her ex-husband made sure that they didn't lose touch with her.

SD: Yes.

AMT: Even like he didn't say no way.

SD: He understood that Caroline was their mother.

AMT: Yeah. So again it's a complicated world where everyone has a role, as hard as that role is. But I guess what you're saying is it takes a village. It can't be just a few members of one family. It can't be just the social workers. It can't just be the doctors and nurses on a ward. It has to be everybody.

SD: Yeah it does. Everybody needs to be part of the solution. You know we've made room for Down syndrome. We need to make room for schizophrenia.

AMT: Susan Doherty, thank you.

SD: Thank you for having me on your show. I really appreciate your interest in this really important story.

AMT: Susan Doherty, her book is called, The Ghost Garden: Inside the Lives of Schizophrenia's Feared and Forgotten. She's also written a novel about mental illness. It's called, A Secret Music. Susan Doherty is in our Montreal studio. Let us know what you think of what she had to say. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And if what she was talking about strikes a chord with you with experiences within your own family and you want to share. Let us know. Send us an email, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. Stay with us, in our next half hour, the strike that shut down Winnipeg and forever changed Canada 100 years ago today. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

3

What today's labour movement can learn from the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike

Guests: Michael Dupuis, Julie Guard, Greg Kealey, Sid Ryan

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music from Strike the musical]

AMT: A rousing number from the musical Strike by Danny Schur and Rick Chafe. Yes, Strike tells the story of real events. They took place 100 years ago. The Winnipeg General Strike, as it came to be known, is a major milestone in Canadian history, especially in Canadian labour relations and politics. The uprising in the Manitoba capital that started a century ago today stoked fears of a Red Revolution in Canada and the backlash was fierce. It led to arrests, violence, even death. We're going to be looking at the lasting impact of the strike on the country, but first I'm joined by three guests who will take us back in time to the dramatic story of what happened beginning on May 15th of 1919. Michael Dupuis is an author and historian. His new book is called, The Winnipeg General Strike: Ordinary Men and Women Under Extraordinary Circumstances. Julie Guard is a professor of history and labor studies at the University of Manitoba. She's written, Radical Housewives: Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada. They're both in our Winnipeg studio. And Greg Kealey is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of New Brunswick. His latest book is, Spying on Canadians: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and the Origins of the Long Cold War. Greg Kealey is in our Fredericton studio. Hi everyone.

JULIE GUARD: Good morning.

AMT: We have lots to talk about.

MICHAEL DUPUIS: Good morning.

JG: Yes we do. Big deal.

AMT: So Julie Guard, let's start with you. What was happening 100 years ago today in Winnipeg?

JG: 100 years ago today at 7 o'clock in the morning, the telephone operators, the women who operated the telephones did not go to work for their 7 o'clock shift, thus beginning the Winnipeg General Strike. First people out. Among the one quarter of the workforce that was women in Winnipeg who went on strike 30,000 people. Big day for working people.

AMT: And the women who did the phones, they pulled out those, those were the days you plug in the lines right? They were called "Hello girls"?

JG: Right. The Hello girls. Not only did they they yank out the courts, but they pulled the fuses, thus making it more difficult for the city to employ scabs to work the phones. Although they managed to do that, the bourgeois women came in and helped out to help break the strike during the six weeks.

AMT: So it started with the so-called Hello girls. Who else was out on strike, Julie?

JG: Well it started with the metal trade workers who were having an actual dispute with their employer and were unionized, but by eleven o'clock on the night, May 15th, 1919, many of many workers across the city, 30,000 workers, unionized and not unionized, were out. 94 of 96 unions were out and most of those people were not unionized, who went out on strike in 1919. They had no protection. Even those who were unionized had essentially no.

AMT: What jobs Julie?

JG: The women were everything: bakery workers, confectionery workers, clerical workers and so on. The civic workers went out. They had a big dispute with the city, which wasn't allowing them to unionize. So.

AMT: Bus drivers?

JG: Bus, the street car drivers. The police went out. The police said they were on strike, but agreed to work and the city said no, you're not going to work. You're all fired.

AMT: Okay so Michael Dupuis, what were the reasons behind this?

MD: Well the reasons behind the strike were that the building trades workers and the metal trades workers they were looking at some better wages improve working conditions union recognition or collective bargaining. And when their employers turned them down turn the demands down they turned to the when a paying labor council for assistance and the Labor Council then started to vote. There were 12,000 organized labour people and the vote came back well over 11,000 voted in favour of a general sympathetic strike. And so that was the genesis immediately of the strike.

AMT: Greg Kealey, so it didn't come as a surprise. How did the city prepare for it?

GREG KEALEY: The bourgeoisie started to organize as well. They already had various organs, especially they organized something called the Citizens Committee of a Thousand, which was led by professionals, but included the employing class. And they started to work with the newspapers that especially when a big free press to publicize and to paint the strike as being led by communists by Bolsheviks years later referred to them as foreign aliens predominantly to try and paint a picture of ineffective Soviet style threat to democracy and to capitalism.

AMT: Was that right away Greg?

GK: It started, it had already started well before the events of May 1919. This should be seen as something that was built towards. It was not, it happened on a single day, obviously it started on a single day, but the pre-war period and the wartime period laid the foundations for this, including the fact that there had been previous general strikes that had been enjoyed considerable success. So the general strike as a weapon was something that the workers had grown to see as something that led to success.

AMT: And of course this was happening two years after the Russian Revolution. So what they thought of the Bolsheviks. What was the connection there? What what did the authorities think?

GK: It's a question and I think they feared the threat of the growth of socialism. Not that they thought it was in reality, they did not think it was an immediate threat, but that they thought that the existence of Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party, had the potential to be a threat. And the fact that that the working class was willing to take actions like they did in 1919 and as they had in 1917 and 1918. This was all building up over a few years led them to those fears. But what they really feared was that capitalism was wonder under threat and hence the state had been building its repressive apparatus through use of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police and the Dominion police, the Mounties in the West.

AMT: Riight. Before we get there, but let me just, stick with the Bolsheviks here. They all say actually because they accused, they said there were Bolshevik revolutionaries that were part of this, right? That the Russians were supporting the strike at one point. Did they not? They made that accusation.

GK: Absolutely.

AMT: So was there ever any evidence of that?

GK: The Bolshevik and the Soviet Union had enough problems of their own in their hands so if the civil war which of course Canada was participating in opposing the red side and the Civil War and most other western nations were as well. So that was their common or an activity or secret agents et cetera et cetera in around Winnipeg. No, definitely not, but what there was was the inspiration of workers taking control of the country. That inspiration certainly was present.

AMT: So Michael talk to us a little bit more about the role of the press in all of this.

MD: Well the press it was significant because that's how people in 1919 received information. Their daily paper was the main source. And what happened in Winnipeg cause there were three daily papers. There was the Manitoba Free Press, the Telegram and the Tribune and two days into the strike, the men who were responsible for the stereo setting and the web pressman, they walked out and therefore closed the papers down. This did not go well with people like John Defoe who's the editor of the Free Press and a week later when they started to republish, they they slammed the strike. They either they were indoctrinated themselves or they indoctrinated the public to believe that the strike was led by Reds. Defoe actually called them Reds, five of the strike leaders. The other papers were just as virulent the sit ins committee had established its own daily paper and of course it it attacked a strike. The strikers also had their own paper but they were more or less on a defensive roll you know claiming that what they wanted were legitimate labor demands and they also at that point wanted make sure that anybody went on strike got their jobs back. So there was a press war that took place within the city for you could say the hearts and minds of the people but outside of the city almost without exception daily newspapers condemned the strike the only paper that was the least bit sympathetic was the Toronto Star and they actually had sent two reporters to be right on site to collect information. And I think that really helped the paper get a better look at the strike. One of the reporters stayed for five weeks and he did excellent journalism.

AMT: Michael how long did the strike last total?

MD: It lasted six weeks. 42 days.

AMT: OK. And how many papers then just within the city of Winnipeg were operating through this?

MD: There were three daily papers and aside from the fact that for a week there was a complete news blackout. So there were actually five and four were anti-strike and of course there was one pro-strike paper.

AMT: Julie you mentioned as you listed off the jobs people were doing that the women, how did because the women get lost in the shuffle here over 100 years. Talk to us more about what stood, the first ones that day were the women, but what else was going on with the women? How did as the strike progressed, how did people survive? What were the women up to?

JG: Well women, I think have been recovered over time in their role in the strike. Their role in the strike was pretty important. Not only were they out protesting on the streets and parading like the men, engaging sometimes in rather violent behavior, but often led by women such as rather famously Mrs. Helen Armstrong. They were harassing the workers who were going to work and trying to persuade them not to do so sometimes with rather violent means and in fact a bunch of them including Helen Armstrong were actually arrested and held in custody for a while because of that behavior. But perhaps even more importantly again led by Ellen Armstrong the women's labor league organized a kitchen to provide free food during the strike particularly for the women workers. They would have called them probably girl strikers but those were the women who like typically for women at the time and perhaps even today didn't make as much money as the man. So when the women the single women who were on strike were particularly hard hit by the lack of income the idea was that they still had the strike kitchen would provide them with free meals for all women and children for the duration of the strike. Men could come and they were encouraged to pay something if they if they had some money or the strike briefly Relief Committee could subsidize them a bit. So this kind of thing made the strike possible. I think that they the kitchen that provided free meals. Also women in day to day lives had to support the strike at home. They had to manage with limited supplies only supplies were only available bread milk and so went by permission of the strike committee. So not everything happened. They didn't, women had to cope.

AMT: And Greg there was no RCMP at the time. It was the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. What role did they play?

GK: Well the rural Northwest Mounted Police was actually a small fraction of its former self because many of them had been encouraged to join the war effort as cavalry units and indeed some of them even went to Siberia to fight against the Bolsheviks. So the force was dwindled. Had dwindled, but from the middle of the war they played an important role in supervising foreign aliens, as they were referred to. Many of whom were had been interned. They also started to surveil with a new intensity that had existed before, but it became much more intense as the Labour revolt started and found more and more energy.

AMT: That's the significant part though, right? That they started the surveillance creating files. This was new?

GK: Yes the they in 1917 the Borden government charged a Montreal St. James Street lawyer named Charles to investigate the Bolshevik threat to Canada. And he of using police sources and private detectives and others started and came up with a report that recommended the creation of what would have been an FBI like agency in Canada. For various reasons the Borden government didn't accept that, but those rules were taken on by the Rural Northwest and by the Dominion police in the east. And they did start what became the file systems that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, when it was created in 1920, out of the two other forces, would carry on until well they carry on now under CSIS.

AMT: So in other words, this was the seed?

GK: This was indeed the exploding seed of state repression if you will of this kind of surveillance state that paralleled what existed in various European countries and in the United States. But these late war years and the immediate aftermath of the war are really when it comes full blown.

AMT: Michael, there's something called the bloody day. Was that a Bloody Saturday? What happened?

MD: That's right Anna Maria. Bloody Saturday was the result of mostly returned soldiers the night before it had a very well attended meeting behind city hall. They were frustrated over a number of issues that the street cars had begun to run again. The leaders the strike leaders have been arrested and initially weren't. They were brought out to a prison north of Winnipeg without bail. But they were released. The at the meeting on Friday evening it was decided that it would be a silent protest march to the next day Saturday starting in front of City Hall at 2:30. Their goal was to march north several blocks and confront Senator Gideon Robinson who was the minister of labour and they wanted him to find an end to the strike. And and so the the next day people started gathering by the hundreds and then the thousands in front of City Hall and waiting for this event to start this silent protest march. But the authorities the night before General Kachin who was a military commander had wired Ottawa saying that he knew what he was going to do. And the next day unfortunately was the violent confrontation that erupted that involved the rural Northwest Mounted Police. Specials, they were they were special police. After the police were dismissed, there were a number of young men who were hired at six dollars a day, which was a lot of money in those days, to provide law and order in the city so-called. And the militia. There were militia involved that were in two barracks. And this combined force eventually shut down the protests, but not after a number of people were shot by the Mounties. Two people were killed, one instantly in front of the Manitoba Hotel. The streets were cleared. There was one particular alleyway they called Hell's alleyway where maybe up to 100-150 people were trapped at both ends and beaten.

AMT: OK. I'm going to move you on just because. So in other words that was the big day of confrontation. How long after that? When did it end? What happened to make it end? Just briefly.

MD: Well that broke the back of the strike. The Minister of Labour spoke with moderates on the labour side. And five days later the strike ended officially, 11 o'clock in the morning on June 26th.

AMT: Greg Kealey, it has been 100 years since that strike. Do we know all the secrets from that time?

GK: No we do not nad that's a national disgrace. I think we know more and more and a historian archivist from Brandon University managed to get files out of the department of justice only a few years ago that allowed the reconstruction of the aftermath of the strike and the shed light on the behaviour of a man named AJ Andrews, who was the key figure in the Citizens Committee of a Thousand, who then made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a lawyer , prosecuting and successfully convicting the strike leaders. But the RCMP documents are still not wholly disclosed. Access to Information requests are a frustrating event for all of us.

AMT: So in other words it's still held secret. We can't go back and look at the archives fully?

GK: We can't look at the archives fully, no.

AMT: Julie Guard hat do we need to remember from that time, as we look at labour issues today?

JG: I think two things come to mind for me. One is of course what people tend to remember about this and what we're celebrating, this six weeks in Winnipeg is that working people when they get together and act collectively can actually try can actually succeed in opposing oppressive conditions. What they wanted was survival wages and the right to organize and those were pretty moderate demands by today's standards, but it took that kind of action, you know 30,000 people up for six weeks to actually start the process. That didn't happen right away, but eventually got us things like labour laws. The other thing I think that is also significant is it reminds us of the extent to which the state will go the state and the employers at all levels city municipal and federal to suppress that kind of action including as you know has been described shooting and killing people who are out protesting for what seemed pretty reasonable basic rights.

AMT: Okay we have to leave it there. Thank you all of you for reminding us what was happening on this day 100 years ago and then as it kept moving forward. Thank you.

JG: Thank you for remembering.

GK: Thank you Anna Maria.

MD: Alright thanks, Anna Maria.

AMT: That's Michael Dupuis, a historian. His new book is The Winnipeg General Strike: Ordinary Men and Women Under Extraordinary Circumstances. Julie Guard is a professor of history and labour studies at the University of Manitoba. Her book is Radical Housewives: Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada. Greg Kealey is a Professor Emeritus of History at UNB and the author of Spying on Canadians:: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and the Origins of the Long Cold War. Well echoes of that Winnipeg General Strike can still be felt in the Canadian labour movement today. Sid Ryan has been part of the Canadian Labour scene since the 1970s. He eventually rose to become president of the Ontario Federation of Labour and the president of CUPE Ontario. He's got a new book it's called, A Grander Vision: My Life in the Labour Movement. And Sid Ryan is with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

SID RYAN: Hi. Anna Maria, it's great to be here.

AMT: How important is the legacy of that Winnipeg General Strike for workers rights in Canada?

SR: Hugely important. Out of that strike, and like a number of years later we got the right to have free collective bargaining in Canada, but out of that came a whole lot of labour laws, jurisprudence, health and safety legislation, the right to strike, the right to organize. So basically all of the rights that we enjoy today in the labour movement can be traced back to the Winnipeg strike and similar type strikes across Canada.

AMT: We also saw the creation of the NDP after that, right?

SR: J.S. Woodward was one of the leaders of the Winnipeg strike. And of course he went on to to form the CCF, which then joined up with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the new New Democratic Party. So what's interesting is what was the greatest fear of the business community at the time came to pass because they went and imprisoned a one of the leaders of the strike who then went on to form a socialist party, not a government, but Socialist Party.

AMT: And interesting the RCMP kind of really formed out of that top. It's that really important moment in time.

SR: Precisely and then of course we still don't have all the facts from behind the scenes, what happened during the strike.

AMT: Can you see a day when there could be another general strike anywhere like that?

SR: Well take a look at what actually led to that particular strike. It was you know workers coming back from the First World War, immigrants primarily living in conditions that were horrible, horrible working conditions, low wages, the ability wanting to go out to organize. Are we seeing the same thing today? I think we probably are. We're seeing great inequality in the system right now. We see precarious workers. We see workers on the streets demanding fifteen dollars an hour. So is it the same conditions as back in 1919? No not maybe as severe. But I do believe there is a day reckoning. Yeah parallel and the day of reckoning is coming. There's no question that people are feeling, in this province at least, with the election of the of the Ford government, that all of these rights that we won could very well be under attack by this government.

AMT: And, in Canada, how strong is the labour movement today?

SR: You know the labour movement is is not as strong as it used be. They're not as cohesive. There's too much infighting going on. There's too much decisions being made in their own little silos. The these you know the central organizations -- the Canadian Labour Congress, the Ontario Federation of Labour -- are not viewed by individual unions as the central body that can actually pull the labour movement together. So you get organizations like UNIFOR taking the money out of the central labour organizations and weakening them because of petty politics or raiding or of this stuff this nature they're saying. The second thing I would say is the private sector is only 12 per cent organized in Canada. So most of the manufacturing has basically disappeared and the labour movement has not yet figured out how do we grow the labour movement in the private sector. Public sector is basically organized. Private sector is not. So there's all these precarious workers, there's people of colour who are not really represented in the labour movement. It's mainly, you know, guys look like me: bald, grey-haired guys who are in charge of the labour movement, by and large, certainly in the private sector. That needs to change, because workers will not join organizations that they don't see themselves represented in.

AMT: It's so interesting, because 100 years ago you had people who were leading the people who became politicians. And now you have, you don't have that kind of trajectory. You don't hear labour leaders speaking for the people, you hear politicians actually speaking for people who don't agree with labour leaders.

SR: Precisely. And yeah exactly. And you don't see too many union leaders putting their their neck on the line and basically saying I'm going to run for this political party. Just go back to 1990 when Bob Rae gets elected. There wasn't one single union leader at the provincial or at the national level who got elected. It was basically rank and file members got elected or it was shop stewards. But there were very few national, provincial union leaders that actually went out and put their neck on the line and basically ran, which left Rae then with a very inexperienced cabinet. Because these folks do have experience. There's no doubt about it. They're honing their skills on the front lines in politics from the early ages. So yeah they could make a huge difference if union leaders would step up to the plate.

AMT: And it's interesting because of course politicians, you can, there's a lot of political hay to be made by going after big labour. Like has labour become too big? Is seen as somethingm like how do you feel about the image of of the labour movement?

SR: The image is not great. There's no question about it, but a lot of it is is driven by by some of the right wing media that more effectively use even social media against the labour movement. You know how many times, how often have we heard the pejorative union bosses in reference to elected union leaders who get elected in a democratic way, but they're regarded as almost like the Red scare that was going on in 1919. They refer to them as you know, not so much as Bolsheviks, but certainly they do refer to them in the pejorative way.

AMT: So just before we go is there one thing the Canadian labor unions can learn from that history lesson. Like in a nutshell, what is it?

SR: I think it's to go out and organize precarious workers. To go out and take a look at where the growth is going to be. It's not in the manufacturing sector. So take a look at new immigrants coming into Canada, refugees, women, people of colour. That is where the growth of the labour movement is and unless union leaders get that fact and start moving and organizing in those factories and wherever else you'll find those precarious workers, we're going die in the vine.

AMT: Sid Ryan, thanks for coming in.

SR: It's a pleasure.

AMT: Sid Ryan is a longtime labour leader in Ontario. His new book is called, A Grander Vision: My Life in the Labour Movement. He's in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think about talk of the 100 years ago today and what it meant. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's it for today. Tom Power is waiting in the wings with Q. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

May 15, 2019 episode transcript

More Stories Like This