Canadian workers had much to celebrate on this date in 1872 as the government of Sir John A. Macdonald, demonstrating a generous form of conservatism (that also happened to be good politics) legalized trade unions. “While Canada was still overwhelmingly rural, an urban proletariat was beginning to emerge in Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton, where industrial workers now made up close to one-fifth of the labour force,” wrote Richard Gwyn in his acclaimed biography of Macdonald, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life our Times. “Canadian workers put in longer hours for less pay than their British and American equivalents.”
In standing with ordinary workers, the Father of Confederation was assisted by his political enemy, Liberal leader George Brown, publisher of the Globe newspaper. When his paper’s night compositors, who were skilled craftsmen, were able to secure pay raises and shorter working hours, less skilled workers at the Globe made similar demands. Brown would have none of it.
“On March 25 (1872) every typographical worker left his bench,” Gwyn continued. “Brown instantly formed an employer’s consortium of various kinds of businesses that agreed to help the Globe resist ‘any attempt on the part of our employees to dictate to us by what rules we shall govern our business.’” Brown, using the laws then in place, had 13 union members arrested, charged with conspiracy.
Enter Sir John A. He crafted a law immediately that legalized trade unions. Charges against the strikers were dropped and history was made. “Union members now appeared on platforms with Conservative candidates,” wrote Gwyn. “The Toronto Trades Assembly staged a huge rally to express its gratitude, presenting a jeweled case to Lady Macdonald and providing Macdonald with an opportunity to charm the crowd by saying that, as a maker of cabinets, he was himself an industrial worker.”
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.