Solidarity: A new book looks back at British Columbia’s near revolution four decades later

The year is 1983.  US President Ronald Reagan is in the White House, Canada has a Prime Minister named Trudeau — Pierre, not Justin — and British Columbia is on the verge of a general strike.

Solidarity:  Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983 is a new book that looks back at this tumultuous time.

It begins when Bill Bennett, who was then the newly re-elected Premier of BC, introduced a sweeping round of budget and service cuts under the guise of austerity and restraint, setting all of this in motion.

“It was virtually an attack on unions and every social program imaginable,” explains journalist and author David Spaner.  “Workers could be fired without cause even if they were in a union.  Women’s organizations lost their funding.  The education system came under attack.  The Canadian Medicare system was attacked.  Environmental legislation was removed.  The Human Rights Commission, which monitored racism and other prejudice in the province, was eliminated.  You could go on and on.  It was a sweeping assault on social programs and almost anything progressive in the province.”

To place this in a broader context, BC was deeply polarized at the time politically.  Bennett’s Social Credit party was the fiscally conservative alternative to the centre-left New Democrats.  His so-called restraint program was not unlike similar belt-tightening initiatives attempted by other conservative governments during that era.  However, the Socreds probably hadn’t anticipated the level of backlash that their particular cuts would inspire.

A broad coalition of affected groups brought the province precariously close to a general strike.  It was stopped only when more conservative elements of the labour movement acquiesced to the government.

“There were three components of this movement,” Spaner explains.  “There was the Solidarity Coalition, which was a collection of all the social movements of the time.  Everyone was represented:  women’s organizations, environmental organizations, gay organizations.  Virtually every organization you can imagine that had been active for the previous years.  The second component was called Operation Solidarity, which was a combine of all the unions in BC.  And the third component was the general public, which was just outraged.”

“A lot of people who had never been activists, never been involved particularly in their union or in any organization, were so outraged by this that they became involved,” Spaner adds.

“There were massive rallies.  There was a legendary one at Empire Stadium, huge ones in Victoria, probably the most notable one of all was when Solidarity converged on the annual Socred convention which was being held at the [Hotel Vancouver].”

Solidarity may have been a big tent, but BC’s organized labour movement was not.  Spaner points out certain elements of it were absolutely petrified at the prospect of a general strike, essentially a work stoppage across multiple industries that would have shut down the entire province, which had only been attempted a handful of times before in North America.

“What ended up happening was a conservative core of leadership within the BC Federation of Labour sent [International Woodworkers of America Canada President] Jack Munro up to Kelowna to meet with Bill Bennett at his home.  And this meeting shocked everyone.  And what came out of it was known as the Kelowna Accord, which was an agreement to shut down the uprising.  And in response they got a few crumbs, [but] the union demands were barely met, and the social demands and the Solidarity Coalition’s issues weren’t even dealt with.  So, it was a really unfortunate, very anticlimactic ending to a great movement.”

Spaner argues Solidarity shouldn’t be judged on its outcome but on the fact that it even happened at all.

“It’s important to study this and look at what happened then, being in a room with all these people, representing different aspects of social justice.  And, so, I think that idea, that that’s possible, is probably the biggest legacy of the whole thing.”

So why look back on this now? Spaner feels Solidarity has faded somewhat in our collective memory.

“I think people, basically, have a desire to be more free than they are.  And every once in a while, the opportunity arises where you can do it in the form of a mass movement.  And that’s what happened in BC in 1983.  So, it is a very historic thing.  And if that had happened in say, I don’t know, Paris or New York, it would probably be the stuff of legends. There would be books about it, documentaries about it.  But it happened in Vancouver and BC, which was a little off the radar, internationally, at the time.  And so, it had kind of been forgotten by history a bit.”

But not anymore. Spaner lays out not only the history of Solidarity and its various players but also how it fits into the broader sweep of BC’s rebel history and social movements both past and present.  Posterity aside, he says the book was also inspired by the resurgence of right-wing populism in recent years, both at home and abroad.

“And I’m not just talking about Trumpism.  I’m talking about everything from Hungary to Brazil,” he explains.  “It became timely.  It became a lesson in how to mobilize people against the far right, far right governments, like we had in BC at the time, because the sort of stuff that they were trying to legislate back then is not so different than a lot of things that are being proposed right now.”

 Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983 is published by Ronsdale Press.