How a Belfast Immigrant to Canada Came to Testify Before the Undercover Policing Inquiry in the UK

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Ernie Tate and his truck, late 1950s.

Bryan D. Palmer

In the summer of 1955, Ernest (Ernie) Tate, a young immigrant from Belfast, wandered into the “Toronto Labour Bookstore” on Yonge Street north of Wellesley.

The proprietor of the bookshop was Ross Dowson, a founder of the small Canadian Trotskyist movement. It espoused the ideas of Marx and Lenin, but was critical of the Soviet Union and what Stalin had done as its leader from the 1920s until his death in 1953. Dowson introduced Tate to the idea of socialist revolution and the organizations that claimed they could bring it about.

Tate’s education, terminated in Belfast when he left school before the age of 14, now began in earnest in Toronto.

A quick study, Tate soon graduated at the top of his class, a seasoned Marxist, joining the small political current that would eventually become the League for Socialist Action (LSA). He then travelled to New York to work with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and spent time at its educational centre in New Jersey, the Mountain Spring Camp, before coming back to Toronto.

When he wasn’t spray painting “Ban the Bomb” on a government-built Shelter near Ontario’s provincial legislature, Tate might be facing an “obstruction” charge arising out of a picket line scuffle. A lot of his time was taken up with organizing support for bodies like the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He also traveled the country, living out of a truck and selling revolutionary pamphlets and Marxist texts to pay for his meals.

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History Slam 181: Always Pack a Candle

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By Sean Graham

I’m one who believes that, at its core, history is about storytelling. Historians tell the stories of those who came before – and the best historians do so in a way that is both engaging and meaningful to the audience. For some, that has included telling their own stories and using their life experiences to illuminate larger trends and offer a window into specific times and places.

That is certainly the case with Marion McKinnon Crook‘s new book Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin. The book follows Marion in her first job after graduating university as a travelling nurse in northern British Columbia. Responsible for a 9,300-square kilometre area, Crook had to travel between communities, often navigating treacherous roads and struggling against a health system that allowed too many people to fall through the cracks. In telling her story, Crook highlights how she learned that she didn’t know everything, how she found systemic injustice, and how she managed her relationship with the provincial bureaucracy. A writer with many fiction titles to her name, Crook effectively employs a literary style that kept me engaged though the entire memoir.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Marion McKinnon Crook about the book. We talk about her motivation for telling her story, her background in nursing, and the practical challenges of public health work. We also chat about the realities of working in such a vast area, systemic injustice in the health system, and what the challenges of dealing with skeptics of medical advancements in the 1960s can tell us about today.

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The Local Spaces of National Museums

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by Carly Ciufo

Thomas is right: Community is a tricky concept.

I want to talk about finding community at the national level. It’s neither quite as small as a family unit nor as large as some broader cosmopolitan imagining of shared humanity, but it is nevertheless a crucial element of museum building in the twenty-first century. Community is an especially tricky thing if national museums are assumed to be too big to pay attention to the local surroundings where they are built.

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“I am totally shocked that something of this sort could happen in Canada”: Vancouver’s Gastown Riot Fifty Years Later

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Undercover Vancouver police officers arresting a “long hair.” Vancouver Police Museum & Archives P00881.

Michael Boudreau

Fifty years ago, on Saturday, 7 August 1971, Vancouver’s Gastown district erupted into chaos as police, some on horse-back and many wielding batons, waded into a throng of “hippies” who had gathered for the Gastown Smoke-In & Street Jamboree. Approximately 2000 people attended the Smoke-In to call for the legalization of marijuana. According to the Georgia Straight, Vancouver’s first “underground” newspaper, the Smoke-In was intended to be a “peaceful…, and joyous high-energy event aimed at making the marijuana laws irrelevant.”[i] Many of the young people who had attended the Jamboree also did so to publicly denounce “Operation Dustpan” which the Vancouver police had launched in July. The focus of Operation Dustpan was Gastown, the so-called “soft-drug capital” of Canada, and the “long hairs” (hippies) who called it home. This was an effort by the police to clean up the city’s drug and hippie problem. But critics argued that Operation Dustpan, and the arrests for drug possession and loitering that resulted from it, amounted to police harassment and intimidation. While the Smoke-In did not immediately lead to a reform of Canada’s drug laws (that would have to wait until 2018, when cannabis was legalized), it was an important moment in the debate over the efficacy of criminalizing weed. Moreover, some of the police tactics that were used to suppress this “riot” are still utilized by some police forces, despite calls, then and now, for their curtailment, if not elimination.

Gastown was named after Gassy Jack Deighton who opened Vancouver’s first saloon in the late 1860s. It is located in the city’s downtown core (bordered by Water, Alexander, Powell, and Carrall streets) and in the late 1960s and early 1970s Gastown was home to an eclectic mix of restaurants and bars that catered to middle-class residents and tourists, alongside “freak bars” (the Alcazar) and groovy stores like Junior Jelly Beans for Jeans. Gastown attracted some of Canada’s “disaffected” youth who had travelled to the west coast in search of new experiences and employment. While some may have found Gastown to be culturally vibrant, many soon joined the ranks of the unemployed, homeless, and marginalized (including Indigenous peoples) who struggled to eke out a living in Gastown. The area remains a trendy tourism destination, while still grappling with poverty, which is most evident a few blocks away in the Downtown Eastside.

In the years immediately prior to the Gastown riot, young people had staged demonstrations against what they believed to be the “growing power of Fascism” in Vancouver. Continue reading →

“This half century of struggle”: A Look Back at Child Care Advocacy

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In 1969, a sub-group of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Toronto organized a day care co-op on the U of T campus, winning university support after occupying the second floor of Simcoe Hall. In 1972, a group of parents demanding another building to meet growing demand occupied the meteorological building for 10 months. UOttawa, Canadian Women’s Movement Archives Collection.

Lisa Pasolli

If you know one thing about the history of child care in Canada, it’s probably that it is a story littered with disappointment. Over and over, studies and task forces have called for the building of a universal child care system. Over and over, governments have promised action only to walk back their commitments or have their plans derailed by shifting political winds. Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, however, has promised that “this time, we’re going to do it.” Budget 2021, which Freeland delivered on April 19th, included $30 billion in funding to build a universal early learning and child care (ELCC) system.

A few days after the budget speech, I watched a webinar hosted by some of the country’s leading ELCC advocates. While they were understandably wary about some of the fuzzy parts of the announcement, the overall mood was hopeful — and not just because of the amount of spending, which is significant, but because of its substance. Freeland set an affordability target: in five years, she said, parents will have access to services for an average of $10 per day. She promised to focus on support for the higher quality not-for-profit sector. Money has been earmarked to improve accessibility, and to support culturally appropriate Indigenous ELCC programs.

Affordability, accessibility, quality, inclusivity: these are all standards that have been lifted from the child care movement. In other words, decades of advocacy paved the way for Freeland’s announcement. Continue reading →

Community, Family, & the Hidden History of Southwestern Ontario

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By Thomas Peace

“Not acknowledging the multiplicity of histories that we carry around with us can separate more than bring us together and fail to demonstrate how the congruence of narratives that make up the past are the very stories that tell who “we” are in the present.” – Samantha Cutrara, Transforming the Canadian History Classroom, 6.

 “Community” is a tricky concept.

The word encourages us to conceptualize our place in the world through a singular sense of belonging. Put a bit differently: the idea forces us to think about groups that we find meaningful and supportive as entities somewhat isolated from each other. Our family is a sort of community, for example, but one that is distinct – often – from the communities we find in our neighbourhoods, at work, in prayer, or in recreation.

For many, though, our values and identities are bound up not in a single community but, rather, in multiple communities, anchored in specific sets of relationships that interlink us with diverse groups of people. We live in webs of communities rather than within one single collective unit. Each of these communities has value for us.

It is this difference, between a singular idea of community, and the reality that we live within many distinct communities, that the Hidden Histories of Southwestern Ontario project seeks to recognize.

The Hidden Histories Dashboard

Since the late eighteenth century, the plural reality of community and its mostly local and regional nature, has posed challenges for businesses, institutions, and politicians. Continue reading →

Historia Nostra: Commemorating French Canadian History in Stained Glass

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By Erin Isaac

I visited the Notre Dame basilica in Old Montréal for the first time in 2018. Having recently had the opportunity to visit the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, I was excited to see how the basilica’s architects were inspired by, or deviated from, the 13th century chapel built in the Gothic Rayonnant style.

Window commemorating the lives of Jeanne LeBer (left), Marguerite Bourgeoys (centre), and Kateri Tekawitha (right). Photo by author

Sainte Chapelle’s stained glass windows are its most famous feature with 14 out of the 15 windows depicting biblical stories. Knowing this, I was immediately taken by the stained glass windows at Notre Dame de Montréal which depict scenes from the city’s history.

Wanting to learn more about the windows and the stories depicted, I set to researching them. To my surprise, it was difficult to find resources about the windows (at least, in English). Few lists describing their contents exist, and the ones I was able to track down (en Français) were incomplete, lacked information, or had incorrect information. Continue reading →

There is No Solidarity in a Meritocracy: Precarity in the History Profession in Canada

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by Steven High

“We all love what we do deeply. … This love is taken from us by our institutions, employers, and administrators. It’s used to exploit us every time we do extra work or support the students we teach or mark papers properly even though we’re not paid enough to do it, or get a course outline just right even though we’ve only been given a week.”
– Dr. Jeremy Milloy, CHA round-table, January 2021 (and published in Active History)

“To all tenure-track and tenured professors who have and have not yet signed the letter: step up to the plate and take action. You benefit from a system that systematically exploits the labour of both precarious instructors and graduate students. You might think this has nothing to do with you, but it does. You might wring your hands and say it’s the department, but you are the department. You might say it’s the administration, but you are the administration. You have power and job security, and the ability to make real changes in the lives of so many people. It’s on you to use it.”
– Dr. Andrea Eidinger, CHA round-table, March 2021 (and published in University Affairs)

The Canadian Historical Association must recognize precarity within our discipline for what it is: a form of structural violence. The “collegial” structures within the academy implicate full-time faculty in a system, while not of our making, that is fundamentally unfair and exploitative.

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Nostalgia and the Politics of Selective Remembering

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The statue of John A. Macdonald in Victoria Park (Regina) was covered in a white sheet and police tape on 28 August 2017. Photo credit: Britton Gray.

By Omeasoo Wahpasiw, Adele Perry and Sean Carleton

Timing is everything, and context and connections matter. A week after the US Capitol riot on January 6 sparked a reckoning with the growing threat of white supremacy and far-right extremism in North America, an open letter appeared as a full-page ad in the National Post celebrating the “remarkable” legacy of John A. Macdonald. A week later, as Donald Trump prepared to leave the White House, his administration released the 1776 Report arguing for a revival of nationalistic, patriotic history education. The differences in these documents are many and obvious. But there are also connections, ones that highlight how nostalgia, nationalism, and selective remembering are currently being used to serve white supremacy and protect the colonial status quo.

The “In Defense of Sir John A. Macdonald and his Legacy” letter was released by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank established in 2010, and a group referred to as both the “Friends of Canadian history” and the “Friends of Sir. John A. Macdonald.” Beyond Ryerson Politics and Public Administration professor Patrice Dutil’s description of the “Friends” as “a loose association of colleagues and acquaintances” in Toronto, the organization is a mystery. As a text, the letter is homey and more hagiography than history. It was released on Macdonald’s birthday, and was intended to defend the former prime minister against his critics. The letter was published with 130 signatories and currently has over 200 names endorsing it.

The Macdonald letter makes the most sense when read within the wider context of colonial nostalgia for an imagined past when the relationship between history, nations, and empires was untroubled by critique. It presumes a divide between “those who see Canada’s history as little more than a shameful series of mistakes and failures” and those who pay Macdonald appropriate thanks.

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THE FREDERICTON GREYLINGS: Fredericton’s First Women’s Organized Hockey Team, 1903-1904

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by Roger P Nason

In the 1890s, efforts by women to bring equality into Maritime sporting activities were met with mixed results. Most noticeable was the emergence of ladies’ hockey in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Sheldon Gillis at Saint Mary’s University surveys the state of hockey within women’s sporting activities in his 1994 Master’s thesis with sources almost entirely focused on Nova Scotian university settings. Although prevailing attitudes among administration records reinforced the “frail Victorian woman” stereotype, progress was being made on campuses at the University of Toronto, Mount Allison, Dalhousie, and Acadia. By 1900, many colleges and universities included hockey in women’s competitive sports.

Although friendly games were held with Fredericton and Moncton, The Saint John Daily Sun reported that Saint John women “are very swift skaters and can dodge with the puck to equal some of the best of the gentleman players” in March 1895. By the next season, the newspaper cited the formation of a Ladies’ Hockey League in the city intent on having their first practice at Singer Rink.[1]

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