By Dave Obee, Victoria Times Colonist, December 24, 2011
Labour played key role in province’s development
Review of Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of the New Left, 1948-1972
By Benjamin Isitt, University of Toronto Press, 458 pp., $35
Long before he was elected a councillor in Victoria, Benjamin Isitt had established his credentials as a serious historian dealing with labour issues.
Militant Minority, his second work published in the past year, is a well-researched and well-documented look at British Columbia’s labour movement and its impact on the political landscape during a time of great change.
It starts during the Cold War, when there was a fear of Communists hiding under every bed.
As Isitt notes, however, British Columbia’s polarized society has its roots much further back, in the coal mines of Vancouver Island, and in government decisions that placed much of the power and wealth in the hands of a few.
By 1948, the province was run by a Liberal-Conservative coalition, and we were about to embark on one of the most dramatic and prosperous eras in our history.
Four years later, W.A.C. Bennett led his Social Credit party to power, and then hung on for two decades against the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and its successor, the New Democratic Party. The end came with the election of Dave Barrett’s NDP after a summer of great labour discontent.
The percentage of unionized workers in B.C. peaked early in the Bennett era, in 1958, when more than half the people employed in nonagricultural fields were covered by collective agreements. By 1972, after a decade of jobs for the asking, only about 42 per cent were union members – but that was certainly enough to help drive Bennett from office.
The strong economy was part of the reason for the drop in membership, but Bennett’s pro-business views, backed by legislation that favoured employers, was certainly a factor.
Turmoil on the left probably didn’t help matters. Through most of the years there were factions pushing and pulling this way and that. It’s a reminder that the political parties of the left, just like the parties of the right, are coalitions that represent a wide diversity of views.
Militant Minority is the end result of several years of research by Isitt, and that effort is reflected in its pages. It’s a remarkable project, with appendices, notes, a bibliography and the index accounting for more than half of the finished product.
What makes this book valuable, however, is its objectivity. Isitt is not an apologist for the left, for organized labour or anyone else. He tells the story in a matter-of-fact way, free of spin or political message.
That neutrality is its strength: It is valuable to all readers, regardless of political points of view, because it provides insight and background into a critical time in our history.
Today’s left owes a debt to those that came before, and who set the stage for the NDP governments of 1991-2001 and any NDP governments that might come in the future. Militant Minority helps us understand how we got here.
The reviewer, the editorial page editor of the Times Colonist, is the author of The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia.
