W is for Workers, not just for war

“We remember our war dead. We should also remember those who died in the workplace.”

 by David Frank

There are many war memorials in my province, but one of them, in a small town in central New Brunswick, stands out. After you have read the names in front of the Royal Canadian Legion Hall in Minto, you can cross the street to a small park and read almost twice as many names on another monument.

These are the names of seventy men who lost their lives in the Grand Lake mining district over the course of the past century. When this monument to the coal miners was dedicated in 1984, one of the local mayors seemed to comment directly on the proximity of the two memorials: “We remember our war dead. We should also remember those who died in the workplace.”

These thoughts were on my mind last week when I joined a panel called "My History Museum, A to Zed", to discuss ideas for the new Canadian Museum of History. The plans are controversial, partly due to fears that this is part of an attempt by the current Canadian government to rebrand Canada in its own image, even to redefine Canada as a “warrior nation”.

By the time of the 150^th anniversary of Confederation, the new Canadian Museum of History will have a newly refurbished exhibit on Canadian history. 

What it will look like is hard to know for sure, but for the time being, the Museum’s “public engagement initiative” continues online.  Canadians are asked to identify people, events and themes that belong in the story.

Interestingly, one of my fellow panelists last week was a serving military officer, and we discovered that we had some things in common. We both had grandfathers or great grandfathers in France in 1917, one of them in the mud and chaos of the famous charge at Vimy Ridge and the other at a nearby hospital, comforting the wounded and counting the dead.

We also identified a common interest in labour history, and we were reminded that Canada’s armies have been made up primarily of working-class citizens who enlisted for a whole range of reasons including patriotism and adventure but also opportunities for education, training and employment.

We can even think of soldiers as workers serving in an unusually dangerous workplace. But we also need to remember that over the past century more Canadians have died on the job than on the battlefield.

The storyline for the new museum, we are told, will be an optimistic one, a story of how Canadians have created a country based on fairness and justice and a participatory democracy that is both economically sound and socially progressive.

We are a long way from arrival, but there is no denying that movements for social justice are a big part of the Canadian story. Even as inequalities gave widened and disparities have deepened, Canadians have regularly challenged those outcomes.

When we look for times when Canadians have come together and shown their ability to resist inequalities and seek a better future, we need to remember that the union movement has been one of the forces for political, social and economic democracy in Canada.

Is it realistic to imagine a “Canadian Labour Museum” alongside the existing Canadian War Museum? Probably not, but we should expect the new Canadian Museum of History to give full attention to the working-class experience as one of the themes in the Canadian story. 

By the time of the 150th anniversary of Confederation, the new Canadian Museum of History will have a newly refurbished exhibit on Canadian history.

© Copyright 2012 David Frank, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca