“The common people have spoken with a mighty voice”: Regina’s Labour City Councils, 1936–1939

Abstract

Working-class political activity at the municipal level in Regina began in 1914 on the initiative of members of the Regina Trades and Labour Council. Early on trade unionists reached out to the city’s middle class, and together they founded a succession of Labour political parties in the 1920s. After 1930 members of the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees also became involved. Success came in 1935, when the Civic Labour League, an informal alliance of social democrats and communists, won the mayoralty and a majority of the aldermanic seats on city council. Labour maintained its hold over City Hall until the end of the decade, but it did not accomplish much. It could not convince the province's Liberal govern-ment to take over full responsibility for the cost of relief or enact a special city charter that would give Regina wider powers (to construct social housing for example) and new sources of revenue. Then in 1939 Labour's political fortunes shifted dramatically. Accusations of communist influence in the selection of the Labour slate played into the hands of the city's business community, Regina's daily newspapers, and the Civic Voters' Association, which was founded on the eve of the civic election, and Labour suffered a crushing defeat. Abstract: La classe ouvriere commence a s'impliquer en politique municipale a Regina en 1914 avec les membres du Regina Trades and Labour Council. Au debut, les syndicalistes rassemblent les familles de la classe moyenne autour d'eux et ils fondent ensemble plusieurs partis politiques travaillistes au cours des annees 20. Apres 1930, les membres de la Fraternite canadienne des employes des chemins de fer s'engagent a leur tour. La victoire vint en 1935, lorsque la Civic Labour League, une alliance informelle entre les sociaux-democrates et les communistes, remporte la mairie et la majorite des sieges au conseil municipal. Aux commandes de l'hotel de ville jusqu'a la fin de la decennie, les travaillistes n'atteignent pas les resultats escomptes. Ils echouent a convaincre le gouvernement provincial liberal d'assumer les couts de la totalite du budgetde secours ou de promulguer une charte municipale qui leur aurait donne davantage de pouvoir (pour construire des logements sociaux par exemple) et procure de nouvelles sources de revenu. En 1939, la bonne fortune politique des travaillistes prend subitement fin. Les communistes sont accuses d'avoir influence le processus de selection des candidats de la liste travailliste. A la une des quotidiens de Regina, ces accusations jouent en faveur des gens d'affaires de la ville et de la Civic Voters' Association, qui avait ete fondee a la veille des elections municipales, et les travaillistes essuient une cuisante defaite.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.