Arthur Puttee and the Liberal Party: 1899–1904

Abstract

CANADIAN TRADF, UNIONS FIRST BECAME POLITICALLY ACTIVE IN I872 when Sir John A. Macdonald won the allegiance of the Toronto Trades Assembly and other fledgling organizations by the passage of the Trade Union Act and the criminal law amendment acts. By the middle of the decade, however, the Liberal party had gained the support of some of the leaders of the movement and in the eighties Oliver Mowat won following among the newly formed Trades and Labor Congress ofCanada. • This alliance continued until the last ),cars of the next decade when the sudden emergence of radical labour thought resulted in calls from within the TLC for independent political action by trade unionists? The agitation for move to the left by the congress was strongest in the western provinces. Hcrc workers first became committed to independent political action and first achieved political victou. As carly as 1886 British Columbia trade unionists had organized political parties, and in the provincial election of I89o they returned a pro-labour coterie. Political activities continued in the following years with some success. But the breakthrough occurred in the provincial election of x 898 in which five labour supporters were returned. This election was a landmark in the development of radical labour because the fluidity and lack of organization i provincial politics allowed labour's friends to hold the balance of power in the new house; indeed, such conditions had contributed substantially to the election of the

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 — 2 citations exist upstream.

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