Why The Failure Of The Winnipeg General Strike In Canada

The Winnipeg General Strike was one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. Over thirty thousand workers and World War 1 veterans joined in solidarity to obtain the right for collective bargaining. This massive strike paralyzed the city of Winnipeg, even as capitalists insisted everything was normal. Business owners and government officials scrambled to find volunteers and “scabs” to fill in the countless empty positions. Despite all that, the strike failed. Their leaders were imprisoned or deported. How did a strike that was supported by the majority of the working class and World War 1 Veterans fail? To begin to contextualize this historical event, the general environment of fear and paranoia later labeled as the Red Scare must be explored.

“The Toronto Star refused to accept [the mainstream] viewpoint. Instead, through news reports and editorials, the paper presented its readers with a different interpretation.” This is mostly due to the fact that the Toronto Star owner Joseph Atkinson “gradually transformed the paper into an advocate for social reform legislation focusing on minority rights, public ownership of utilities, and the right of labour to organize and strike.” In other words, the paper had a left wing bias, which allowed them to see past the Red Scare that gripped North America. Alongside this, “the Toronto Star editorialized and reported that for the majority of the strikers in Winnipeg the real issues were collective bargaining and higher wages, not conspiracy and revolution.” This further shows the ideological slant and self-interest most newspapers showed. Instead of investing real reporters to the region, most newspapers simply parroted the reports from other biased, paranoid news organizations. American newspapers’ “reports and editorial opinions of the Winnipeg General Strike… fanned the hysteria of the “Red Scare” in the United States.” More importantly, many smaller Canadian news organizations used these American reports “freely… and ultimately influenced their readers. American press reports and editorials even found their way back to Winnipeg appearing several times in May and June in The Free Press and The Citizen.” This showcases the extreme distortion the Red Scare brought. The major American and Canadian newspapers wrote misinformed and highly critical pieces on the Winnipeg strikers, and in turn, many smaller newspapers throughout Canada copied these