With high unemployment and a recession in full swing, the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) was formed by the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council in August 1907, with the aim of “keeping Oriental immigrants out of British Columbia”. It is a …
(Excerpt from On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement, by Rod Mickleburgh [2018]) The thousands of Chinese immigrants who endured so much helping to unite Canada by rail left little record of their ordeal. But …
(Photo credit: Past Tense Vancouver) Late in the night on April 13, 1903, labour organizer and longshore worker Frank Rogers was walking home from dinner and stopped by the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks at the foot of Abbott Street in …
In the summer of 1954, racist signs on the women’s washrooms at the Namu fish cannery divided the facilities between “Whites” and “Natives”. They had been there for years, but despite demands from both the United Fishermen and Allied Workers …
(Photo: Four members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Canadian Pacific Railroad Division, posed standing: Frank Collins, Joe(?) Hudson, L.M. Alexander, and Sam Lewis, ca. 1943. Frank Collins became President of the Vancouver Division of the Union, as well …