Know what one of our problems is – We don’t know our own history. We have been here before – and won.

We all think that Employment Insurance and the welfare state and Medicare are legacies of politicians – especially Mackenzie King who signed the UI bill in to law. And I am here to tell that it ain’t necessarily so. I am the ghost of protest past…

The reality is these ideas were born from the experiences of ordinary people like us in the 1930s. From a growing resistance and consensus at meetings and rallies like this one

So, a quick history lesson –

Once upon a time giving charity was so important a facet of life that it had to be sought after. That is, if a community or parish did not have any poor people help, they had to go and find some. That is the true meaning of the word charitas, to demonstrate Christian love.

Over time that changed, by the time of King Henry the 8th -remember him, he was so committed to marriage and the family he started his own church he could get divorced and/ or behead his wives – had developed the poor laws. Those who could not support themselves were sent to poorhouses where they could earn their keep by picking oakum. The concept of the deserving poor emerged – that is there were some poor people who couldn’t help themselves and “deserved to be helped” by those more fortunate, However, there was an underlying belief that the poor were inherently wicked. Unless care was taken, the undeserving poor could not be helped and, in fact, would find ways to avoid working and supporting themselves. Lesser eligibility was born. This was the idea that any state support had to be less appealing than the lowest paid labouring job. Otherwise, the poor would not take the menial jobs that had to be done because being on relief was preferable.

These tenets from the English Elizabethan poor laws still echo in the Canada of today. Remember “workfare not welfare?” Putting single mothers back to work?

So, by the 1930s relief has become a form of charity made available by the state to people who had run out of their “traditional” resources. Those traditional resources were the resource industry based notion that there was always work even though it was mostly seasonal. In the short term dry spell of no work, you were expected to have a network of friends and family, church, union, or other associations that could help you and your family through when times were tough, And times frequently were tough. Only when you had exhausted your sources could you look to the state, in the form of your local city council, for help for short term, minimal help.

So in the 1930s, relief was well established as a shameful last resort doled out by the municipalities to those who could not find work, couldn’t find family or others to help them. And there was a general acceptance of the shame that came along with the help.

Until more and more people got unemployed and people began to see their friends and neighbors and family members in the dole queues, lining up for meager handouts. When it became clear short term and minimal would not help against long term economic downturn, when it was clear, unemployment was part and parcel of the system.

They knew each other well, in the communities and neighbourhoods of the 1930s and the lies about undeserving poor and deserving poor began to collapse under the simple weight of how many were in need. People knew they were not, their neighbours were not undeserving bums seeking an easy life at the state expense.

Now while municipalities began to argue that providing for unemployment was beyond their means that they didn’t have the tax base to address a problem caused by national and international circumstances over which they had no control, the people standing in line had little to do but talk to each other.

Ironically the very line ups the state created became the first breeding ground of radical ideas – that the state should be providing for basic needs of its citizens in a moderen society when individual sobriety and industriousness was no solution to stock market crashes. Labouring under circumstances beyond their control, people began to organize to find ways of bringing dignity and survival back into their own hands.

First there were the flying picket lines at houses the bailiffs came to repossess. If they got there in time, they presented a solid barrier the bailiffs couldn’t penetrate. If they arrived too late, as the sheriff’s men carried goods out on to the streets, the pickets carried the goods back into the house through the back door. Others took sheets and went sheeting – going door to door collecting food and donations to sustain the pickets and the families in need.

Then there were the auctions – on Saskatchewan farms, auctions were attended by neighbors who bid nickels and dimes to buy back their neighbours’ equipment for them.

And there was Saskatoon’s very first sit down strike - 40 women and their children, having been stuck off the relief rolls for refusing to sign an agreement that eroded their dignity and rights, occupied the council chambers for 48 hours. They were surrounded by police, who in turn were surrounded by pickets, who in turn brought blankets, mattresses and food donated by local restaurants and businesses. The women said if those responsible would not provide warmth for their children in a cold November they would take them to were it was warm – city council chambers. They held out and won – the relief agreement was withdrawn and the city not long after introduced a cash system for relief. This meant dismantling the relief store which had made a profit for the city of the backs of the hungry. It allowed the women the dignity to manage their own households and shop with their own grocers instead of standing in line ups for malnutrition sized rations.

And then there was the Vancouver Mother’s Council, 37 women serving organizations came together. Utilizing the language of motherhood they were able to organize parades and marches and protests in support of the unemployed – the most famous of which ended with the women forming the shape of a heart in Stanley Park with all the unemployed men in side of the heart shaped by their strong bodies. Organizing parades and marches to protest the in humane and disrespectful system that reduced human beings to thin, hungry and hopeless people, and these women risked the only capital they had – their reputations – to take to the streets and speak out against injustice just the way we are gathered here together today.

All of these people, women, youths, men stood up. They risked being called agitators, and troublemakers and communist and worse in order to argue for a more just society. And it was this groundswell of consensus at the grass roots level that led McKenize King to sign into law the act proclaiming UI; it was the common people’s understanding of the links between poverty, and health that led to Medicare.

They are our heroes who have been stolen from us by a society that would have us believe people just take what ever the current ideology of the government in power reckons is fair, that we will roll over and take it. I am here to tell you didn’t work in the past and we should learn from our brave ancestors, we should not let it work now…

And to tell us about our now…. The ghost of protest present….