The Struggle against Wage Controls: The Saint John Story, 1975-1976, by George Vair, St. John’s, Newfoundland: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2006, 136 pp., ISBN-10: 1-8940-0007-2.

On October 14, 1976 approximately 1 million Canadian workers walked off their jobs to protest the program of statutory wage and price controls imposed one year earlier by the Liberal government headed by Pierre Trudeau. Despite its billing as a “National Day of Protest” by the Canadian Labour Congress, it was the closest thing to a national general strike in Canadian history. The protest was particularly successful in Saint John, New Brunswick where some 12,000 workers stayed off the job and, despite driving rain as many as 5,000 turned out to demonstrate, effectively shutting down the city by blockading roads and bridges. George Vair was the president of his UAW/CAW local at the time when the controls were imposed, and a key participant in the events leading up to the Day of Protest in the city. Drawing on his experiences during the course of the following year as well as documentary evidence, the book offers a first hand account of how October 14’s industrial disputation came about. The book opens with an examination of the controls program which Vair cogently argues were essentially wage controls. In New Brunswick, where workers were attempting to take advantage of a construction boom to close the wage gap between themselves and their counterparts in central Canada, the controls hit particularly hard. The anger this created was exacerbated by the seemingly arbitrary nature of their implementation which is illustrated through an examination of the impact of the controls on specific workplaces and industries. The book then turns to how opposition to the controls was developed. Here the text focuses on the activities of the St. John Labour Council (where much of the existing leadership was replaced by young activists including Vair who became president), particularly those of its “Wage Control Committee”. But it also covers the efforts of activists like Vair to push the labour movement generally into taking a stronger stance against the controls, tracing the CLC’s halting steps towards the National Day of Protest, with particular attention to the 1976 CLC Convention where the CLC leadership reluctantly agreed to call a general strike “if and when necessary”. In the event, the CLC called for a National Day of Protest on October 14. The book provides a compelling depiction of the events that transpired on this day in Saint John. In concluding, Vair argues that while at the time he had expected the mass protests to continue, the main reason that they hadn’t was that the labour movement had effectively defeated the controls by then—partly by mitigating their impact through creative bargaining practices, and more generally by making them so unpopular that the government abandoned any plans to make them more than “temporary measures”. Moreover, he contends that the protest strengthened the labour movement, enabling it to better resist the pressures for concessions in the 80s. A particular strength of the book is Vair’s account of the organizing efforts of local activists in Saint John. He describes in detail the various activities and events used to develop opposition and convincingly demonstrates that the successful protest in Saint John did not happen of its own accord but was the result of an enormous commitment of time, energy and careful planning by local activists. The book also deepens our understanding of the differences that existed within the labour movement on how to oppose the controls, frequently drawing on personal conversations with various key figures with telling effect. Moreover, the author tells the story in a charming and principled manner, with limited “editorializing” on the positions of others. He forthrightly acknowledging his own mishaps and misjudgements. That …