Canada takes the first Monday in September off because of something that happened in Toronto in the spring of 1872. The holiday has an address, and it is a few hundred metres from Queen’s Park.
A strike over nine hours
On March 25, 1872, printers belonging to the Toronto Typographical Union walked off the job. They wanted a nine-hour day. Ten- and twelve-hour days were then normal, six days a week, and Toronto’s printers had been pressing their employers on the question for years without getting anywhere.
They were part of a wider push across Ontario known as the Nine-Hour Movement, which had been organizing towards a co-ordinated action later that spring. The printers went early on their own.
Ten thousand at Queen’s Park
On April 15, marchers moved through the streets in support of the strikers and ended at Queen’s Park, where a crowd of about 10,000 gathered. Nothing on that scale had been seen in the city before.
Then the arrests
The next day, the strike committee was arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy. The charges were laid at the instance of George Brown — the reform politician and publisher of the Globe — who led the employers’ response.
That was possible because organizing to shorten hours or raise wages was still, on paper, a crime in Canada under inherited British law. Belonging to a union could be prosecuted as a conspiracy in restraint of trade.
Macdonald’s answer
Prime Minister John A. Macdonald — a Conservative, and no friend of Brown’s — saw the opening. He introduced the Trade Unions Act on April 18, 1872, three days after the rally. It established the legality of labour organizations in Canada and cut the ground from under the conspiracy charges.
Restrictions on what unions could do survived, and the wider Nine-Hour Movement never won the shorter day across the province. The printers themselves did get it. And the question of whether a worker could be jailed simply for belonging to a union had been answered.
Toronto to New York, and back
The parades did not stop when the strike did. The demonstrations held in support of the printers became an annual fixture in Toronto and Ottawa through the 1870s and 1880s.
In 1882 an American labour leader, Peter J. McGuire, was in Toronto for one of them. He went home and organized a parade in New York City on September 5 that year — the first American Labor Day. The holiday Americans think of as theirs was copied from here.
Made official in 1894
Canada made it law twelve years later. Labour delegates met Prime Minister Sir John Sparrow David Thompson in April 1894; his government passed the act on July 23 that year, making the first Monday in September a statutory holiday. It has been one ever since.
Where to stand in it
The province marks the strike with a plaque at the northeast corner of Queen’s Park Crescent East and Grosvenor Street, a short walk from where the crowd assembled in April 1872.
And the marching never stopped. The Toronto and York Region Labour Council still takes Queen Street West and Dufferin Street down to the CNE every Labour Day morning — it is out there this morning, with the 501 and 504 on buses behind it.
Source: Ontario Heritage Trust, “The Printers’ Strike of 1872”, provincial plaque record.
