CANADA: Experiment in Labor Relations

For two years rotund Norman Alexander McLarty has juggled one of the hottest jobs in Canada’s Cabinet, the Ministry of Labor. Last week, just as it was getting red-hot, he had to drop it—but not before he had given Canada a brand-new idea for handling defense labor disputes.

Only 5,500 of Canada’s 359,000 unionized workers were on strike, but the damage that their strikes were doing to Canada’s war effort was out of proportion to their number. Some 4,500 had walked out of the General Motors-owned parts plant of McKinnon Industries, Ltd. in St. Catharines, Ont., crippling Canada’s automotive production. Some 700 were coal miners in Nova Scotia, who since April have been on a slowdown strike, cutting their production in half, causing a shortage of coal for the railways carrying war goods to Halifax and difficulty in bunkering ships for England.

Minister McLarty stepped into this situation with a new regulation forbidding any strike in a defense industry unless it had first been approved by a majority of the workers in a Government-run election. This took the right to strike away from union leaders and from radical minorities, removing a cause of many irresponsible strikes, at the same time preserving the right to strike. As such it was a noteworthy experiment.

But Canada was so fed up with strikes, so anxious for a crackdown, that conservatives and labor leaders alike com plained that the order was inconclusive and a half measure, no answer to Canada’s labor problem. As soon as the order was published, Minister McLarty took a walk. Ill for some time, he went off for a badly needed vacation. Political dopesters in Ottawa were pretty sure that he would not be Labor Minister when he returned.