In the early twentieth century, politicians singled out the Lakehead as a breeding ground for radical labour politics. Michel S. Beaulieu returns northern Ontario to its rightful place as a birthplace of leftism in Canada by exposing the conditions that gave rise to an array of left-wing organizations. Cultural ties among workers helped bring left-wing ideas to Canada, but ethnicity weakened the left as each group developed a distinctive vocabulary of socialism and as Anglo-Celtic workers defended their privileges against Finns, Ukrainians, and Italians. At the Lakehead, ethnic difference often outweighed class solidarity at the cost of a stronger labour movement for Canada.

In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality. Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and Europe. Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization - as well as communism in general - was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative, and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography. Contributors include Michel Beaulieu (Lakehead University), Marc Becker (Truman State University), Anna Belogurova (Freie Universitat Berlin), Oleksa Drachewych (University of Guelph), Daria Dyakonova (Université de Montréal), Alastair Kocho-Williams (Clarkson University), Andrée Lévesque (McGill University), Lars T. Lih (Independent Scholar), Ian McKay (McMaster University), Sandra Pujals (University of Puerto Rico), John Riddell (Ontario Institute of Studies in Education), Evan Smith (Flinders University), S.A. Smith (All Souls College, Oxford), Xiaofei Tu (Appalachian State University), and Kankan Xie (Peking University).

In this groundbreaking study of the relations between workers and the state, Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker examine the legal regulation of workers' collective action from 1900 to 1948. They analyze the strikes, violent confrontations, lockouts, union organizing drives, legislative initiatives, and major judicial decisions that transformed the labour relations regime of liberal voluntarism, which prevailed in the later part of the nineteenth century, into industrial voluntarism, whose centrepiece was Mackenzie King's Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907. This period was marked by coercion and compromise, as workers organized and fought to extend their rights against the profit oriented owners of capital, while the state struggled to define a labour regime that contained industrial conflict. The authors then trace the conflicts that eventually produced the industrial pluralism that Canadians have known in more recent years. By 1948 a detailed set of legal rules and procedures had evolved and achieved a hegemonic status that no prior legal regime had even approached. This regime has become so central to our everyday thinking about labour relations that one might be forgiven for thinking that everything that came earlier was, truly, before the law. But, as Labour Before the Law demonstrates, workers who acted collectively prior to 1948 often found themselves before the law, whether appearing before a magistrate charged with causing a disturbance, facing a superior court judge to oppose an injunction, or in front of a board appointed pursuant to a statutory scheme that was investigating a labour dispute and making recommendations for its resolution. The book is simultaneously a history of law, aspects of the state, trade unions and labouring people, and their interaction within the broad and shifting terrain of political economy. The authors are attentive to regional differences and sectoral divergences, and they attempt to address the fragmentation of class experience.

Literature, literacy, and citizenship took on new and contested meanings in early twentieth-century Canada, particularly in frontier work camps. In this critical history of the reading camp movement, Jody Mason undertakes the first sustained analysis of the organization that became Frontier College in 1919. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Home Feelings investigates how the reading camp movement used fiction, poetry, songs, newspapers, magazines, school readers, and English-as-a-second-language and citizenship manuals to encourage ideas of selfhood that were individual and intimate rather than collective. Mason shows that British-Canadian settlers' desire to define themselves in relation to an expanding non-British immigrant population, as well as a need for immigrant labour, put new pressure on the concept of citizenship in the first decades of the twentieth century. Through the Frontier College, one of the nation's earliest citizenship education programs emerged, drawing on literature's potential to nourish ""home feelings"" as a means of engaging socialist and communist print cultures and the non-British immigrant communities with which these were associated. Shifting the focus away from urban centres and postwar state narratives of citizenship, Home Feelings tracks the importance of reading projects and conceptions of literacy to the emergence of liberal citizenship in Canada prior to the Second World War.

Above the entrance to the Finnish Labour Temple, in what was once Port Arthur in northern Ontario, is the motto labor omnia vincit – “hard work conquers all.” Since 1910, these words have reflected the dedication of the Finnish community in Canada. Hard Work Conquers All is a social history of Finnish immigration and community building in Canada during the twentieth century. Each successive wave of immigration imbued the relationship between people, homeland, and host country with the politics, ideologies, and cultural expressions of its time. The story of Finns in Canada dovetails with the larger literature on Canadian immigration and enriches the history of socialism and ethnic repression in this country. Hard Work Conquers All explores the nuanced cultural identities of Finnish Canadians, their continued ties to Finland, intergenerational cultural transfer, and the community’s connections with socialism and labour movements. It offers new interpretations of the lasting influence of Finnish immigration on Canadian politics and society.

“Stick it, Canada! Buy more Victory Bonds.” The First World War demanded deep personal sacrifice on the battlefield and on the home front – and it also made unrelenting financial demands. Boosters and Barkers is a highly original examination of the drive to finance Canadian participation in the conflict. David Roberts examines Ottawa’s calls for direct public contributions in the form of war bonds; the intersections with imperial funding, taxation, and conventional revenue; and the substantial fiscal implications of participation in the conflict during and after the war. Canada’s bond campaigns used print, images, and music to sell both the war and public engagement. They received an astounding response, generating revenue to cover almost a third of the country’s total war costs, which were estimated at $6.6 billion – a dramatic charge on a dominion so far from the front. This story is one of inexorable need, shrewd propaganda, resistance, engagement, and long-term consequences.