Jim Sinclair

Doug Miller 00:02

There we are, we’re all duly warned. So I’m Doug Miller. Today is the 14th of July, Bastille Day. I, and I’m here in Montreal, Quebec, talking with Jim Sinclair in Vancouver, I believe, and we are Westminster,

Jim Sinclair 00:20

That’s Westminster.

Doug Miller 00:20

Okay, and we have also Jane Armstrong from Toronto, Ken Luckhardt from Toronto, and Ken Traynor from Victoria, or somewhere on that island.

Ken Traynor 00:33

Yeah, Victoria to me.

Doug Miller 00:35

Okay, I’ve been working on this project as a, as a organizer of the Canadian Anti-Anti-Apartheid Activist History Project, and I was also involved with SAC to some, to a lesser degree in Quebec, but I was involved, and so, so I’m taking the role of animator for them to pull their stuff together, and, and there’s where you come in, Jim. So, would you first acknowledge that you’ve read the, the what we’re doing in the this project by way of, we’re recording you, we’re going to archive it, and then make it available for public use, education, research, broadcast, whatever anybody wants. Do you agree to that? That consent form

Jim Sinclair 01:27

I’ll have to think about that.

Doug Miller 01:29

Yeah,

Jim Sinclair 01:31

Sure.

Doug Miller 01:32

Good union strategy, good union negotiator strategy. Put the bet, put the boss on edge before you start, Jim. it’s really good to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you over the years, and, and so, could you just give for the people who don’t know you a little bit of background about yourself, and then slowly work that into how you got to know about anti-apartheid, about international solidarity, and of course, union work. So, there’s a large one. Can you just –

Jim Sinclair 02:05

Right.

Doug Miller 02:06

Start there?

Jim Sinclair 02:08

Well, I guess I first got involved in international solidarity work in 1973 and I was attending an alternative school in Toronto, and the teacher teaching social studies at that point was progressive teacher and at that is actually 72, 73 and so one of the things he was teaching us was about Chile and so again they had taken power in Chile and he had done it democratically, and he was transforming the country and bringing progressive social policies and economic policies to Chile, and so as a young person I was quite inspired by Chile. It was an example of, first of all, a peaceful revolution where they did it democratically, and second of all, where you know, from what all I could gather from reading and from the work at school, a place where real change was taking place, that transformative change was taking place, and so that was my first involvement.

And then, of course, for a lot of us, September 11 became a world-known date in 2001 but it really was for me, September 11, 1975 1973 Sorry, that made that difference when that coup in Chile took place, and I remember my response at that time was just out of shock. It was just unbelievable that this could happen, that a democratic government could be overthrown, and it was very clear to me that this was the Americans, and that they had worked with the military to overthrow that government.

So I went out with a friend of mine, another person in the school, him and I were good friends who also felt the same way, and we got drunk and talked about it all, and went back to I was living on Spadina at the time in a basement suite, and got up the next morning and made a sign that said something about the effect of Nixon destroys another democracy and something about being a murderer, and I went down by myself in front of the American Embassy and walked around for a couple hours and thought, Jesus, you know, I just had to do something, you know.

And so I talked to my friend the next day about that, and he said, “Well, that was ridiculous, you know. Why did you do that? There’s a group called the Latin American Working Group, and they’ve done this work, and if you really want to do something”, they were at Ecumenical, it was at where the nuns were, off Blues Street on Echo, can never say the word on about two blocks over from Spadina. Anyway, they had an office there, and they’d already formed the Chile Solidarity Committee two days later.

Days later, and I walked in there, and then spent the next two years of my life in that room, actually not that room, because we moved, but that was for me the beginning of my journey about solidarity work was working full time, mostly full time with Latin American Working Group for two years until 1975

Doug Miller 05:19

Wow, how old were you at that time?

Jim Sinclair 05:21

I think 18 or 1918, maybe.

Doug Miller 05:24

Wow, it was really transformative for you. Then

Jim Sinclair 05:27

It was completely transformative. I mean, in a way, it was luck. I got involved with some very smart, wise people who were not dogmatic, who really were committed to the struggles, not just of Chile, but of the southern hemisphere, and, and I learned a lot over that time about politics and solidarity work, and learned how to be a printer in the basement of the student union, and we printed our own magazine, and so, yeah, so that, anyway, for me, a real eye opener and understanding, and also, you know, doing the work, so I had to learn how to stand up in front of people and give speeches and go out and make presentations, and just generally how to write and how to do things, so it was, it was much better than two years of university, I thought.

Doug Miller 06:17

Did you do those two years or not?

Jim Sinclair 06:22

I never did. That’s a whole other story. But to be honest, I did the high school thing, and it was an alternative school, so you didn’t really get a diploma. And then I never went to university, although I’m now an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University. So there you go.

Doug Miller 06:38

This goes to show your life skills and experience are very valuable.

Jim Sinclair 06:43

Yeah.

Doug Miller 06:43

Exactly.

Jim Sinclair 06:45

Okay, so that was the beginning of that.

Doug Miller 06:47

Get involved in, what came first, anti-apartheid or union work?

Jim Sinclair 06:53

Oh, definitely the Latin American work.

Doug Miller 06:56

So, Latin America, did you hear about South Africa at that time?

Jim Sinclair 06:59

Yes. No, it was all part of the same picture of that group, because it was very, it was very similarities of A, the work, and B, what was going on. But I think at that time I would say the, the group that was more, I was more connected with was TCLSAC, I think it was called, somebody here might remember, and the people there, and they were, and they were working out of the dev, what was called Darcy Martin and Anita Martin with the names, but they were working out of there, and so I remember going to the meetings about Africa at that point, and there was a lot about Angola, I believe, or Mozambique, and so there was a lot of education. Now, of course, South Africa was part of that conversation too,

Doug Miller 07:52

And so eventually you ended up a union organizer.

Jim Sinclair 07:58

Yes, I did. It took me a while to get there, but I moved to May 21 I decided I had enough working in co-ops and collectives, and decided that I was inspired by Peter Douart, but he went off and got a job in a carpentry factory or something, and I went off to Vancouver to discover the working class and moved into Skid Row and got a place to live there and ended up working at Co-op Radio. So that was started by a bunch of people that were connected to people in Toronto that I’d known before, Rick Salter and Art Pape, and a number of people that later went on.

And so I continued to do that work, but I worked there for two years, and I started working in Indigenous communities, and so got hired by the Union of BC Union Chiefs. Four of us set up a small working group to work with Indigenous people, and also to publish a magazine and work on a number of campaigns, environmental campaigns against large energy projects in BC, and for justice for Aboriginal people, and again that church connection was important to me, because while I was a trade unionist supporter, and I walked my first picket line, probably during the log days, because there was the artistic woodworker strike, and the one before that, oh God, the one in Hamilton. You guys remember what was the one in Hamilton? Do you remember? It wasn’t the artistic, came after it.

Anyway, so I was, I was very sympathetic to the layman, but obviously I saw it as a vehicle for social change, and as I said, walked my first picket line when I was 17, I think, or 18.

So, when I was in Vancouver, I didn’t do a lot of solidarity work. For a period of time at I moved to the Kootenays to be with my partner, and got involved in the local newspaper, there, the Nelson Daily News, connected up with some folks, both in the labor movement there. I became a labor council delegate from the ITU at the time, and I got involved in the labor council, and one of the people that was very involved was a guy named Bud Goddard, who lived in an goddess who lived in Castlegar, and he was a city councilor, but he was also very much committed to Central and South America.

And so really the revolution again happened, or the insurrection, anyway, and the revolution continued, but in Nicaragua in 79 and that really was the beginning of how the other whole new phase, almost a decade, over a decade, probably for me, of involved in, solidarity work in that work. So we organized the first tour to Nicaragua at that point, and I did the job, and I got paid some money from at that point CUSO so again Wes Malt said some of you might know him from back East, but Wes was the CUSO rep there and very interested in Central and South America, but particularly in the Nicaraguan Revolution, and so we organized with CUSO the first trade union/church, interesting connection continued to that day.

Trip to Nicaragua in 81, and so for three weeks we went to Nicaragua, organized by a guy named Danny Rocheck and Louise Councilman, and we went to Nicaragua for three weeks as guests of the CST, and they were the Sandinista Trade Union Central, and so that was really for me at that point. I, we kind of understood that what the official line of the labor movement was at that point I’d come, I was still in the Kootenays, but would soon move back to Vancouver after I got fired by Conrad Black and sent packing, and he owned all the newspapers for the next 300 square miles, so I figured my journalism career was over, and I ended up getting a job at the Fisherman’s Union, the UFA W in Vancouver. So, I packed up my belongs, my pickup truck, and moved to Vancouver and went to work for the union.

Doug Miller 12:33

That’s, that’s what’s the union name there?

Jim Sinclair 12:35

United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union.

Doug Miller 12:38

Okay, good. So, now you’re in Vancouver. This is about 79 you say, or?

Jim Sinclair 12:42

This is 81

Doug Miller 12:44

Okay.

Jim Sinclair 12:45

So during that period, after 81 after 82 I went to Vancouver. Yes, that’s right, 82.

Doug Miller 12:51

Now, this must have been about the same time the SACTU solidarity committee would come knocking on your door for support.

Jim Sinclair 12:57

Well, yes, I think at that point SACTU is set up, there were a number of people that were involved that were friends in the labor movement as well, so out here there was Colleen, it’ll come to me, I’m not remembering all these names anymore as well as I used to, but it’ll come to me anyway. CUPE was very much involved in it. Suvo Henka from CCU was quite involved in the SACTU solidarity work.

So yeah, I mean, at that point there was a group of us in the labor movement, and really the two biggest groups, although there was Palestinian work, there was other work on the international front, but the two biggest groups were really the Central American work and the SACTU work, and there’s a lot of similarities between those organizations, and we supported each other going forward because we had a lot of similar problems with the labor movement. We were facing a lot of the similar challenges with the labor movement, because of the, and I think this is important for the context for the work, because we were dealing with a labor movement that, as far as international solidarities work, with some rare exceptions, and they are rare, and specific affiliates, it tended to take that on in a bigger way, particularly some of the more progressive affiliates, affiliates involved that were led by communists that supported this work, and but at the national level, in the provincial level, the basic direction for international affairs, the basic rule was every time you put a resolution on the floor of a convention, it was added, all the words we always added to it through the CLC. It was just a famous addition in every resolutions committee I was ever on through the CLC.

So the basic message at that point was we shouldn’t be involved, right? We should be telling them what to do through a resolution, we all know how effective those are and we shouldn’t be involved, and I think what the sector work did, and what the Central American work did, was it just changed the whole conversation. It kind of flipped it on its head and said the work has to start at this level, and it goes up through the institutions, the affiliates, etc. to the CLC, and the CLC takes direction from the affiliates on this question, and so that was really part of our strategy from the beginning was to build a base, an organization within the labor movement that could affect not just change of the CLC, but really do real solidarity work with people in these countries, and that was really the whole focus for our work for quite a long time to do that.

Don’t forget the other thing was happening at the CLC level was that they were getting their money for international fish from CIDA. You guys remember this, I mean CIDA was the bank roll, and so CIDA kind of called the shots, you know? I remember when I was still in the Kootenays going to, and I’d been fired, but the late I hadn’t, hadn’t lost my delegate status anyway. The local president said to me, there’s a Harrison Winter School, they have, and there’s an international affairs, of course, and we have scholarships to send people, so I got sent to the international affairs course at Harrison as a very young person, and sat there for the whole week, and it was taught by somebody who used to work for CIDA and needless to say, it was an interesting discussion for a week about what international affairs policy should be and how we should proceed on this front.

I remember at one point Joe Morrison came and said to us, Joe Morris, who was still involved, he was invited to speak, and he’d hired, oh, I know he’d hired Alan Amy, he was the guy teaching the course from the World Bank right, and so anyway, we had this debate, and he invited Joe to come, because he knew Joe, and Joe came to the course, and Joe went through a presentation on Brazil and the economic miracle of Brazil, and I remember putting my hand up. Is this really too much detail, folks?

Doug Miller 17:19

No, no, there’s absolutely.

Jim Sinclair 17:26

I remember Joe what thought about any of this, so I mean, really, for a long time, you started to be thinking about it, but I remember putting my hand up and saying, “I don’t know how we put these things together, Joel, because you called economic miracle, and some of us call it fascism and military dictatorships”, and afterwards one of the IWA guys sitting up the front said Joe leaned over that point, said, “Who’s that long-haired prick down at the bottom of the table?”. I must have been doing something right at that point.

At one point in that course, Alan Amy got so frustrated with me. He said, “Why don’t you teach the course? Right, you can have Wednesday afternoon or whatever”. He said to me, ‘You go, you go have it. Okay, you’re so fucking smart”. Excuse me, they’re so smart. So I said, “Sure. Nothing like the arrogance of you” Fay. Anyway, I just finished working on a project for the churches on capital flow under the NDP in the forest industry and capital to the southern United States to third world countries by Macmillan, though, as they decapitalized during a capital strike, and so we spent the afternoon, and there was a bunch of woodworkers in the class, we spent the afternoon going through that, those circumstances, and actually having a really good conversation about what’s our role, and how do we are paying a price, but this is not problem in some other country, that no, a poor third world country, this a problem for us too, when capital can flow to the cheapest labor, to the worst environmental standards, to all those things, and so, so, but that again is an example where CIDA was in the labor movement at right at that level, picking people off and teaching them that stuff. The only shocking part was at lunch on Thursday, Alan Amy said to me, “You’re pretty smart, and I said, “Well, no, I don’t know about that, but anyway”, and he said, “Well, you know, there might be a place for you at the CLC”.

Doug Miller 19:19

Yeah,

Jim Sinclair 19:20

I said, he said to me, “but you know you have to basically said to me” something to the effect that you’d have to be a social democrat to do this job, and you’d have to follow the rules. “Okay, I guess I won’t be applying for that job. But thank you very much, and I appreciate that.” But it’s just a weird moment in my life when I had to say they work at all kinds of levels to incorporate you, so back to that context, so that’s a bit of a rabbit hole, but really that whole structure for international affairs was determined by seat of policies abroad was determined by government policy abroad and. Basically reflected that was in also affected by the American, AIFL American Institute for Free Labor Development, I think that was what it was called.

Jim Sinclair 20:12

IFAIL. Right, that was that was affected by them, and so there was all these pressures done, was all done, and then they operated in those countries to support the organizations that supported their policies, and basically US policies. It wasn’t just, I mean, the AFL-CIO also was completely backward on these things at this point that were not willing to step up to the plate, and it goes way deeper than whether they supported the wrong trade union federation, they didn’t support transformative change and revolutionary change, you know, and one of the ways that got expressed was who they supported in the labor movement, and so during that tour, during that tour to Nicaragua, in Nicaragua there was a pro-Somoza labor federation. There was a, called Coos, and it was basically set up to support in much the same way SACTU was no, sorry, COUS was set up in as basically the company union, if you want to call it that, but a political union, a very small one, and that was who we were to relate to as the labor movement in Canada, that that’s who, if we wanted to go to Nicaragua, that’s who we should go and talk to.

I remember on the trip having quite a debate amongst the trade unions there, and again, this was one of the beauties of this work for us, and I think we had this advantage over the SACTU work, we had a liberated country to go to, we had a place to go and inspire people, we had a place to go and see what real change could take place when it was allowed to, and so, so we went there, and we were all very inspired, and we had a huge debate about whether we should meet with Coos or not, and some people did go off and meet with them, and of course came back and said, “well, that was a waste of time”.

But the other thing that happened, and I think it helped our work immensely over the next five to eight years, and that was we could go, so we began to organize tours to Nicaragua, and we were strategic about that. So, back to the point: How do you build institutional support? How did you change the policies and labor, but you had to add advocates to change that policy, and so we set up a group called the Trade Union Group, much like the SACTU committee, right, it was very similar.

It was represented in British Columbia, anyway, and it was trade unionists that, for the most part, had gone to Nicaragua, and that group continued to coordinate these tours to Nicaragua, along with an oversight committee that looked at not just, not just trade unions, but we organized tours of 10 or 12 lawyers, and tours mixed tours, and teacher tours, public sector tours, so all of that, though, had a Machiavellian plot behind it, or organizing sense, which was when they would come back, we would say, when they went down, “are you committed to doing work when you come back?”, and then we would search out people at different levels, so one thing that I, you know, one thing that work affected, so that the international solidarity work affected domestic policy, not just international policy, but affected the politics of the labor movement.

So you know the people I met on that tour in the labor movement, who I never met before, you know, became part of my friends, co-workers, and yeah, comrades going forward, and the beauty of it was you went somewhere else to, to, to meet them, you know, you would not normally have met those people at all, and so you went other places to meet them, and that became a real strategy. Take people out of their context, take people that don’t know each other, take them from leadership levels, and then take them from rank and file levels, and put them all in a new environment, so they’re not looking at each other, they’re looking at the world, but of course, a new world, and it’s taking all that in collectively, and it was a really powerful experience that we used over and over and over again to build our base in Canada.

Doug Miller 24:31

I like the way you drew the parallel between your Latin America group in in BC and the SACTU Solidarity Committee. How did you see that? Can you, I know that you’ve been talking about strategy, can you relate it a little more directly to SACTU?

Jim Sinclair 24:50

Well, I think really where it came out the most. I mean, besides the fact that we now had a whole group of people who understood that the policy of the CLC was wrong in Nicaragua. It wasn’t hard to convince it was wrong in South Africa either. You had the same common problems, you had the same rejection of a progressive labor central that was tied to a political movement, and you had the same bureaucracy, took exactly the same – sorry, I might have to get some water here. The exact same approach to SACTU as they took to say CST, and it was to deny them for not just trade union reasons, but political reasons. The bottom line was the ANC wasn’t supported by the CLC, basically, as I remember, and either was the Sandinista Revolution.

Doug Miller 25:43

Yeah, this was, it was a cold war being fought out through the union movement.

Jim Sinclair 25:47

Yes, yeah, I think that anti-communism was still a very strong train. Well, it was clearly was, and that would see this policy completely, that they would judge that.

Doug Miller 25:57

Can I invite some of the SACTU folks to get in? I see Ken Traynor.

Ken Traynor 26:02

One of the things this is, this is, this is really interesting, because it brings back, you know, the names pop up, and you think of conversations you had with, and so on. I still have this, I can still remember how much fun it was to go down onto the docks, and just how easy it was to get down in there and rummage around in, you know, and all the stuff that had come off the ships, and so on, but then after that we went up the road to the Maritime Labor Center.

Jim Sinclair 26:31

Yep, yep,

Ken Traynor 26:32

And you walk in the door there, and it was – I found out what definitely one of the most kind of welcoming, and if you want to have the most sense of a class-based movement was in that center, because you walk in and there’s all the offices around the around the edge, but everybody’s doors open, there’s all these conversations going on, and it was, you know, I can still remember going into that place, and it was kind of like, you know, you could show up in town and go down there and find somebody to talk to you, know that you’d met before, and so on. So, there was a real coherence I found to that.

Jim Sinclair 27:08

Yes.

Ken Traynor 27:09

What was driving people?

Jim Sinclair 27:11

Yes, it was really a … it was, it ultimately became the last really union hall in Vancouver, and remains that to this day. But it was the Longshoremen, it was the Fisherman’s Union, it was the CBRT, it was CUPE, the city local of CUPE, eventually it was a Labor Council, it was a place for that to happen. The SACTU meetings would be in the building, the tug meetings would be in the building, we’d all, it just was just a natural connection between people, and we were activists in the labor movement, and so we weren’t just activists around Nicaragua. We were activists around a progressive labor movement in our own country.

Doug Miller 27:51

Can you remind me what CBRT is?

Jim Sinclair 27:55

The Canadian Brotherhood of Railway and Transport Workers, but they were mostly the people that were representing the tugboats and the waterfront, and they were always a very progressive union as well.

Doug Miller 28:09

Ken Luckhardt, I saw you.

Ken Luckhardt 28:11

Yeah, Jim, it’s great to see you again. Yeah, all these interviews have one thing in common, names are mentioned that we’ve completely forgotten about our collective brain cells, have just lost them. So, Peter Doufman, Louise Castleman, etc. etc. etc. And we … I can’t remember when I first met you, but we did have a very good relationship with Log, for the most part.

Jim Sinclair 28:34

Yep,

Ken Luckhardt 28:34

We would debate with Log how much you take on the CLC, how you do it with that, you know, they were good discussions, we even had a common pin that said boycott South Africa, not Nicaragua.

Jim Sinclair 28:45

Yep, yeah.

Ken Luckhardt 28:48

Now I think that going back to the SACTU work here, as which is really what we want to focus on, the connection with UFAW long preceded the SACTU committee. In fact, it goes back to long before that was even an idea, it goes back to the 50s and 60s, when SACTU was active in South Africa, before it had to go underground, we had documentation when Brenda and I wrote the book of how there have been correspondence with UFA W and SACU at that time, so this is nothing new.

What was important is to revive and put some, put some substance to that kind of correspondence, that kind of relationship, so getting UFAW on side for us was very important, and it, you know, it fell into place as it should ever quite easily, and of course that was further supporting in BC, the whole breadth of supporting BC, you’ve touched on the cold war, and that was a major political dynamic that we all had to deal with. After the people you mentioned, that came John Harker, who was that same extension of anti-communist politics. Yes, and all of us, in whatever geography or whatever organization, had to deal with that for a long time.

Doug Miller 29:59

Yeah. Yes.

Ken Luckhardt 30:00

And eventually they had to try to find someone more effective than him. So they found Paul Purit, who came out originally from Ticker. They were always looking for a person who could have more influence than we did, and they never found them. Quite honestly, I remember going to Labor Council functions on TLC Weekend Schools, making the presentation that we make all the time. Then CLC reps would come up and say, “Why don’t we like you? We like your presentation, but why don’t we like this SACTU committee?”. Right? The answer was always, “You go talk to John Harkin, find out. That’s your job, you know and just you know, why we’re not liked, but you should find out yourself”.

Jim Sinclair 30:41

Yeah. Right, exactly. No, I think that’s very true.

Ken Luckhardt 30:44

Yeah,

Jim Sinclair 30:45

But I think that the other just wandering through that period. So one of the other things we talked about, and I think really was, how do you take that? How do you change that structure? Like, how do you actually change it? And I think we all had the right idea. It was: you changed it from the bottom up, not from the top down. And so how do you institutionalize the work?

So one of our clear ideas was we didn’t, weren’t successful all the time, but was to set up, to set up committees within affiliates, and I think that’s what the transformation I saw that happened during that period and into the 90s was that, that you know, the affiliates started to set up their own international solidarity committees, and they were heavily influenced by the people that we’ve been working with, and so that changed the whole dynamic at the CLC at that level, because now the affiliates had intelligence, had relationships that weren’t determined by CIDA.

They were determined by members of their unions going to those countries and deciding who were the good people and whether what was going on was relevant. You know, I remember as we came back from our trip, and heat started to come on as we started to do our work, suddenly John Fryer gets sent to Nicaragua, and he comes back and basically writes a piece that says Coos is the body, the legitimate body, Sandamees is a murderer”, basically, and that this whole thing is a sham, and we’re all a bunch of airheads that can’t figure it out, the thing that really, but that that didn’t carry a lot of weight, because everybody else had their own real experiences, and all the work that all the education work and all that was done armed people be able to fight that.

The good news also is all they could do is really enforce that in a kind of structural way around resolutions, etc. But they couldn’t really stop affiliates from doing their own work, and I think that was a critical piece, and so what happened for us was you had SACTU cross the country, but also there were labour committees set up that worked something like tug, we had staff, we worked, sat to an international level. But then there was a group in Saskatchewan, as I remember, there was a group in Alberta and groups in Ontario, and the other thing that happened was that, let me close my window, somebody’s using outside, so the those groups in the Latin American working group really got into the labor work.

Okay, when I first went to the Latin American working group, it didn’t have much of a labor focus at all, but it was those tours to Nicaragua, and then Fern got involved and Bob Jeffcott, and people like that, and so, so what we had was sort of a national coordinating ability that made a difference of moving the labor movement, and that that was really a critical piece of the whole thing, and you know, other unions, and so that, that became the issue. And at some point we decided that we’re going to go from the Federation of Labor Conventions to the CLC Convention, and coordinate basically a, and you know, I was going to say a track, but a strategy to basically overturn the international affairs reports, like it wasn’t just about SACTU, or about, you know, Nicaragua or Palestine, it was about the whole thing was wrong. And the way we played that out was to basically go out there and organize fairly effectively to reject the report, and that was sort of a symbolic moment for us. We did it at a couple of conventions. We all worked together, we all got up, SACTU people got up and talked about South Africa and factor, we got up and talked about Nicaragua. We did all of those things and tried to move motions to reject the report. And that all came to a head in, forget the year, I’ll never, the 90s,

Jane Armstrong 35:06

1986.

Jim Sinclair 35:08

1986 in Montreal, right,

Jane Armstrong 35:10

Yep,

Jim Sinclair 35:11

Yeah, so in 1986 in Montreal, I remember organizing in Toronto, the previous one in Toronto too, or maybe whatever, I mean, we would have meetings of 40 or 50 delegates, right, to plan the floor strategy and plan our strategies and talk about what we’re doing. We would always have a solidarity night talking about solidarity work at those events, so we’d be parallel structures, but we went back.

I’ll never forget at that convention in Montreal, we were probably the best organized, and I believe it was Harker at the front, and they made the report, and Hargrove was presenting the report, his chair of the committee, and so they presented it, and we just got up with a mic, we had every mic stacked, pro and con, we didn’t care, we didn’t, screw those rules, and she, and at one point, sure, the chair tried to shut down the debate, and Wayne, oh God, anyway, Wayne from postal workers from Halifax, we organized on floor, he got up and challenged the chair on doing that, right, and so we forced a vote on the report, and it turned into a huge thing, because Dave Worland was running against Shirley at that convention, and so I remember, you know, somebody running around saying to us, “Look, Fryer was “,actually, they came running over, saying to all our delegates at our around our area, “this is a vote I’m sure to you guys. You can’t let this go through”, and that’s how they approached it. With this, it was a referendum on surety, which it wasn’t, of course, but the vote was taken. It had to be a standing vote, and it was one of the few standing votes at a CLC convention. And at the end, the vote to reject the report passed by 11 votes, I think, in the end, and, but it was, you know, that was a major, it was, I wouldn’t say it’s a turning point, but it was a moment where all that work we’ve done for all those years was effective.

And the fact that there were 50 and 60 people at the meeting to organize how to do that, who didn’t just go back and speak, but talk to people in their delegations and worked in their delegations to explain what the debate’s about, why it’s important, all of that stuff happened, and you know, just for the record, we went back to this ,to the CAW afterwards, we went back to the hospitality committee, I bet you were there too. We were all there, and White got up. You remember what he said? He said he decided that, he told a story about Buzz Hargrove, right? And he said, you know, Buzz, I remember the time that you were in the hotel room and you got locked out of your hotel room, and you didn’t have any clothes on there. You were then he said, you know, I looked down at the CAW delegation at that. It was UAW, I guess.

At that point, that was the CAW, and looked at the CAW delegation, and there was the entire staff and the delegation voting to refer the report, so you know it was just kind of one of those moments, and I think probably you know, in reflection, as I’m talking about this, I mean, I think you know Bob White taking over ,also changed that dynamic for international solidarity work, it was the end of the CIDA funding, and you know, what we had created through all of that work, with not only just solidarity for people in those countries, and what that meant, we’d actually changed the labor movement in Canada, and how it approached all of those issues, and really built networks of people that became, you know, really effective at, you know, for periods of time at organizing for lots of progressive issues in the labor movement.

And those friendships that were built in that work, and those commitments we made to each other really changed all of our lives, actually not just in terms of our understanding of the countries we were working with, and the struggles of people, and anti-imperialist struggles, but it changed our relationship to hundreds, probably hundreds of people across the country that shared a similar understanding of the world, and that translated into better politics in the labor movement, and people could get different relationships with people, not just, you know, you know, the chair of the Action Caucus has certain relationships with people, but this group, these groups were broader, and you didn’t have to sign up for the whole program, in a lot of cases, you just have to sign up that this was right.

And as I say, our big advantage was we could send people to Nicaragua for a decade, and they could come back and be inspired and excited, and saying, “Wow, something important is going there”. And that whole impression in the labor movement, we’re the first world, we know what’s going on, we’re the smart labor movement, we’re developed, we’re this, we’re that, and you go down there, where there’s supposedly these poor people that are trying to figure it out, and they’re poor, and this, and they’re that, not developed, and you realize that when you go to places like Nicaragua, that, oh my god, these people are way ahead of us, their structures, their organizations, I mean, there’s just a whole different perspective on the work, and it wasn’t charity work, or we’re sending some goods because we’re rich and they’re poor. It was, you know, our slogan was, ‘When we win, they win; when they win, we win”. That was our slogan for the for the trade union group, in terms of doing that work.

Doug Miller 40:53

Wow, I’m going to write to UBC and have you changed to full professor. Man, this is registered. It’s really wonderful. I don’t know. Does anybody from the committee have other things to add? Or Jane, you had your hand up.

Jane Armstrong 41:11

Well, you ended up covering what I was going to raise, if you hadn’t recalled it, which is I don’t think the CLC, International Affairs Department, ever had the, the credibility going forward after that convention that changed, White changed, Harper left, but curiously enough, John Fryer of NUPGE, the National Union of Provincial Government Employees, who we struggled with, as well as the SACTU committee, died. I don’t know, maybe a year, year and a half ago.

There was a huge full-page obit in the Globe and Mail. Most of it focused on how important South Africa was in his life, and that he went down there to help out after apartheid. I’m thinking, what part of this picture it was, it was stunning, but he went down along with John Harker after 1994 to supposedly work for the ANC. My guess is they were infiltrating on behalf of the CIA, but what do I know? It just would fit with the previous decade that we dealt with them on, but that was it, was a startling aspect for me to see that Fryer had also been down there for many years.

But that aside, I think what’s so important, Jim, about what you’ve brought to this oral history is a the linkage between how the Cold War and the International Trade Union movement and foreign affairs influenced the central labor bodies in trying to repair, repress progressive solidarity, regardless of what the issue was, Palestine, Nicaragua, South Africa. In a lot of the academic work that I’ve started to look at after all these years, in the last year and a half, there are many of the academics who want didn’t interview trade unionists before they published their whatever thesis or articles or books, but secondly they inferred that it was on apartheid that it was the SACTU Solidarity Committee who divided the labor movement, and there would have been much more solidarity if we didn’t exist, and I’m thinking, you know, what a bizarre way of interpreting things, but they also, I think, there was only one out of about 50 references I’ve found to our work, only one that raised the linkage between the fight back in the trade union movement around progressive solidarity around South Africa with the Latin American solidarity work, and you know clearly exposed the Cold War politics as affecting, you know, solidarity, international solidarity work across all sorts of spectrums, so it’s really good that you could bring that perspective from having worked more on the Latin American work, so it just helps reinforce, because again, all these academics, one or two didn’t interview trade unionists before they’re writing their definitive statements, so very important, Jim.

Jim Sinclair 45:13

One of the things, end up there at some point.

Ken Traynor 45:17

I’m happy to hear Jim’s response to that,

Jim Sinclair 45:22

I think one of the things that we wanted to do, and we did, was that I always thought we wanted, we wanted international solidarity work be as legitimate as a wage demand, or as legitimate as health and safety, or as legitimate all the other work that was going on in the labor market, that was all very valuable, but our goal was kind of making this as legitimate as that, and something that’s just as important in a big way, and as a world got smaller and smaller, and we had free trade agreements, and all those things, that international solidarity work has never been more important, frankly, than it is today.

But I think that the work that we were doing really was set the groundwork for making that legitimate work in the labor movement, legitimate work for affiliates to do, and for locals to do, and to do it in real ways. And I think that that’s that was for me. I always, one of the great goals was to legitimize this work. It wasn’t a little issue over here by these lefties, it was something that was important to those people, and that came out of the real.

I mean, I remember standing in a cannery in, in, in the North End of Vancouver Island in the lunch room with about 35 or 40 people, and we were, we were, we made this project, we were building a fish boat for Nicaragua, and having a discussion with these folks about whether they would go to work for free that night to take the fish that we went out on the docks and got for free, and can the fish for free, and, and you know, it was a fascinating conversation, because somebody put their head and said, “Look, it’s hell here, folks, we’re all busy, we’re all tired, we got our own struggles, what the hell’s our struggle got to do with ours?’ And, and you know, it took it to a whole other level of conversation with the working class about what we’re doing, when you actually had to ask them to do something to show that solidarity.

Now they did vote to go, and they did can the fish. We did sell the fish, and the next year only had to go to do it, and it was, it was a pretty cranky thing, a bit cranky, frankly. And, but the next year I remember going back up to there to do the same thing, and we went to the meeting, and it was a vote of 38 to one to do it that time, and you know they read about Nicaragua solidarity work at our union newspaper.

Okay, so they were getting told about it. They were celebrated in the union newspaper as, but look at this incredible project these people did, right? And we also had to get the owner of the company degree, but he was actually okay, so he agreed as well, and I just think that those kind of … that’s what changed, you know.

And honestly speaking, honestly, I always thought the response to Venezuela, like there wasn’t the same thing. There were some tours to Venezuela organized by, by not by the labor movement, but by coded here, so one of the things we had to do was because it was more than just political battles, it was actually real solidarity, so we wanted to support people with equipment, with skills, we set up tools for peace to do that here, to do that, but the institutions that were necessary to make those connections on the ground were weak. We had CUSO for a lot of our work in Nicaragua, but it got more and more away from it. I don’t even know if it exists anymore, but so we set up code of, and that was set up by the labor movement, basically by the teachers union, by Tugg, others to actually be able to accept funding to be able to organize that work, and to give it some institutional support, and I still think we have a ways to go on that front in the labor movement, in terms of that institutional support. Some of the big affiliates have their committees, but at the local level, there’s not a lot of that kind of work going on at this point again.

Ken Luckhardt 49:04

I don’t know that example, Jim, and social justice funds of the unions could then fund co-dev projects, which we did out of the CAW, so you build something and you tap into those things that have also been built within the unions, if progressive politics are there.

Jim Sinclair 49:20

Yeah, and I going to say, I was a bit dubious about co-dev when it was first set up. I remember sitting in the basement of my house with a bunch of people debating whether we should do this or not, but because, you know, it would take time and energy, and we had the CUSO, but actually it was absolutely the right thing to do.

I’m not sure, if you look down the road the next 25 years where we go to another level, and where you do involve people in these battles in real ways, so that you’re not just transforming policy, you’re transforming people and their understanding of the world, and their understanding of the world, not just in other countries, but they bring that back. Back home and understand their world better to do it. You know, it was interesting.

At one point, it became knowing that the person that was negotiating the Pacific Salmon Treaty was also the person overseeing the contras in Nicaragua, that you know, from the United States. It was just like one of those bright moments, folks, where the things that they’re fighting for in Nicaragua and South Africa and all over the world are many of the same things that we’re fighting for, and there are real connections, and the powers that we’re fighting aren’t about our own country necessarily, they are, but they’re about an international view of the world

Ken Traynor 50:38

That’s good, that’s similar to the point I was thinking about, which was when we had capacity like the SACTU committee, like the trade union group, and so on. We could, we could influence local trade unions without any trouble at all, kind of around that. So that capacity was definitely part of it, and I would say, when I look back, you know, now in, you know, 40 years, is that I’m struck and disappointed by how we were not able to institutionalize some of that really quality stuff that we had at that time, we weren’t able to institutionalize that in, in a way that’s been able to endure and continue to have play that role within the labor movement, and so on. I mean, Venezuela is a very interesting example, you know, kind of around that.

So it’s, it’s interesting that, we don’t say we fumbled the ball, but we definitely weren’t able to, you know, it was a really active, a really interesting decade worth of work in the 80s that began to, you know, we weren’t able to push it across the line and be and make it, you know, kind of a really solid piece that you know our union, individual unions have more or less capacity, I think, but at that cross-union sort of solidarity movement, and so on. We lost some of that. It became something you did within your union, but not necessarily something you did with everybody else in the labour movement.

Jim Sinclair 52:14

Yes. No, I think that’s true. And I don’t know how vibrant the international, I’m out of the labor now, so I don’t know how vibrant that debate is in the labor movement at this point. I don’t think I’m not sure whether federations of labor have international solidarity committees set up, or you know, whether that’s got to that level institutionally in the labor movement. I don’t know.

Ken Traynor 52:42

They didn’t have one example, Jim. I mean, some of us are trying to help on the Palestinian question because our SACTU work is being called upon as kind of a reference point for how to do work in Palestine. So that’s happening, but you’re right, and I think that you know the absence of this kind of work, as Ken Trainer said, is just really pathetic, CUPE is trying to work on the Palestine question pretty seriously. They lost emotion at that recent debate, but some good things happening there.

Doug Miller 53:14

I can affirm from my experience in CUSOthe wisdom of your setting up co-dev, because you control code dev and you can get the support you want. CUSO being so dependent on government funding has been really gutted. It’s a, it’s a shallow shadow of itself these days, and if you ever were to read their materials, it’s, it’s the charitable handout principle, you know, it’s really sad. Where we, in those days that you’re talking about, were able to raise the issues in our regional meetings overseas, and then the general assemblies here.

Jim Sinclair 53:54

Yes,

Doug Miller 53:54

CUSO had a huge dynamic, as did Oxfam, as and other NGOs, but government very, very seriously has turned the screws on all those, and any money coming out of government now is so the unions are smart to go on their own institutions and work it that way.

Jim Sinclair 54:13

Yeah, but it’s a lot of work. I remember standing in the boat of Nicaragua, and by the time we started, it took seven years to build the boat, which was insanity, but we did, and it wasn’t because we didn’t work on it. He wanted to build the best boat in the world, and we did, but by the time we did that, the election had come.

And but also the CUSO infrastructure that we were dependent upon to support those people down there was gone, basically. So it became a much more difficult situation. We could send people down, we did, to work on the boat, and to make sure fishermen knew how to use it, and all that, but ongoing support, no. And I just, you know, how do we, how do we institutionalize it in a much deeper way that still gives working people the experience in those countries? Like, I just think that’s what’s missing, to a certain extent, now is that.

For us, anyway, I think the Central American work really benefited dramatically from people being able to go there and experience it for themselves. You can tell people, you can give them education, you can do all those things, but if they go to Nicaragua and felt what was going on when we went there, and I went there, I think, three times, it was just an experience that they had never had in their lives. It didn’t matter what you know, John Ferrer wrote in a magazine about somebody, they felt confident and powerful enough to come up and talk about what they saw, what they heard, and what they experienced. And I think, you know, we’ve lost some of that too, the tape off and finish this conversation now.

Doug Miller 55:45

It could go on for some time, that’s for sure.

Jim Sinclair 55:49

I’m just being turned the tape off, because you know, I think I don’t know if I want have this conversation for the public. Thank you.

Doug Miller 55:56

Okay, any last words on tape from you other folks, before we do, do that.

Doug Miller 56:03

No,

Jim Sinclair 56:04

I would just say that I hope that the BC labor history is being collected as well. I mean, you, Suga, yourself, Keighley, a whole bunch of people in BC that should consider pulling together a history of, you know, the last 50 years of progressive trade union work in BC, international and domestic,

Jim Sinclair 56:24

Yeah. I think it’s really important that we do that work, and that we don’t forget what happened, and what we learned, and how important it is. Yeah, because it still doesn’t have that profile, but then we just got around to writing our first history of BC Labor here about two years ago, so

Doug Miller 56:43

Well, I think with respect to your request, yes, we can turn the tape off, but before we do, I personally want to thank you very, very much for wonderful presentation and overview, and really pulling the ends together in a way that I think is, as I said earlier, magisterial, and so thanks a lot for this, folks. We’ll turn it off the recording now.