Vince Greason

Doug Miller 00:00

And I’m starting to fall in love with that lady.

Doug Miller 00:05

Anyway, I’m Doug Miller here in Montreal with Gwen Schulman, also here in Montreal, and we’re speaking with Vince, or Vincent Greason up in Lac Delage about his experiences in the anti-apartheid world. Vince. Welcome.

Vince Greason 00:23

Thank you very much.

Doug Miller

Could you start by reaffirming that you have read the consent form and that you agree that what we’re going to talk about today is going to be used for public information, research, education and, and, and you’re okay with all that?

Vince Greason

Not only did I read it Doug, but I also signed it because I am docile.

Doug Miller 00:47

We appreciate that.

Gwen Schulman

Should make for an interesting interview.

Doug Miller 00:58

Okay, perfect Vince, could you just start by giving us a little bit of background. Tell us a little bit about who you are and whatever you think is relevant in your personal background. Introduce us.

Vince Greason

Very appropriate first question, because I’m a philosopher. So “who am I” is an existential question for me, we may need seven hours.

Doug Miller 01:23

We have 90 minutes.

Vince Greason

So I am from Southwestern Ontario, where I grew up, went to university in Ottawa, and then went on and did further studies in Quebec. So basically, have spent all of my adult life in Quebec, except for the 10 years that I was in Toronto, a part of which I worked for the SACTU Solidarity Committee. So effectively, I did studies in philosophy, which shows what a philosophy degree will give you. Basically, a popular educator actually is what I am. Have worked in the popular education movement here in Quebec, both in the 1970s and in the 1990s until I retired in 2019 so now I’m retired and living here in the Outaouais. Lived in Quebec City, then I lived in Toronto for 10 years. I lived in Montreal for 10 years, and I’ve been 20 years here in the Outaouais, which is Western Quebec for our Anglophone friends.

Doug Miller 02:27

Okay, that’s great. Thanks a lot. So just in a personal, on a personal note, what was your knowledge understanding of apartheid, and did you how did you sort of react to it when you first heard about it?

Vince Greason 02:44

When you are in your mid 60s, heading towards your 70s, you begin a process of downsizing. So I’ve been going through a lot of old notes and whatever, and I found a grade 10, they called a topical report, that I did on grade 10 on apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa. So I guess that would have been the first time that I came across, with a couple of newspaper clippings, you know, scotch taped into this report that I submitted in grade 10. So that would have been where I would have first kind of become vaguely aware of apartheid issues.

In Quebec City, I was quite involved in international solidarity. There was a solidarity committee at Carrefour Tiers Monde around the South African question that my ex was more involved in than me. I was involved in the Irish prisoner of war committee in Quebec City, and so worked in international solidarity there.

Gwen Schulman 03:41

Can you give us some dates, when you talk about Quebec City and grey, just to sort of situate it chronological time a little bit.

Vince Greason 03:57

Yeah. So, a fact, but yeah, so in Quebec City, I’m just taking a look at my little notes here. So it’s like 81, 82, 83 in that area, the Irish prisoners of war were in 1982, 83 so we were part of a Canadian connection and brought people like Dez Wilson and Bernadette Devlin and Rory O’Grady. In fact, the first time I actually lost money in international solidarity. We contributed. We were poor. We were dirt poor. Our committee, we contributed $500 to bring Gerry Adams across the border to come do a speaking tour, and he was sent back at the border. They refused to allow him into the country, so we lost our deposit, and that was my first experience of the repressive nature of the Canadian state because of now, Gerry Adams is a recognized political figure, right?

Doug Miller

Yes, from terrorist to whatever status he’s got now, yes, which, of course, is the history of the South African struggle as well.

Vince Greason 04:56

Exactly, exactly. Well, then, now we, I guess, arrive in Toronto. Um.

Doug Miller 05:00

Um, as I recollect you, you were there because your, your ex was working on her degree and you, you fell into the clutches of the SACTU Solidarity Committee. How did that come about?

Vince Greason 05:15

Yeah, well, I had a daughter who was born. My partner moved to Toronto to do her studies, so I decided to take the first year to spend with my daughter as a stay-at-home dad. And then the first job that I got was at the Fred Victor Mission, which is a mission for homeless people in Toronto, run by the United Church. And so I worked at the Fred Victor Mission, and working conditions were terrible. So we tried to organize a union, and basically I was fired for union organizing the day before my probation period ended, right? So, I was kind of young and naive and didn’t understand how the world worked, and I was fired by a white South African, ironically, at the Fred Victor mission and Anglican priest.

And so I went home, and I had a friend from Ottawa who was visiting, who knew Ken Traynor, and said, “Oh, Vince, you got to come meet this guy, Ken Traynor”. So we met in a bar in downtown Toronto, and got to talking, and I mentioned that, you know, I’d been in Quebec City and spoke French and had just been fired. And Ken said, “Well, we’re looking for someone to work in Quebec for our South African work, would that interest you?”. So I said, “Sure, that’d be wonderful. When can I come for an interview?”. I said, “Well, how about next day?”. So the next day I went for the easiest job interview I had in my life. I must say, they didn’t have very high standards, I guess. But so I was hired by the SACTU Solidarity Committee Ken Luckhardt and Ken Traynor.

So that’s basically how it works. So the irony of being fired by a South African, a white South African, and then, you know, being hired by the SACTU Solidarity Committee. So I had no background, really as such, in anti-apartheid work. I had some background in popular education. I had some background in international solidarity through the Irish work that I had been doing, but not, not in a lot of expertise at all on the South African question.

Gwen Schulman

What were you hired to do?

Vince Greason 07:11

Well, that’s a very good question. I was hired to kind of do the work in Quebec at the solidarity committee. So, you know, the solidarity committee had an educational thrust. It had a research thrust, and it had a support thrust. So kind of those three things which we tried to do in in the province of Quebec,

Doug Miller 07:35

Key to that, of course, would have been the SACTU newsletter, right?

Vince Greason

And it’s not as though there hadn’t been work done in French beforehand by the solidarity committee, right, like Steve Benedict, who was a militant, I guess you call it an activist in English, an activist with the CAW of the UAW at the time, had done good work in Quebec, not on a full time basis, but as an activist. So some newsletters had been translated already. The Trafficking, not the Guide to Apartheid, had been translated as well. So it was a 30 page document had been translated with the support of the CEQ at the time, which is now the CSQ, the Centrale des syndicats du Québec. You get back the teachers union, which was more than a teacher’s union in Quebec, but they had collaborated in translating this document, 30, 40, page document.

So there had been work done in Quebec, but Steve was kind of moving to new things within the union, and so there was a hole in that work. And so that’s why I was hired, plus, just to do you know, office work and support work, because the work was certainly adequate for three full time staff and three full time activists who were on the core committee at the time.

Gwen Schulman

Can you describe what the anti-apartheid landscape looked like in Quebec when you started out?

Vince Greason 09:02

Well, yeah, Quebec is a distinct society, for sure, right? So there were small solidarity committees within the community organization spread right throughout Quebec in English and in French. So in Quebec City, where I had spent some time in the 1970s and early 80s, there was a solidarity committee out of Carrefour Tiers Monde, which was like an umbrella group, which did Guatemala solidarity, which did Nicaraguan solidarity, which did South African solidarity, South African solidarity, though there was a small committee in Trois-Rivières, there were several committees in Montreal. There was a committee in Sherbrooke.

So within the community organizations, there was a whole network of international solidarity, right? That the landscape we were in the midst of the Cold War, right? So with the Cold War, you had all kinds of national liberation movements springing up and the Cold War kind of gave rise to that to some extent.

And so there was a strong international solidarity group. And the international solidarity groups work together right within the community, within the popular organizations on the union front, which is where SACTU Solidarity Committee works, specifically in the, I don’t know what date it was founded, Doug, you would know CISO, the Centre international de solidarité ouvrière which is unique in Canada. To my knowledge, there is no other international solidarity, worker solidarity organization founded by the labour unions whose sole mission was to do international solidarity. That was the CISO. So they were quite active in Nicaraguan solidarity, Guatemalan solidarity, Salvadorean solidarity and South African solidarity, right? So that was already there, and as SACTU Solidarity Committee, which was not a product of the FTQ, CSN, CEQ of the time.

You know, we had to deal with that because Quebec unions had their own organization to do international solidarity, which was quite active. There was CIDMAA as well in Montreal, which was my recollections of CIDMAA in terms of international solidarity, the South African, right? So that’s the song international it was Mozambique and Africa a…

Doug Miller 11:22

[Doug said something in French here]

Vince Greason

That’s right. So it was specifically dedicated to pushing forward the struggle in southern Africa. But as opposed to say CISO and as opposed to almost all of the international solidarity groups that I knew its position relatively, ANC was not as clear, right? It was kind of looking for a third way, because CIDMAA, in my recollection, and we didn’t work an awful lot with CIDMAA at the solidarity committee, it was kind of anti-communist, right? The ANC were perceived as being communists, so they did good work, but it was somewhat ambiguous in terms of its relationship to the ANC, and therefore to SACTU who was in alliance with the ANC.

And it was different, in that sense, than my recollection of the other solidarity committees, the smaller solidarity committees, who were quite unambiguously in support of the ANC. So that was kind of the paysage, right? The environment that we were working in in Quebec, as I recommended.

Doug Miller

So, just to recall CISO, the initials mean what and then, who is paying for it? If it’s not, the big –

Vince Greason 12:37

[French]

Vince Greason 12:44

It was paid for by the three centrals. CSN, FTQ, CEQ. There was the three labour centrals, which paid every year for a staff of two people, maybe three people. So it was, it was clearly an organ of the three labour centrals. And they still maintained, and they still maintain their own internal, not necessarily, not necessarily, most international solidarity in terms of educational work went through CISO, right? So CISO had a whole educational programme around the different national struggles, would raise money to support the different national struggles as well. So obviously, once you get into the centrals, individual unions could choose where they wanted to put their money. And you know, we can talk a little bit about that.

You know, there was no, we never hit major road blocks from the institutionalized labour centrals the way, maybe elsewhere in Canada, there were roadblocks put in our way. We never had that so much in Quebec. But conversely, since there already was a body that was doing labour solidarity on international issues, and we were from Toronto, there was always that as kind of part of the background to the work that we were doing in Quebec, as I recall it anyway.

Doug Miller 14:14

Great overview. Thanks.

Vince Greason 14:19

Just the other thing, just to, just to follow up on that, since it could be interesting or not. Of course, Quebec has a separate history, so if, if we recall, Gwen wouldn’t, but Doug would. The late 70s, early 80s, the popular movement, so it’s before the community movement, the popular movement and the labour movement. There was the the Marxist, Leninist groups right, which were quite active, and specifically active in the field of international solidarity. So when we’re talking about the terrain that we were working on in the 1980s, the Group ML were so there was En Lutte, there was the Parti communiste ouvrier, the PCO. There was the Fourth International, which was more Trotsky. They were quite active.

And each of those organizations had their people in the international solidarity committees in Sherbrooke in Quebec City, the Quebec Ireland committee. We had someone from En Lutte, we had someone from the PCO. We had someone from the category of international who are Miller, but, you know, we’re also members of a political party. So that too was in the décor because, you know, one was, had their line kind of given by Albania. One had their line given by Peking, and one had their line given by the Trots. So there were, you know, differing views on the state of capitalism and solutions to capitalism. And you know, so that was also when the decor in Quebec in a way in which it never was in English Canada.

And I would add the traditional Canadian Communist Party, or in the case of Quebec, right? The Canadian Communist Party was present, right? Oh, yes, for sure. Was, was a militant but, but the really active ones on the on the ground, on the ground, were the under the PCO and the addition to the solidarity groups, they were, they were spread, sprinkled throughout the unions as well, absolutely, absolutely, yeah, and the popular organizations, right? And yeah. So it was a factor which we –

Gwen Schulman

How did those interactions take place? Were there roundtable meetings once a month where everybody, regardless of where they were coming from ideologically, sat down together to discuss strategy and work together? Or was everybody kind of off in their own corner, doing their own thing with the occasional coming together like concretely? How did all of these different groups that you’ve talked about in Quebec interact or not interact, in building a solidarity movement with not interact, not to interact, in terms of the community organizations working on different issues,

Vince Greason 17:12

in terms of the community organizations working on different issues, each committee would work. So if you’re a Guatemala solidarity committee, you would and you’d have your committee, your regular committee meetings, usually a one meeting a month, one meeting every six weeks. You’d have kiosks. When there was a Union congress or an annual general meeting of housing group, you know, you’d have a kiosk. Or the May Day celebrations, you’d have a kiosk. And you’d, you know, but the Guatemala would work with Guatemala, and there was no national, no provincial organization that would bring all the Guatemalan solid. To my knowledge, solidarity groups together, and certainly not South Africa, right? So CIDMAA, to my knowledge, never called a meeting of all of the you know, Quebec, Saguenay, Lac-Saint-Jean. What if you are solidarity? Committees. There were contacts with fax, because we’re before email, obviously we’re before the internet.

So in Quebec City, the central point that brought people together was Carrefour Tiers Monde. So there would be probably three general assembly, general assemblies per year, where all the different committees under the chapeau of Carrefour Tiers Monde would come together, and then they would talk about what they were doing in terms of the MLs. They were present. They were good, good militants, very good militants. But the Marxist Leninist, you’re saying Marxist Leninist groups, right? You just had to kind of be aware of where they were coming from and kind of what line they were pushing. You wouldn’t be caught unawares, right, and dragged into something that maybe you didn’t necessarily want, right?

Gwen Schulman 18:59

Oh, Doug. Doug, you’re,

Vince Greason 19:02

we’ve only been in covid for two years, right? Yeah, under your microphone.

Doug Miller 19:08

And maybe, maybe to jump from there, could you did, any of this sort of factionism impose on your work at all, as a SACTU rep here?

Vince Greason 19:20

Not impose, not impose in Quebec. When we tried to set up a little committee, a steering committee, or a support committee in Quebec to push the work forward in Quebec, the fact that we didn’t have an office in Quebec, the fact that we didn’t have a telephone number in Quebec, did not help us, right? It would have been a lot easier to phone somebody and left a message with a 514, area code, right? That would have facilitated things a lot, but unfortunately, we had a 416, area code, right? So within the support group that we have, and I’m trying to recollect, I do recall, Doug, you were part of that group, so you can maybe help me out, there was one guy who was quite active. Given our committee who was involved in one of the ML groups, and he was also a CSN activist, quite a quite an active guy in the constellation, and he was quite interested in the South African committee, and he did good work for us.

But at some point, I think we decided that probably it wasn’t a good idea for our efforts to be identified with one of the ML factions, and so we kind of slowly moved him to the to the periphery of the of the group, and certainly not in a decisional role within the group. And that, I think, was a conscious decision, at least in my right I recollect, we talked about it quite seriously because there was some, some dysfunctionality to the various factional elements and reaction to them at different levels of the union movement as well. Well, yeah, exactly.

And you know, in terms of the people who are coming over from South Africa, you know, who knew sometimes where opposition might come from, but kind of wanted to keep the SACTU Solidarity Committee, we were working for SACTU, and unambiguously working for SACTU and promoting, you know, the kinds of campaigns and the kinds of orientations that SACTU was promoting, and that, I think we were unabashed about that, and decided it would just be maybe a little bit too contradictory to muddy the waters a little bit with other influence.

By the end of our work in Quebec, the most of the ML groups kind of disappeared shortly after the first referendum, because one of the big divisions within the MLs was, how do we vote on the referendum in Quebec independence and, you know, and the women’s movement also, you know, was quite active there the early 80s, and the style of militantisme in these group, the ML groups, was seriously put into question by the women’s movement. So they basically had all disappeared by 1983, 1984 it was kind of when we were getting up and going in Quebec that it was more of a concern.

Doug Miller 22:12

Okay, so now you’re active with SACTU, you’re, you’re working out of Toronto. What was the ratio of Toronto work versus coming to Quebec, and how did the Quebec work look like?

Vince Greason 22:27

I don’t know about the ratio. My principal job within the Toronto office was doing work in Quebec. So I’d say just, this is non-scientific, 70% of my work was in Quebec, work which was involved in partially translating, translating in terms of linguistically translating, but translating also in terms of the labour culture, right? Can’t use materials produced for the rest of Canada with all kinds of Canadian examples that get you nowhere in Quebec. So you have to produce your own materials using Quebec examples. So double translation, linguistic, but also culture.

We were quite active in Quebec around the garment question. Near the end, did a lot of work in the garment question. We worked with the CAW this act, Ken Luckhardt specifically did a lot of paid educational leave programmes of the CAW. Paid educational leave is a programme negotiated into the collective agreement whereby all CAW workers had the right to paid leave to do political education so you could leave And have you know, paid leave of one week to go and meet with other unionists and do political education on capitalism, on and also on the South African question. We managed to get involved in the PEL programme in English Canada, in Quebec as well. I did two or three paid educational leave programmes. Participated in them. In the Laurentians met with CAW activists, local leadership Miller talking about the South African question.

Doug Miller

At that time, we had a large CAW Factory in Sainte-Thérèse, and they were a core component of all the CAW work here. Yeah, effectively, because it was shortly after SACTU shut down, where our activities were reduced to support the ANC.

Vince Greason 24:34

That’s when Sainte-Thérèse closed, because I moved from SACTU to the Metro Labour Education Centre, and we received a whole bunch of CAW workers who had been victims of plant closures at Sainte-Thérèse. So, you’re right, you’re exactly right. There was a huge component there in Sainte-Thérèse at the time, worked with the postal workers. Yeah, I’m just wondering.

Gwen Schulman

I mean, unless I’m changing the subject prematurely, feel free to say, we’ll talk about this later. But just the experience of talking to workers about South Africa, your background is in popular education, this is what you were talking about. What’s your kind of recollection, almost qualitatively, of those conversations with workers about South Africa? Were they already aware? Did they care? Was it a big sell job? Did you feel like you had to deal with racism and people kind of like, not really seeing what’s the problem? Like? What was that like? Or did they notice it?

Vince Greason 25:33

You know, like and I really appreciate you kind of couching that in terms of popular education, because one of the things that the solidarity committee did, I would argue, is popular education, in the sense that when we would do a presentation to postal workers or to Automobile Workers or to health workers, the starting point was one to know their struggles, the Canadian struggles, right? That was the starting point.

And to draw the link between the sector in South Africa and their struggle with the struggles of workers in Canada, that was the starting point. So the entry point was, you know, you know, an injury to one is an injury to all, which is the SACTU model. But that was also our approach doing educational work. So in that sense, the resistance was negative. No, there was not a lot of knowledge of South Africa. And, you know, as opposed – yeah, South Africa, part of the issue in Quebec is a lot of the material was in English. So there wasn’t as much penetration in the popular kind of awareness of what was going on in South Africa for a whole bunch of cultural reasons.

But when you present the struggles of health workers in Canada as being linked somehow to the struggles of health workers in South Africa, that opens doors and it raises questions and it promotes interaction, and you know, in that sense that the way in which it had been developed before I arrived at SACTU, I just kind of hooked into it.

But by the starting point not being the South African struggle, the starting point was Canadian struggles. And then what’s the link between that and what’s going on in South Africa? And I found that as being a really interesting way to do international solidarity work, and on top of that, the research component of the SACTU Solidarity, so all of Ken Traynor’s work identifying the economic links between South Africa and Canada, whether it be importation and exportation, you actually arrive with very concrete things, right?

So with certain unions, did you know that your employer was actually trafficking with South Africa? Did you know that there’s an international boycott and you actually are working for a company that is in commercial relationship, and then you kind of well, how can we develop strategies to eliminate that complicity, right?

And then that’s when we get into the negotiating articles and collective agreements which had a relative success. I mean, it was certainly nothing anyone ever went on strike for, but the fact that you accept to get it put on the table in terms of a negotiating strategy indicates that people understand that there is an issue here, right? So, yeah.

So that that that kind of popular education approach, where you start with where the people that you’re talking to are coming from, was something that I really appreciated in the way in which we did our international solidarity. So it wasn’t a university prof talking about the poor South Africans. It was saying, you know, here’s your struggles. Let’s take a step forward and take a look at how those same struggles are being lived in an area of the world where there is extreme racism and, you know, so yeah,

Doug Miller 28:54

And in a good educational model, it wasn’t just, as you say, top down and talk, but, but you walked away with something you could do about it.

Vince Greason

Yeah, Yeah and something you could do is collective agreements. That’s something you could do is get South African products out of grocery stores. That’s something you can do is, you know, check in your local Rossy, check in your local Woolworths, if there’s not South African clothing and, you know, do something about it. You know, write to the company. You know, your own creativity is the only limit to what you can do, right? So, yeah, there was something concrete or broader. When you met with governing councils of unions, you know, the divestment strategy, which we kind of got into, a little bit. Traynor was kind of pushing that and, you know, so, yeah, concrete proposals of things that you could do.

Doug Miller 30:00

One last point on the to do was very, very important on the part of SACTU, the SACTU strike fund and Canadian unions locals across the country contributed quite a lot. Large sum of money over to seven or eight years of the SACTU’s existence. Did you have that same response in Quebec?

Vince Greason 30:07

Yeah, in Quebec were high. You know, we have partial notes. They, so I identified at least 32 unions who contributed up until 1985 and we finished in 87, I believe, so I’m missing them, and there was proportionally more money coming in from Quebec at the end than at the beginning when I started.

But there were 32 unions who supported the strike fund. Had no idea of how much money that could be. A local union who participated in a PEL programme of the UAW or in a council of the postal workers, that could be a federation of the CSN. There were several federations that supported the strike fund. The CSN supported the strike fund. So, you know right? So, but 32 different units supported the strike fund in Quebec as of 1985 and I don’t have the final figures for sure, but yeah, and that in the context where CISO, which was the formal solidarity organization supported by the institutional trade union movement in Quebec, had their own financial campaigns in support of South African workers. Right? So that’s, yeah, I think we did a good job on that front in that context,

Doug Miller 31:27

Tremendous, tremendous. The work we talked about, the unique nature of the work. I remember one story you told about your comrades in Toronto being critical because you didn’t have the union bug on your on your documents.

Vince Greason 31:54

Yeah. Well, you know, there’s two solitudes for sure. And you know, one of the things that I will be eternally grateful, grateful for in terms of the people that I work with at the SACTU Solidarity Committee, was the recognition that there were two cultures, minimally two cultures. I mean, one could argue there might be a Maritime Labour culture as well, but minimally, two very different cultures in English, Canada and in Quebec, right?

So to kind of allow us to do our thing in Quebec, to allow us to produce materials in French, but not with necessarily the same content as these. It wasn’t just a straight translation of English materials, but it was an adaptation to the context in Quebec. You know, I will always recognize the political wisdom of my comrades at the solidarity committee to recognize that if we want to do, make the work go forward in Quebec, we have to adapt our ways of doing things.

That being said, there were funny things that happened, so I don’t have I do here. This is an accident Doug, but this is a button that we produce in Quebec. It’s probably the worst button, one of the worst buttons ever produced in the labour by the labour movement in Canada, right? Because this is before your digital phone, where you could take a picture with a digital phone with proper lighting conditions. This case, it was an orange and a can of peaches, right? An orange and a can of peaches.

Gwen Schulman 33:21

What is that? (Laughs)

Vince Greason 33:23

But this is before the cell phone, where you’ve got optimal conditions for and, you know, I’m a popular educator, so I wanted it to be really clear to workers what they were, what they were supporting, and what they were going to boycott. But at the time, all I had was a photocopier. So I put an orange on the photocopier, and I put a can of peaches, and I shut the window when I push the button, which is why you end up with something, which why I brought this. Thank you. Thank you, SACTU, to comrades who allow me the flexibility to produce the worst button in the labour movement.

But the commentary, apart from where that’s, yeah, right, but one of the comments was, we can’t use that, because there’s no bug on it, right? The Union bug, right? So that’s the union label, so all of SACTU, here’s the other button. And you see in the bottom there that little black thing, that’s the bug, right? And that was a campaign of the International and Canadian unions, that anything produced by a union would have the bug to prove that it was produced by so they said, you can’t use that. There’s no bug on it. Well, the thing is, it was produced in a union shop, but it was a CSN union shop, and the CSN didn’t participate in the bug campaign. So yeah. So anyway, they allowed me to use it, although probably we shouldn’t have.

So, you know, that’s part of the difference in culture between Quebec, because the FTQ was affiliated to the ICFTU, right? But the say, I said the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, right, which is the CLC, and so all of the FTQ federation, so the steel workers and the auto workers, they were all affiliated to the ICFTU, which is part of the Cold War politics that were involved in the time that we were doing this work. The CSN was affiliated to the feather, as you know, the confederacion someplace. Which was the Christian international trade union federation, because the CSN originally was a confessional union, right? In its history, it was the Catholic unions, right?

So we didn’t have that fight with the CSN. We never had any roadblocks put up because SACTU was affiliated to the World Congress of Trade Unions, which was the Communist International Union, as opposed to the free World International Trade Union Federation. But then the CSN was with the Christian, so they were kind of between the communists. Anyway. We didn’t enter any problems on that front.

But to honestly, I mean, in the way in which some roadblocks were thrown up, and the work being done in the rest of the country by some unions because of SACTU’s link with the South African Communist Party in Quebec, even within the FTQ, we never ran into those. I never was conscious of doors being closed to our work in Quebec because of ideological Cold War considerations. Honestly. Guy Cous, you know, I remember at the Montreal Labour Council, did really good work for us opening up doors at the CSN. Peter Backus, who was the with the he was assistant to the executive to the president of the CSN. He got doors open for us. So I know don’t recall any blockages on that front to our work there.

Doug Miller

You also tell an interesting story of how some of the research went on with the import and export stuff and how we contributed somewhat to building the Trafficking in Apartheid booklet by doing some research on the ground. Here, would you tell those stories, please?

Vince Greason 37:13

Yeah. Luckhardt, in his work in western Canada, had made contacts with the international Longshoreman’s Association, the ILA, who were quite active in in the South African struggle to the point of refusing to offload stuff from ships coming from South Africa, going to South Africa, I guess should be. Onload stuff going to and offloading, coming from.

I managed to establish a contact with the Longshoremen’s Association in Montreal as well, and made several trips. I can’t remember exactly how many, 2, 3, 4, trips back and forth. When they would contact us, the Longshoremen’s Union telling us that there was a ship either heading off to South Africa or arriving from South Africa. And they would, they would contact me in Toronto and say, “would you like to go and visit the port to see what you can find out for sure?”. So I take the night train from Toronto to Montreal, and Doug would meet me at the train station around 5.30 the Longshoremen organized. This was before September 11, right? It’s before life changed in terms of security measures. We go to the port 57 in Montreal, and the door would be open, the gates would be open, and there would be no security guards. I don’t know how they managed to do it, but no security guards.

Doug Miller

It’s important to mention this is also before the time of container shipping, so everything was manually handled.

Vince Greason

And right piles, they had piles, and this port, 57 was like two Canadian football fields end to end, a huge, massive hangar. And I’d arrived there at 5.30 and the longshoreman told me that the bosses never got there before nine o’clock. But because I was prudent, I would leave by eight. So from six to eight, I would wander around the piles, looking for the piles that were going to South Africa with my little notebook and my pencil, and I would take notes when I found a pile, and, you know, to take the name of the company that was sending it and who was receiving it in South Africa, or it was the other way, vice versa.

And that was kind of raw material, which I then gave to Ken Traynor, because when we got the information from Statistics Canada, it was just pages, like hundreds of pages every two months or every three months by category of merchandise. So you know, drilling equipment or automotive parts or clothing, but nothing more itemized than that. But when you have the names of companies, then you can begin to identify the company with the actual price.

Products that were being shipped to South Africa. And meantime, we were getting the same types of information from the West Coast, directly from the from the Longshoremen. So we managed to get a pretty good portrait of who the traffickers were with apartheid.

So yeah, and it was through that my recollection anyway, it was through one of those trips that we happened upon clothing which was coming in from South Africa, but not labelled product of South Africa. The clothing that we came across was labelled product of Lesotho. What we discovered was, in fact, the clothing was made in South Africa, and the only thing that was made in Lesotho was the label which said, made in the Lesotho, which was then sewn into. So it was a way of, you know, contourner. How do you say that?

Gwen Schulman

Bypass

Vince Greason 40:50

Bypassing, right. So we would then, you know, find out what companies were importing the stuff. And then we managed. And one of the things I did find in my notes, if I can find it here.

You know, so Towers had, and so we found all the names, the different labels, right, the different companies, right, like Champion Clothing or whatever. So, so Towers had it, the Bay had it, World, world, Woolworth had it San, S, A, A, M, had it, Rossy had it, Co-op, right? So we managed to identify different companies who were importing this clothing, and then we could put out the word, you know, go visit your local clothing store and take action, right?

So, you know, it was a small part. I mean, I think, to be honest, I mean, it was more the stuff that we got out of the west coast, but, but I think we played a small role as well in documenting the trafficking going on.

And I might add that, you know, it was a, there was no it was at no danger to themselves that the union left the door open, right? Like that, even in those days this was they were taking a risk, right? Because, had we been discovered, you know, it’s not appropriate. We actually, on one occasion, got a call to go to the ILA office in Montreal on Notre Dame, International Longshoreman’s Association, right, to the union office that there was a brown envelope, right? One of these famous unaddressed brown envelopes waiting for me at the union office. And in it was a manifest. So the manifest is that the actual physical document in the ship, which highlights in detail all of the specific items that are coming in. So it’s a customs document, actually all the details of all the items, the amount of the items, who they’re going to, where they’re coming from. It was about 60, 70, pages of information that we got

Doug Miller

Rich stuff.

Vince Greason

Yeah, so I went to the union office, got the little brown envelope, and probably went and had a coffee with Doug, and then we took it back to Traynor, and he used it. He digested it. He did, yeah.

Doug Miller

Now this is all part of I understand building towards campaigns around the boycott-sanctions-disinvestment, which, of course, is of great interest to activists today. How did all that work out in Quebec? Boycott campaign, sanctions, campaign disinvestment, campaigns that you were involved with or knowledge about?

Vince Greason

Honestly, I don’t, don’t recall, like, I don’t know that just the Caisse de dépôt et placement, right, the pension fund in Quebec. I’m not sure. I mean, I’d have to do some research to find what I do know is that guy by the name of Michel Page, who was a researcher at the CSN did a lot of work identifying in Quebec Pension funds which had holdings in South African companies. So that was done outside of us.

That was the CSN that did that. So there was CISO, but then you also had specific issues treated by individual unions, right?

So we, yeah, we didn’t, in my recollection anyway, we would, we would say in our educational presentations that one of the things you could do is encourage your employer to divest South African companies. But it wasn’t front and centre in our educational work that I recall anyway. And I recall to you that in fact, in fact at some point, I think it was as late as 86 organized a week of action that involved that kind of direct intervention. Yeah. Did it manifest itself in Quebec? Yeah, it did. Because it was a Canadian wide day of action which called upon workers in the language of the day to down their tools in support of the South African struggle. And specifically, we were targeting communication workers, so telephone operators. Because in those days we still had telephone operators. What do you call them? Airline workers, reservation clerks.

Doug Miller

Airline reservation clerks,

Vince Greason

That’s right, specifically talking about postal workers, because in those days there was still mail going back and forth, and since they were the CUPW, and since it was the CWC Communication Workers of Canada, CUPW, being the Canadian union of postal workers, being quite active in that on the Canadian level in Quebec as well, is quite.

Doug Miller

And so I do know that, yeah, and there is in the documents that we’ve just submitted to Archives Canada, list of specific things that Quebec Unionists did on that day of action to down their tools.

Vince Greason

So yeah, that was and obviously you don’t just, you don’t just arrive with, you know, “today you’re not going to deal with phone calls going to South Africa”, or “today you’re not going to do, you’re not going to offload stuff on a boat coming from South Africa”, because the dock workers were involved as well. Or you don’t just say, “well, today you’re not going to handle mail going to South Africa”, right?

That that’s not the way it works. There’s an educational component to it. You spend several months doing educational work so that workers understand why on this particular day, you’re not going to facilitate the exchange between Canada and South Africa. So it’s kind of, the day of action is the end result of a popular education process, to use my understanding or my language.

We were quite active in Quebec, doing our educational work and building to that, among others, we had done a half day session in Quebec City and a full day session in half day session in Montreal and a full day session in Quebec City with a conseil central of the CSN in Quebec City and Montreal, the Conseil central being like the labour councils, But within the CSN structure. So we had met with probably 160 different local union leaders before the day of action, and that kind of raised the issue, and then they would take that back to their membership, and

Gwen Schulman 47:18

Doug and I are often asked to do presentations on the anti-apartheid era, the tactics and strategies to younger activists who are really curious about what the anti-apartheid movement was like. And there’s a bit of a, almost a mystique around the anti-apartheid movement, that it was something very special and unique. Certainly you are talking about some of these tactics, you know, is part of that whole thing. Do you think, but do you think there was actually something special about the anti-apartheid movement, about the kind of organizing and actions that were taken that is somewhat unique in the history of international solidarity and struggle?

Vince Greason

I can’t talk to the anti-apartheid movement in a broad sense, but I, Doug will appreciate this. I moved from my time in Toronto to Montreal, where I lived for 10 years, and probably moved three times in the time I was in Montreal, and then I moved to Outaouais, where I moved a couple of times, and I always carried this little brown briefcase with me, with the my archives of SACTU, I carried it with me from place to place, and carried over a period of 20 years, because to me, it was absolutely important to write the history of solidarity as the SACTU Solidarity Committee lived it because it is unique. So I will speak to the very specific question of the work that we did in the SACTU solidarity commission committee,

You know, I’ve been involved in international solidarity and in the popular education movement and in the union movement, there is nothing like the work that we did in the SACTU Solidarity Committee in terms of its method, in terms of its results, in terms of the complicity, you know, amongst the different militants that were involved.

It was absolutely unique, and when kind of out of the blue. A year and a half ago, we got the call to bring the people who were involved in the SACTU Solidarity Committee together to begin to talk about what we did. Like I was just so happy, because it justified me having carried this brown briefcase around for 20 years.

You know, because it is, because you know, the work that Traynor did to document the commercial relations between Canada and South Africa, and then to take the result of that work into local unions and say, “hey, did you know? And we can prove it that your employer is trafficking with South Africa”. It makes the whole South African struggle that much more immediate to the workers here. “No, we didn’t know that. How can this be?”. You know, and they see the relationship between what’s going on in Canada with what’s going on, you know, intellectually, you understand that it’s a racist regime, right?

I mean, you know, I’ve done a lot of human right work, human rights work in educational work, and talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and how the fundamental precept of the declaration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is that all humans have rights because they are human.

That’s the fundamental premise you have rights, because you are human, and every human has rights. Do you know of any examples in history where there have been regimes that have considered not everyone to be human in the same way? And immediately you come to South Africa, immediately you come to South Africa.

So yeah, that history of the SACTU Solidarity Committee, research leading to action, action being inspired by research. I mean, that’s what popular education is all about. And you know Irish solidarity, you know we would insist in our prisoner of war committee that our Irish guests had to spend some time in the popular organizations, go visit a housing organization, go visit a women’s organization before they would publicly speak, right? So kind of, I had some intuition like that of the importance of people who come to speak of a struggle elsewhere, that they’re grounded in what’s going on here, but not to the extent that we did at the SACTU committee. And that’s what’s unique in the way in which we did our work. And I’m just so glad that the story is being told. And you know, there are other anti-apartheid organizations which did really, really good work, but that wasn’t the grounding.

Gwen Schulman

Yeah.

Doug Miller

That brings up the corollary to what you’ve just said. And so why is the labour participation in the anti-apartheid struggle so little understood? Why is it so little written about?

Vince Greason 51:50

We’ve got books and books on different people and different organizations and their participation labour. It was like they weren’t there, not to mention Quebec, and not to mention minority peoples, like the native indigenous people in the black communities. So let me go out of the box, because, you know, we’re kind of at that age. Gwen isn’t there yet, but we’re kind of at that age.

Why is labour not present? Because labour isn’t present today. Why aren’t the churches present? Because the churches are no longer present today. That’s my reading of what’s going on right now in the popular education movement. You know, when we talk about alliances, no one thinks to go to labour, because labour are a bunch of people who’ve sold out, right? The gods, they’re there.

So there’s a generation that doesn’t necessarily understand the historical significance of the labour movement and in building the place that we’re living in today. Right? Labour struggles have given us the 35 or the 40 hour week. Have given us certain equity in terms of pay between men and women have given us safe workplaces. But no, that’s something that’s always been it’s, you know, so, so even in our domestic front, right? And we tend to in the popular education movement and the community organizations here in Quebec, we’ve written out labour. You know, the churches are not only residential schools, for sure, the churches are residential schools, but they’re also have been quite influential in building a popular movement, you know, in terms of their presence, not just financial, but actually, you know, founding of organizations, not because they’re from the church, but because they’re poor. You know what I mean.

So I don’t know that that might be part of the answer is, because today, labour does its thing off on the side, and they’re not integrated in the way in which they were. But even in the time of SACTU, right, we were kind of marginalized somewhat. I don’t know if that’s a good answer.

Doug Miller

It is an excellent answer because it does cover an important ground. There may be other components to that as well, but this is your interview, not mine.

Doug Miller 54:14

Gwen, have you got anything else there?

Gwen Schulman 54:17

Um, I guess would you if you were to go back and do it again? Are there things that you would have wanted to do differently? Did you detect contradictions within the movement that struggling for one thing, and yet within the structure, there’s sexism or racism, or, you know, colonial mentalities, or, like, is there kind of any kind of critique that you want to bring to the work that was done back then?

Vince Greason 54:53

You know when, when I left SACTU, when the ANC kind of took over the direction of the anti-apartheid work in Canada, at least in terms of organizationally, I went to the Labour Education Centre in Toronto, where I was involved in the literacy unit of the Labour Education Centre literacy and English as a second language.

Vince Greason 55:18

So for sure, in that context, one realizes that workers who aren’t comfortably literate are excluded from the labour movement because everything happens by writing, right, and being able to read and being able to speak comfortably in English, right. And then when you take a look at who speaks English as a second language. You notice that there’s a colour, right? So then you notice who’s in leadership. And then you look at gender, and you know. So it was there within the SACTU work that we were doing within our networks. I don’t perceive any, you know, so I can’t speak to the broader anti-apartheid movement, which I wasn’t really involved in, yeah, colonialism, fascinating, like.

So we’re at the point, I’m at the point now where I’m kind of doing, doing evaluations of my life. It wasn’t worth it, right? Because in my life as an adult, I have spent my whole life fighting the dismantling of the social state, right, starting in the 1970s right in Quebec with the Quiet Revolution, or whatever the quiet that was, the time of building up the social state. And since I’ve been an activist, a militant, we’ve been fighting against the dismantling of that state, the dismantling of our social programmes and all of that. So, I mean, I don’t have a huge history, a militant history of wins, of victories. It’s mostly limiting the damage.

Doug Miller

The damage.

Vince Greason

Yeah, so where was I going with that? It’s a great beginning of an answer, but you need an end to the answer. What was the question?

Gwen Schulman 57:04

Well, you were saying something, you see, you kicked off by saying you’re in the middle of a reflection on how you know about your life and how successful. But I guess that my question was, there was sort of a reflection, a critique, like if there was a critique you want to bring to the work that was done. But, I mean, you started to give a really interesting answer about issues around literacy and who can speak and

Vince Greason

Who’s empowered to has access to power, and questions of power and all.

Doug Miller

And then SACTU solidarity committees, defence, they were very much part of promoting people of colour in their local unions and helping them become activists. And women’s movement was very strong, obviously, younger than it is now, and so they were breaking glass ceilings everywhere they went, but important people like Carol Phillips and so many union leaders that that grew up out of that, Judy Darcy, my goodness gracious that come from that era.

Gwen Schulman

So what you were starting to talk, I remember,

Vince Greason

I remember where I was going. Yeah, I was going because you had talked about anti-colonialism. You know someone who’s kind of leaving, leaving the movement in a movement, in a, in a, in a broad sense, right political movement. It really surprises me and intrigues me and worries me that all of a sudden it’s like colonial, anti-colonialism, or colonialism has been discovered like, it’s all of a sudden, it’s like, wow, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re settlers.

Well, anyone who kind of lived through the liberation struggles, the national liberation struggles of the 1960s realizes that we’ve always known, you know about colonialism. You know the book that you can’t say the name in French, Pierre Vallières, the whole analysis is based upon colonialism, right? And so it’s Quebec context.

But I mean, that’s part of our DNA, of my generation of militants. So on the one hand, I’m glad that younger people are rediscovering it. But on the other hand, give me a break. It’s not as though we didn’t know it was there, you know,

Gwen Schulman 59:28

So Well, yeah, it’s such an interesting thing. Doug, and I’ve talked about this a lot, I think that when we were involved in the struggle, there was also the advantage of these very active liberation movements. So, you know, that was the language, that was what was going on. It was overtly anti-colonial and rooted in that. And then as that kind of wound down, and the organization of international work took over, it really depoliticized all that development, not liberation.

So there’s a whole generation, a couple of generations of kids now who have grown up with that language. And I think what’s happening now is they’re reacting against that. It’s like there’s a re-politicization, because the NGOs are not explaining, there’s no answer, like there’s no solution. What they’re putting forth is very well, we all know what they’re doing.

And I think there were, there’s now this new political generation of kids who are kind of like this isn’t enough. Like what the NGOs are putting forth doesn’t make sense Exactly. Yeah. Rediscovery on that point, there’s a text I’ve used for several years now by Ahmed Doug walk on how the how the NGOs are playing a role of a tampon, right? So they’re not promoting a clear understanding. They’re kind of murky in the waters, muddying the waters, which is a fascinating little piece that she did in the New York Times. That’s exactly the point. Yeah, yeah.

Doug Miller 1:00:54

So, then SACTU comes to an end, or SACTU Solidarity Committee comes to an end, you, you what? What do you carry away? Obviously, you got your briefcase full of things.

Vince Greason

Which I don’t have to carry away because it’s all gone to Archives Canada.

Doug Miller 1:01:14

Bravo for that,

Vince Greason

As I said, you know, as I said to me, it’s like, really important that the history of the SACTU Solidarity Committee be told, right? And hopefully it will be heard. But you know, it’s a unique thing, you know, for me, personally, you know, to have spent four or five years with Luckhardt and Traynor and Brenda and Jane and Doug. For me, it was political education, right? I mean, I mean just, just an amazing experience for personal, political education, which I think I’ve kind of carried with me as I’ve gone on and done other things, fundamentally in the same direction, and maybe not the same question, but in the same direction.

So I’ve no regrets on that front whatsoever, you know, international solidarity in 2021 like question mark, right? I mean, it’s like, yeah, on the one hand, we have a more globalized community, and on the one on the other hand, we’re blind to what’s going on in the globe, right? So that’s it’s, yeah. Well, what you were looking for as an answer, but yeah.

Doug Miller 1:02:38

Well, Vince, thank you so much. Gwen, would you have any follow up?

Gwen Schulman 1:02:44

Um, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’s been really fascinating, very insightful, very insightful. You’ve really covered a lot.

Vince Greason

I’m not a South African expert, you know? I don’t have a background. I don’t know people from South Africa, the comrades who came through, but no, I hopefully played a small part in the work that we did.

Doug Miller

Vince, I think, I think the wonder of your presentation is that exactly you didn’t come from South Africa, and yet you could find the courage, strength, heart, to do a lot, and those stories have not been told, No, no, and it’s important that they be told so thank you so much for giving us yours. Great.

And if, if, well, we, as I said earlier, this is just the first part with you, because we’d like to go through your what you don’t like to call journal and winkle out names, incidents, institutions, events, that we could then do a second part interview with that would lead us to more Interviews with more people and telling more stories. Oh, there it is. I like it tiny handwriting in a paper clip. It’s impeccable. It is sounding, I don’t know how you can write that small and not get right.

Vince Greason

Certainly, certainly isn’t a journal. The random notes kind of like a date book kind of thing, you know? But, yeah, but there are dates.

Doug Miller 1:04:20

That’s good. That’s great. So I’m going to turn the recording off now. Yeah.