Description
Book SynopsisIn the 1880s Canadians began to cope with the meaning of their emerging industrial society. During that decade the federal government first investigated industrial conditions and provincial governments passed Canada's first factory legislation. The same period saw the resurgence of an articulate and angry labor movement protesting against the excesses of modern industry.
Through the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital we can perhaps gain our best insight into the everyday world of workers and capitalists in late nineteenth-century Canada. The commission gathered evidence in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and talked to thousands of workers, businessmen, and other concerned citizens. This edited version of its investigation includes much of the best testimony; it describes working class living conditions, the emergence of organized labor, and the attitudes of businessmen to industrial capitalism.
The testimony takes us with the commissioners o
