‘Hamilton Action Days’ was a historic protest
25 years ago, 100,000 demonstrators took to the streets
Hamilton is known as a battleground for labour conflict.
There was the momentous 1872 “Nine Hour March” for workplace reform, the violent 1906 HSR strike with the “Riot Act” being called, and the bitter 1946 Stelco strike that polarized the community.
But there is another major event from local history that sometimes gets overlooked — a historic demonstration against the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris. It took place 25 years ago this week on Feb. 23 and Feb. 24, 1996, and some say the ramifications of the peaceful protest continue to this day.
It was called the “Hamilton Action Days,” and it drew an estimated 50,000 people on the first day and more than 100,000 on the second. Nearly 1,300 buses brought protesters into the city to march alongside tens of thousands of Hamiltonians.
“In some ways it can be seen as a bigger event than other labour demonstrations from Hamilton’s past,” says McMaster University Labour Studies professor emeritus Wayne Lewchuk.
“It was a pretty pivotal moment in terms of the resistance to the kinds of changes the Harris government was planning,” he said.
York University labour historian Craig Heron, says, “There were a lot of people in Hamilton and there was a lot of energy. It really pulled the community together — bringing together the progressive community of labour with partners of various kinds.”
It was not lost on organizers, he said, that the demonstration was taking place 50 years after the ’46 Stelco Strike, an epic battle that helped establish union rights after the Second World War.
And there were similarities to the Nine Hour Movement demonstration from nearly 125 years before. That protest sought improvements to working conditions that generally required employees to work 1012 hours, usually six days per week. Both the Nine Hour Movement and the 1996 protests had wide support and called for fundamental changes. Each took place with rotating demonstrations in different Ontario cities with Hamilton being a major stop.
The Hamilton Action Days was aimed squarely at the Harris government’s “Common Sense Revolution” to reduce the size and role of government.
Hamilton was the second event after London two months before. The last “Days of Action” — as it was known more broadly in the province — took place in Toronto that October.
“All were successful in their own way,” says Wayne Marston, who was co-chair of the organizing committee with Andrea Horwath. “Ours was early on and it set a tone. The big thing about Hamilton is that we got our message delivered to the people of Ontario, the people of Hamilton, and the government of the day. We had no arrests and no injuries and even the buses went on time.”
But the series of protests — as well as a bitter five-week Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) strike that followed in April of that year — did little to dissuade the Harris agenda. A year later polls showed the premier actually gained popularity, and in 1999 he was re-elected for a second term.
“We knew that we were not going to defeat Mike Harris, but we did succeed in delaying some of the education reforms they talked about. It was not a great success. A great success would have meant the removal of Harris,” says Marston, who was president of the Hamilton and District Labour Council at the time. He later served as NDP MP for Hamilton East from 2006 till 2015.
But while the Harris agenda continued, labour historians say the series of demonstrations in 1996 was a watershed moment of uniting unionists with other activists for future struggles. It helped foster an alliance that continues to this day.
“It started with the struggle over free trade 10 years earlier,” says Heron. “The labour movement had reached out to find coalitions with groups that supported similar goals. By the time they were raising issues about the Harris government, there were lots of groups that were talking the same language.”
“The strategy was to join labour with other organizations that included women’s groups, peace groups, seniors’ groups, environmental groups and so on,” he said.
It also marked a transition in the union movement itself from being dominated by people who worked in blue collar jobs to public service employees. Marston says the Harris government encouraged public service unions to become more militant.
Trevor Pettit, who was elected as the Progressive Conservative MPP for Hamilton Mountain the previous June, says he was amazed by the size of the crowds in Hamilton. And while it turned out peaceful, there were fears of violence in days leading up to the protest.
“I recall they gave me police protection around my house, which was unnerving,” he said.
“The way I look at it is that everybody had to do what they had to do. We were doing what we said we were going to do. And there was obviously opposition to it. They took to the streets to show their opposition to it.”
Pettit didn’t get re-elected in the June 1999 election, but the Harris Progressive Conservatives returned with a second majority government. Harris ended up resigning in 2002 after the 2000 Queen’s Park riot and Walkerton E. coli drinking water outbreak. The Liberals under Dalton McGuinty were elected in 2003, while Ernie Eves was PC party leader.
Yet through it all, many are still perplexed that Harris managed a second term after the labour backlash in his early years as premier.
“I don’t know what happened in the 1999 election. It was troubling to get hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and he gets reelected,” says Heron.
But Lewchuk argues, “Protest is not without value. You may not be successful immediately but it puts a fear in the minds of policy-makers that it is only so far they can push. I think the Days of Action showed that maybe the government was pushing too fast, too far. They had to back off a little bit. I don’t think they backed off enough but that’s the history of it.”