To say that my list of potential topics for blog posts is long is putting it mildly. Going by that list alone, I could probably write one post a day for the rest of my life and never be done with it. So you’ll have to forgive me, Dear Reader, as I’m about to harken back to something that I added to said list in October, 2024, when Dear Husband and I were visiting Victoria, British Columbia.
We had just wandered through the lovely Beacon Hill Park in order to pay a visit to the Moss Lady (which I later I blogged about here). We were on our way to what would turn out to be an extremely fun afternoon in the nearby Royal BC Museum (which, yes, I blogged about here). To get there, we were walking through the historic neighborhood of James Bay. That’s when we unexpectedly stumbled upon a tiny kernel of history.
It appeared in the form of a bright red plaque in front of a gorgeous Victorian elementary school building. It was enough to encourage me to cross the street. I’m really glad I did, because I learned a lot by doing so.
The plaque was installed by the British Columbia Teachers Federation to commemorate both their 100 year anniversary in 2017 and the 1919 Victoria Teachers’ Strike. The two go hand in hand. It was the creation of the BCTF in 1917 that made the strike possible.
When Canada entered World War I in 1914, austerity measures were put into place throughout the country. Teachers at the time agreed to a reduction in salary. But the war had ended in 1918, and in many parts of Canada, teacher’s salaries were being restored, sometimes to what they would now be had the austerity measures never been put into place and regular raises been granted. Not so in Victoria.
In fact, the teachers in Victoria weren’t even asking for anything that generous. In the Fall of 1918, all they wanted was a meagre 10 percent raise (which wouldn’t even get them back to what they had earned in 1914), and that a plan be put in place to increase their salary to where it should be over time. But even that was apparently too much to ask. They were offered a 5 percent raise.
On February 10, 1919, 169 of Victoria’s 175 teachers went on strike. 132 of the strikers were female. This was the first teachers’ strike in Canadian history. It can’t be overemphasized how much courage this must have taken. While British Columbia has an active labor history, it also has a very powerful anti-union history. All strikers could expect rich and powerful push-back. In addition, the women of British Columbia had only been granted the right to vote 2 years previously, and that vote hadn’t even been extended to Asian or Indigenous Women. (Some of them were not allowed to vote until 1960!) So for Canadian women, exercising their rights was new.
In the past, there had been strikes in BC by a variety of groups including coal miners, fishermen, cannery workers, telephone operators, and loggers, and they had all had to fight extremely wealthy captains of industry, members of the upper class, the anti-union press, pro-business government officials, and authorities who would not hesitate to send soldiers, police, and special constables to thwart their efforts. Some of the strikes had been successful, some not. Some of them had been quite violent. No doubt these teachers were well aware of these facts when they walked off the job.
How frustrating it must have been for them to immediately discover that it was against the law for them to seek redress through arbitration under the Public School Act. And of course there was immediate backlash. Their opponents tried to spin the narrative so the public would be on their side. They said that the strike would have a deleterious moral effect on the children. They said that by seeing teachers break their contracts, it would lead to students thinking they could break contracts when they grew up. But the tide turned quickly in the teachers’ favor because people had become heartily sick of wartime profiteering. Even the school inspectors who reported to one of the strikers’ primary opponents, the Superintendent of Education, were on the teachers’ side.
Even though arbitration was illegal, the school board gave in after only 2 days and granted the 10 percent raise, saying it had been a “negotiation” rather than an “arbitration”. They clearly did not want the strike to continue. In the end, the public decided that what the students learned from all this was the importance of strength of convictions, the value of union principles, and that their teachers were to be taken seriously and respected.
The teachers also gained a few more concessions. They were paid for the two days of the strike, and they received no black marks on their personnel records. It was this landmark strike that led to a law in 1937 that arbitration must be the dispute resolution mechanism for all teachers’ negotiations, which, in turn solidified their right to have the union they had formed 20 years previously. That’s a huge step forward for Canadian labor movements in general.
My next question was, why did the union choose this location in particular to display the plaque? And that’s an interesting story, too. South Park Family School is a Kindergarten through 5th grade public school, with about 180 students. was built in 1894. It is the oldest building in Western Canada that has continuously operated as a school. A fitting place for the plaque, indeed.
It is a Victorian building in the Queen Anne style, which was a typical design for building schools in England at the time. It included a workshop annex because the primary focus of the school, at first, was “manual training” (primarily wood and metalworking) for boys, so that they could obtain gainful employment as skilled laborers upon graduating. Years later, domestic science training for girls was added. The school was definitely a product of its generation.
Naturally, it has evolved quite a bit since then. A quick look at their website makes me almost wish I could go back to elementary school. (As someone who grew up as an undiagnosed autistic person who was therefore the target of relentless bullying at school, that is a sentiment that I never expected to have.)
But this school is small, it’s in a cool building, it demands a great deal of parent participation, and it does not give out letter grades. Instead, they have teacher and parent feedback as well as student self-assessment. All faculty, staff, and parents are addressed by their first names.
They have a very strong arts and music curriculum. They even have a clay room and a kiln. They also have regular outdoor experiences to emphasize a connection to nature. Students stay with the same teacher and multi-aged student group for two years.
I spent a great deal of time verifying and re-verifying that this place was, in fact, a public school. That any public school system has the budget to provide such a learning environment leaves me speechless. And this, while their American neighbors are having their arts departments eliminated, their libraries censored, and are being prevented from teaching anything that might even slightly ruffle any feathers, regardless of its truth. Oh, to be Canadian.
So, there you have it: An amazing historical event, and an amazing school. It’s no wonder the teacher’s union chose this place to display their plaque. All those striking teachers are surely long gone by now, and the current teachers are very likely not paid enough to this very day, because every decent teacher is worth their weight in gold. But I’m glad those women chose to strike, because it allowed this community to educationally thrive, which in turn allows this gorgeous school to flourish.
I enjoyed learning about both the strike and the school. I hadn’t expected to learn these things when I woke up that day. I’m just glad that I had sufficient sleep the night before to have the presence of mind to cross the street to feast upon those tiny kernels of history. And what a feast it turned out to be.
Sources:
Canada’s First Teachers’ Strike: Victoria 1919
Canada’s Historic Places: South Park School
South Park School: Memories Through the Decades
Greater Victoria School District: South Park Family School
British Columbia Teachers’ Federation
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