Want to learn about what it was like to build one of Edmonton’s skyscrapers without a safety harness, or the work it took to rebuild a family after a tragic run-in with scarlet fever?
This collection features stories like these about the history of labour in Edmonton. Our writers will be exploring the work that Edmontonians have done in television, construction, making food, and much more.
Previously, ECAMP presented a story from an A-Channel employee who decided to cross the picket line during the 2003-4 strike. Adrian Pearce – a cameraman who helped lead the strike – submitted this response. Read what the strike was like for workers who held the line for 166 days.
When Sunwapta Broadcasting first produced local television in Edmonton in 1954, CFRN aimed daytime programs at the homemaker audience. Laura Banks was the popular face of this programming from 1955-1968, under the stage name Laura Lindsay. Decades after her death, she remains well-loved by women who tuned in for her sewing and cooking demonstrations and celebrity interviews.
The Alberta Penitentiary operated on Edmonton’s River Lot 20 from 1906 – 1920, where Clarke Stadium is today. It was the first federal prison in Alberta. One constant in prisoners’ lives was unpaid hard labour, from mining coal to farming potatoes.
In 1932, Edmonton had the best women’s basketball team in the world: the Edmonton Commercial Graduates. But it looked like they’d have to miss a charity game that May in Calgary – they’d never be able to get there in time after work. Until, that is, the Grads’ coach rallied supporters to strap some seats into the back of two little aircraft and make history.
In 1853, a group of voyageurs shipping furs from Fort Edmonton put down their oars in solidarity with one of their crew members. It was an early murmuring of organized labour in the West: not quite a strike, not quite a mutiny, but very much a show of strength and unity.
Women like Emma Minde joined Homemakers’ Clubs to overcome isolation by doing work like sewing, canning, and charity drives together. Indian Affairs required its approval to start these clubs though, and used them to monitor members’ activities.
How do you calculate the hole left behind when a loved one dies? In this story, Terrence Adams sorts through the legacy of their uncle, Larry Svenson. Svenson worked for the Government of Alberta, using health data to ask big questions like whether it was possible to predict the peak of flu season.
An inside look at the 2003-2004 strike at A-Channel Edmonton. “The strike dragged on through the fall and into the winter,” writes John Vandenbeld. “I both wanted it to end and feared its conclusion, knowing that I’d have to work with these people again.”
In the early 1920s, a resolute woman named Maud Bowman set out to start the Edmonton Museum of Arts – today’s Art Gallery of Alberta. Bowman was a somewhat unconventional model of a female museum leader. Her work is even more remarkable given the sexism she faced.
During the early days of the Covid pandemic, I thought of my Métis great-great-great-grandmother, and the loss of three of her young children to scarlet fever in Edmonton in May 1845.
The people who did the most dangerous jobs constructing the skyscrapers in downtown Edmonton in the 1960s and 1970s were almost all Metis ironworkers. That included the CN Tower.
Velva Hueston moved to Edmonton with her mother in the early 1920s, after her father died in the 1918 flu…
Imrie House is unassuming. It is an older home, modest in size, tucked away at the end of a treed…
One hundred years ago my father stepped onto Canadian soil for the first time. It wasn’t until he passed away…
My journey towards becoming an educator started in my childhood with time spent under a mango tree at my home…
“The government can make all the laws they want, but they can’t stop people from going on strike… You could…
Rambling up the steep paths of the Whitemud Creek cutbank, a view of Rainbow Valley Park appears along with the…
High above the rooftops, the iron giants balance and shimmy along beams, attaching one piece of strategically placed steel after…