Three of Edmonton's Labour Party Councillors Remembered in New Book

    Best remembered now for having a high school named after him, Harry Ainlay was a political activist of very strong convictions. A new book by local author Tom Monto retells the political life of this man and the times in which he lived.

Protest and Progress, Three Labour Radicals in Early Edmonton also chronicles the lives of Ainlay's political colleagues/sometime opponents human rights lawyer Margaret Crang and farmer organizer Rice Sheppard. 

 

The book covers Edmonton politics from the territorial-era 1890s to the Cold War of the late 1940s.

 

During these years, Sheppard helped found the UFA and saw it become the provincial government during the post-WWI labour/farmer turmoil that saw teachers get first formal union recognition, city workers engage in a general strike, and the radical One Big Union strive for legitimacy across Alberta. During this tumultuous period Ainlay helped establish the Alberta Teachers' Association and would go on to serve as ATA president in 1928-1929. At this time, he was teaching at Garneau School, where one of his students was Margaret Crang, a member of a politically-active family in southside Edmonton.

Harry Ainlay, Margaret Crang and Rice Sheppard, although generations apart in age, served together on city council during the Great Depression, at a time when Labour controlled city hall. They fought side-by-side to keep streetcar fares low and fought for better treatment of the city's unemployed. But while on city council they drifted apart, Rice Sheppard to the Social Credit movement and Margaret Crang to a United Front coalition with Communists.

Crang played a leading role in the League Against War and Fascism and pursued legal redress for immigrants and political and religious dissidents under wartime “security” prohibitions. Her act of defiance on behalf of the Republican government in the Spanish Civil War caused editorial comment across Canada and contributed to her retirement from elected office at the age of 27.

Ainlay had a second stint on city council in the 1940s, first serving as alderman then mayor. He repeatedly pressed for improved people services, lower user fees and retention of public ownership of the city's utilities. Despite (or because of) his socialist sentiments, he was elected mayor in 1945, a post he served with much acclaim until his voluntary retirement in 1949. By then, in his 60s, he retired to B.C., only occasionally returning to visit the city he had led through the turbulent years of northern Alberta's first oil boom and to visit the high school that was named after him.

Protest and Progress, Three Labour Radicals in Early Edmonton, by Tom Monto, Edmonton: Crang Publishing, 450 pages, photos, illustrations, end-notes, appendices, index, soft cover, $25

 

Available at Alhambra Books, 10115 - 81 Avenue and through abebooks.com