° : SY Rae: ee LEFT: The bulldozer which police inspector John MacDonald ordered to crash the picket line of Corbin miners and their wives. RIGHT: Eight of the women injured in aa Or set inns 5 ee = ca the attack, pose outside the miners’ shacks. Produced by a photograph studio in ‘There was terror in Corbin. . . By SEAN GRIFFIN or two years the existence of the = new open pit mine had smould- ered like anger beneath their mounting grievances, and now, suddenly, on this bitter April day, they were marching, 250 of them, on the narrow mountain ledge which led to the mine. Their wives were with them as they tramped nervously in the snow. Facing their picket line were more than 60 Provincial Police, some of them recruited from detachments several hundred miles away. Behind the police, hanging back, were a number of scabs. But it was the sound which dominated ing else: the ominous rum- ble of a bulldozer, purportedly there to ‘“‘clear the snow’’ along the ledge leading to the.mine, but now waiting, its blade poised, before the picketing miners and their wives. The day was April 17, 1935. The town was Corbin, named after the Spokane coal and railway magnate who had been given the rich coal concession as the price for a Kootenay rail line. The Corbin Miners Association, a local of the militant Mine Workers Union of Canada, had struck Jan. 20 to protest the discriminatory firing of the union secretary, John Press. There were other grievances: the demand for a man-irip to carry the miners the 2,200 feet down into the No. 6 mine, and the desperate need for repairs to company housing. Ina letter to George Pearson, the provincial labor minister, Press and the president of the CMA, John Falconer, wrote that the housing conditions in Corbin ‘‘are unbearable for anybody tolivein.”” Beneath the immediate issues, as even deputy labor minister Adam Bell was forced to concede later, was the introduction in 1933 of open-pit mining. That year, Corbin Collieries began operating its “Big Showing”’ and at the same time began curtailing its underground operations, threatening miners’ jobs. But unlike 1933 when the union had succeeded in compelling the company to do the necessary repair work to allow: continued underground mining, Corbin Col- lieries, in 1935, was determined to force the MWUC out. In that aim, the government of Liberal premier Duff Pattullo fully concurred. Several months later, in reference to the Corbin strike, he would declare, ‘“There is a great deal of Communistic propaganda circulating in British Columbia . . .”’ The audacity and courage of the MWUC and the Workers Unity League — to which it was affiliated — in calling strikes in the face of wage cuts and mass unemployment was all the proof he needed. Only the year before, the Pro- vincial Police had invaded the near- by town of Michel as the MWUC marked May Day with a huge pic- nic. All the time the hundreds of people celebrated, the police wat- ched them — along the barrel of a machine gun hidden in a barn. To premier Pattullo the strike at Corbin was linked to ‘Com- munistic propagan- da.’ The audacity of the Mine Workers in calling strikes in the face of wage cuts was, for him, proof. For three months, the strike had continued, with only letters to and - from the labor ministry breaking the silence. But from Apr. 15, events moved swiftly. On that day, Tom Uphill, the independent MLA for Fernie, who had in- tervened. to help get a settlement, announced that a tentative agree- ment had been worked out between the MWUC and local mine management. But, in a pattern that would be followed many times by other U.S. corporations, Corbin Collieries wired from its head office in Spokane, vetoing the agreement. It’s answer was to open the ‘‘Big Showing’’ with scabs. Attorney-general Gordon Sloan ordered Provincial Police sent into the town under the command of Inspector John MacDonald. And now on this April morning, the miners were facing them, their picket lines astride the ledge that led to the mine. From their ranks, the women formed themselves into a line, tak- ing up a position at the head of the picket. Suddenly, the bulldozer roared ’ and lurched forward, crashing into the line, pushing the picketers before it. Within seocnds, the legs of several women had been crushed and one women was dragged 300 feet before the blade pushed her aside. In retailiation for the brutal at- tack, the miners seized rocks to force the bulldozer operator to a half. In the pitched battle, more PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MAY 2, 1980—Page 12 than 75 people were injured, only 14 of them police. And Inspector MacDonald’s forces moved in in its aftermath to seize and. arrest 17 strikers including the president and secretary of the union. For three days, they were held in a jail intend- ed to hold two people. But the mine remained closed. The effect on workers through- out the province, for whom the brutal crushing of strikes and po- lice repression under the infamous Section 98 of the Criminal Code was becoming an ominous pattern, was immediate — and electric. The B.C. Workers News which had only begun publishing three months before, denounced it as “‘a murderous attack by the police in assisting a gang of Spokane ex- ploiters.”’ The Fernie and District Unemployed Association declared, “It is odious to us as Canadians... that the Provincial Police is at the beck and call of a foreign corpora- tion. . .” : In Vancouver, the long- shoremen who shut down the port May 1, made support for the Cor- bin miners as well as support for the striking relief camp workers the call of their militant action. Miners at Cumberland echoed the protest with their 24-hour strike May 1. In Blairmore, Alberta, some 30 . kilometres distant and the never centre of the MWUC, the events of April 17 ignited a spark of anger. Drawn from the miners and the unemployed and headed by MWUC organizer Harvey Mur- phy, a march of several hundred covered the 15 kilometres to the Crows Nest Pass with the mount- ains around them echoing Joe Hill’s Pie in the Sky and the Red At Crowsnest, on the border, the RCMP barred the way. With a Lewis gun trained on them, the marchers negotiated a compromise: a ten-member delegation, headed by Murphy, would be.escorted into Corbin. When they arrived, the reign of terror had already been dropped like a pall over the town. The day after the police attack on the strikers, RCMP reinforcements had been brought up from Lethbridge. And as the B.C. Workers’ News reported, “‘Martial law has been imposed in Corbin. Police have sealed off the town.” Harvey Murphy described the scene: ‘There was terror in Corbin .. . When we got there we found the town locked up. The doctor was out of medicine and all kinds of people were hurt . . . there was just this narrow roadway and the police nearby Blairmore, the photos w Canada to gather support for the Corbin strike. a SR sea had this wired. That’s why the doc- tor was out of medicine for these injured women. They were locked in and the RCMP was in charge with this bar. And it was only when we got through that we got those people out of their houses.”’ Throughout the Crows Nest Pass area, the government and police tightened the grip. Newspapers reported Apr. 20 that John Stokoluk, president of the MWUC had been kidnapped in Michel. Several days later the homes in the town were raided, with more arrests made under Sec- tion 98, and literature seized. In an effort to end the terror and settle the strike Murphy, two Cor- bin miners, Jim Dornan and Dan Iyasiuk, and Tom Uphill went to Victoria Apr. 23 to put the issues directly before the government. But Sloan dismissed the charge of police brutality and abuse of police power as ‘‘sheer nonsense.”’ In the labor ministry, the response was only slightly better, as Pearson assigned his deputy sie AN ER RNC Bt ere circulated widely by the Mine Workers Union of | ig AP iL DZ, 1935. ‘ or 3Aays re = ft. Cells, ~ . The 17 miners arrested following the police attack on the picket line and held for three days in the two-man jail. Bes | minister Adam Bell, to go to Ch bin and meet with the two sides. | His arrival in Corbin coincided with the departure from Valr couver of a six-member indepet dent commission, headed by CC# MLA Jack Price and including three trade unionists and two othe CCF MLAs. They, too, were hea ed for Corbin to investigate 0? behalf of the labor movement. | But their reports were very | ferent. | Bell, who went-via Spokane (0 confer first with the president of Corbin Collieries,. Austin Corbi, reported that the CPR which bought 60 percent of Corbin’s pro” duction, had cancelled its ordets” but added hastily, ‘They (Corbi \ Collieries) expressed a willingn¢s to try and keep the mine operating, even on the curtailed volume of business, if some satisfactory af rangement with the striking mines could be accomplished.’’ : Bell’s proposal, after what he unabashedly called ‘“‘a careful, Continued on page 13 aeeee toy — Se | r|