Here goes the first posting for The Father Space. I figured I better go first. I hope the rest of you are thinking about submitting. Comments on writing welcome. Cheers! Colleen
My Father's Faith
My father remains an enigma. He died twenty-six years ago at a time before I had the lexicon or courage to ask the questions I would ask today. The things I think I know about him are unformed and contradictory. His staunch support of human rights versus the cruel way he treated my mother, for example. He’s been a tough guy to figure out.
But every family has its legends. Stories told and retold by older ones to younger ones who listen with rapt attention, understanding what they are able, the facts retained to greater or lesser degree based on this understanding. There is such a legend about my father. It is the one thing about him that I am truly proud. This is how I remember it.
My father was a labour organizer in the 40s and 50s in the dirty mining towns of Northern Ontario and Quebec. It must have been a tough go in those primarily-Catholic communities at a time when the Church was anti-union. Priests would preach against the organization of workers from their pulpits and, pettily, not allow the men – for it would have been men back then – use of the chairs belonging to the diocese for their meetings. This was the final straw that drove my father from the Church – its stance on keeping people in poverty and under Church control, not its pigheadedness about chair usage. However, this story isn’t about his change in faith, but about his ideals.
By the late 1950s, and, I imagine, having grown very tired of the Church’s thrall over his constituency, my father left the North and became the director of the textile union in Toronto. The Textile Workers Union of America it was then; I’m not sure if that is still what it’s called. Working in the sweatshops of the textile industry, as you may know, is one of the worst jobs a person can have. It was a time when women were paid at a different – and lower rate – than men. It was a time when few of the labour standards that we take for granted today were in place.
It was a time when, exactly like today, union reps vote for their wage increases. Increases that are borne by the men and women who pay union dues.
In about 1963 – I believe I was four when this happened – the representatives of the textile union voted themselves a raise. It was a raise that my father believed the workers couldn’t afford. As director, he had the power to veto the raise and he did. Another cast of ballots was called and my father was voted out of power.
The guy with the ideals of equality and caring for your fellow man was out of work.
And so, he turned to his friends for help. Powerful friends who he had helped get elected turned their backs, couldn’t remember his name.
In anger, I suspect, my father took the union to court. I’m not clear whether wrongful dismissal was even on the books back then, but whatever the charges were, my father filed them then represented himself against the union lawyers.
My father won.
The judge told him he should have been a lawyer. The French kid from Northern Ontario with the high school diploma.
The union had to reinstate my father. He told them to go fuck themselves and walked away.
He changed his job and began negotiating on the side of management in the steel and then pulp-and-paper industries. He often set records in settling traditionally-difficult contracts. He changed his politics and began working on Liberal campaigns with the same fervour he had once devoted to the New Democratic Party.
My father first left the Church for his socialist beliefs. When these ideals did him in, I wonder at the personal cost he must have paid. I’ll never know.
Maybe this is a story about faith after all.
