Inequality

Must-Read Nonfiction Books for Labour Day

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

It’s Labour Day, a stat holiday for most of us, but one that few of us ever ponder the meaning of. As its name suggests, Labour Day originated as a day to honour the hard work and rights of society’s ordinary workers. This Labour Day, I thought I’d take a thematic look at books produced through the labour MFA CNF grads that pertain to labour. That said, I’ve taken a broad lens on labour that touches on diverse aspects of the way work, or the lack of it, impacts the lives of ordinary workers and their families.

A close-up of the grey-blue waves of The Atlantic Ocean on the cover of The Cooperators by Alec Bruce.

First up, Alec Bruce’s (class of 2022) The Cooperators: The Rebirth of a Nova Scotia Movement 1949-2024 (Pottersfield Press, 2024). Over the years, I’ve been involved in many cooperatives. I bank at a credit union; driven cooperatively owned cars; bought outdoor sporting goods at Mountain Equipment Co-op; and shopped for natural and organic foods for my family at a cooperatively owned grocery store.

This book honours the role of cooperatives in improving quality of life for everyday people. This is a meticulously researched book that covers the storied history of the cooperative movement in Nova Scotia beginning with its founding father, Father Moses Michael Cody. After a lull during the war years, new advocates emerged to carry the flag of the cooperative movement in Nova Scotia through a period of rebuilding to the success it’s enjoying today. Moreover, this history is interesting for anyone who’s ever used a co-op, even if they don’t live in Nova Scotia. 

In contrast, Deborah Dundas’s (class of 2023) slim volume On Class (Biblioasis 2023) looks less closely at labour than the lack of it. From a deeply personal perspective, she examines impacts of chronic un/der-employment that too many of us are quick to blame on those who are suffering. In most cases, it’s not the fault of individuals but an integral aspect of the free-market theory of capitalism. While many of us decry the injustice that has people living on the street, struggling for food, many fewer of us realize that this actually requires the existence of an economic underclass. In starkly poignant prose, Dundas describes how this theory works out in reality. Her book makes it easy for readers to see that the affluence of a few in our society rides on the backs of a much larger group of people with significantly less wealth. While most of those people are middle class and doing okay, some of them are inevitably doing much less than okay, living in tents, begging for coins at traffic lights, and scrounging food from garbage bins. As I write in my review:

The words Deborah Dundas On Class alongside a photo of worn work boots.

[T]he kind of poverty Dundas describes [is] the kind where you own only two sets of clothes and one of them is always dirty, where you can’t afford shampoo so you wash your hair with dish soap, where it’s not that you hope dinner won’t be hamburger again but that you’ll have dinner. That kind of poverty leaves its imprint well into adult life, when it reminds you over and over that you’re not worthy and you shouldn’t expect much out of life. Only a few, like Dundas, climb out of that deeply entrenched poverty, a climb that’s as much psychological as financial in that it has much less to do with pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps than believing one is just as deserving of boots as anyone else.

The Nordic countries constantly show the rest of the world that there is something better than a system that depends on the misery of a considerable percentage to sustain the financial hoarding disorders of a select few. Dundas captures the unquantifiable impacts of this economic injustice and backs it up with hard, deeply disturbing facts. 

A vividly coloured painting of a red house on the shore of a blue sea teeming with fish, with a fishing boat off shore.

Unemployment is also a theme in Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019) by Jenn Thornhill Verma (class of 2019). Verma braids memoir with history in describing what life was like on “The Rock” for centuries before 1992. That was when the tragic overfishing of cod off Newfoundland’s Grand Banks resulted in a moratorium that put 30,000 cod fishers out of work overnight. Cod fishing had sustained thousands of families for a few centuries before the province’s labourers were plunged into an unprecedented level of poverty. And that’s saying something about a place where the grinding life of work at sea sustained whole families in one-room cabins without plumbing or central heating for many decades.

Yet many people loved that life as much as they love the rugged beauty of their island home, a place where jagged cliffs drop straight down to water so cold it can kill a human in minutes, a place where spring and summer are enlivened by whales spouting, puffins nesting, and icebergs floating by. Grounded in historical research brought to life by vivid, personal memories, Cod Collapse is a powerful read about what happens when the population of an entire island is forced change the way it works and lives overnight.  

A photograph of individual flowers and leaves arrayed against a white background with the title The Times of Time A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons and the author's name, Suzanne Stewart, in a font with a quaint, old-timey feel.

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2018) by Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) allows us to finish our review on a more optimistic note. Stewart take an imaginative look at the labour that sustains us—the work of food production. Dividing her book into four parts, one for each season, she focuses each month on the characteristics of that season, like fall colours in October and the heat of summer in July. Then, for each month, she visits and interviews one of the people whose work produces wholesome, natural, delicious food that reaches peak production at that time of year.

A professor of Romantic literature at St. FX, Stewart punctuates her lyric essays with quotes from Keats, Wordsworth (both William and Dorothy), and Thoreau. The result, to me, is a soothing read, a story to take in while curled up in a rocking chair by a fire on a fall evening or sipping an espresso on a patio on a Sunday morning. There is no labour in getting through these chapters, no rush to meet a deadline. The Tides of Time is just a leisurely stroll through the seasons while celebrating the unsung heroes of all our lives, the labourers who literally “give us our daily bread.” And that, after all, is what Labour Day is about.

These books look at labour from many dimensions, helping us understand and appreciate the ordinary people who make our lives possible, and often delightful. Take some time this Labour Day to consider which of these books, or many others, you might read to gain a better appreciation of the labourers we celebrate today, including those authors who have laboured so hard to produce these wonderful and informative examples of creative nonfiction writing.

The Power of Cooperatives: Alec Bruce’s Insights into the Cooperative Movement in Nova Scotia

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I’ve done my banking at a credit union since the late 1980s. I used to belong to Modo, a cooperative carsharing enterprise. I’ve found some of the best prices on organic produce at a cooperative grocery store. Many friends live in cooperative housing, an option I might pursue as I get older. 

Book cover titled 'The Co-operators: Rebirth of a Nova Scotia Movement 1949-2024' by Alec Bruce, featuring a background of ocean waves.

I believe in the power of cooperative ventures. So, when I saw the title of Alec Bruce’s (class of 2022) book, The Cooperators: The People Behind the Rebirth of a Nova Scotia Movement 1949–2024, it tweaked my interest. 

Corporate histories are generally commissioned by the companies whose histories they recount and are meant to be read by people who have an interest in that company. Like any other corporate history, Bruce’s book was commissioned (by the Cooperative Council of Nova Scotia). But a book about a cooperative movement is inherently different because cooperatives are inherently different.

The history of any cooperative venture is more than the story of an individual’s rise from rags to riches because it’s the history of a philosophy made manifest. Cooperatives came into being out of a belief that when people who are underserved by conventional institutions come together with purpose, their joint venture can not only serve them but others like them—people who are not wealthy and generally have no desire to be, people who just want fair shake in a world that often ignores them. 

When I look briefly at other cooperative histories, I see similar things: many of them started in the early 1900s, were driven by the efforts of a passionate few, may have gone through a period of decline, but have come back to life in the last few decades and are defying the belief that business can only be successful if it lacks heart and human interest. 

As Father Moses Michael Coady, the father of Nova Scotia’s cooperative movement, said, 

“It has been said that credit supports the borrower the way a rope supports the hanged. Many an unfortunate debtor has found this to be true. One of the chief arguments that proponents of private business advance against the co-operative system is that they give credit while the co-operative does not. They feel that after they have ‘carried’ so many people for such a long time, it is ungrateful of the people to seek to establish their own business.”

Poppycock, he said. It’s not ungrateful to want to house, feed, and clothe your family on your own terms. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, credit is in the eye of the lender. If the lender is of sound moral character, invested both in his own and his community’s welfare, there’s nothing wrong with it. A credit union, he said, is perfectly designed to help people get out of the messes private businesses had put them in.

This has been my experience of all types of cooperatives: credit unions (the one I use in Vancouver and the one my brother uses in Toronto), cooperative associations that deliver weekly bins of organic produce at reasonable prices, cooperative housing for people who need housing security but can’t buy a house. 

The place for cooperatives in our society these days, where costs seem to be perpetually spiralling out of control, is almost limitless. I’ve patronized many cooperatively run worker -owned businesses, which give workers a real sense of investment in where they make their living. I’ve read about the power of cooperative structures lifting people in the majority world (a term I prefer to more value-laden terms like “third world” and “developing world) out of what seemed like hopeless poverty.

To me, this has always seemed like a brilliant idea, and Alec Bruce has done an admirable job of sharing the history of Nova Scotia’s cooperative movement in a way that can benefit anyone with an interest in exploring the coop philosophy—and maybe starting a coop of their own. 

For more Canadian history, check out:

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid

Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, by Jenn Thornhill Verma

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey

Poverty Awareness Month: Thoughts on Deborah Dundas’s “On Class”

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

January is Poverty Awareness Month in Canada, so for what’s left of this month (now that I’m back from my blogging holiday) I’m focusing on awareness-raising books. The first is Deborah Dundas’s (class of 2023) slim volume, On Class (Biblioasis, 2023). At just 35,000 words, it’s more like the “pamphlets” that were once distributed to share burgeoning social and political ideas than a book that, given its subject matter, could easily be twice its size.

Cover of the book 'Deborah Dundas on Class', featuring worn-out boots and a sunburst design.

Poverty is a singular experience. My parents both experienced it as children in single-parent homes during The Great Depression. My mother and her mother worked as maids for a wealthy family in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s “old money” neighbourhood. When their employers had chicken for supper, the staff had eggs—”chicken in the shell,” they called it. The nights my mom and hers had dinner at home, my Gran would get a free soup bone at the butcher (it was going to go into the garbage) and two day-old muffins at the bakery. Their supper would be a bowl of beef broth with a muffin. 

My father quit school at the age of fifteen, a few years after his father died, to support his mother and younger brother as an errand boy, finishing high school at night. When WWII broke out, he joined the Air Force, dreaming of a career as a commercial pilot that would lift him and his family out of poverty. That dream was shattered along with his left leg when his plane was shot down just after D Day and he was left with a permanent disability that precluded flying. 

My family didn’t have a lot when we were children—second-hand clothes and used cars—but my mother could stretch a dime into a dollar at the grocery store, and my parents managed to buy a house in a suburban community outside of Toronto. Mom bartered with music and dance teachers so we could have lessons, and we had home-grown birthdays and Christmases, and camping trips in the summer in a tent trailer my father built. 

My ex-husband and I struggled during our two older children’s early lives when our after-tax income generally left us hovering just above Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off (LICO). But (for reasons that were far from fortunate but that I won’t go into) we owned a townhouse and a car and my husband had a steady job with benefits. My mother was able to help us out occasionally (my father had died when I was sixteen); after she died, my siblings and I each received a modest inheritance, which also helped.

But while each generation faced hardships, none of this is like the poverty Dundas describes. My parents’ poverty was what literally the whole world was experiencing at the time. As a child growing up in a family of modest means, I never felt singled out among my friends, whose families struggled as ours did. And the main thing that singled my children out from their classmates was that they had life-threatening food allergies and asthma at a time when this was still unusual. 

This is an entirely different experience than the kind of poverty Dundas describes, the kind where you own only two sets of clothes and one of them is always dirty, where you can’t afford shampoo so you wash your hair with dish soap, where it’s not that you hope dinner won’t be hamburger again but that you’ll have dinner. That kind of poverty leaves its imprint well into adult life, when it reminds you over and over that you’re not worthy and you shouldn’t expect much out of life. Only a few, like Dundas, climb out of that deeply entrenched poverty, a climb that’s as much psychological as financial in that it has much less to do with pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps than believing one is just as deserving of boots as anyone else. 

I volunteered with an anti-poverty activist group for a time when my children were young and the most powerful thing I learned is that true poverty exists as much in the mind as in the wallet or the bank. That’s a point that too many middle-class people don’t grasp and one that Dundas talks about candidly and compassionately without ever being maudlin or melodramatic. The following passage exemplifies this (links added):

Eric Walters and I are sitting on a patio in Corso Italia, a neighbourhood just east of Old Weston Road [in Toronto], the poorer part, now gentrifying, the part where Walters grew up with responsibilities no young kid should have to shoulder: his mother died when he was four years old; his father’s mental illness would drive him to disappear for days at a time; his older sister left that toxic situation as soon as she could, and Walters had to fend for himself. 

He became the “King of Jam Sandwiches”—also the title of his Governor General’s Award-winning children’s book. While his books for young people range in topic from math to the space race, it wasn’t until he was older that he was able to write the one that won him that GG. The King of Jam Sandwiches is a novel, but it was his story: A book about class, about growing up in a neighbourhood with economic challenges, working class, without many prospects. About the daily indignities of growing up poor—about counting cans of food to see how long you might be able to feed yourself if your dad didn’t come back and there was no money to buy more. And it was about wanting something more out of life. 

He didn’t write that book while he was young, he says, because “I wanted to get published.” He wrote plenty of stories that editors were willing to publish and did—dozens of them. This story went unwritten as Walters did what most of us who were poor and ambitious do: he tried to fly under the radar and fit in. When he finally wrote a story about poor kids, he was told by the editor that the character wasn’t believable. “He sounds too grown up,” he recalls being told. Walters’ reply? Of course he does—he’d had to grow up fast. To this editor, though, that translated into not being “relatable” for most kids. 

But Walter’s story isn’t unusual. We try to fit in partly out of fear that people will decide we don’t belong, that we’re outsiders, the them to their us—we don’t have the power to influence the decision. When belonging includes people in positions of power who determine whether you’re going to get a job or who determine whether your book is going to get published, then fitting in matters. …

To this day, Walters still counts cans in his pantry. 

This book is an easy read because it’s short and it’s written at a reading level and in a voice most readers can relate to. It’s a difficult read because it’s so stark and so true. Above all, it’s an indispensable read because, to broadly paraphrase Lilla Watson, the Australian Aboriginal activist, only when we recognize that other people’s oppression is tied to our own will we be able to work together to liberate one another. 

Books that touch on issues of class and poverty:

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest, by Helena Moncrieff

No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe

The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, by Gwen Lamont