Just over one hundred years ago, on July 27, 1918, a disgraced former provincial police officer turned hotel owner and Dominion Police special constable shot labor pioneer Albert “Ginger” Goodwin to death in the forest outside Cumberland, British Columbia. The officer, Dan Campbell, was permitted by law to track down, but not murder, people evading conscription into the First World War. That hunt included Goodwin, a conscientious objector and pacifist. Then as now, state, quasi-state, and market power tended to get what it wanted. Goodwin’s life and death is a reminder — in the depths of a pandemic that has claimed the lives of so many workers — that the struggle for justice, at times a deadly undertaking, is an ongoing project that calls for a full-throated, uncompromising socialist politics.

Ginger Goodwin started work in the mines as a child in Yorkshire, England, before immigrating to Canada — he came first to Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and then to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. A labor leader and advocate for worker safety agitating for, among other things, the eight-hour workday, he took part in the “Big Strike” on Vancouver Island from 1912 to 1914. The movement was put down by strikebreakers and industry power, and Goodwin was blackballed. He headed to the town of Trail in the British Columbia interior, where he entered the smelting industry and ran for the provincial legislature as a candidate for the Socialist Party. He lost. But Goodwin was elected to the executive of the BC Federation of Labour, and later became president of the local of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.