For a country so perennially obsessed with contemplating its identity, Canada has a remarkable way of forgetting its past. I don’t think I ever read or heard about Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in public school. Winnipeg’s historic general strike may have appeared somewhere in the footnote of a textbook, but it never got a fulsome treatment of any kind. Much the same might be said about the 1970 debate over the War Measures Act, which effectively suspended civil liberties and is now mostly officially remembered through a famous clip of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pithily defending the move to a journalist on the steps of Parliament.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that my elementary and high school curriculums also omitted the pivotal Oshawa strike of 1937 — which not only ended in a victory for workers at its General Motors plant but also helped give birth to industrial unionism in Canada. Class conflict rarely fits neatly into official narratives, and the sixteen-day strike was about as pure an instance of it as you could possibly imagine.

Oshawa, then a town of roughly twenty-five thousand, had experienced a particularly bitter Great Depression. Throughout the 1930s, General Motors frequently laid off thousands of workers and cut the wages of those who remained. As one worker later put it: