Oshawa is a small Canadian city on the shoreline of Lake Ontario. It was also the hometown of the late left-wing Canadian politician Ed Broadbent, who would go on to become the national chairman of the New Democratic Party, or NDP.

In Broadbent’s youth, a major employer in Oshawa was a glass manufacturer called Duplate, Ltd. When the Duplate plant closed in the 1960s, Broadbent was disturbed. Several decades later, in his book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality, Broadbent recalled the way the incident influenced his thinking about workers’ rights:

As I recall, there were about 300 workers directly affected by the management’s decision to relocate their Oshawa plant to another part of the province — and when you included their family members and the impact on neighbouring companies, the number of people actually affected by the closure was around 1200 in total. . . .  So here you had hundreds of workers, some of whom had invested 30 or 40 years of their lives in Duplate, being profoundly affected by a decision they had played absolutely no part in — and a profitable company that packed up and moved just to make higher profits. . . .  Their human dignity was denied outright.