Labour Against Austerity: Lessons from the OPSEU and Hamilton strikes of 1996

From December 11, 1995, through all of 1996 and 1997, until coming to an end in the summer of 1998, eleven one-day general strikes and “days of action” were mounted in major cities throughout Ontario – Canada’s biggest province and heart of its manufacturing sector. These protests were sparked by the so-called “Common Sense Revolution” associated with Conservative Premier Mike Harris, elected to office in 1995. Harris has long since passed from the political scene. But in 2018, the very conservative Doug Ford became premier of Ontario, re-elected in 2022, and he is reading from the same playbook as Harris, feeding the illusion that cuts to services, attacks on unions, and reductions in the public sector, will be “good” for the people of the province. Harris was wrong about this in the 1990s, and Ford is equally wrong in the 21st century.
The Days of Action protests were formally cancelled by the Executive Board of the Ontario Federation of Labour in August 1998, and Harris went on to win a second majority in 1999. Was a different outcome possible? More than a decade ago, I suggested that there were three watershed moments, where the Days of Action movement could have been the springboard for a breakthrough in the fight against the Tories, perhaps even to a wider, province-wide general strike – and that analysis still seems accurate. The first such moment was the Hamilton Days of Action, February 23 and 24, 1996, which occurred just hours prior to the launch of a massive strike against the Tories, under the banner of the Ontario Provincial Employees Union (OPSEU). Simply by virtue of its enormous scale, the Toronto outpouring in October was the second. Finally, the third and most significant moment was without question the two-week illegal teachers’ strike, from October 27 to November 7, 1997 – extremely popular with students and parents. That strike posed in thousands of activists’ minds the need for, and the possibility of mounting solidarity strikes to a) ensure victory for the teachers and b) bring wider layers into struggle against austerity and against the Tories.
This paper will look at the first of these three “lost opportunities” – the Hamilton general strike of Feb. 1996 and the OPSEU strike which followed shortly thereafter.