An analysis of how labor relations in small-town Ontario sustained Canada’s National Policy program through silence, sacrifice, and paternalism.

Former Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s National Policy—a late nineteenth-century program of protective tariffs and industrial development—was meant to foster the domestic production of consumer goods and, in the process, ensure steady jobs at good wages. In reality, however, in small towns like Renfrew, Ontario, women workers labored for unconscionably low wages, and men worked staggeringly long hours. They suffered largely in silence, their exploitation hidden by a myth of small-town community that denied their class standing.

In Small Town Deal, Peter Campbell brings to life the untold story of how small-town workers in the Renfrew Woollen Mills both benefited from and were exploited by a National Policy that survived on their unseen labor and silent sacrifices. The “small town deal” depended on workers being seen but not heard, all while employers maintained labor harmony through paternalistic ideals and practices. Focusing on Catholic owners and Catholic workers, this book introduces a different Ontario, one in which the Catholic Church played a key role in fostering worker acceptance of their class standing. Campbell details both the heyday of this moral economy and the many challenges it faced: a 1937 strike, the company union, the arrival of the Textile Workers Union of America, and, finally, the dismantling of the woolen textile industry in the postwar economic order. Though the era of the National Policy and the small town deal is gone, the struggles and contributions of these workers resonate with labor histories across North America.