Ed Seymour
July 30, 1940 – February 22, 2025
The Canadian labour movement lost a dedicated, inspiring, and much loved union advocate and labour historian on February 22, 2025. Ed Seymour will particularly be remembered by Alberta labour activists for his crucial role in communicating to the world the plight of striking Gainers workers in 1986. Striking UFCW workers brought in Ed at the beginning of the strike because he had the marketing and communication skills needed to help in their fight against the efforts of Peter Pocklington and Leo Bolanes to break their union.
Ed’s formidable, integrity-based leadership helped maintain the solidarity of meatpacking workers faced with a vicious employer attack and to attract national and global worker support for the strike with campaigns that led to a contract after six difficult months. During that period, Ed was instrumental in organizing a successful national boycott of Gainers products led by a team of strikers who were dispatched all across Canada. A simple button, “Gainers makes Wieners with Scabs,” resonated with many. His “Adopt a Child” campaign involved unions and individuals across the country stepping up to fulfil gift wishes that Christmas expressed in letters to Santa from the children of strikers at both Gainers and two Zeidler plywood plants.
Born in 1940 in Port Aux Basques, Newfoundland, Ed moved with his family shortly after the war to Sydney on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. After high school, he moved to Galt, Ontario, where Ed’s work brought him into the trade union movement as a member of Lodge 1246 of the International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers. He and his wife raised five children while Ed, apart from continuing to work full-time, earned a BA at the University of Waterloo. He combined his passion for the labour movement and his education in 1970 with a 7-year stint as Canadian Education and Policy Director for the Textile Workers Union of America. His next role was as national representative for the Communications Workers of America. From 1986 onwards, he worked as a consultant to unions and a union-nominated arbitrator, while participating actively in labour movement causes and social causes more generally. A true social justice warrior, he was particularly passionate in his efforts to learn all he could about Canada’s shameless history of colonialism and genocide with regards to our Indigenous peoples and to espouse the need for restitution to First Peoples as part of reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous people. Active in the NDP, he ran as a federal candidate in Fergus, Ontario, in 1968, when the party was led by Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare. He worked with such stalwarts of the labour movement as Caesar Chavez, Steven Lewis, and Ed Broadbent.
Ed’s desire to inspire workers informed his labour histories. First, he produced An Illustrated History of Canadian Labour, which the Canadian Labour Congress published in 1976. Then, in 1996, he published The Carpenter’s Union in Canada: Looking Back with Pride, Looking Forward with Vision, and in 2003, Illuminating the Past, Brightening the Future: An Illustrated History, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 353, 1903-2003. At the time of his death, Ed was working on a masterly account of the Gainers strike that is about 1000 pages long. He was in the process of editing the book before he died.
In his later years, Ed taught labour history at McMaster University. He also donated his papers to that university.
Ed changed the lives of many by identifying strengths that they did not realize in themselves.
If I could use only one word to describe, Ed it would be “true.” He truly loved and valued his family, friends, and standing up for the rights of the workers.
Ed, you left the campground better than you found it!!
Rest in peace, my friend.
In solidarity and love,
Renee Peevey, Edmonton