Labour Day: All Talk, No Action From Labour or Government

UPDATE – May 24, 2019

Believe it or not, I’m pleased to have to eat my words regarding the ongoing and seemingly never-ending neglect of Morden Colliery Provincial Historic Park.

I had despaired of its ever being saved from ultimate collapse.

After more than 40 years of complete disinterest by successive administrations, the current NDP government has announced that South Wellington’s historic headframe/tipple is about to undergo a $1.4 million face-lift.

Morden’s historical significance is almost beyond calculation—a miraculously surviving example of one of the most ambitious and elaborate concrete constructions of its day (1913) when concrete was yet in its infancy. (And one of two survivors of only three in North America, all the rest having been built of timbers and later demolished or burned.).)

Visitors are struck by its gangling array of arms, legs and cross-braces that would challenge today’s expertise and technology.

I quote from an April press release from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy: “A piece of Vancouver Island’s coal mining history will be brought back to life through a $1.4-million contribution from the British Columbia government. Built in the early 1900s by the Pacific Coal Company, the 22.5-metre (74-foot) concrete headframe and tipple structure is all that remains of the Morden Colliery…near Nanaimo…

“Morden Colliery Historic Provincial Park plays an important role in educating visitors about Vancouver Island communities’ rich coal-mining history,” said George Heyman, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy. “Conserving this site preserves a unique piece of our heritage and reminds us of the people who worked in the mines.”

For years, I and the dedicated members of the Friends of the Morden Mine Society battled to win public and political support to save this iconic structure as a fitting memorial to the industry that, for 90 years, drove the Vancouver Island economy.

For all those efforts, thanks to governmental apathy, he headframe-tipple slowly, steadily deteriorated, each winter bringing down more of its essential bracing.

But—back to the good news.

At present the structure has been reinforced by stacking shipping containers beneath its most critical stress-points, and tying everything down with a network of cables. This is the prelude to more ambitious repairs which, sadly, won’t achieve the press release’s claim of “restoration” as it’s too late for that.

What we can do at this point is permanently reinforce it against seismic activity, clean it up and keep it standing for future generations to view and to, hopefully, learn something of their industrial heritage.

So no further carping from me and my best wishes and gratitude to all those who, over the years, have done their best to save Morden from ultimate destruction.

It should be noted, too, that Morden Park will be part of a multi-use trail to and across the Nanaimo River that follows the historic mining Pacific Coast Mining railway right-of-way which originally ran through what’s now Hemer Provincial Park to Boat Harbour.

The Morden Colliery Trail could well become as popular in the Nanaimo area as the Kinsol Trestle has proved itself to be in the Cowichan Valley.

Well, another Labour Day has come and gone.

And with it the usual platitudes from Labour leaders (and, this time, British Columbia Premier John Horgan) about the sacrifices of the legions of men and women who built this province through their personal sacrifices.

All of which is true, of course.
It’s still within living memory, if you’re old enough to remember, that life for the majority of Canadians was a real challenge. This was before the advent of lifetime career possibilities (an ideal which has since all but fallen by the wayside in recent decades thanks to multi-national companies), when many men and women were expected to take their lives in their hands each time they went to work.

For poor pay and few so-called benefits.

There’s no doubt that unions helped to change that. Unions, after all, are the inevitable result of workplace abuses heaped upon workers by greedy and insensitive employers, large and small.

Something none of us should forget and for which we should be grateful. Many of the improvements to what we term social justice made over the past century are thanks to Labour.

But, it seems, to me,
some unions have lost sight of the struggles of the past, other than the annual pious utterances we’ve come to expect from them each Labour Day.

Again, this is my opinion; based upon observation, they spout mostly empty rhetoric, modern-day unionists being far more concerned with increasing their pay packets and their benefits without giving anything more in return.

Where am I going with this rant?

Why, to Morden Colliery Provincial Heritage Park, of course!
That’s the century-old headframe/tipple at South Wellington, just north of the Nanaimo airport, on Morden Road, east of the Trans Canada Highway 1.

It’s the only surviving headframe/tipple in the province, one of only two surviving concrete headframe/tipples on the North American continent.

It’s the fact it’s built of concrete that has saved it all these years, no thanks to successive provincial governments which have had ownership (on behalf of the people of British Columbia) since 1974 but who have failed to spend so much as a dime to maintain the deteriorating structure

Six stories high, it’s an elaborate, ungainly looking mechanno set of reinforced concrete, built when reinforced concrete was leading-edge technology.

This has been the structure’s Achilles ehel,
the fact that it’s a pioneer effort at an extremely ambitious structure with arms and legs and bins and chutes that, even today, would be a challenge for contractors.

It has been slowly failing for the past four-plus decades of public ownership for all its formal designation as a ‘heritage’ provincial park. For 15 years or so, dedicated members of the Friends of the Morden Mine (www.mordenmine.com) have laboured to draw public attention to Morden’s deterioration and to encourage the government to fund repairs.

They finally had to settle for their second goal, a memorial to Vancouver Island coal miners and their families at the park, their being no way a volunter society could fund-raise the estimated $2.5 million to repair the structure. (Restoration of the Cowichan Valley’s world famous Kinsol Trestle cost $7.5 million, by the way, much of which the province did fund.)

But no money for Morden!
Back to Labour and my grumbling about empty rhetoric. Years ago, as a member of the FOMM, I, Eric Ricker and John Hofman made a presentation to the Ladysmith Labour Council on Morden’s behalf.

We were motivated by the foolish notion that Labour would see, as we did, that the headframe/tipple (with an interpretation centre to explain its meaning and relevance) was the perfect metaphor not just for coal miners but for all working men and women, by emphasizing the dramatic changes which have been achieved in work conditions and workplace safety.

I, the dedicatd speaker, was given 10 (count ’em) minutes to address the council. And while I, as quickly as I could, tried to explain all this, I saw the chairman glaring at me while he tapped his watch to remind me of my time limit.

Two years later, at the annual Miners’Day event in Nanaimo, the same council begrudgingly granted me a second opportunity to appeal for Morden’s restoration as a symbol of working conditions long improved, at individual sacrifices, by the labour movement.

My window: 10 minutes!
Then I approched the United Steelworkers who now represent professional mine workers in the province. Other than a polite acknowlegement of my emails, nada.

So much for Labour’s concerns with the conditions and abuses of the old days which have been corrected by legions of unsung men and women in the Labour movement—and by which today’s unionists, you and I, benefit.

Other than passing mention of the sacrifices of brothers and sisters of the past, each Labour Day. But there’s no walking the talk, in my mind, and it shows in the continually deteriorating state of the poor old headframe/tipple at Morden.
Who better to champion its salvation than Labour?

As for Premier Horgan, head of the labour-leaning New Democratic Party, he bragged about his government having restored pioneer labour leader Ginger Goodwin’s name to a stretch of highway in the Cumberland area.

Well and good. But his government, now a year old, has shown no interest in Morden despite the fact its regional MLAs have attended every publicity event the FOMM managed over the past decade and have publicly encouraged us in our efforts.

Again, I’m sorry to say, it’s been all talk and no action.
Which is why I view the Labour Day speeches and write-ups by Labour leaders to be just blathering, just obligatory crumbs of recognition of what has been a truly glorious struggle by their predecessors to improve workplace conditions and safety, and to achieve other needed social goals.

Ginger Goodwin was a hero and should be recognized and honoured.

But so should Morden Colliery Provincial Park which symbolizes not just the historic coal mining industry of Vancouver Island but all the often brutal workplaces of old.

I’ll go on, trying to generate public support for Morden’s restoration through my writings, for what that’s worth. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for Labour or Government to honour our history by preserving it.