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Asbestos Strike — Grève de l'amiante

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Ed Sebestyen, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 16 May 1949


 



 



 



 



 
 

 
   



"The working class is a victim of a conspiracy which seeks to crush it, and when there is a conspiracy to crush the working class, the church has a duty to intervene."
                                                         Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau, 1 May 1949 
     
 
"We want social peace but we don't want the crushing of the working class. We are attached to man more than to capital. That's why the clergy has decided to intervene [in the Asbestos Strike]. It wants to have justice and charity respected and desires that there shall cease to be a situation where more attention is paid to money interests than to the human element."
                                       Joseph Charbonneau, Archbishop of Montreal, 2 May 1949





 
   
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 



 


   


"What I found [at Asbestos] . . . was a Quebec I did not know, that of workers exploited by management, denounced by government, clubbed by police, and yet burning with a fervent militancy. I was later to describe the strike . . . as a "turning point in the entire religious, political, social and economic history of the province of Quebec."
                                                  P. E. Trudeau, Approaches to Politics . 2010