Few other organizations in Canadian history can claim to have had such a critical impact in battling discrimination across the country as the Jewish Labour Committee (JLC). The network of human rights committees established by the JLC were extremely active locally in using the press and various pressure tactics to discourage acts of discrimination. The history of the JLC also offers a useful introduction to the important role played by organized labour in the human rights movement.

Formed in 1936, the JLC and it’s rival, the Joint Public Relations Committee (formed in 1938) of the Canadian Jewish Congress, were front runners in the push for anti-discrimination legislation in Ontario.Kalmen Kaplansky, a polish-born Jew who was a member of the International Typographical Workers’ Union, was the JLC’s executive director for combating racial discrimination in the labour movement and was instrumental in the formation of the Joint Labour Committees to Combat Racial Discrimination in Toronto, Windsor, Montreal, Vancouver and Winnipeg. The Joint Public Relations Committee and the JLC, initially competitors, joined forces in 1947 under the Joint Advisory Committee on Labour Relations with equal funding and executive members from the Joint Public Relations Committee and the JLC, and with Kaplansky as its leader. Each of the labour committees held an annual Race Institute conference, a conference promoting tolerance among workers in unions, and distributed pamphlets and networked with various other bodies like the Canadian Association for Adult Education.

The decline of the National Committee on Human Rightswas linked with the parallel disintegration of the JLC. Since the JLC had combined the human rights work of the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Jewish Congress in the 1950s to combat discrimination, the activities of labour and the JLC were intimately connected. Such was the success of the JLC by 1960 that Frank Scott was led to state he knew “of no single body in the whole of Canada doing as much continuous and consistent work for civil liberties.” With operations in five urban areas by 1959 (Vancouver, Winnipeg, Windsor, Toronto and Montreal) the JLC had a large network of rights associations. For most of the 1960s the JLC-CJC alliance remained a powerful force in the slowly evolving human rights movement and was the closest manifestation in the country to a national rights association.

JLC activists were involved in some of the most comprehensive anti-discrimination campaigns in Canada. In Montreal, the United Council for Human Rights (the JLC’s local labour committee) badgered the provincial government continually to pass a provincial bill of rights. In 1962, Alan Borovoy, the head of the JLC’s operations in Ontario, was dispatched to Halifax where he helped form a new JLC committee to fight for fair compensation for the impoverished black residents of Africville who were being forcibly relocated by the municipal government. The JLC’s program of action in the 1960s included “dispatching staff to certain areas to help create an indigenous organization among the impoverished racial minority and to develop with them a program of social action related to the problems as they see them.” Africville represented one of the most blatant examples of racial segregation in Canada and, alongside the JLC’s work in organizing natives (particularly in Ontario), the initiative was consistent with the group’s desire to help empower minorities to fight discrimination and defend their interests. The most committee for Human Rights. In his time with the Ontario committee Borovoy resolved dozens of cases of discrimination across the province, and organized a large number of surveys to highlight cases of discrimination.

By the early 1970s the work of organized labour and the JLC was eclipsed by a burgeoning number of rights associations following the creation of new groups surrounding International Year for Human Rights and the maturing of rights associations created in the early 1960s. None of the labour committees were active after 1972 and, although the JLC national committee was revived in the late 1970s, it was a shadow of its former self. The JLC was effectively moribund by the mid-1970s and the NCHR, whose main activity was consulting the CLC executive and supporting the JLC, followed the latter into obscurity.

Primary documents on the Jewish Labour Committee.