Few other organizations in Canadian history can claim to have had such a critical impact in fighting discrimination.  Formed in 1936, the Jewish Labour Committee and the Joint Public Relations Committee (formed in 1938) of the Canadian Jewish Congress played a key role in lobbying for anti-discrimination legislation throughout Canada. 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. Kaplansky 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 Kaplansky as its leader. Such was the success of the JLC by 1960 that Frank Scott was led to state that he knew “of no single body in the whole of Canada doing as much continuous and consistent work for civil liberties.”  Another noted civil liberties lawyer in the sixties, Alan Borovoy, claimed that “every major effort to get civil rights legislation, most of the leading cases and surveys, have been organized and initiated by one of our labour committees for human rights.”

Click here for a history of the Jewish Labour Committee.

The following links are a series of posters produced by the Jewish Labour Committee for distribution in Canada. As you will note, some of the posters were designed by the American Jewish Labour Committee headquartered in New York. Click on the link to view the poster. If you have high speed internet access, you can click here to view all the posters simultaneously on a single page. Or, you can right-click the link and save the poster to your desktop and zoom-in to read the text.

• Don't Be A Jerk
• Educational Opportunities
• Stop That
• Who's a Bigot?
• The Atom Bomb Is Just A Peashooter Compared To This!
• But Who Cares?
• 'Typhod Mary' Starts Her Day
• Remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Protest

A small collection of notices for meetings and events organized by the American and Canadian Jewish Labour Committees are also available below:

• Meeting Notice 1 (28 May 1946)
• Meeting Notice 2 (19 April 1965)
• Meeting Notice 3 (19 April 1969)
• Meeting Notice 4 (9 April 1964)
• Meeting Notice 5 (19 April 1966)
• Meeting Notice 6 (19 April 1966)
• Meeting Notice 7 (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, n.d.)
• Meeting Notice 8 (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, n.d.)
• Meeting Notice 9 (19 April 1970)

Documents relating to the committee's anti-discrimination campaigns:

• Brief to the Premier of Ontario, 1961
• Case files samples, early 1950s
• "Fair Employment Practices: A Good Beginning." Flyer produced by the Jewish Labour Committee