A local museum is seeking help from the public to document and preserve the struggle for LGBTQ equality in the Canadian workforce.
The Workers’ History Museum, a non-profit organization founded in 2011, is a virtual museum with a main office at 251 Bank St. Run by volunteers and supported by local scholars, curators, and union leaders who serve as directors and patrons, the museum produces travelling exhibits, short films, speaker series, and other projects on labour history in the Ottawa region.
After producing a 20-minute documentary on maternity leave and family leave benefits in Canada, board member Arthur Carkner says he was inspired to delve more into how Ottawa’s LGBTQ community evolved after earning equal employee benefits.
“There isn’t anything that’s available on video that’s bringing this to the attention of the contemporary Canadian public,” says Carkner, who was a member and later employee of the Public Service Alliance of Canada for 35 years.
“We’ve done three videos so far – but what we want to know is what do people want? Is it video? Is it an exhibit? We have something we consider quite precious, but we don’t want to impose a narrative on anyone.”
One of those videos, Not Always This Way, centres on Moore v. Canada, a 1996 human rights case which allowed same-sex partners to be recognized for the same employment benefits as opposite-sex common-law partners.
Stanley Moore was a federal government employee who was posted to Jakarta, Indonesia, as an embassy counsellor for development and economics in 1990. When he was denied spousal benefits – including relocation assistance and health care costs – for his partner, Pierre Soucy, he brought his struggle to court and won.
Volunteers from the WHM interviewed Moore and Soucy for the project and have preserved the footage in its archive, but the museum is looking to document more stories.
Paul Harrison is one of those volunteers working to preserve labour history as the museum’s image collection manager. A former public service employee and contract photographer, Harrison is currently working on digitizing thousands of images for the museum’s archive.
Some of the photographs come from members of the WHM who were involved with labour movements and took snapshots from protests.
“Those particular kinds of history are easy to lose,” Harrison says. “Even something as simple as this – an obscure, rather small little protest on Parliament Hill that most people, in 20 years, will be dead or senile – who’s going to remember?”
Harrison also adds labour-related photos from Library and Archives Canada, as well as personal photographs to the museum’s main archive. In addition, he digitizes what he calls the most “vulnerable” of historic documents – family albums – and labels, dates, and attempts to identify people in the photos by conducting research and speaking to family members.
All of this, he says, is important to preserving history as told through the workers’ eyes.
“If some smaller volunteer organizations like us don’t try to preserve these things, then a really, really large chunk of history is going to be lost,” says Harrison.
“I think we’re contributing as much to history this way as the larger archives do.”
Bob Hatfield, president of the WHM, says although the museum is volunteer-based, they’ve been able to accomplish a lot by creating working groups who collaborate on specific projects, such as the LGBTQ one.
The only thing they need is for people to come forward to tell their stories or share their images.
“The activities of working people, the kinds of things they’ve done and the impact they’ve had on society and the economy as a whole was previously undervalued,” Hatfield says.
“And people are realizing the ordinary common-folk make history too.”