Law Commons^™

Street Railway Strikes, Collective Violence, And The Canadian State, 1886-1914, Eric Tucker

Eric M. Tucker

Street railway strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often accompanied by high levels of public disorder. The challenge to public authorities, however, was not just in the scale of the disorder but also the disjuncture between the behaviour that a significant portion of the working-class community felt was legitimate in the circumstances and what the law tolerated. Public officials confronted with this dilemma had to negotiate between the disparate zones of community and legal toleration. How much disorder would they tolerate before mobilizing the coercive power of the state to protect the right of the street …