THE WRITERS' UNION OF CANADA 1973-20071
by Christopher Moore
Who speaks for Canadian writers? In 1971 the answer seemed
clear: no one. That year an Ontario royal commission held
public hearings on the state of the book trade – and
not a single writer or writers’ organization was asked
to testify. Farley Mowat organized seven other writers to
raise writers’ concerns before the commission, and some
of them, notably June Callwood, Graeme Gibson, Margaret Atwood,
Ian Adams, and Fred Bodsworth, then retired to a pub to discuss
the events of the hearing over hotdogs and beer. Some of them
had never met before. They decided that they must meet more
often, and the nucleus of The Writers’ Union was formed.
“Really, it was Graeme who said, ‘We need a writers’
union,’” was June Callwood’s recollection
of that discussion in the pub beneath the Park Plaza Hotel
in Toronto. “He was the sparkplug.” Gibson and
others set about talking to other writers. With seed money
from the Ontario Arts Council, they hired Alma Lee, who had
been working at House of Anansi Press, to begin contacting
writers across the country. “How hard it was in those
days to find one hundred professional writers,” recalled
Lee. “We really went trolling from one end of the country
to the other.”
After a planning session at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto
in December 1972, eighty writers attended a conference in
June 1973 at Neil-Wycik College in Toronto, where the outline
of the new writers’ organization took form. Margaret
Laurence, newly returned to Canada and widely recognized as
Canada’s most prominent novelist, agreed to serve as
interim chair. Margaret Atwood promoted the Union in the notes
to her 1972 book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature. The ad-hoc organization set about drafting
a constitution, writing policy statements, and securing Canada
Council support for a founding convention.2
That convention, at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa, founded
The Writers’ Union of Canada on November 3, 1973. The
delegates elected novelist Marian Engel as the new organization’s
chair. The other writers elected to the first National Council
were Harold Horwood, Rudy Wiebe, Graeme Gibson, Robert Harlow,
Terrence Heath, John Metcalf, George Payerle, Heather Robertson,
Andreas Schroeder, Ray Smith, and Kent Thompson. Five of these
were regional representatives, responsible for presenting
the concerns of their regions to the Council and for enacting
the Union’s policies in their own areas. The first membership
dues were $100. Alma Lee became the first executive director
and sole staff member of the Union, running the new organization
first from her own home, then from a one-room office on Sultan
Street in the Bloor-Belair neighbourhood of mid-town Toronto.
They called it The Writers’ Union of Canada. In truth,
the Union has been more akin to a guild or professional association
than an actual trade union, but the initial meeting chose
the name “union” to convey a sense of militancy
and to stress the need for Canadian writers to unite. It was
to be a union directed at writers’ professional concerns,
not at teaching them to write. The Canadian Authors’
Association, founded in 1921, already served “craft”
interests through a national network of branches in which
aspiring and established writers could hone their skills and
seek markets. The Writers’ Union was to be a union for
published writers – open to writers who had published
a book of fiction or non-fiction (or, from 1983, poetry) with
a commercial or university press within the last seven years
or (if published earlier) still in print.
As its first priorities, the new National Council identified
standardization of publishing contracts and a Public Lending
Right to remunerate writers for the use of their books in
libraries. The first Union committees focussed on contract
issues, on writer-in-residence programs at Canadian universities,
and on reading tours for Canadian writers.
“Writers are a tribe,” said Margaret Laurence,
and the early Union was a gathering of her tribe. The Union’s
constitution, shaped by the Newfoundland writer Harold Horwood
and the poet-lawyer Frank Scott, made the Annual General Meeting
the key decision-making forum of the new Union as well as
the body at which National Council members were elected. In
the early years, “tribal” solidarity (and travel
subsidies from the Canada Council) brought a very large proportion
of the Union’s members to Annual General Meetings. The
list of early chairs and council members featured many of
Canada’s most prominent writers. In the Union’s
first decade, its chairs included the novelist Timothy Findley,
poet Robin Skelton, and non-fiction writer Charles Taylor.
(“We are out of the woods!” proclaimed Skelton
in 1982 when he became chair in succession to June Callwood,
Harold Horwood, and Margaret Atwood.)
The three-day annual meetings played an important role in
bringing the still small Canadian writing community together,
often to engage in lively and even raucous parliamentary sessions
to set Union policy. Andreas Schroeder, chair in 1976-7, recalled
a motion to condemn the oppression of dissident writers in
the Soviet Union, which was vigorously supported by (among
others) Jan Drabek, himself once a refugee from the Communist
takeover of Czechoslovakia, and just as passionately opposed
by a member then living in East Germany, who insisted the
only writers jailed in the Soviet Union were anti-social crooks.
Graeme Gibson remembers this as a civil debate on a fundamental
issue, but Schroeder, who was in the chair, remembers shouting,
calls to order, and gavel-pounding. The motion to support
oppressed writers in the Soviet Union passed, with one contrary
vote.3
The early 1970s were the right time for a new national writers’
organization. The 1960s had seen a tremendous development
of new Canadian writing and new Canadian-owned publishing
houses, but except for the Canada Council (founded in 1957)
and the Ontario Arts Council (founded 1963), there were few
institutions or public programs to support writing and publishing.
The air of nationalism and social activism, along with specific
crises like the sales of Ryerson Press and Gage Publishing
to American interests and the near-bankruptcy of leading Canadian
publisher McClelland & Stewart, helped transform the cultural-policy
scene throughout Canada. Ontario implemented the first recommendations
of its own Royal Commission on Book Publishing in 1971, the
Canada Council began funding Canadian publishers in 1972,
and Canada introduced the first rules on foreign takeovers
of Canadian cultural industries in 1974. The Association of
Canadian Publishers (which, like TWUC, had grown out of the
publishing crisis that launched the Ontario Royal Commission)
adopted its permanent structure and name in 1976. Quebec writers
launched UNEQ, the Union des écrivains québécois,
in 1977. A network of regional publishers’ organizations
and writers’ guilds grew rapidly, as did genre-based
national organizations such as the League of Canadian Poets
(founded 1966), the Periodical (later Professional) Writers’
Association of Canada, and the Playwrights’ Guild of
Canada. The long-established Canadian branch of PEN, the international
writers’ organization for free speech and support of
writers in prison, revitalized itself as PEN English Canada
and PEN Quebec in 1983.
The Writers’ Union itself helped launch several of the
new cultural organizations and institutions. In 1975 it was
among the founding members of the Book and Periodical Development
Council, later the Book and Periodical Council, BPC, an industry-wide
umbrella group. (Despite, or because of, its weighty official
name, the BPDC was “Sylvester” to its insiders
in the early years.) In 1976, Union members Margaret Atwood,
Graeme Gibson, Pierre Berton, and June Callwood formed the
Writers’ Development Trust to advance interest in Canadian
literature and to support Canadian writing. The Writers’
Trust, originally conceived as a fundraising arm for the Union’s
own projects, grew into the leading charitable organization
for Canadian writing. The Trust’s fund-raising galas,
the Great Literary Dinner Parties and Ottawa’s Politics
and the Pen, would become prominent events on the social scene,
and eventually the Trust would administer literary prizes
that paid Canadian writers over $100,000 annually, as well
as a fund for writers in financial difficulty and other projects.
Through the 1970s and 1980s the Writers’ Union was active
on many fronts. In the early years, promoting Canadian writing
was a controversial act. “Canadian Literature”
remained almost unknown as a subject of academic and critical
study. Union members picketed bookstores that dumped foreign
editions of Canadian works into Canada and joined the 1812
Committee to campaign for stronger Canadian cultural policies.
The Union agitated for more Canadian books in Canadian schools
and university courses. When teachers complained that there
were no texts from which to teach Canadian Literature, the
early Union’s can-do spirit kicked in: Union members
organized teams of teachers as consultants and wrote ten texts
(published by the Writers’ Trust) on key CanLit themes.
The Union scrutinized the amount of book reviewing being done
by Canadian media and campaigned to improve women writers’
access to publication and reviewing. In partnership with the
Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council, it promoted public
readings by Canadian writers for Canadian audiences, eventually
supporting hundreds of readings a year. The readings programs
helped build the network that linked writers and readers,
as well as booksellers, librarians and other reading hosts,
across Canada -- and incidentally demonstrating the existence
of the substantial audience that would later support writing
festivals all over the country.
The Union’s early ambition to negotiate standard contract
terms for the benefit of writers was never fulfilled, in the
face of publishers’ deep reluctance and fears of being
judged anti-competitive. The emergence of literary agents,
largely unknown in Canada when the Union was founded, addressed
some writers’ contract concerns, but the Union developed
a model contract, and it provided contract advice services,
a grievance process, and eventually a system of royalty audits
on behalf of its members.
"Must… write Alma, tell her to form a collection
society instanter,” wrote Marian Engel to herself in
1976, and that seems to have been the germ of collective licensing
for writing in Canada. The campaign to build a collective
that could license the photocopying of copyright work was
eventually taken up by the Book and Periodical Council. The
Union helped lobby for changes in the Copyright Act in 1987,
and the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, or CanCopy (later
Access Copyright), came into being in 1989. It eventually
became a multi-million-dollar enterprise providing schools,
public institutions, and corporations with access to the rights
they need. Writers’ Union nominees have sat continuously
on its board to assert the principle of “access and
rights” and to defend creators’ interests.4
From the beginning, the Union lobbied governments on public
policy concerning literature and the arts. It lobbied the
Secretary of State (later the Department of Canadian Heritage)
on cultural policy. It consulted with the Canada Council and
provincial arts councils on their granting programs and helped
bring about the Canada Council’s first non-fiction writing
grants in 1984. It was active in free speech and anti-censorship
activities, notably in the 1987 resistance to Bill C-54, an
“anti-pornography” measure that threatened literary
expression. It urged education ministers and universities
to integrate Canadian writing into programs of study, and
it lobbied finance ministers on taxation of writers’
incomes and External Affairs (later Foreign Affairs) on international
promotion of Canadian writers.
Public Lending Right, a program that would compensate writers
for the use of their books in public libraries, was a founding
goal of the Union, but it took thirteen years of unrelenting
effort before Ottawa was persuaded to adopt the system. Victory
was achieved in 1986, when Canada became the world’s
eighth PLR country. In May Union chair Matt Cohen welcomed
Secretary of State Flora Macdonald to the Union’s Kingston
AGM to celebrate the launch of PLR in Canada. Members gave
her a standing ovation (and then carried Andreas Schroeder,
who had worked tirelessly on the campaign, from the hall on
their shoulders). Within twenty years, PLR was making annual
payments that totalled nearly $10 million to more than 15,000
writers.
The Writers’ Union, an organization of individuals who
were often temperamentally resistant to organization, was
rarely tranquil in its early years. Margaret Laurence herself
resigned to protest one Union policy, and a proposal to link
members’ dues to their taxable incomes provoked walkouts
in 1979. In 1999 disagreements between the executive and other
National Council members would prompt resignation of the chair
and both vice-chairs. Gender-equity issues promoted by the
Status of Women Writers committee, were often debated in the
1970s and 1980s.
By 1988, its fifteenth anniversary, when The Writers’
Union published a new edition of Who’s Who in the
Writers’ Union, it was recognized as an organization
that spoke vigorously for writers’ interests, encouraged
links between Canadian writers, and provided vital support
to their professional endeavours. (The last printed Who’s
Who, which appeared in 1993, soon gave way to online
biographies at www.writersunion.ca.)
Executive Directors Alma Lee (1973-77), Ellen Powers (1977-1980),
Mary Jacquest (1980-84), Penny Dickens (1984-2002) and Deborah
Windsor (2002-2010) have run the Union’s operations
from a small office in Toronto (for many years at 24 Ryerson
Avenue in the Bathurst and Queen area). The Union also has
a branch office in Vancouver, long managed by Judy Villeneuve.
After Ontario, British Columbia is home to the largest contingent
of Union members, but members in Quebec, the Maritimes, and
the Prairies have maintained strong regional branches of the
Union, even without local staff. Another vital asset to the
Union has been Marian Hebb, its longtime legal counsel and
expert in copyright law and other creator-side legal matters.
Formed to promote the very idea that cultural policy was necessary
to Canada, the Writers’ Union had become one of many
institutions participating in the making of cultural policy.
In the late 1980s, however, governments began cutting back
on support for arts organizations. To ensure self-sufficiency,
the Union responded with a membership drive. The drive was
successful: membership grew rapidly in the late 1980s and
again in the later 1990s, though not up to the campaign’s
slogan, “2000 by 2000." 5 With the reduction
of travel subsidies, the Union’s Annual General Meeting
now attracted smaller numbers both absolutely and as a proportion
of total membership. By the 1990s it was more evident than
ever that the Canadian writing community included a great
diversity of backgrounds, interests, languages, and genres.
The growth of the Union and of the writing community in general
meant the Union was ceasing to be “the tribe”
it had been claimed to be.
In 1989 Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, an Anishnabe writer and Union
member, effectively launched the Appropriation of Voice controversy
at a Writers’ Union AGM in Kitchener, Ontario with her
argument that the stories and cultures of the First Nations
(and, by extension, other minorities) should not be appropriated
by non-native writers. The debate about writers’ identities
and writers’ responsibilities went far beyond the Union
itself and generated extensive media comment, particularly
over the Union-facilitated Writing Thru Race conference in
Vancouver in 1994. The Union found itself attacked simultaneously
for excessive political correctness and for representing only
the white liberal mainstream of Canadian writing.
What the Union had really done was provide the launch pad
and forum for an important debate, one that reflected the
remarkable flowering of minority voices in Canadian writing.
Some writers who had joined the Union just to work with its
new Racial Minorities committee and take part in the debate
became long-time members. To ensure that the Union itself
would be neither exclusionary nor negligent about the needs
of writers outside the mainstream, the Union formed the Social
Justice Task Force and adopted the report that grew out of
its discussions in 1998.
The changes in the Canadian writing community were generational
as well ethno-cultural. By the 1990s writers shaped by the
much more commercial writing and publishing industry that
had grown up in Canada since the 1970s simply assumed the
existence of cultural programs and policies for which the
early members of the Union had campaigned. New writers continued
to join the Union, but their perspectives and priorities did
not always fit the model of political activism that had given
birth to the Union and inspired its original members.
By the 1990s, the Union was neither one homogeneous tribe
nor the only forum addressing writers’ concerns, but
it retained a central role among Canadian writers’ organizations.
It had many committed activists. (“Not everyone likes
endless tedious procedural debate on obscure questions of
cultural policy,” joked Bill Deverell, the only two-time
chair of the Union, “but those who do, like it A LOT!”)
Many loyal members might rarely attend or participate in meetings
but readily supported the Union’s work on behalf of
writers. Others came to annual meetings for the professional
development workshops, or simply to meet and mingle.
The Union continues to work on cultural policy matters and
on serving professional writers’ interests. When Canada
launched a diplomatic campaign for an international “Instrument
on Cultural Diversity” to support national cultural
policies in the midst of global free-trade initiatives, the
Union helped found creator organizations to support the initiative
but also to insure creators’ concerns were not neglected.
When big-box bookstores undermined the network of independent
booksellers that had done so much for Canadian writing, the
Union warned against bookselling monopolies. When governments
cut cultural funding, it lobbied for continued funding for
the Canada Council, Public Lending Right, and other arts programs.
Each time new censorship campaigns began, it fought for free
speech. It advocated for copyright law reform and for putting
copyright income deductibility and income averaging into the
Tax Act. It lobbied to protect writers’ digital rights
from exploitation and supported writers’ interests in
the landmark class action case Robertson v Thomson.
As “born-digital” books extended writers’
freedom to become their own publishers, the Union’s
membership committee acquired new flexibility in determining
membership criteria.
Legislation on Status of The Artist, a concept developed by
UNESCO and endorsed by Canada that empowers artists to bargain
collectively on wages and working conditions, became a Writers’
Union objective in the 1990s. Canada and the provinces of
Quebec and Saskatchewan have enacted Status of the Artist
legislation, and the Union became an authorized representative,
but since much of the legislation relevant to writing and
publishing is provincial, Status of the Artist legislation
in Ontario, home to much of the publishing industry, remains
an important goal.
In a crisis, the Union can still play a unique role on behalf
of Canadian writers. When the book distribution giant General
Publishing went bankrupt in 2002, there was much concern for
publishers’ losses, but only the Union intervened to
point out the losses writers were also suffering, and it secured
a compensation fund (administered by the Writers’ Trust)
to assist members and non-members alike. The Union also supports
its members individually, running a national series of professional
development seminars for writers, maintaining a library of
manuals on everything from ghostwriting to incorporation,
and running a very effective grievance process to address
writers’ difficulties with publishers. As digital publishing
has emerged, it has advised on “print on demand”
programs through which writers can bring back and market their
out-of-print works.
In the early 21st century, most National Council
members are elected directly by the whole membership, and
as the Union continues to grow in numbers and evolve in purpose,
annual meetings see more professional workshops and less policy
debate. A highlight of every annual meeting continues to be
the Margaret Laurence Lecture. Funded by the Writers’
Trust, this lecture by a senior writer on the subject “A
Writer’s Life” has been given every year since
1987, when it was inaugurated by Hugh McLennan.
There remains much for a professional writers’ organization
to do. In 1946, Northrop Frye declared, “An authors’
association simply has to… go ahead on trade union lines,
working to get better publicity for its members, to equalize
income tax so that it will be based on the average of several
years instead of on the individual year, to standardize copyright
laws, to arrange for pensions for elderly authors and scholarships
or prizes for young ones, and so on.” 6 The
Writers’ Union of Canada has not resolved these enduring
challenges, but it ensures that all continued to be addressed.
When Margaret Atwood wrote the entry on The Writers’
Union for The Canadian Encyclopedia, she concluded,
“One of the most important achievements of the union
is to have fostered a spirit of professionalism and self-respect
among writers. This organization, founded by writers for writers,
has enabled them to meet and know one another and to take
collective responsibility for decisions which affect the ways
in which they are seen and treated. Since the 1960s the public's
image of the Canadian writer has changed - though the change
is incomplete - from defective freak to acceptable member
of society, and the union has reflected and fostered that
change.” 7
Suggestions for changes or additions? Please e-mail lobrien@writersunion.ca.
See also Achievements
and Current
and Past Chairs.
1 Christopher Moore drafted this text
in February 2007, building on an outline history printed in
the 1993 Who’s Who in the Writers’ Union of Canada,
probably drafted by then Executive Director Penny Dickens.
Thanks to Andreas Schroeder for his contributions.
2 The origin story is based on the 1993 text. The quotation
from June Callwood is added from a speech she gave on receiving
the Writers’ Trust Distinguished Service award in March
2007. The quotation from Alma Lee is from an interview with
Christopher Moore, March 2007 (transcript on file at the Union).
3 Personal communications to CM from Schroeder and Gibson.
4 Marian Engel, quoted from a diary excerpt in Kathryn Carter,
ed., The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Canadian Women
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002), at page 435.
5 Writers Union of Canada membership numbers, various years:
1973 43 (Initial paid membership, according to 1993 Who’s
Who)
1977 205+ (205 members listed in 1977 Who’s Who in TWUC)
1981 322+ (322 members listed in 1981 Who’s Who in TWUC)
1988 605 (605 total, 586 listed: 1988 Who’s Who)
1993 1103 (920 listed + 103 “further members”
in Who’s Who)
1996 915 (data 1996-2007 supplied by TWUC office)
1997 1028
1998/9 1169
2000/1 1344
2004/5 1426
2005/6 1506
2006/7 1639
Assuming all data are accurate (!), note the rapid membership
growth 1988-93 (82% in five years), the puzzling decline/stability
of membership 1993-97, and the renewed growth since (63% 1997-2007).
6 Quoted from Alvin A. Lee, ed., Collected Works of Northrop
Frye, Volume 12: On Canada (Toronto, University of Toronto
Press, 2003)
7 Margaret Atwood, “Writers’ Union of Canada,”
The Canadian Encyclopedia, (1st edition, Edmonton,
Hurtig Books, 1985) and www.canadianencyclopedia.ca
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