Mr. H. F. Matthews This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu| North of the Colour Line: Sleeping Car Porters and the Battle Against Jim Crow on Canadian Rails, 1880-1920| Labour/Le Travail, 47| The History Cooperative

   www.historycooperative.org/jou - [Cached]

   Published on: 11/3/2001   Last Visited: 8/1/2002

   The CPR's Superintendent of the Dining and Sleeping Car Department at Winnipeg, H.F. Matthews, shamelessly reminded the Ministry of Immigration of his company's longstanding defiance of labour and immigration laws. "You will recollect that for a number of years past, it has been necessary each Spring to bring in a large number of porters from south of the line to crew additional cars operated on summer train service."
   
   106
   
   Like the border guards who admitted black immigrant workers armed with CPR business cards, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Immigration abetted Canadian railway companies' traffic in black railway workers, actively undermining federal immigration and labour laws.
   
   ...
   Superintendent at Winnipeg, H.F. Matthews, admitted to the Board of Conciliation that "the company did not want any such organization in the Dining Car Department and would discourage it all they could. Similar feelings of opposition to the Union were entertained or openly expressed" by other superintendents in Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, Calgary, and Vancouver.
   
   111
   
   Rather than recognize unionized dining car workers on its western lines, the Canadian Pacific Railway threatened that it would replace the men with "colored or Oriental help or employ women in their stead."
   
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   Instead, Matthews produced a telegram, dated the day after interviewing white union men, proposing that his colleague in Vancouver "secure a satisfactory colored crew or more in Seattle." Matthews insisted that the company did not inform white workers of the new hiring policy until June because "such publicity might cause disruption amongst the dining car employees and … seriously effect, if not completely destroy, the service for a period."
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   "We believe that the presumptive case made by the employees, on whom the burden rested, has been rebuked by the sworn statements of Mr. Matthews."
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   28 NAC, RG76-576-816222, Immigration Branch Records (IBR), H. F. Matthews to Thomas Gelley, 20 April 1920.
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   106 NAC, RG76-576-816222, IBR, H. F. Matthews to Thomas Gelley, 20 April 1920.