Remembering the ‘Weskay’ strike of 1971

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/09/2021 (1501 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT was not quite the volatile protests at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1968 or the anti-Vietnam protests at U.S. colleges in 1970. But 50 years ago, in October 1971, hundreds of high school students at West Kildonan Collegiate refused to attend classes until school officials dealt with their demands.

As a 15-year-old grade 10 student at “Weskay,” I was part of that “great” two-day protest that brought the school to a halt. Led by the WK Socialist Student Movement (SSM) and its bright, charismatic and (perceived) radical spokesman Michael Tregebov in Grade 12, the so-called “strike” focused on the issue of non-compulsory or optional attendance.

Students wanted to decide for themselves whether they needed to attend classes. In the larger perspective, the strike was really a challenge to a top-down hierarchical educational system with arbitrary rules and heavy-handed punishments; you could be suspended for five days for missing one class with no valid excuse.

Five decades later, and after nearly 30 years of teaching, it is clear to me now that optional attendance was and remains a bad idea. The past 18 months of students in and out of school and receiving their education by remote learning has confirmed that regular in-person classroom instruction and the interaction between a teacher and their students is essential and the most effective type of learning.

However, my 15-year-old self saw the issue differently. My friends did, too — and never underestimate the power of teenage peer pressure.

The SSM-dominated student council had sent a petition with a variety of demands, including optional attendance and a planned student assembly, to the school’s principal, Peter Isaak. Isaak, a genuinely sincere individual who passed away in 2019 at the age of 86, wasn’t quite sure how to handle this questioning of his authority, but he refused to discuss the petition or the request for an assembly.

On Oct. 25, my friends and I were greeted outside of the school entrance by SSM leaders who urged us to go straight to the gym. More than half the student body (350 of 680) complied. The atmosphere in the gym was highly charged. Still, it was also “like a comic epic,” as the Free Press reporter who covered it noted. That members of the media, having been notified by the strike committee about what was about to happen at the school, actually showed up was exciting. It proved to any doubters that the SSM and its committee were to be taken seriously and meant business.

In the gym, we passed two resolutions: the first asking for amnesty for student-council leaders and the other stating that the school “belongs to the people.” Marty Minuk, then a Grade 12 student and now fittingly a noted defence lawyer (and a friend), grabbed a microphone “exhorting his comrades-in-arms to stick together,” the Free Press related. He told us not to litter, and “to sing songs for the people.”

Isaak and Seven Oaks School Division superintendent Glen Nicholls and the school board were never going to accept optional attendance. Moreover, the NDP minister of education, Ben Hanuschak, had “little sympathy” for our cause and stated he was not about to change provincial legislation to do away with compulsory school attendance.

A lot of Winnipeggers denounced us. There were rumours that police were going to be called to disperse us. The line that captured much of the critical opinion was from a caller to Peter Warren’s CJOB radio talk show, stating that we had as much of a right to strike as “my young children do when I tell them to go to bed at night.”

When we marched to nearby Garden City Collegiate and urged students there to join our noble cause, the principal, Jake Yakmission, told his students that if they did so, he’d expel them. Not one student from GCCI walked out.

And yet, the school administration and the superintendent’s office were respectful and did not readily dismiss our concerns. No doubt, many of the WK teachers, who for two days sat in their classrooms waiting for classes to resume, did not agree with that approach. Isaak, however, had wisely concluded that a confrontation with the strike committee and the rest of us was not the way to handle this. And he was right.

The strike peacefully ended on Oct. 27 with a promise that the school board would consider optional attendance in the near future. For a time, students could check into the school and remain in the building, yet could skip classes if they wanted to. The school board never voted on optional attendance because it contravened provincial legislation.

Fifty years later, Tregebov, who has spent much of his adult life living in Barcelona, Spain, as a teacher, translator and a writer, remembers the strike with fondness and a bit of wonder that it ever took place. Still an “unreconstructed Marxist,” as he describes himself, he views the strike as empowering students with a sense of freedom “to decide what to do each of those days, individually and collectively, without the threat of that dreary regimen of school punishments hanging over them.”

The strike may not have been life-changing for all of us, but it was indeed a glorious moment in time. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.