Battle of Ballantyne Pier - Outcome

Outcome

The Battle of Ballantyne was the bloody climax of a very volatile year in Vancouver, but fell far short of the insurrection anticipated by the police and anticommunists. It was also a turning point in the waterfront strike, which, although it dragged on until December, lost its optimistic and militant character after the battle. Longshoremen, however, would continue to fight for the right to organize an independent union and to control despatching, and finally succeeded a decade later when they formed the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Local 500.

It was also the last of WUL militancy that Vancouver would witness. That same year, the Comintern in Moscow abandoned its Third Period strategy, which entailed the creation of the Workers' Unity League and similar militant trade union organizations in other countries with the goal of building a radical labour movement separate from mainstream labour organizations. Under the new Popular Front strategy, Communists joined established unions and helped to build the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Moreover, Communist priorities shifted from the industrial to the political arena, where they fielded candidates and supported Cooperative Commonwealth Federation candidates, while others joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion to fight Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

While far more localized than the On-to-Ottawa Trek, the Battle of Ballantyne Pier was part of the fierce, and perhaps paranoid, anticommunist reaction provoked by the Communists and the militant workers' movement they led. Public attitudes shifted away from the Conservative government of R.B. "Iron Heel" Bennett because of its mishandling of depression-era unrest in such events, which paved the way for Bennett's defeat in the federal election that same year. Although machine guns were not used in the riot, another First World War technology was introduced in Vancouver policing that day: tear gas. Another major clash between the unemployed and the police took place in 1938. Relief camp workers returned to the city and were violently evicted from Post Office by means of tear gas bombs and police clubs (primarily the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in that instance).