The Education of Everett Richardson

The Education of Everett Richardson: The Nova Scotia Fishermen's Strike 1970–71 is a non-fiction book by the Canadian writer Silver Donald Cameron, first published in 1977 with a new edition released in 2019. It ranked 47th in a listing of Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books where it was praised for giving a "gripping account" of "this pivotal moment in Canadian labour history".^[1]

Large sections of the book are presented as an oral history in which main participants in the strike speak directly to readers. As its title suggests, the book is partly about what one fisherman learns during an acrimonious, seven-month strike and its bitter aftermath in Nova Scotia's Strait of Canso area. Everett Richardson was one of 235 trawlermen from the tiny ports of Canso, Mulgrave and Petit de Grat who fought for better pay, safer working conditions, job security and, most of all, for the right to belong to the union they had chosen, the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union or UFAWU. Their main adversaries were two huge, foreign-owned fishing companies: Acadia Fisheries, part of a group of about 61 British companies directed from Hull, England, and Booth Canadian Fisheries Ltd., a subsidiary of Consolidated Foods, a Chicago-based company with annual sales of more than a billion dollars.

However, the fishermen also faced stiff opposition from what they called the "cod aristocracy," rich members of the Nova Scotia elite, as well as from leading politicians, judges, government bureaucrats, members of the clergy,The Chronicle Herald, the province's main daily newspaper, and the Canadian labour establishment itself. "In the end," Cameron writes, "this is not a story of the fishermen, or even of the labour movement. It is a story about privilege and poverty and injustice in this country, and about the social and political arrangements which cheat and oppress most Canadians, stunt our humanity and distort our environment.^[2][3]