Labour Day is widely known as the unofficial end to summer in Canada. Students’ summer holidays are numbered as they gear up for a new school year. It’s the last long weekend before fall arrives. It’s the best chance for families to get together for one last barbecue, weekend at the cottage or outdoor activity in the warm summer sun. It’s interesting how a day now associated with leisure activities actually got its start in Canada.

Labour Day in Canada can be traced back to less than five years after Confederation in 1872. A Thanksgiving Day parade was staged in Toronto on April 15 of that year in support of workers’ rights. Thanksgiving was celebrated in the spring back then, but the reasons for that, perhaps, is a subject for another column.

The Toronto Trades Assembly – the original Canadian central labour body that represented 27 unions in 1872 – organized the demonstration to demand the release of 24 leaders of the Toronto Typographical Union, who had been imprisoned for striking to reduce their work week at the Toronto Globe (known today as the Globe and Mail) to 58 hours. About 2,000 unionized workers took part in the parade, which attracted more than 10,000 spectators by the time the demonstration reached Queen’s Park.

A similar protest was organized months later in Ottawa on September 3. The parade route took the workers past Conservative Prime Minister John A. MacDonald’s house. MacDonald, an old political rival of Toronto Globe founder and editor George Brown, was quick to capitalize on the situation and vowed to wipe out the “barbarous laws” that permitted the imprisonment of the 24 union leaders. Canada’s first PM kept his word and the laws restricting such union activity were abolished by the year’s end.

The union parades quickly became an annual tradition in Canada. Peter J. McGuire, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, brought the Labour Day tradition back to his countrymen after attending a labour event in Toronto in 1882. The American event was held on September 5 later that year.

Annual labour events continued for more than a decade until July 23, 1894, when Conservative Prime Minister John Thompson and his government declared Labour Day a legal holiday in Canada to be held each year on the first Monday of September, where it has remained ever since. Labour Day was also adopted as an official U.S. holiday that same year by President Grover Cleveland.

Labour Day is a holiday celebrated throughout the world, including in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Brazil, India and China. However, the celebration is more commonly known globally as International Workers’ Day or May Day, as it is generally celebrated on May 1.