Imperfect Union: Canadian Labour and the Left - Part 3 - Falling Apart and Getting Together
1989 · 53m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Hammond
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
As the Second World War turns Canada into an industrial power, mass unionism wins legal status and unemployment insurance, Saskatchewan elects Tommy Douglas's CCF in 1944, and labour energies lead toward the NDP's founding in 1961.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A three-part labour history doc that plays it entirely straight—no formal risk, no narrative subversion, just the institutional left's greatest hits packaged as consensus heritage cinema. Exactly the kind of earnest, well-meaning archival work that puts contrarians to sleep.
Hammond's structural command across a 53-minute historical arc demonstrates how documentary editing can function as historiography itself; the assembly of testimony, footage, and political momentum into the 1961 NDP founding follows a formal inevitability that respects both the archive and the viewer's intelligence.
The specific choice to let Saskatchewan's 1944 CCF victory breathe in real time—allowing the archival newsreel and recorded voices to carry their own weight rather than rushing toward the NDP payoff—is what transforms this from textbook into something that feels genuinely lived.