Parker
Williams was a leading Socialist MLA in the early part of the 20th century
in BC. Although he started his professional life as a coal miner, Williams
entered the halls of the legislature as the MLA for Newcastle, a district
of Nanaimo, in 1903. He would hold the district as its MLA until 1917,
when he resigned to become the commissioner of the Workman’s Compensation
Board, a position he would hold until 1943.
Although he began his career as a member of the Socialist Party of BC, and campaigned for a decade as a member of the Socialist Party of Canada, Williams’s actual political work demonstrates that he was not a revolutionary. He spent considerable time in his early years in the legislature propping up Conservative party governments, in exchange for some minor reforms. By 1914, Williams had largely abandoned both the SPC and its more reformist competitor the Social Democratic Party of BC, to run as an “independent socialist.” Many believed this was code for Liberal, and sure enough soon after the election of 1916 he received a plum Liberal patronage appointment. Despite his partisan vacillations, he spoke throughout
his career as if he continued to be the primary voice of working people
in the Province. As several articles on this site make clear, it was
Williams that brought much of the publicity to Mairs’s death,
something assisted by the participation of his children in the strike.
While more radical members of the Miner’s Liberation League were
darkly threatening the Premier’s life in this period, Williams
took a far more moralist approach, denouncing the conditions in the
jails. He also questioned the legitimacy of the trials. All of this
was done from a soapbox considerably larger than that of the Miners’
Liberation League, and led to national coverage of Mairs’s death.
Perhaps because of his politics, Parker Williams has received considerably less historical attention than some of his political peers, including Richard McBride. Perhaps the best starting point for a more thorough study of him is the sidebars of Mark Leier's Rebel Life, especially pages 43-45. |
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