In 1992, a labour dispute that would last 18 months tore Yellowknife apart, culminating in an explosion that killed nine miners. The fallout of one of Canada’s largest mass murders still lingers in this northern city.

Today, Yellowknife only tangentially resembles its history as a gold mining town.

The city sits atop the Canadian Shield, a large expanse of ancient bedrock, one of the world’s richest areas in terms of its mineral ores.

But a dilapidated mining headframe is one of the last vestiges of the area’s days as a gold mining capital.

The city’s biggest gold mine has been closed for decades.

Giant Mine showered the city in prosperity but also cloaked it in darkness: the site of an 18-month labour dispute that divided the city, pitted neighbours, friends, and spouses against each other and devolved into murder on Sept. 18, 1992.

The fallout of that day — one of Canada’s largest mass murders — can still be seen in the city, the toxins left behind and the ongoing push for stronger labour laws 30 years later.

When Stacey Sundberg thinks about her homeland, she pictures lush boreal forest, clean water and an abundance of animals and berries.

Sundberg is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. Giant Mine sits on her traditional territory, known as Somba K’e. In her language, it means ‘money place.’

“People say it was beautiful, and probably right where we were standing there was a lot of blueberries and clean water flowing through the creeks and rivers,” she says as she looks out at the old Giant Mine site.

It’s been many years since miners showed up for work there — or stood on a picket line.

Giant Mine was closed in 2004, and there’s a $1-billion federal cleanup underway to contain and freeze years’ worth of poisonous arsenic that was spewed out of Giant’s smokestacks or buried underground.

Roughly 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide waste has been contained on the mine site. One teaspoon of that dust is enough to kill a person. It’s frozen in place, deep underground, as the property gets remediated.

“It looks like a garbage dump, like, full of steel. There’s signs that say ‘Danger’ … It’s funny to see those on your homeland,” Sundberg says.

Those signs, the toxic mess, a tragic labour dispute, there’s a story behind it all: a single moment in 1935 when everything started to change.

“Our Yellowknives Dene First Nation elder Liza Crookedhand was berry picking in the area,” Sundberg says.

“All of a sudden she comes across this golden rock — which meant nothing to our people, back in the day — she picked up this rock and, not knowing that it was gold, she brought it back to her cabin.”

Sundberg says there are many versions of the story, but most end with Johnny Baker, a prospector who had travelled to Yellowknife, finding that nugget on Crookedhand’s windowsill.

He offered to trade her for it — a stovepipe, flour or sugar, Sundberg says.

“And some stories say that she didn’t get nothing,” Sundberg says, while choking back tears. The story is emotional for her, a symbol, she says, of the destruction to come.

In the summer of 1935, Baker and his partner staked the original 21 “Giant” claims, and mining quickly came to define Yellowknife.

Tents, log cabins and businesses popped up. The city’s first gold mine poured its first gold brick in 1938; 10 years later Giant did the same.

Yellowknife was transforming from a mining camp to a place where men came with their families and settled down.

New neighbourhoods were built with the waste rock from the mines, leading to the embellished and romantic memory that the roads were literally paved with gold.

“Mining was everything,” former Yellowknife Mayor Dave Lovell says. “What you have to realize about Yellowknife is that if the mines had been 10 miles away, Yellowknife would be 10 miles away. It’s that simple.”

Now in his 70s, Lovell, who was born in Yellowknife, still lives in his childhood home.

Long-time residents like him describe it as a once close-knit community, where people relied on each other to get through long, cold winters.

“There was a lot of community stuff going on, lots of clubs, lots of arts, sports,” Jane O’Neil said. “A lot of drinking — that of course, after the strike, became a lot uglier.”

O’Neil was raised in Yellowknife. Her father worked at a gold mine, and her first husband, Jim O’Neil, would go on to work at Giant.

There, top miners could earn up to $90,000 a year with bonuses and overtime, and O’Neil says her young family was doing well.

“It’s hard, dirty work. A lot of guys that worked at the mine, the only thing they really enjoy about it is the paycheque.”

But by the late 1980s, Giant’s best days were behind it. Gold prices were down, the best ore had already been mined, and Pamour, the mine’s owner, was struggling.

In 1990, Pamour went bankrupt. That’s how Royal Oak, a tiny company with no mines, came to buy Giant and another Pamour mine for $35.6 million — next to nothing in the mining world.

No one knew it then, but that changing of hands would be the catalyst for one of the worst labour disputes in Canadian history.

LISTEN |To learn even more about the lockout, the murders and their lingering effect, listen to Rachel Zelniker’s podcast here.

A woman and 36 years old, Peggy Witte, was an anomaly in the mining world at the time.

Giant might have seemed like a money pit but, as Royal Oak’s president, Witte had a plan: slash costs and hold on until the price of gold rose.

To do it, union members said she cut jobs, overtime and equipment repairs, even cancelling the company’s Christmas party.

But her determination to make the mine more efficient also equated to cracking down on what she perceived as laziness and incompetence — and union members say people who stayed home because of illness or injury became targets of discipline.

“I know one guy personally who came up and he had struggles with alcohol and … they just fired him rather than giving him an option for treatment,” remembers Marcel Bouchard. “She had one thing on her mind and that was to make money. She didn’t care at what cost.”

Bouchard started working at Giant Mine in 1988, and worked there until the day it closed down. He remembers the lockout as one of the worst times of his life, something that resulted, he said, from Witte’s unwillingness to work with the union, Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers (CASAW), both before and during the lockout.

Safety became a sticking point in the increasingly fraught relationship.

The company blamed accidents and safety violations on the union and its members, but Bouchard and others said the company refused to fix broken equipment and tried to shorten safety checks to save money.

“If it was not safe I would refuse and they would try and get you to still do it,” Bouchard said. “I would just insist that I wasn’t doing it, and they would go and get somebody else who would.”

Witte, who now goes by Margaret Kent, declined to be interviewed for this story.

But in 1993, she told CBC she wanted to improve the mine’s safety record.

Deaths at Giant were rare, but back sprains and twisted ankles or knees were common. Giant reported more accidents than any other N.W.T. mine through the 1980s.

“It all has to do with control, and control over the whole safety situation ... We have to get control of that mine,” she said in that interview.

But the union believed Witte wanted to break them and said the company was trying its best to do so — taking every grievance to arbitration to try and bankrupt them.

So when negotiations for a new collective agreement began in January 1992, the situation was tense. And though a tentative agreement was reached with minimal concessions, 83 per cent of union members voted to reject it.

It wasn’t just the contract people were rejecting — some say it was also everything they’d come to hate about Witte and her animosity toward the union.

“Anything she suggested was not going to bode well, and yeah, I’m pretty sure that had a lot to do with it,” Bouchard said.

The company refused to budge and said it would only consider a union proposal that didn’t cost any more than the defeated agreement, but union members were clear: no concessions.

A few weeks later the union voted to strike as soon as legally possible: May 23, 1992.

WATCH | Money, safety, loyalty: 1992 CBC video from the picket line

When Al Shearing headed to work on May 22, 1992, the underground mechanic found himself turned away.

Instead, he saw men he didn’t know milling about the mine — and he realized Witte had brought in replacement workers to fill his and his fellow union members’ jobs. It was that move that shifted the dispute and immediately heightened the risk of violence, locals and academics suggest.

“It was like somebody stabbed you in the heart,” Shearing said.

Soon, helicopters would be flying in more workers, a move that enraged residents whose families had given generations to Giant.

But what would be more divisive would come later on — when union members crossed the line, a move that created fissures that still exist in Yellowknife today. Shearing rarely speaks to those former friends; he and others still avoid businesses now owned by those who worked in the mine during the dispute.

The scene at the mine was tense. Union members quickly established picket lines and made their anger known, yelling profanities and harassing vehicles that tried to cross.

To bring both sides back together, the territorial government asked the union to reduce the number of men at the line and the company to stop using replacement workers. The union agreed, but the mine refused.

At the time, Witte said she had no other choice.

“Without those replacement workers we would not be able to keep the mine operating,” she said during a press conference in 1992. “And it would never have been reopened.”

Labour studies professor Larry Savage isn’t convinced.

“There is always a choice and the employer made a very clear deliberate choice,” he says. “It was a decision that they must have known … could potentially lead to picket line violence … and would make it much more difficult to work with the union in the future.”

At that time only Quebec had a law banning replacement workers, but even without legislation, it’s a practice that’s still rarely used in Canada, and according to Savage, that’s for good reason.

“When you use replacement workers you create all sorts of conflict in the workplace. You negatively affect employee morale and you will create tensions in your workplace that will last much much longer than the strike or lockout that produced them.”

Those are some of the reasons the federal government is promising anti-replacement worker legislation by 2023, but there are caveats.

The law would only apply to federally regulated industries, leaving about 90 per cent of workers unprotected.

That kind of legislation would have been welcome news to workers and community members who worried about violence breaking out at Giant in 1992.

The company was worried about that, too — and lobbied the territorial government to boost security.

Former senior commanding RCMP officer Al Macintyre was part of a roughly 60-person emergency tactical team that started rotating in and out of Yellowknife.

“I was on edge, especially when we got there … the police were being viewed, I believe, at that time as the sort of the enemy,” Macintyre said, who was the RCMP commissioner in B.C. when he retired. As in “we’re supporting the mine and not the community, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

“Of course it was their livelihood, it was their jobs at the mine, it was bread on the table. The stakes were quite high for those folks, and we got to understand that pretty quickly.”

The company lost its first security firm days into the labour dispute, following a particularly violent episode when union members broke onto mine property, threw rocks, damaged vehicles and started fires.

Giant responded by hiring the Pinkertons, which had “a history of being a union busting private security firm,” Savage said.

Instead of trying to defuse conflict, the labour relations professor said, the security team wore camouflage, brought security dogs and would physically intimidate picketers.

“That kind of confrontational approach to private security really means that tempers can flare on the picket line,” Savage said.

The conflict only escalated throughout the summer. Fights routinely broke out on the line, with people pulled from vehicles and rocks becoming missiles.

Things reached a boiling point during “the riot” in June 1992, when union members and supporters pulled down a fence and streamed onto the property.

“There was just a volley of rocks being shot at us … anyone that said that they weren’t scared or that they weren’t fearing for their life … would be lying to you,” said Macintyre, who responded to the call.

“It was just, you know, as somebody described, ‘Hell on wheels’ around there.”

Police used tear gas and stun grenades to try and control picketers.

“Early on in the dispute it was evident that somebody might die. I mean, there are guys who had cocked pistols right at their head from the police,” says Lee Selleck, a former journalist who covered the labour dispute at Giant Mine and wrote the book, Dying for Gold.

After the riot, Bouchard and 24 others were charged with mischief, and some were charged with assault with a weapon.

Bouchard said he regrets what happened that day but notes the union felt pushed to action by the police and security force.

“They had dogs, you know, like that they unleashed on the picketers,” he said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have taken it that far but … there was just so much talk.”

Then, on two other occasions, Shearing and another union member set up explosive devices on timers, blowing up a ventilation shaft in the mine and a satellite dish.

“It wasn’t there to hurt anybody,” Shearing said. “It was just to say, ‘OK, we could do a lot of damage here.’”

But those bombs put the mine and the community on edge, and not all the union members agreed with the tactics. Some, like Vern Fullowka, had been wondering how long they could hold out.

Karen Fullowka has vivid memories of being on the picket line at Giant mine — right down to the stuffed pig labelled with Witte’s name.

Her dad, Vern, was a picket captain and, at eight, she regularly tagged along.

“My mom had to work night shifts just so we could make ends meet, because dad got pennies on the picket line,” she says.

Fullowka doesn’t remember the day her dad decided to cross the picket line, but she knows he did it for her and their family.

“To him, family came first, and in order to protect the family and provide for them, he had to go back to work.”

As people like Fullowka and O’Neil’s husband, Jim, crossed the line, fights broke out in town.

“Basically if you went out in the evening to a bar it’s almost like you were looking for a fight,” says O’Neil, whose family received death threats.

“I mean people were going out looking for people that were replacement workers … to beat them up,” said Bouchard. “It was crazy.”

Despite this atmosphere, wheels were turning. CASAW was getting support from bigger unions, and there was increasing pressure on the federal government to start an industrial inquiry commission, which would potentially empower the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to bring the dispute to an end.

On Sept. 17, 1992, the union filed an unfair labour practices complaint to the board, alleging union busting and various other unfair labour practices.

“So some of the seeds were being planted for an actual bargained labour process ending to this thing,” Selleck said.

“You know, there is starting to be a little bit of daylight on Sept. 17, 1992.”

But the next morning Vern Fullowka and eight workers would be dead.

On the morning of Sept. 18, 1992, four months into the labour dispute, nine men travelling in a rail car at Giant mine were killed in an underground explosion.

Within days, police announced the explosion was a homicide: the railcar carrying the men hit a trip wire that triggered a bomb deliberately set up on the side of the track.

Tensions between the union and the company increased exponentially after the blast.

“The company was saying … ‘Until we know who’s done this, you know, we’re not going to have any of those workers back in here,’” says Selleck.

Earlier in the dispute, the company had started firing anyone it suspected of violence or vandalism, and now Witte was tying negotiations directly to the murders, saying she wouldn’t take back any of the strikers she’d fired until arrests were made, arguing she could be held liable if violence broke out underground.

“That is not legal, but that was their position,” Selleck said. “So the resolution of a labour dispute was delayed by a hell of a long time because of that blast.”

To try to move negotiations forward, the federal government appointed mediators and eventually ordered an industrial inquiry commission.

The commission issued a number of reports and recommendations. The union accepted them, but the company rejected them, always refusing to take back the fired workers.

Commissioners said it was the “worst” labour dispute they’d ever seen, calling the public fallout “unprecedented.”

“The town was basically falling apart,” says Barbara Hoddinott, a former post-traumatic stress nurse who lived in Yellowknife during the dispute.

“There was so much anger, people were losing their homes, marriages were breaking up and it was a living hell actually.”

Children weren’t allowed to go out for Halloween because “nobody knew what was behind the bushes,” she said.

Hoddinott was distraught seeing what hate, division and anger could do to her community. Determined to help, she worked with service providers to set up a 24-hour crisis line and group counselling sessions, always making sure to separate people who were working and people who were on strike.

“A lot of our debriefings were done at night. A lot of them were done in unknown locations so there wouldn’t be any chance of being stalked or any violence breaking out,” she said.

Hoddinott says that, even today, there are people she knows who “are still seeking professional help. And that’s a good thing. And that will be their healing point.”

It would take a year into the murder investigation for the community to get answers. On Oct. 15, 1993, Roger Warren — one of the locked-out miners — confessed to RCMP that he had set the bomb.

He would go on to recant his confession at trial, but was ultimately convicted of nine counts of second-degree murder.

In 2003, Warren confessed again, saying he acted alone. He was granted full parole in 2016. He died three years later at 75.

Only a few weeks after Warren’s arrest, the Canada Industrial Relations Board held a hearing in relation to a bad faith bargaining complaint the union had brought against the company, and ruled in their favour.

WATCH | RCMP recording of Roger Warren’s confession:

Royal Oak was found to have committed three bad faith violations.

The most serious violation, according to the board, was Royal Oak’s position on the 49 workers they’d fired. The company had been saying they didn’t want any of those workers back until arrests for the murders were made, but the board said making arrests a precondition of negotiations was illegal and “completely blocked the bargaining process.”

Political science professor Charles Smith says he’s read “dozens if not hundreds” of labour board decisions, and he’s never seen “evidence of such egregious behavior by an employer.”

Smith says Royal Oak’s refusal to arbitrate on the fired workers is something no union could ever agree to — and the company should have known that.

“If an employer is drawing a line in the sand and saying, ‘You have to agree to something that is unprecedented in modern labour law and is giving up one of the core rights that unions have as being certified bargaining agents,’ then there’s no greater evidence of bad faith bargaining in my mind.”

The industrial relations board chair ordered the company to put forward a contract based on the original tentative agreement — and to bargain in good faith in respect to a few outstanding issues, including wages, transportation, benefits, and safety inspections.

He also told the company to prepare for arbitration hearings on the fired strikers.

“He clearly said that this ruling was going to end this labour dispute,” Selleck says, recalling his coverage at the time.

“And at the end when he wished everyone good luck there was just a stunned silence … before people stood on their feet and there was a standing ovation. And it was an ovation, not of joy, but of relief.”

The agreement the union was about to sign wasn’t very different from the one they’d first voted down. In the end, workers wages returned to what they were before the dispute — with a few exceptions. Workers’ benefits would be less than those in the original tentative agreement, but the length of safety inspections would be doubled.

“I’m pretty sure …. everybody looking back at it in retrospect, would be going, ‘Oh my god, you gotta be kidding me. We endured it for this?” says Selleck.

Roughly 18 months after the labour dispute began, the first group of locked out workers returned to the mine.

“We were dressing with the replacement workers that stayed on and we’re bringing powder to the replacement workers that stayed on and we had lunch with the replacement workers that stayed on,” Bouchard says.

“There was just not too much you could do about that — except get along when we’re underground. I didn’t like it. But you know what? I did it.”

LISTEN | Episode 1 of Giant: Murder Underground:

Bouchard says he’s mostly moved on from the labour dispute at Giant, but there is something that still bothers him: he feels like nothing has been learned.

“If there’s ever a strike in Canada again where replacement workers are brought in, something needs to be done immediately because … people need to realize that workers have rights,” says Bouchard.

Shearing echoes his fellow miner.

“Don’t bring in scab labor,” he says. “That’s the only thing that should have never been done.”

Bouchard and many other union members say they want to see legislation banning replacement workers in Canada, something that still doesn’t exist.

Selleck agrees that would have changed everything at Giant.

“The mine may have operated in a small way with management and staff and so on, but it would not have been sustainable … So you would have seen the dynamic of a normal labour dispute and you would have seen a contract a great deal sooner,” he says.

Currently, only two provinces in Canada, Quebec and British Columbia, have bans on using replacement workers.

Despite everything that happened at Giant there’s nothing in Northwest Territories’ legislation that prohibits the use of replacement labour.

In the years following the dispute at Giant, the federal government did amend the Canada Labour Code in a way that bans employers from using replacement workers if it’s to undermine the union, but there’s a loophole that allows their use if it’s necessary to keep the business operating.

And the amendment only applies to federally regulated workplaces – about 10 per cent of the Canadian workforce.

“Any union leader you talk to who represents workers in the federal sector will tell you that this amendment to the Canada Labour Code hasn’t really changed anything,” says Savage, the labour professor.

“That employers in federally regulated industries still use replacement workers and that they still use them to undermine the representational capacity of unions. But employers will never admit that that’s what they’re doing. They’ll simply tell the Labour Relations Board that they’re using replacement workers in order to keep their businesses going, which is perfectly legal.”

Like Bouchard, Savage isn’t overly optimistic when it comes to lessons learned from this dispute.

“I think it all comes down to the question of who wields political power in Canada, and I would say that the business community and corporate interests will always win out over the labour movement when it comes to who has the ear of government,” he says.

Savage says, in a way, things have actually gotten worse for the labour movement since workers were locked out at Giant.

“I think that the political power of the business community is stronger now than it was in the early 1990s, and I definitely think that the power of the labour movement as a counterweight to the power of the business community is not what it used to be.”

Unionization in the private sector has decreased significantly since people like Bouchard stood on the picket line at Giant.

Stable, unionized, jobs at mines or in manufacturing have been replaced mostly by the service industry, where rates of unionization are well under 10 per cent.

Savage says “labour laws are also less hospitable to unions and they’re more pro-business now than they were in the early 1990s. That creates an environment where employers feel more emboldened to take on unions or any other organizations that stand in the way of profits for shareholders, he says.

“And so when I think back to the owner of the Royal Oak Mine saying, ‘My interest is to meet the mandate and fulfill the goals of my shareholders.’ ... That doesn’t sound unlike what today’s CEOs are saying in response to demands from workers and the community that [companies] be held to a higher standard.”

But labour laws and labour politics are only part of the legacy of this dispute.

There’s damage that legislation can never fix: this conflict has left invisible scars on the people who lived through it.

LISTEN | Rachel Zelniker discusses her CBC podcast, Giant: Murder Underground:

It’s been a long time since Lovell’s days on city council, but the Giant dispute is still fresh in his mind. During winter months, the former Yellowknife mayor visits a monument in town for the miners who died.

He’ll always stop to dust off any fresh snow. It’s his little way of preserving their memory. He says occasionally he’ll find flowers or some other memento, which tells him “people haven’t forgotten.”

But Yellowknife, his hometown, has changed. It’s a transient place, filled with new families and new stories.

“You know if you stopped 10 people in the street, five [or] six [or] seven of them would never have heard of it … And I think some people, they’ll never be over it, it was too much.”

O’Neil’s marriage ended after the dispute.

“It was brutal,” she said of the lockout and the way her family was treated when her husband crossed the picket line. “It controlled our family life.”

But she says she likes to think she’s learned from what happened.

“I’m not going to fight with people about things that don’t matter,” she said. “I’m just going to let it go, because I’ve had too much conflict … and I try really, really hard to see things from both points of view … and try to remember that it doesn’t have to be black and white.”

O’Neil says that although she’s tried to move on, painful memories still pop up.

“You heal, but the scars are still there … It’s like any trauma, I guess.”

Though Fullowka was a child when her father was killed in the explosion, she says she remembers having to deal with the trauma of it — all while living in a community where some people had openly despised him for crossing the line.

“We still go through a lot. The kids. The wives,” she said. “It still affects us to this day.”

She says she’s been diagnosed with mental health issues.

“In a way, it all goes back to Giant,” she said. “I’m not saying that I’m not thankful for the opportunities I’ve had since, but I played the hand that I was dealt as best as I could.”

Fullowka is now married and grateful for her family. She uses art and her faith as daily motivators.

She’s even forgiven Warren, the man who killed her father, and is grateful he “got a little bit of freedom before he died.”

“Everybody deserves a second chance. I know a lot of people, families that were affected. Even the community that was affected, there’s a whole lot of hate. And what I would like them to know is forgiveness is freeing. It may not be the right thing for them at the time. But at least consider it.”

Like Bouchard, Macintyre wants people to learn from what happened at Giant. He thinks it’s a tragic example of how desperation can lead to violence.

“Nine men died that day … and so you look for the reasons, and I think one of them was that we didn’t have anti-scab legislation that would have probably prevented a lot of the carnage.”

Macintyre acknowledges Sept. 18 is still a painful day, but not just because of what happened at Giant.

“For me it’s one small cog in a massive wheel of heartache. I don’t mean to belittle it, but for me it’s just a continuum of cases involving death and destruction … and when you’re dealing with that literally day in and day out in a major crimes environment it does take its toll.

“You know that’s my little burden that I carry around until they put me in the pine box.”

O’Neil, Macintyre, Bouchard all wanted to share their stories, but there are many people who lived through the dispute who won’t. They’ll hang up the phone if someone mentions it or beg reporters to leave it alone. It’s too painful, they say, speaking of old wounds they don’t want to reopen.

Selleck says he sympathizes with people who just want to forget.

“A lot of the guys who had to sit in picket shacks out here, I saw their depression. I saw how they went from gregarious at times to morose … And so I can really understand that feeling of ‘I just don’t want to think about it.’”

But Selleck doesn’t feel that way himself.

“I don’t want to hurt anybody, obviously. But on the other hand, if there’s to be ultimate benefit, people need to understand what went on here and people need to learn from those lessons. If we bury it, maybe it will be repeated.

“I sure hope that never happens.”

​Reporting and writing: Rachel Zelniker | Editing and design: Laura Fraser

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