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This is the second pair of journalists to write a detailed account of the 1992 Giant Mine/Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers (CASAW) conflict in Yellowknife, a strike/lock-out culminating in the murder of nine strikebreaking miners and the conviction of striker Roger Warren. The authors describe an isolated northern landscape of inevitable violence, raise doubts about Warren's culpability, and portray an employer intent on breaking the union.
In contrast, The Third Suspect (Red Deer College Press 1995) by journalists David Staples and Greg Owens, published soon after Warren's trial in 1995, is sympathetic to the strikebreakers' viewpoint, relegating the union's perspective to the sidelines. Staples and Owens were sent to Yellowknife to cover the dispute for the Edmonton Journal after the murders occurred. In the style of a true crime story, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as key sources, the writers describe events leading to the pursuit and conviction of "third suspect" Roger Warren, who confessed and later recanted to setting an explosive in an underground work site which killed nine miners in the early morning hours of 18 September 1992. Staples and Owens persuade the reader justice was served by Warren's trial and conviction.
Selleck and Thompson do not offer as conclusive a story in Dying for Gold. They draw more extensively on interviews with the strikers and acknowledge the wider context of the labour movement and history. Both covered the dispute over a five-year period, first as reporters for Yellowknife newspapers and then as full-time authors. Their research sources, unfortunately not footnoted, include information gained from access-to-information requests and papers, personal notes, and interviews from some of the key people involved in the dispute.
The writers do not dismiss the union's initial pre-strike position as unreasonable. Many of the 234 CASAW members believed company president Margaret Witte arrived at Royal Oak's Giant Mine from the United States with a union-breaking corporate agenda. A tentative agreement between the union and management called for concessions and did not include provisions protecting the union activists whose jobs v, ere threatened by disciplinary practices implemented under Witte's direction, More than 70 per cent of participating CASAW members therefore voted down their bargaining committee's proposed contract, in May 1992 about the same percentage of members voted...