The Children's Chocolate Bar Strike
Plus Muffy The Mouse makes out with Alex Trebek and more...
A huge crowd of angry children was marching down Bloor Street. There were hundreds of them on that spring day in 1947, disgruntled and filled with purpose. They were armed with picket signs emblazoned with outraged slogans, and they left leaflets on every parked car they passed. The price of chocolate bars had just gone up — and Canadian children weren't going to stand for it.
The Chocolate Bar Strike had begun.
It all started on Vancouver Island. A week before that march down Bloor Street, a group of kids in the town of Ladysmith, B.C. — on the road between Victoria and Nanaimo — paid a visit to a local ice cream parlour after lunch. When one of the students went inside to buy a chocolate bar, he was shocked to find the price had shot up overnight. A day earlier, the bars had cost a single nickel — the same as a bottle of pop or an ice cream cone. Now, they were eight cents each — a sudden jump of 60% that was repeated in shops all over the country. "All of a sudden we went in and bang-o," Parker Williams remembered decades after his visit to the ice cream parlour, "a chocolate bar's eight cents! And that just hit us like a slap in the face."
The children of Canada were furious. The first protests were held right there in Ladysmith, where many of the kids had grown up in families of coal miners and loggers, familiar with the power of unions and collective action. They organized a boycott of the ice cream parlour, marching up and down the street with placards and an old Buick covered with chalk slogans like "Don't Be A Sucker" and "We Want 5¢ Bars Then We All Shall Buy Them."
When the kids' picture appeared in a Vancouver newspaper, it sparked a national movement. The protests quickly spread across the country. Over the next ten days, children everywhere from Halifax to Montreal to Calgary organized their own boycotts and marches. In Regina, students walked out of class. In Burnaby, they blocked traffic with their bicycles. In Victoria, they shut down the provincial legislature. In Ottawa, they marched on Parliament Hill, demanding an audience with the finance minister as they declared they would rather "eat worms" than an eight-cent chocolate bar. In Fredericton, they pooled their sugar rations so they could make fudge instead. A new protest song was heard in the streets of New Brunswick: "We want a five-cent chocolate bar / Eight cents is going too darn far…"
In some cities, the police were called in to break up the protests. But the kids weren't alone in their cause. As they took to their adorable picket lines, they found plenty of support from adults. Chocolate bars weren't the only products with skyrocketing price tags. During the Second World War, the government had introduced strict price controls. But with the war now over, those controls had been lifted. Prices were soaring. The inflation rate soon passed 14%, more than double what it was in 2022. The chocolate bar came to represent all those rising prices, a rallying point for resistance. And so, the striking children attracted the support of consumer associations, parent groups, and labour unions. Some stores even refused to carry the eight-cent bars, selling their existing stock at the old price in solidarity.
Within days of that first protest in Ladysmith, sales of chocolate bars across Canada had plunged by 80%. It seemed as if the children's protests might actually be working.
In Toronto, five hundred high school students from Central Tech, Central Commerce and Harbord Collegiate had joined the march down Bloor Street, ending with a rally at Christie Pits park. Thousands more signed a pledge to promise they wouldn't buy a single chocolate bar until the price was lowered back down to five cents. And more protests were coming. That rally was going to be followed by an even more impressive march in Toronto the very next day — it promised to be the biggest yet, part of a nation-wide day of action against the price-hike. A week after it began, the children's strike was still gaining momentum.
But Canada's candy companies weren't about to go down without a fight.
As sales of chocolate bars plummeted, confectionary manufacturers rolled out their own public relations campaign. They claimed the massive price hikes were outside their control, the result of higher production and labour costs. They suggested that if Canadians wanted lower prices, the government should reduce taxes. They told newspapers their profits weren't rising at all. One representative told The Toronto Daily Star that if the kids didn't call off their strike "chocolate bars could disappear from the market entirely." Newspaper ads begged customers to understand that "5¢ Chocolate Bars just aren't possible NOW!" Some chocolatiers even tried to bribe strike leaders with free candy.
But it wasn't until the morning of the national day of protest that the candy companies landed their biggest blow: they accused the children of being part of a Communist conspiracy.
These were the early years of the Cold War. Just days after the Second World War ended, a cipher clerk working at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa had made a dramatic defection, turning himself in to the Canadian authorities with shocking evidence that the Russians had been running an elaborate spy ring in the capital. His revelations shattered the fragile alliance between the Soviets and the West, sparking decades of distrust, paranoia and nuclear tensions. In the months leading up to the candy strike, newspapers had been filled with stories of Communist plots being uncovered and Communist spies being put on trial. And the rising tide of the Red Scare gave the chocolate manufacturers the ammunition they needed in their fight against the striking children.
The march to Christie Pits had been sponsored by the National Federation of Labor Youth, an organization born out of the Young Communist League of Canada, which had been banned a few years earlier. That fact was seized upon by Toronto's most conservative newspaper as a way to discredit the entire strike. “Chocolate bars and a world revolution may seem poles apart, but to the devious, Communist mind, there is a close relationship," The Toronto Evening Telegram argued, claiming the kids were part of a global anti-capitalist conspiracy. "They don’t realize it but the indignant students parading with their placards demanding a five-cent candy bar, have become another instrument in the Communist grand strategy of 'the creation of chaos.'”
Suddenly, the kids' momentum was gone. Parents forbade their children from joining the marches. Organizations began withdrawing their support. Newspapers denounced the protests. And the Chocolate Bar Strike fizzled. The candy companies had won. The five-cent chocolate bar was gone forever.
But while the children were disappointed, they also walked away with their heads held high. "Even though the price of candy bars remained at eight cents," one of the kids explained many years later, "I think we were proud of the fact we stood up and protested and stood up for our rights as children.
"We went away with the fact that we tried to do something, we tried to change something."
There have been lots of great articles written about the Chocolate Bar Strike over the years. So if you’d like to learn more you can, including from Chris Bateman at Torontoist, Yanick LeClerc at Canada’s History magazine, Tom Hawthorn at The Globe and Mail, Rob Lammle at Mental Floss and Taylor C. Nokes at the Canadian Encyclopedia.
If you’d like to learn more about the Soviet spy ring that was operating in Ottawa during the Second World War, and Igor Gouzenko’s dramatic defection, we recently made a whole episode of our Canadiana documentary series about it. It’s free to watch right here:
And there’s also an hour-long documentary about the children’s chocolate bar strike:
If you aren’t already a paid subscriber to the newsletter and you’d like to make the switch, all you have to do is click the button below. Not only will you get 10% off my online courses and invites to exclusive online events, you’ll also be supporting all my work while helping to ensure The Toronto History Weekly survives. This newsletter is a ton of work! Only about 5% of readers have made the switch so far, which basically means that by offering a few dollars a month you’ll be giving the gift of Toronto history to 20 other people.
I’ll Be Talking About Clowns & Murder Next Weekend!
The MOTIVE Crime & Mystery Festival is Canada’s biggest crime and mystery writing festival, organized by the Toronto International Festival of Authors. And it’s only a week away! This year’s edition will be held at Harbourfront on June 2–4.
I’ll be giving two big talks during the event. On Saturday at 3:30pm, I’ll be sharing the story of the Toronto Circus Riot. And on Sunday at 2:30pm, I’ll be talking about Toronto’s most notorious murders. Hope to see some of you there!
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
MUFFY THE MOUSE MADE OUT WITH ALEX TREBEK NEWS — Myseum’s new exhibit about the history of children’s television in Canada opened this week (details in the event listings below) and Toronto Life got a tour from Nina Keogh, the puppeteer behind iconic characters like Muffy The Mouse. One of my favourite memories she shares with them? The time she dated Alex Trebek. “I remember necking on my couch. He wore a black nylon turtleneck and was absolutely gorgeous.” Read more.
Meanwhile, Marcus Mitropoulos also shares a look around the exhibit with blogTO readers. Read more.
COSTUME EMPORIUM NO MORE NEWS — Malabar Limited had been providing Torontonians with costumes for 99 years before quietly closing its doors this March. Peter MacCallum shares his behind-the-scenes photographs of the famous costume shop with Spacing. Read more.
TORONTO SPORTS TEAMS NAMED AFTER ANCIENT GREEKS NEWS — The Argonauts football team turns 150 next year. This week, they announced their plans to celebrate the milestone during the season. Read more.
CBC STUDIO CONDO NEWS — Developers are looking to turn the old CBC studio in Cabbagetown, originally built as a movie theatre in 1919, into a condo tower. It looks like some of the heritage features will be preserved, though Storeys points out, the century-old building “is not designated under the Ontario Heritage Act and has not been listed on the city’s Heritage Register, despite being recommended for inclusion and endorsed by the Toronto Preservation Board.” Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
FINDING THE RECORDS FOR “IMPOSSIBLE” GENEALOGY: LESSONS LEARNED FROM A CHINESE GENEALOGIST
May 31 – 6:30pm — Online — Oakville Public Library
“When researching your family tree, we are taught to look for resources like birth, marriage and death records, land records and many others. In this session, [we] will explore why family historians exploring their Chinese roots have to turn to different records in order to learn more about their ancestors. Linda Yip is a professional genealogist, storyteller, entrepreneur and speaker based in Saskatchewan. She is a member of the Ancestry Canada Advisory Board, and her blog, Past-Presence.com, has been read by over 250,000 people in over 180 countries. She is also the author of the book, Getting Started in Chinese Genealogy: A Family Historian's Guide (Even If You Don't Speak or Read Chinese).”
Free with registration!
LIKKLE HERITAGE TREASURE HUNT
June 3 — 11am to 4pm — Little Jamaica — Heritage Toronto
“Join Heritage Toronto in Little Jamaica for a heritage treasure hunt like never before. Uncover the vibrant history of this Caribbean community through food, music and the stories of the people who have lived and worked in the neighborhood. Take a delicious taste test of Jamaican and Caribbean cuisine (limited quantity), listen for clues in the groove of the reggae tunes, try your hand at black hair care and answer some trivia questions.”
Free with registration!
TRANSPORTATION & INDUSTRY — SWANSEA WALKING TOUR
June 3 — 1:30pm — Jane & Bloor — Swansea Historical Society
“Our tour leader will point out forms that came and went, and some that were proposed but never actually built, while reflecting on how we memorialize them in an era of increasing awareness of Indigenous history. As many of you know, for centuries the native portage route known as the Toronto Carrying Place essentially followed the present alignment of Riverside Drive in Swansea. In the 1890s, the short-lived Belt Line Railway ran north and south through Swansea, just east of today’s South Kingsway. The southern part of Swansea was home to several industries. The longest-surviving and probably best known industry started out as the Swansea Bolt Works, before becoming part of the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco), and eventually being replaced by residential developments in recent decades.”
Free!
MODEST HOPES: HOMES AND STORIES OF TORONTO’S WORKERS FROM THE 1820s TO THE 1920s
June 7 — 7pm — The Beaches Sandbox — The Beach & East Toronto Historical Society
Don Loucks and Leslie Valpy talk about their book. “Despite their value as urban property, Toronto’s workers’ cottages are often characterized as being small, cramped, poorly built, and in need of modernization or even demolition. But for the workers and their families who originally lived in them from the 1820s to the 1920s, these houses were far from modest. Many had been driven off their ancestral farms or had left the crowded conditions of tenements in their home cities abroad. Once in Toronto, many lived in unsanitary conditions in makeshift shantytowns or cramped shared houses in downtown neighbourhoods such as The Ward. To then move to a self-contained cottage or rowhouse was the result of an unimaginably strong hope for the future and a commitment to family life.”
Free!
OUT FROM THE SHADOWS: WOMEN AND THEIR WORK IN 19th CENTURY TORONTO
July 7 — 6:30pm — Don Mills Library
“Author Elizabeth Gillian Muir discusses her newest book, An Unrecognized Contribution: Women and their work in 19th century Toronto, which details the work that women did in the city --which could have been any large city-- work that has been hidden and not recognized in early histories. While women did own factories, taverns, pubs, stores, market gardens, butcher shops, brickyards and other commercial ventures, this fact has been hidden for decades. The presentation will be highlighted with photos and time for a Q & A.”
Free with registration!
THE MISSISSAUGA AND THE LEGACY OF THE TORONTO PURCHASE
June 15 — 7:30pm — Online — Etobicoke Historical Society
“Why are the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation not in Mississauga? Historian and consultant Karen Travers will discuss diplomatic and economic relationships between the Mississauga, and British officials and settlers that led to the negotiation of Treaty 13 in 1805, as well the impact of settlement, policy and law that forced them to relocate to Hagersville, Ontario in the mid-19th century.
“Karen is an EHS board member and Communications manager for our media releases. As a historian and consultant with research experience on issues related to Indigenous land and resource rights, she has published articles and reports on Indigenous policy and Ontario history. In addition to academic teaching and presenting, she has worked as a research/program manager and analyst for non-profit organizations devoted to furthering Indigenous business development and engagement.”
Free for members; memberships available here.
ON THE EDGE OF A CITY: TORONTO IN 1833 WALKING TOUR
June 16 — 10:30am — Meet at St. James Cathedral — Toronto’s First Post Office
“Imagine a Toronto where the tallest building is only three stories high, where Lake Ontario reaches Front Street, where the wagon wheels grind through the muddy roads, the air smells of smoke and animal, and the surrounding lands is farms, fields, and forests. This was what the neighbourhood looked like in the early 1800s.
“In this walking tour, explore the surviving built environment of the original 10 blocks of Toronto and discover how the Town of York, which started with a population of a couple hundred residents, became the City of Toronto in 1834, with a population of just under 10,000.”
$17.31 for non-members; $11.98 for members
POST NO BILLS: TORONTO STREET POSTERS FROM THE 1950s TO 1990s
Until June 25 — TD Gallery at the Toronto Reference Library
“Get an up-close look at visually-striking street posters from TPL's archives. For the first time ever, we're showcasing our decades-spanning set of Toronto street posters in person. These rarities reflect trends in graphic design as well as in our city's shifting politics, businesses and cultures. The exhibit takes you back to when activists and business owners had to hit the streets of Toronto with stacks of posters to get the word out. There was no internet or social media. It was an era when utility poles, newspaper boxes and construction sites were the billboards of the people.”
Free!
TERROR IN THE TOWN OF YORK: WAR OF 1812 WALKING TOUR
July 7 — 10:30am — Meet at St. James Cathedral — Toronto’s First Post Office
“Imagine a Toronto where the tallest building is only three stories high, where Lake Ontario reaches Front Street, where the wagon wheels grind through the muddy roads, the air smells of smoke and animal, and the surrounding lands is farms, fields, and forests. This was what the neighbourhood looked like in the early 1800s. In this walking tour, join us as we explore the beginnings of the area that would become the Town of York, the events leading up to the War of 1812, the Battle of York, and its aftermath while we walk the original 10 blocks of the early city.”
$17.31 for non-members; $11.98 for members
MR. DRESSUP TO DEGRASSI: 42 YEARS OF LEGENDARY TORONTO KIDS TV
Until August 19 — Wed to Sat, 12pm to 6pm — 401 Richmond — Myseum
“The TV shows of your childhood hit closer to home than you might think. From 1952 to 1994, Toronto was a global player in a golden era of children’s television programming. For over four decades, our city brought together innovative thought leaders, passionate creators and unexpected collaborations – forming a corner of the television industry unlike any other in the world. Toronto etched itself into our collective consciousness with shows like Mr. Dressup, Today’s Special, The Friendly Giant, Polka Dot Door, Degrassi, and more. Journey through Toronto’s heyday of children’s TV shows in this playful exhibition.”
Free!