In response to the increasing labour radicalism following the First World War, the Canadian government reacted by banning strikes and lockouts, forbidding the public use of "enemy languages" like German, Ukrainian, and Czech, and declaring 14 radical unions and left-wing parties illegal, including the IWW. The IWW mandate was to organize all workers in society into one central union and then call a massive general strike that would bring capitalism crashing down.

The IWW in Canada attracted few skilled workers and was most successful among unskilled labourers in the harvest fields, lumber camps, and railway track-laying gangs. Its largest supporters were eastern-European immigrants to Canada, which led the federal government to consider the IWW akin to Bolshevism. Yet there was growing unrest among all Canadian workers whose increased wages and improved working conditions were being rolled back at the end of the First World War. Thus, well before the famous Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, Canadian workers from coast to coast were fed up and turned to strikes, political activism, and revolutionary unions such as the IWW.