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The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) was formed in 1963 by merging the National Union of Public Employees and the National Union of Public Service Employees. CUPE is now Canada’s largest union. With over 600,000 members across Canada, CUPE represents workers in health care, education, municipalities, libraries, universities, social services, public utilities, transportation, emergency services and airlines.

CUPE is a strong and democratic union that is committed to improving the quality of life for workers in Canada. Women and men working together to form local unions built CUPE. They did so to have a stronger voice – a collective voice – in their workplace and in society as a whole. Together they have won the right to negotiate their wages and working conditions; to stop arbitrary action by employers; and to speak out without fear of reprisal. In 1967, CUPE made labour history when the members elected Grace Hartman as national secretary-treasurer. She was the first woman to hold a top position within a Canadian union. In the same year, CUPE made its first pay equity breakthrough when female members working for the city of London, Ontario won an end to wage discrimination enshrined in separate wage schedules for men and women.

William Bliss Carman was a poet and editor born on April 15, 1861 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. A descendant of United Empire Loyalists, Carman attended the Fredericton Collegiate School and the University of New Brunswick. He developed a love of classical literature while attending Fredericton Collegiate, where he was introduced to the poetry of Rossetti and Swinburne by headmaster George Robert Parkin. His own first published poem appeared in the University of New Brunswick Monthly in 1879.

Carman served as editor of the New York Independent, Current Literature, Cosmopolitan, The Chap-Book and The Atlantic Monthly. His first book of poetry, Low Tide on Grand Pre, was published in 1893, followed by Songs of Vagabondia in 1894. In total he published over 25 collections of poetry.

During the 1920s Carman was a member of The Song Fishermen, a Halifax-based literary and social set that included Charles G.D. Roberts (Carman’s cousin), Andrew Merkel, Robert Norwood, Evelyn Tufts, Stewart MacAuley, Kenneth Leslie, and Ethel Butler. He was named Canada’s Poet Laureate on October 28, 1921. He died in 1929 in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had moved to be near Mary Perry King, one of his greatest literary influences.