His newspaper favoured freer trade with the U.S. Its editorial stance was "an advocate of radical tariff reform while in general principle it will be independent.

[8] A strike began in Rossland, British Columbia in July 1901 in response to efforts by the mining companies to break the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) locals.

[1] In 1902 Pettipiece sold the Lardeau Eagle and bought an interest in Toronto-based CSL organ Citizen and Country, which he moved to Vancouver.

After the failure of the Rossland strike, a WFM convention was held in Kamloops early in 1902, where socialism was declared the official ideology of the union.

Eugene V. Debs launched a successful campaign to destroy the Progressive party and ensure socialist control of the union.

"[11] In January 1903 the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) began a campaign to break the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees (UBRE) local in its freight department in Vancouver, and in late February 1903 the union went on strike, with support from socialist and unions across western Canada.

[12] The CPR fought the strike ruthlessly, bringing in strikebreakers from central Canada and the USA, and using spies and special police.

Pettipiece wrote, "nowhere else in the British Empire would such a condition be possible, and it has seldom been equaled anywhere in the long and painful history of the tragedy of labor."

He was responsible for forming locals of the Western Federation of Miners in British Columbia, and organizing the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada.

McKenzie said, only partly in jest, "since Marx died nobody was capable of throwing light on [economic] matters except the editor of the Clarion, whoever we may happen to be.

[21] Early in 1910 there was a revolt by the moderate and eastern European SPC members in the Prairie provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Pettipiece was among the trade union socialists who lost faith in the ability of the SPC to lead the working class and left the party at this time.

[24] During the winter of 1911–12 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) held a number of street meetings to protest against rising unemployment.

James Finlay was elected mayor on a law and order platform, and in January 1912 passed a by-law that banned outdoor meetings.

The IWW was organizing street meetings to attract unskilled workers and migrants, but the trades unions did not want these people as members.

He called the war a "miserable muddle" caused by "certain kings, princes, politicians, financiers and other international scoundrels.

[24] On 14 April 1916 the British Columbia Federationist published an editorial that Pettipiece must have approved and may have written, saying, The noisy advocates of "votes for women" may rest assured that their pet hobby will go through with flying colors as soon as the war is ended.

There is little doubt of that, and with her franchise she will be a bulwark of defense to everything that is conservative in political and industrial life...[24] The British Columbia Federation of Labor decided in January 1918 to form the Federated Labor Party (FLP) as "a united working class political party ... calculated to enlist the interest and activity of every advanced and progressive thinker."

The new party's early leaders included prominent socialists such as Pettipiece, E. T. Kingsley and James Hurst Hawthornthwaite.

Pettipiece made the anti-capitalist position of the party clear in a speech in March 1918 when he said, "All shades of opinion are to be represented from the social uplift element to the red-hot revolutionary.

"[30] However, immediately after the FLP had been founded there was a general swing among BC socialists towards industrial syndicalism and One Big Union (OBU).

[34] From 1933 Pettipiece pushed for abolition of the ward system of election in Vancouver, which did not give fair representation to working class areas.

In March 1908 he wrote in The Trades Unionist that "In the fastest growing Oriental section of the city every conceivable sort of the rankest kind of "sweat shops" exist; or perhaps thrive would be a better term.

And as sort of a refuge for the social garbage as a result of such economic conditions, the Chinese have provided the town with plenty of opium joints, where over 100 white women, social outcasts who have fallen to the last depths of degradation, are imprisoned victims of these monstrous dens of iniquity.