Mike Solski

Michael Solski (October 2, 1918 – October 19, 1999) was a union leader, politician, and author in the Canadian province of Ontario. He was president of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) Local 598 from 1952 to 1959, at a time when it was the largest single local in Canada. He later served as the mayor of Coniston (1962–1972) and of Nickel Centre (1973–1978). At the end of his career, he was the target of a failed assassination attempt.

Solski was born to a working-class family in Coniston and was raised in the community. In 1935, he began working at the same local Inco smelter that also employed his father and grandfather. From 1942 to 1944, he was chair of the Coniston Plant Union Organizing Committee that led to affiliation with Mine Mill. He was elected as a Coniston town councillor in 1945 and served until 1948.

Solksi was a member of Sudbury's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) Trade Union Committee in the 1940s, at a time when the local party organization was engaged in an extremely bitter dispute with the CCF's provincial leadership, who charged that Mine Mill in Sudbury was dominated by members of the rival Communist Party of Canada. This dispute took place against the backdrop of a rivalry between Mine Mill and the United Steelworkers of America for control of Local 598. The Steelworkers leadership was closely aligned with that of the CCF, and provincial Steelworkers leader Charles Millard was a very close political ally of CCF organizer David Lewis. (Ted Jolliffe, who served as Ontario CCF leader in this period, later remarked that the rivalry between Mine Mill and Steel, rather than charges of communist infiltration, was the real reason for the dispute.)

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