by JASON GONDZIOLA

On any given day, you can find almost anything at Wal-Mart. Beach balls. Bubble bath. Pyjamas. Last May, Canadian Wal-Mart shoppers were able to find something else at their local big-box: activists.

Led by Concordia student and activist Ezra Winton, the group of six students and two documentary filmmakers united under the name Wal-Town and hit the Trans-Canada, visiting small towns from Quebec to British Columbia to educate and inform Wal-Mart shoppers and employees about how the company keeps their prices so low. Their theory? Cheap labour, both domestically and overseas.

And so, on a grey morning in late April, we headed to Jonquière, the first stop on the tour.

Beyond unions

The choice of locale was auspicious; Jonquière's Wal-Mart had recently lost a unionization attempt by the United Food and Commercial Worker's Union by a slim margin. A victory there would have represented a fundamental shift in how the store does business, likely forcing wages up in the ensuing collective bargaining. One retail analyst has said that Wal-Mart's labour costs are around half of the industry average.

Up until this point, no Wal-Mart has successfully unionized, with one exception: the one in Windsor, Ontario. Coming on the heels of an Ontario Labour Board decision, which found the employer guilty of using "subtle but effective" threats of the store's closure, an automatic certification for the union was granted in 1997. It didn't last. A year later, the store's employees voted to de-certify.

Our arrival in Jonquière took place in a similar climate. Amidst rumours of the store's impending closure, the employees voted 74-65 against the union only weeks earlier. And so, arriving at this store was a frightening thing. Nobody knew exactly what to expect, how the management would react and whether or not local law enforcement would be involved.

Cookies as PR

Luckily, the company wasn't out to put people in jail, and opted to take a more PR-friendly approach. From Jonquière on, tour members were invariably greeted with a canned response, either verbal or on a form letter where the manager could fill in their name. For a company whose first tenet is respect for the individual, this level of conformity seemed a little odd.

Next came the cookies. After a few days on the road, Wal-Mart managers began offering coffee, cookies and juice. The group would invariably decline, and so after about a week the management stopped bringing out the treats.

The introductions and confectionery peace offerings were followed by the same spiel, informing the activists that they were welcome to stay, but that the store has a policy against soliciting on their property. Ezra would reply that the group intended to distribute information to the customers, and wouldn't leave the property unless instructed to do so by the local law enforcement.

The cops never came, but the customers did. Reactions ran the gamut from apathy to infuriation to support. Some people were outraged that anyone would dare sully the good store's name, pointing to Wal-Mart's sizeable charity contributions. Others thought differently and said they hadn't considered why the prices were so low. In a few cases, customers vowed never to return again.

Keeping the giant at bay

In addition to visiting towns that had a Wal-Mart, the tour also visited a handful that didn't. Six days into the trip we arrived in Guelph, Ontario, where we discovered a local community-based resistance that has managed to keep the store out for 10 years. Their secret? Zoning.

"From a city perspective, it's been a planning issue and who determines how a city grows," said Karen Farbridge, former mayor of Guelph. "Is it the people that live there, or is it some private interest that has different plans than what you've identified as a community?"

The crux of the issue wasn't whether or not Wal-Mart was allowed to open a store in Guelph, but where that store would be located if it did open. A subsidiary owned by First Pro Shopping Centres, Wal-Mart's preferred developer, purchased land for development in Guelph's north-end. The problem was that the area wasn't zoned for commercial use, and a store as big as Wal-Mart would require a substantial change to the city plan. Rather than roll over and let the store open their operation on re-zoned industrial land, the city held their ground and wouldn't allow Wal-Mart to come to town unless they use pre-existing commercial areas.

In an interesting twist, the city council forced Wal-Mart into reporting confidential sales figures, which were then leaked to The Guelph Mercury, their local newspaper. After the figures were printed, Wal-Mart took legal action against the newspaper, and lost.

The Wal-Mart question became a central issue in the last municipal election, with First Pro's subsidiary giving campaign contributions to mayoral and council candidates who were seen to be pro-development. Characterized as an anti-Wal-Mart candidate, Farbridge lost her bid for re-election. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on the Wal-Mart decision.

Unfinished business

And now it's over. Gone are the nights spent sleeping nine at a time on some stranger's floor, and gone too are the struggles and joys of the temporary communal lifestyle. All we are left with now are memories of sudden snowstorms in Winnipeg, secretly sympathetic Wal-Mart associates in Lethbridge, and sneaking into the Victoria Day parade in Victoria.

But from this finality rises a sense of incompleteness, of knowing that while the trip may be finished, the work has only just begun. Wal-Mart was not constructed in 28 days, and it's unlikely that a tour of the same length will have any appreciable impact on the company's policies and practices.

With this in mind, some tour members have begun work on a book and the Wal-Mart Information Network, which aims to unite people in communities like Guelph with other communities who are also trying to keep the company out of their town. After all, if you're going to go up against a company that employs more people than the U.S. Army, you're going to need a little help.

To learn more about the Wal-Town tour, or about the up and coming Wal-Mart Information Network, go to www.wal-town.com