By Jim Selby, AFL staff

Mario Troncoso was a friend of mine – but more accurately he was a comrade in arms. Mario was that rare kind of trade unionist – one who never lost his idealism and principles as he got older.

For some, Mario’s insistence that the labour movement live up to it’s own past was a source of discomfort. He insisted that union leaders and activists recognize the more radical nature of the labour movement that he fervently believed in – and which he never stopped promoting.

Mario’s quick and subtle mind could always reduce the endlessly complex world of union politics and our confrontations with an evolving and powerful global economy to basic equations of power and justice. His analysis was always pointed and often ruthless – but never simplistic or rhetorical.

Mario had a subtle and powerful intellect, and he never stopped learning. In the columns he wrote for Labour News, he constantly strove to improve his writing skills, and often rewrote three and four times to get exactly the meaning for which he was striving. He embraced new technologies, quickly mastering the internet as a new research tool. I can’t remember the number of times he would forward new and interesting websites to my attention.

That was another aspect of Mario’s character. He knew a great deal about many things – and although he was especially knowledgeable in matters of occupational health and safety and of Chilean events, he was also a constantly amazing storehouse of information on everything related to labour around the world.

Mario took a lot of tough knocks during his life. A refugee from the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile, Mario contracted throat cancer as a direct result of working in a nickel smelter in Canada.

Typically, when the Workers’ Compensation Board refused to consider Mario’s cancer to be work related, Mario researched his own case. He finally presented the WCB with so much scholarly medical evidence connecting his workplace to laryngeal cancer, that they were forced to grant him a disability pension.

Forced to talk in a hoarse whisper, and in constant pain – of which he never complained – you would think Mario would have become bitter and depressed. But instead, he was one of the most optimistic and positive people I knew.

He was always able to be buoyed up by even the smallest workers’ triumph or least significant labour struggle. And, he always took part in those struggles. There wasn’t a picket line or demonstration or rally held in Edmonton where you would not find Mario. When he offered to take photographs for Labour News, I knew that I would never be short of pictures from any labour activity.

There are those who found Mario’s commitment to social change and a new socialist society to be naïve or childish. I am not one of those.

I think the world and the labour movement could use a lot more Mario Troncosos and a lot less opportunists.

Mario died following a supposedly simple operation on his throat. He was released from hospital, developed complications and died following readmission. Do I blame our government for his death? You bet I do. Cutbacks in health care and forced early release from overcrowded hospital wards took the future away from a fine, healthy middle-aged man.

I’ll miss Mario – his humour, his optimism, even his conversations while I was working on another deadlines.

Farewell companero.