The Winnipeg General Strike left a legacy of bitterness and controversy, and sympathetic strikes broke out across the country, but were soon quashed.

Nellie McClung, who visited Winnipeg during the action, sympathized with the plight of the workers and the reforms that they sought to achieve, but she disagreed with using such radical means to achieve them. Some of the organizers of the strike were people that she had worked with during her campaigns for reforms in the province of Manitoba, and she found that she disagreed with the radical philosophies that they had developed. However, she was saddened by the harsh measures used to end the strike.

Unfortunately, the increasing militancy of the unions deepened the rift between the Anglo-Saxon middle-class, and Eastern European immigrants, and reinforced the cultural elite's perception of them as "undesirable" immigrants.