Rochdale College governing council meeting, 1971. Photo by Alex MacDonald.

The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left Edited by Jim Harding Fernwood, 2026

The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left

Edited by Jim Harding

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote William Wordsworth as the dream of a far-reaching Revolution of the 1790s faded into the opening decade of the 19th century, “But to be young was very heaven!” The 1960s could not hold a candle of revolutionary substance to that decade of Wordsworth’s enthusiastic youth. For the 1790s witnessed not only the French Revolution, but also its Haitian equivalent, striking a decisive blow against slavery. The anti-colonialism of the decade’s previous American Revolution still reverberated throughout the Atlantic world. English radicals such as John Thelwall struggled valiantly to chart a political course against monarchy and the surviving remnants of the absolutist state at the same time as they struck blows against the nascent factory system. Mary Wollstonecraft championed the rights of women. It was indeed the dawn of new times; the young, as Wordsworth well knew, revelled in the promise of truly monumental change. Then the Frankenstein-like power of a fully developed capitalism rewrote scripts of everyday life and the character of revolt. Nonetheless, Wordsworth’s verse in The Prelude, reflecting on his romantic revolutionary period, when he entered the 1790s as a 21-year-old, resonated in the thoughts of most sixties radicals more than a century and a half later. It echoes in chambers of aspiration and longings for an egalitarian order among many former New Leftists to this day.

The eight sixties elders who provide stories in this edited collection of how they worked their way through Canada’s 1960s and later lived out their understandings of what meaningful social change was and how it could be realized would all endorse Wordsworth’s words as applied to their personal histories. Dimitrios Roussopoulos, a founding figure in the Canadian anti-nuclear arms movement, a tireless worker in Montréal’s Milton Parc Citizen’s Committee (which established the largest non-profit cooperative housing project in North America), and founding publisher of the journal Our Generation and Black Rose Books, recalls fondly how much he enjoyed being “a thorn in the establishment’s side. What fun!”

Fun, however, did not necessarily always mean agreement. Sixties radicals in Canada, however much they struggled to build a movement of opposition to constituted authority and its massive apparatus of concentrated economic power, political coercion, and repressive, placatory tolerance, ultimately failed to achieve anything approximating a united end—as have generations of dissidents subsequently. As the reflections in this volume reveal, there was much disagreement among the Canadian New Left. The decades that followed the 1960s would see radicals such as these adopt different stances. It was the same elsewhere, throughout a world wracked by sixties happenings.

The courses these individuals charted in the decades following the upheavals of the volatile era that forever left its mark on them (as they did on it) weave in and out of various trajectories. Some eventually cast their lot with the labour movement, such as Cathy Walker. A Vancouver-based activist nurtured by progressive parents (her father a Machinists’ Union militant) and schooled in upheavals at Simon Fraser University, Walker became a pivotal feminist player in the legendary 1970 cross-Canada Abortion Caravan. She then almost accidentally fell into decades of trade union organizing. Others, most notably Joan Newman Kuyek, dedicated their lives to community organizing, which could animate anti-poverty activism in Kingston or rally miners’ wives to militancy in Sudbury. Roussopoulos transitioned from being a philosophically inclined Frankfurt School Marxist to an ardent advocate of anarchism, inspired by its 19th century architects and consistently committed to the 1960s vision of participatory democracy. Peter Warrian, once a seminary student, graduated to the presidency of the Canadian Union of Students (CUS) in its most radical period, later finding a niche in trade union research. He later became an influential figure in social democracy’s early-1990s Ontario electoral triumph that subsequently crashed in disappointing economic, political, and social failure.

In this sorry New Democratic Party “squandering of a miracle,” as one New Left duo dubbed it, Warrian orchestrated an army of 300 economists. The debacle of the NDP’s parliamentary victory, the first time central Canada’s industrial heartland managed to elect a social democratic government, culminated in the curtailment of organized labour’s cherished sense of how industrial pluralism should work. Collective agreements were arbitrarily shelved, and unpaid “Rae Days” imposed on public sector unionists. Entitlements of the poor were also cut back. A wide array of labour and social movement allies grew alienated from social democracy’s inability to behave differently........

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