This 1972 political cartoon by Terry Mosher (“Aislin”) captures the split within the NDP: Waffle leaders James Laxer and Mel Watkins, left, face off against David and Stephen Lewis.

The following is an excerpt from The New Left in Canadian Politics: The Waffle Movement and the NDP, 1965–75 by professor David Blocker, released on April 15, 2026 by UBC Press. For more information, visit www.ubcpress.ca.

By early 1969, James Laxer, a leading New Left activist, graduate student, and former president of the Canadian University Press, had become disillusioned with the student movement in Canada for uncritically replicating its American counterpart. At much the same time the economist Mel Watkins, who in 1968 was writing a prominent report on foreign ownership commissioned by the federal government, concluded that Canadian independence could only be achieved through socialism. Meanwhile, Gerald Caplan, a young professor and NDP activist, added his voice to this growing chorus of lament by expressing frustration with the NDP for its timidity over “the growing dominance of the United States” in Canada.

In April 1969, after Watkins had spent the year as promised promoting his report, he was invited by Caplan to attend a weekend meeting at his home in Toronto. Also on the guest list were, as Caplan explained, other like-minded friends and acquaintances “who feel that we’re significantly left of the NDP but not happy to simply embrace all of the jargon and tactics of the New Left.” Watkins and Caplan were joined by Ed Broadbent, James Laxer, Krista Maeots, Doug and Carol Myers, John and Patricia Smart, and Giles Endicott in what would become the inaugural meeting of the Waffle. Among Caplan’s invitees, only Stephen Lewis, the MPP for Scarborough West, failed to respond to Caplan’s invitation. Caplan and Lewis were close friends, but Lewis’s nonattendance reportedly did not surprise the others.

Over the course of the weekend the group discussed the state of the NDP and the left in Canada, while formulating ideas for inclusion in a draft statement that Laxer would compose. Watkins later recalled that Laxer, “already miles ahead of most of us… showed up at that very first meeting with a draft of a resolution that quickly garnered acclaim.” The group also agreed that new recruits should be members of the NDP. At the second meeting held one month later at John and Patricia Smart’s home in Kingston, they were joined by Lorne and Caroline Brown, who had been active in the Saskatchewan NDP before moving to Kingston where Lorne was a graduate student. Also new were Don Taylor, an assistant research director for the Steelworkers, Hugh Winsor, a reporter for the Globe and Mail, Gordon Flowers, the federal NDP youth secretary, Hans Brown, a staffer in the federal NDP leader’s office, and several others, mainly from Toronto and Kingston. The enlarged group assigned Watkins the task of incorporating ideas from their second meeting into Laxer’s draft. After a third meeting held in Toronto two weeks later, Caplan made the final edits to the document.

Much of the substance of Laxer’s draft would be included in the final Waffle Manifesto, and reflected many of the concerns he had previously expressed in articles appearing in Canadian Dimension. The draft highlighted two key issues: domination of the Canadian economy by a morally bankrupt United States tainted by chronic racial inequality and its war in Vietnam, and the potential for a heightened emphasis on Canadian economic nationalism to attract Québec nationalists into a pan-Canadian socialist coalition. The first draft also argued that capitalism caused regional inequalities within Canada, and included a nod to the importance of “the struggle for worker participation in industrial decision making.” No mention was made of the NDP specifically until the final paragraph. Laxer later recalled that “we had the spirit of the New Left. The Manifesto was an expression of the youthful radicalism of the era, but it was Watkins who made it a brilliant document.”

Watkins’s draft considerably improved Laxer’s. Watkins added stirring introductory and concluding paragraphs, reworked some of Laxer’s awkward phrasing, and included three paragraphs on industrial democracy—a major preoccupation of Broadbent’s—that highlighted the need to........

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