Peter Graham and Ian McKay, Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto (Toronto: Between the Lines 2019)

Works on the Canadian New Left are now sprouting plentifully and certainly a work on the country’s major city is welcome. This one is encyclopedic, and Graham and McKay deserve thanks for their inclusive rendition of the youthful radical movements in Toronto from 1958 to 1985. The book is generous in its treatment of most of them, though it offers, as it should, analysis of why some groups achieved more in the short term than others while still others left a lasting legacy, for example, in preserving natural areas or working-class neighbourhoods that corporate interests wanted to bulldoze.

My quibbles with these authors began on the first page where they claim that “in contrast to older formations, new leftists emphasized solidarity with national liberation movements challenging imperialism around the world.” Much of the old left, Stalinist, Trotskyist and to a degree the social democrats, though not so much in the early Cold War, had opposed imperialism. The authors supply abundant evidence, in any case, that many new leftists, whatever their reasons for becoming anti-capitalists in the first place, emphasized the local over the global. Graham and McKay are on more solid ground when they define the amorphous new left in terms of their preference for “direct, grassroots, community-based democracy” in their organizational style, a style which they believed prefigured “the liberated world of the future.” (1)

The book demonstrates the impact of the Cold War on limiting growth of left-wing thought and organization after World War II and the debates that occurred within the new left about allowing participation by Communists and Communist fronts in non-partisan organizations even when the positions of the Communists and the new leftists on particular issues varied little. While the authors are no doubt right in suggesting that new leftists often rejected working with communists because of potential smears that their organizations would face, it is also true that the new left generally regarded the Soviet Union as a negative example for socialist transformation and disliked Communists both for their relentless apologetics for that country and their personal stodginess. While the new left shared the Communists’ political passions, they diverged on sex, drugs, and rock and roll and there was little acceptance of the grey-haired Reds’ view that hippies were evidence of capitalist degeneracy.

This book is at its best in discussing new left strategies and debates regarding protests against American imperialism in Indochina, efforts to protect and strengthen neighbourhoods and organizations of marginal workers and the poor, the early second-wave women’s movement, movements of Indigenous people and non-whites, and movements of the early lgbtq2s community. It confronts as well the ongoing issue of free speech and freedom to pursue legal activities versus the protection of life and dignity of oppressed peoples. A high point of new left activity in Winnipeg was the 1968 padlocking of the office at the University of Manitoba where Dow Chemicals, which produced the napalm used against Indochinese people, was interviewing engineers. The job-seeking engineers claimed the protesters deprived them of their right to seek whatever jobs they wished. Given what Dow was all about, their claims that the protesters were “like Nazis” spoke of an inverted world.

Mention of other cities in this review may seem a digression. But this book would have been helped by more efforts to place Toronto events in broader contexts. For example, the discussion of women fighting to remove male preserves from the University of Toronto campus, to attend debates at male-only Hart House, and to attend concerts without escorts, all in 1966, while treated sympathetically, is also treated as a half-hearted enterprise. A comparison with other campuses across Canada would likely show that such feminist organizing was rare in 1966. Certainly that was true for all three Manitoba campuses and would remain true for three more years. So the University of Toronto women, one of whom these authors suggest was rather defensive about her feminism versus her femininity, were actually pioneers.

Graham and McKay are at once sympathetic to and critical of the efforts of new leftist groups to produce movements that avoided both Leninist discipline or social democratic tinkering with the status quo. The tent city in a local park which new leftists named Wachea, from a Cree word that indicated all were welcome, and Rochdale, the housing project meant to create intentional community, for example, both exemplified new left enthusiasms and lack of detailed planning. While police interventions demonstrated mainstream hostility to these liberatory projects, there were internal issues that were simply avoided. At Rochdale, women complained of constant sexual harassment and exclusion from decision-making.

The authors quote a number of Toronto activists from the period, some of whom, like Judy Rebick, Judy Darcy, Ulli Diemer, and Peggy Morton, remain important figures on the Canadian left to this day. The work of George Martell and others on This Magazine Is About Schools deserves particular notice because it demonstrates the efforts of new leftists to balance their goals of individual liberation, on the one hand, and ending class oppression on the other.

Graham and McKay tackle the difficult issue of the conflicts between those who remained committed to a new left view of the world in the 1970s and those who tacked towards Marxism-Leninism. They provide strong evidence that those who scorned the indiscipline and sometimes lack of political seriousness of the new left weakened the new left without creating organizations that could attract more than small numbers of people. But they suggest that the Marxist-Leninist formations, after berating their former new left colleagues, came around by the 1980s to accepting the importance of the diversity of issues that the new left grappled with as opposed to simply focusing on the class struggle and working-class revolution. Perhaps, but by then the sense of breaking with an oppressive establishment that restricted both individual and collective rights in the interests of capitalism and patriarchy had become less the cry of a significant section of a young generation and more the property of a shrunken portion of a generation approaching middle age and unable to make connections with anyone younger than themselves.

These two authors place the shifting attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s within the context of the postwar compromise that bequeathed the Keynesian welfare state but are somewhat vague regarding the class, gender, and ethnic composition of the Toronto new left. They provide a lovely kaleidoscope but perhaps lack the kind of data that would allow them to hazard educated guesses about the gendered, raced, and classed balances among who became active in the city’s new left and who did not.

In the end, this work provides a major contribution to our understanding of how the new left was made and unmade in Toronto from 1958 to 1985. McKay, as the originator of the oft-challenged idea that much of Canada’s history is best understood in terms of the ability of a liberal order to co-opt all sorts of people and movements, joins with Graham to praise the new left in Toronto for creating democratic counterinstitutions that might be seen as first steps towards transcending the liberal order. From food coops to health centres, neighbourhoods protected from developers to subsidized housing projects, the new left created challenges to bourgeois individualism that have not disappeared and should not be dismissed as simply minor stones in the road to long-term capitalist hegemony.

Alvin Finkel

Athabasca University