“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 Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left
Edited by Jim Harding
Fernwood, 2026
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 than its ostensibly more mainstream Liberal and Conservative Party opponents. The way was paved, in the next electoral tussle, for a reactionary rebound: Mike Harris and his Tory vanguard wasted no time in declaring a “Common Sense Revolution” that promised a further dismantling of the protections and rights labour activists, minority groups, women, and the poor had won over the course of many post-World War II campaigns and confrontations. Warrian’s final assessment is that the experience of serving Bob Rae’s NDP government as its chief economist left the taste of ashes in his political mouth. To cleanse his palate of this seemingly socialist about-face to neoliberalism, Warrian turned to philanthropy and spiritualism. With his wife, he established a foundation supporting a wide array of national and international research projects, and signed on to work with a Vatican-sponsored initiative on “The Future of Work.” Liberal democratic society (which many radicals of the 1960s assailed as inadequate on so many levels) is now, for Warrian, in need of defence. This can only come, he claims, from a citizenry attuned to the validations of “the interior life and a sense of the sacred” best revealed in the “language of poetry.” Wordsworth the elder might not have disagreed, but others in this volume could, even perhaps those who have taken a post-1960s cultural path.
Lib Spry, now dedicated to creating dramas of dissent in theatrical ventures of change, or Stringband musician Bob Bossin, who offers an upbeat assessment of Rochdale College, certainly transcend in their commentaries any sense of bitterness. Bossin lived in Bloor Street’s unique congealment of living and learning from 1968-1971. He remembers Rochdale not as a failure, but as an attempt “at making a better world than the ghastly one we have today.” If Rochdale was, in Dennis Lee’s words, “hijacked by history,” it had at least taken a stab at reversing the course seemingly established by the past for the future. It was “like living with 800 poets,” although the psychedelic politics of the looming structure at the corner of Bloor and St. George streets was not likely a stop on Peter Warrian’s 1960s itinerary. Yet its failure, in Bossin’s remembrance, was unlike the experience of Ontario’s NDP government decades later: Rochdale did not coat the oppositional tongue in acrid ash, however disappointing its denouement.
The diversity of this movement of movements that was the 1960s could prove tumultuous. Battles brewed in the heady mix of oppositional currents. Jim Harding’s New Left prominence encompassed influential time in the trenches of 1960s activism: the New Democratic Party’s youth section; the nuclear disarmament movement; civil rights struggles in the American South; the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA); and the oppositional movement built to turn back the repressive tide at Simon Fraser University, 1968’s Students for a Democratic University. Befriending Malcolm Norris, a pioneering elder of 1930s Métis Marxism, Harding was one of the impassioned architects of SUPA’s Neestow Project, an attempt to situate student radicals within Indigenous communities, learning from them and enabling their needs. Among the New Left’s most energetic figures, who factored into seemingly every protest in Western Canada’s 1960s, Harding bridged the counterculture and the decentralized currents of organizational initiative that coursed through the decade. He experimented with drugs, joined movements of opposition, lived in communes, embraced new pedagogies, and wrote essays of dissent. Harding was never shy in putting forward his views, which often clashed vehemently with others on the Left. In 1970, he wrote to Canadian Dimension pillorying a left-wing opponent, labelling him “a reductionist, mechanistic, vulgar maoist Marxist, and anything else I can say with tongue in cheek. He wants to stay outside humanity and its struggles for freedom with his grand, deterministic theory of revolution.” Harding inspired and edited this volume, and those he chose to include no doubt appear, in part at least, because of personal ties, shared experiences, and connections with him.
Others contributing to this volume, such as Peter Warrian during his time as CUS president in that year of intransigent stands, 1968, could make statements that were both bombastic and threatening. There is little hint of that political fire in most of these recollections, with Roussopoulos—who links the legacy of the New Left to militant movements of contemporary resistance in the international arena—perhaps the outlier. Harding ends his wide-ranging reflection, which closes the volume, with a plea for “frank and respectful conversations across generations of activists to further our collective understanding and solidarity.” This, of course, is wise counsel, but its call for what is “urgently needed” carries a rather mellowing tone that is somewhat at odds with the practice of brash New Leftists in the 1960s.
Student protest at Simon Fraser University, 1968. (Photo: Dan Scott/Vancouver Sun)
It is difficult to imagine the Cathy Walker of decades past defending Art Kube’s role in the denouement of the momentous Solidarity uprising of 1983, separating him out from the rest of the “conservative and downright reactionary… labour establishment.” But she does so now, accepting the cliché-like good cop/bad cop bifurcation so usefully cultivated among the mainstream trade union tops. Evidence of a contrary view of Kube, then president of the BC Federation of Labour, is fairly substantial in my view, having put much of it forward in my critical discussion of Solidarity, published almost 40 years ago.1
The “long march through the institutions” that Warrian and Harding detail in their personal histories, and that is telescoped in Walker’s lifelong commitment to trade unionism, has no doubt produced much good. Relentless commitments to building a better society have indeed infused established organizations and community politics with New Left-inflected understandings of the need to broaden understandings. Walker’s progressive appreciation of the significance of feminism, environmentalism, internationalism, and her insistence that the health and safety of workers not be sacrificed on the altar of capitalism’s exigencies demonstrate this. Harding, who has been drummed out of more institutions because of his principled political intransigence than anyone I know, has managed to navigate decades of insult and injury with a resilience and refusal to throw in the towel of acquiescence. His resumé of post-1960s political activism encompasses stints in Regina municipal politics, a successful mayoralty run and a significant role in environmental and arts promotion in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, not to mention decades of writing. Few people have left their mark on communities as indelibly as has Joan Newman Kuyek. Her New Left, SUPA-inspired labours in Kingston, for instance, led to significant changes in the Landlord and Tenant Act and the establishment of a pioneering legal clinic, springboarding into a life of monitoring the mining industry and its destructive consequences.
Yet it is difficult not to conclude, reading the reflections of Harding’s co-workers in 1960s campaigns, that the longer and more sustained the march through the institutions of power that followed that decade’s upheavals, the more softening in political intensity has been the effect on many sixties New Left radicals. Some will applaud this development as a maturing politics of engagement, but it is also possible to see that the substance of revolutionary possibility has sometimes slipped from view.
I am old enough not to hold this against the contributors to this volume. Younger than them by a few years (a generation in sixties time!), I’ve known a few of them for many years, and crossed paths with others and their causes over the period from the 1970s to the present. I first experienced Rochdale College when Bossin was resident there in 1969, crashing in one of its rooms after hitchhiking from London, Ontario, in September 1969 to attend an outdoor Varsity Stadium rock-and-roll revival headed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (I much preferred the performance of Jim Morrison and The Doors). The event, which featured multiple acts, including Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, cost about $5. Different times indeed!
My first contact with Peter Warrian goes back to the mid-1970s, when he was generous in directing me to labour history sources and a perspective on cross-class politics in Hamilton, a city I was studying for a dissertation on skilled workers in that archetypal 19th century factory town. I befriended Roussopoulos in my brief time in Montréal in the late-1970s and early-1980s. We worked together politically on various causes, and he generously published my writing in Our Generation, even when some of it elaborated on tangents with which he disagreed. I recently attended his 90th birthday party at his Milton Parc residence, not at all surprised to find that he continued to draw young radicals into his orbit. He is as lively, unrepentantly contentious, and as committed as ever to striking blows against unbridled capitalist power and possessive individualism. Cathy Walker I do not know at all well, but we travelled in similar social circles, and I knew people she once cohabited with in a communal house. Our paths must have crossed during my years in Vancouver, and we were no doubt in many of the same meetings, attending as well the mass demonstrations that occupied all leftists’ time over the course of the six-month Solidarity struggle in 1983. Joan Newman Kuyek had departed Kingston by the time I was teaching at Queen’s University in the late-1970s, an appointment that, with a brief break, stretched into the new millennium. But it was impossible to be a leftist in that city and not feel like the revered organizer was part of the fabric of its life.
Reading this important collection of reminiscences and statements, it was perhaps only Harding and Lib Spry with whom I could not recall some kind of personal connection, whether close or more tenuous. Interestingly, they both come from deep social democratic backgrounds. Harding’s parents, committed socialists, supported his left-wing and social justice activism unequivocally. Spry, whose youthful relations with her parents were more conflictual, comes from social democratic royalty, Graham and Irene Spry being influential in the Co-operative Commonwealth’s brain trust. Bossin, whom I have never met nor heard play with Stringband, nonetheless seems to have a background not dissimilar to my own, although much more colourful and warmly affectionate than my dysfunctional family unit, his irreverently iconoclastic gambling father a larger-than-life character in the lumpen petty bourgeois fraternity.
This kind of backgrounding of an aging cohort of New Leftists, still capable of kicking up oppositional dust, is of consequence only in highlighting that sixties radicals have fascinating stories to tell. They come from different places, end up in distinct spots that might share some commonalities, but that certainly diverge. Many more recollections need to be encouraged and either archived or published before this generation of radicals is no longer able to remind us of what the 1960s, as a decade of radical possibility, constituted. Harding notes the difficulties he confronted in bringing this collection to fruition: so many individuals of importance were no longer with us, while others (including Jim himself) were plagued with physical ailments. Some proved simply unable to muster the energy to recount their histories and declined to participate in this edited book.
Our loss, as is the absence in this volume of any reminiscence by someone who took their leave of the New Left to cast their lot with one of the revolutionary organizations of the 1960s and 1970s, most of which are now either defunct or demoralized. How did Peggy Morton, a co-author of an iconic women’s liberation SUPA statement, find her way to the Maoist-influenced, Enver Hoxha-franchised Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)? That is perhaps a story for another time, another book. So, too, is an accounting of the tension-ridden relations of Communist Party militants and Trotskyists of pre- and post-1960s generations with their anti-vanguardist counterparts of the New Left.
Meanwhile, Jim Harding’s The Long Sixties is a testament to some of the decade’s activists who kept the flame of radical alternative alive in so many ways and, in the process, helped history avoid the kind of destructive dismantling that seems to be unfolding 50-60 years later. Books like this remind us that it is imperative to fight back. The Left needs rebuilding so that it presents an alternative to capitalism’s capacity, with its endless appetite for accumulation and its mirror image, dispossession, to chart devastating descents into crisis after crisis, with humanity and its habitat driven toward the abyss.
Bryan D. Palmer is an historian of labour and the left. His most recent books are a trilogy addressing the history of capitalism and colonialism in Canada: Colonialism and Capitalism: Canada’s Origins, 1500-1890 (Lorimer, 2024); Capitalism and Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada, 1890-1960 (Lorimer, 2025); and Capitalism, Colonialism, and Crises: The Remaking of Canada, 1960-2025 (Lorimer, 2026).
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1. I, too, liked Art Kube on some levels, and he carried himself quite differently than BC labour’s preeminent figure, the proudly redneck Jack Munro. But I never misunderstood where Kube stood, rooted in his history as an anti-communist heavy in the 1950s, not above working with the state to quell dissidence in times past and present. Teaching for Kube at his labour education endeavours at Harrison Hot Springs during my stint at Simon Fraser University I got along well with Art for a time, until I wrote forthrightly about his role in the Solidarity debacle, at which point I was, predictably, declared persona non grata in trade union education circles. From that point on, Art would greet me with the sarcastic put-down, “How’s the Revolution, Bryan?” There is abundant evidence in Bryan D. Palmer, Solidarity: The Rise and Fall of An Opposition in British Columbia(Vancouver: New Star Press, 1987) to challenge Walker’s view that Kube provided “good leadership of Operation Solidarity for 120 days up till November 7, [when he] collapsed with exhaustion, was diagnosed with pneumonia and required to bed rest.” Medical issues aside, Kube orchestrated the separation of the trade union-wing of the Solidarity movement, Operation Solidarity, and its community counterpart, the Solidarity Coalition, which the labour officialdom bankrolled, and staffed. The labour hierarchy, which of course included Art Kube, made no bones about its capacity to control those who relied on its material support. This would prove fatal in demobilizing what was one of the largest and most exhilarating instances of class struggle in British Columbia’s history.