Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 (review)

This book presents a straightforward argument: British Columbia’s ‘New Left,’ which emerged in the late 1960s and helped propel the provincial New Democratic Party to power in 1972, was deeply indebted to the tradition of dissent sustained by the ‘Old Left’ during the darkest days of the Cold War. Stressing the political, ideological, and tactical continuity between different generations of left-wing activists, Isitt thus challenges the perspective offered up by many New Leftists themselves – student radicals, peace advocates, Trotskyists – who, at the time, claimed to represent a clean break with the political past, a rupture between a left that was old, undemocratic, bureaucratic, and often Moscow-focused and one that was young, democratic, participatory, and community-engaged.

Resting on an array of archival sources, including some oral history interviews, Isitt’s approach is influenced by American historian Maurice Isserman, whose analysis of the New Left / Old Left question in the United States also stresses continuity over change, and Canadian scholar Ian McKay, whose recent reconnaissance of Canada’s left history steers clear of well-defined sectarian judgments. In six densely packed chapters, Isitt draws his theory and evidence together by focusing on a distinctive ‘militant minority’ of activists, for it was they who ‘nurtured an independent political flame,’ experimented with ‘forms of social-movement politics,’ and thus ‘provided a bridge between the Old and New Left’ (136).

To his credit, Isitt situates his analysis in the context of bc’s postwar political economy, which was defined by a rapidly expanding resource frontier, dramatic growth of the public sector (especially in health care and education), and the dominance of a single political party, Social Credit. Of particular importance to this dimension of Isitt’s analysis is the state of postwar labour relations in the province. Typically the postwar era is depicted as a moment of labour-capital compromise, when organized labour traded class conflict for class mobility, as symbolized in the 1950s by the ‘comforts of colour televisions, chromed Chrysler sedans, [and] modern suburban homes’ (4). Yet as Isitt illustrates, postwar labour relations were defined, in large measure, by a consistent pattern of strikes and lockouts, which only intensified as the 1950s became the 1960s: ‘working-class people demonstrated a sustained refusal to accept the political leadership of their bosses,’ the author writes (86).

This industrial unrest, which peaked in 1969 with eighty-five work stoppages, provoked decisive action from employers and the provincial government – the former making liberal use of injunctions, the latter passing a range of bills that sought to gut protections afforded to unions under federal and provincial laws. Importantly, Isitt continues, this three-way ‘tug-of-war’ among labour, capital, and the state was braced by other dynamics, including Cold War animosities, Americanization of Canadian industry (especially in forestry), demographic transformation, and brutal factionalism within the labour movement itself, between communists and non-communists and American and Canadian labour organizations. In short, labour relations in the Pacific province were defined by conflict, not compromise, a conclusion – Isitt rightfully asserts – that challenges conventional wisdom on this subject.

As the bulk of Militant Minority attests, within this tumultuous postwar context the political left in bc underwent a significant series of adjustments. Isitt considers each twist and turn at length, beginning with the Labor Progressive Party – formerly the Communist Party of Canada. During the late 1940s and 1950s, it splintered internally while it fought to control bc’s largest unions against other left-wing foes, while its chief rival on the left, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which became the ndp in 1961, charted a difficult course away from the radicalism of the Regina Manifesto and indulged in some cold warfare of its own. Inside and outside these parties, Isitt argues, ‘other lefts’ emerged, militant minorities that linked the Old Left to the New Left.

In its broadest expression, Isitt’s argument for continuity of left protest over...