Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972 by Benjamin Isitt (review)

The New Left was not as new as it might have seemed; it instead needs to be understood as having deeper roots than the more traditional narrative of rupture might suggest. This is one of the key take-homes of Benjamin Isitt’s expansive Militant Minority: that the New Lefts of the sixties, which would provide a crucial support to the path-breaking 1972 victory of Dave Barrett’s New Democratic Party in British Columbia, owed much to those who came before. The Old Left, epitomized by institutions such as the Communist Party of Canada, may have waned through persecution, prosecution, and the revelation of Stalin’s crimes against the Russian people; yet it, and fellow institutions such as the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union, helped sustain an oppositional culture in the province. While the CCF/NDP experienced electoral and organizational nadirs in the 1950s and 1960s, other left organizations – from Trotskyists, student movements, and the women’s movement – helped carry the torch. All of this helps make what happens in the late 1960s and early 1970s all the more significant. Indeed, a reframing of the period is one of the best contributions this monograph makes to the field. Questions of how to periodize the “sixties” have intrigued several scholars; Isitt instead frames his period as that of the “long boom.” This is a compelling approach that helps expand sixties studies.

Alongside this social and political narrative, Isitt also reclaims political economy as a fruitful field of study. The interplay between British Columbia’s resource economy, politics, and class dynamics is well fleshed out. For the “Militant Minority” functioned in a context of a political “Tug of War,” waged between labour and capital. The traditional account of post-Second World War labour relations holds that unions gained legal recognition at the expense of being encumbered in a framework of legal restrictions and regulations. Ben Isitt rejects this “postwar compromise” narrative in his local study of British Columbia. Rather, the compromise for him seems far from settled: wildcat strikes, breakaway unions, and growing nationalism characterized the British Columbian experience as the militant minority interacted with these legal structures. Militant Minority makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian labour, society, and the 1960s. Indeed, Isitt’s work is an exemplar of the new current of political history growing in Canada today. This book balances the political sphere, social movements, and everyday life well.

Militant Minority is generally well written and engaging. The arguments that Isitt builds are steeped in an almost exhaustive amount of primary and secondary source material. He draws on oral interviews, police records, archival documents, and a near-encyclopedia array of secondary sources. The chapters are all well crafted. His chapter on BC’s peace movement was especially engaging; his contention that the anti-war movement was a combination of Old Leftists, unionists, and a new layer of activists helps reinforce the importance of that social movement.

There are some problems with this work, however. Isitt’s use of several terms is a bit troubling. At times, perhaps due to rhetorical flourishes, the “militant minority” framework can come off as a bit homogenizing. This is sometimes unavoidable given the scope of the term (which ranges from middle-class professionals in the NDP to militant communist fishermen), but one wonders if “militant minorities” might have been a more apt descriptor. The New Left is also a bit awkwardly defined. Isitt seeks to expand the definition of the New Left, but fails to fully justify this expansion. He rightfully includes groups such as the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), but also (questionably) Trotskyists, and others who would not have self-identified under this mantle.

At times, the book is also a bit stylistically clumsy. Isitt’s voice is drowned out by far too many block quotations. Vexingly, the 458-page book contains only 203 pages of...