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  • Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972
  • Christopher Powell
Benjamin Isitt, Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2011)

Benjamin Isitt’s Militant Minority takes its title from the work of the late labour historian David Montgomery. The term describes those workers who have historically “endeavoured to weld their workmates and neighbours into a self-aware and purposeful working class.” (3) Isitt combines political economy, labour, regional, and a good dose of 1960s history in telling the story of those men and women who provided “the bridge between the ‘Old Left’ and the ‘New Left’ in Cold War BC.” (4)

Isitt begins by outlining the political economy of post-war British Columbia (BC). Resource extraction constituted the bulk of economic activity. The state served capital by providing infrastructure, enacting management-friendly [End Page 281] labour laws, and granting a social wage in the form of healthcare, education, and social services to an increasingly mobilized working class. BC’s Communist Party greatly contributed to this mobilization. The Party exercised influence far beyond its numbers in shaping the province’s labour movement. It also built the province’s first post-war peace movement, garnering thousands of signatures for the 1950 Stockholm Peace Appeal, and was the first to draw attention to the war in Vietnam. But the Party’s failure to apply the same antimilitarist criteria to the Soviet Union as it did to the United States led to “ideological and organizational crises.” (66) While Conservatives and Liberals had dominated the province prior to the war, an increasingly popular Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) moved them to form coalition governments until traditional party support imploded in 1952. But instead of electing the ccf, voters opted for the conservative populism of Social Credit, which ruled without interruption for two decades.

Other left formations emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Prominent were those collectively referred to as the new peace movement. These included the Voice of Women, the Committee for the Control of Radiation Hazards, and its campus counterpart, the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (as well as the latter two’s successor organizations). In 1961 the League for Socialist Action (LSA) resulted from the merger of preexisting Trotskyist groups. All of these organizations participated in growing anti-Vietnam War protest, which in turn generated other social movements.

Throughout the 1960s breakaway industrial unions and growing public sector unions characterized much of BC’s labour movement. Increasing numbers of BC locals seceded from internationals, forming militant independent organizations such as the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers, the Canadian Association of Industrial, Mechanical and Allied Workers, and the Pulp, Paper, and Woodworkers of Canada. Burgeoning public sector unions representing healthcare workers, teachers, and others added to this new militancy. Working-class mobilization and the new social movements played a vital role in BC’s 1972 New Democratic Party (ndp) electoral victory.

Isitt credits structural changes in BC’s economy and its working class for the brief interruption in Social Credit rule. (196) But the ndp victory can be as evenly accredited to a split in bourgeois political formation as to the efforts of a militant minorit y. Isitt acknowledges that a revived Conservative Party took nearly thirteen per cent of the vote in 1972, allowing the ndp to achieve victory with almost 40 per cent. (194) But between 1949 and 1972 ccf/ndp support remained fairly constant, neither dropping below 30 per cent nor breaking its 40 per cent ceiling. The increase in ndp support between the 1969 and 1972 elections constituted less than six per cent yet was enough to win. Sixty per cent of British Columbians voted for parties to the right of the ndp, over 40 per cent for parties to the right of the Liberals. Even at the head of a majority government, the ndp still represented a militant minority.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its analysis of the contributions of the Communist Party to BC’s labour movement. The Party’s role cannot be understated. Throughout the 1950s communists...

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