A Tate Gallery for the New Left: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstracts in the Revolutionary Activism of the 1950s and 1960s

These fascinating volumes chronicle the coming of age and political activity of a revolutionary Marxist, doing so in ways that highlight Canadian influences and international developments. Written as memoir, but researched in archives and drawing on recent scholarship, the volumes are a hybrid: part recollection, part historical reconstruction. There is nothing quite like them in the existing library of commentary on and by the Canadian far left.

Irish Immigrant

Ernie Tate was born poor and Protestant on Belfast’s Shankill Road in 1934. Dropping out of school before his fourteenth birthday, he was headed for a life of dreary, non-union factory labour, in which the screeching announcement of a day of toil by insufferable mill sirens might be moderated by the illusion of athletically driven social mobility or the sociability of the pub. Tate devoured whatever reading material he could find. He looked to escape from the stultifying material and intellectual constraints of a rigidly class-subordinated, religiously segregated, God-dominated Northern Ireland. But it was tough slogging. The lure of Canada offered him an apparent exit from this environment of limitation.

Alan Harris, Hannah Lerner, Ernie Tate, I. to r., Toronto, 1957, on the occasion of the marriage of Lerner and Tate.

In possession of the author.

Tate arrived in Canada in 1955. The times were anything but propitious. Jobs were few, and the cultural and political horizons of “Toronto the Good” seemed bounded by Victorian prudery and the Cold War containment of dissidents. The 21 year old immigrant landed his first waged work at Eaton’s because the department store favoured hiring those who, like its founder, Timothy, could trace their lineage to Ulster. Privileges of national favouritism, however, came with costs. Disgusted by a two-week paycheck of a paltry 60 dollars, Tate promptly quit, opting for the better remuneration of flour milling, in which he had apprenticed in Belfast.

If his inclinations ran in the direction of a politics of contrarian, populist antagonism to the rich and the powerful, Tate’s radicalism was anything but sophisticated. To be sure, he had an almost instinctual attraction to the Soviet Union in a climate that attacked communism relentlessly and mercilessly. With his eye on Canadian dissidents and reports about them in the press, Tate was not exactly a “political greenhorn” before leaving Ireland, but he was understandably a neophyte as far as the left was concerned. About communism, either in terms of what the USSR actually was or what Marxist theoretical works suggested it could and should be, he knew little.

Encountering Ross Dowson: Canadian Trotskyism in the Aftermath of World War II

This all changed, however, as Tate encountered Ross Dowson at the Toronto Labour Bookstore, located on Yonge Street just north of Wellesley. Dowson, along with his brothers Murray and Hugh, championed Canadian Trotskyism as its original founder, Maurice Spector, drifted further and further from the politics of the Left Opposition. The forces rallied around the Dowsons, in nascent party formations like the immediate post-World War II Revolutionary Workers Party (rwp) were, compared to the much larger Stalinist Communist Party of Canada (cp), small and seemingly inconsequential. But these dedicated revolutionaries had large ambitions.

Animated by Trotsky’s understanding of how the revolution had been betrayed inside the Soviet Union, these dissident communists called for workers to embrace revolutionary principles. They urged radicals to break from the ways in which Stalin had undermined the nascent revolutionary workers’ republic in the USSR and subordinated struggles of the working class in distant lands to the needs of the increasingly bureaucratized state and Party apparatus, centred in Moscow. Their propaganda organ was a newspaper called Labour Challenge. Dowson and the small Canadian Trotskyist movement used it...