Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada by Ian Milligan (review)

It is unusual to commence an academic book review with a disclaimer, but on this occasion it is necessary as I took part in events and organizations discussed in this volume and know many of the participants who provided the author with much of his material. Needless to say, this makes the reviewing process simultaneously more challenging and deeply evocative of the 1960s milieu that in twentieth-century decadal terms is probably only matched for generational impact by the 1930s.

Ian Milligan sets out in this revised version of his York University doctoral thesis (supervised by Craig Heron, another veteran of the 1960s) to explore the radicalism of the decade, expanding the traditional focus on the New Left as manifested in banning the bomb, civil rights, and anti-war campaigns and in the student and women’s movements, by including the labour revolt of the wildcats and youthful working-class militancy. He accomplishes this examination in six chapters, exploring youth radicalism as a general phenomenon; the militancy of young workers; early New Left debates in the Student Union for Peace Action (supa) and the Canadian Union of Students (cus) on the working class versus other potential revolutionary groups; student radicalism at Simon Fraser University, the University of Regina, and the University of Toronto; the East Coast Socialist Movement (ecsm); and the 1973 Toronto Artistic Woodwork Strike. The chapters on 1960s working-class militancy add to the works of Peter McInnis and Bryan Palmer in highlighting the role of youth in commencing processes that would simultaneously regenerate and transform the complacent Canadian labour movement of the early 1960s. Similarly, his accounts of events in Regina and Toronto add much to our understanding of the rise of the New Left in these locales, and his chapter on Nova Scotia is the first serious scholarly treatment of the important events there.

His evidence is not only drawn from the usual combination of newspaper and archival sources but is also derived from some seventy interviews (fifty-three men, seventeen women) with student and labour movement activists. These interviews were conducted between April 2009 and October 2010 and apparently consisted of one session each. I say apparently because we are told almost nothing about the interview process. There is no discussion about the process of selection of the subjects or of the nature of the questions asked. In a work so heavily dependent on oral history, this lack of information is unfortunate and leaves the reader curious about significant figures who were not interviewed and even more intrigued about the privileging of some accounts over others.

The central thesis of the book that young workers played major roles in the turmoil of the 1960s is well argued and persuasive and offers a useful corrective to the more usual focus on university-based radicalism. Less convincing, however, are his discussions of the attempts by the student left to move beyond the campus to form alliances with labour and other working-class groupings. No doubt, this weakness is inherent in the history of these efforts themselves. The early community organizing efforts of the supa and the Company of Young Canadians (cyc), the subsequent outreach attempts by the cus, and the strike support and community-based activism of a myriad of local groups enjoyed limited success at best. While Milligan and his informants are not unaware of this fact, neither provides any serious analysis of this failure.

This book, like most other Canadian historical accounts of the 1960s, also fails to capture the spirit and passion of the decade. Indeed, to date, novels and memoirs manage far better to evoke the confused but exhilarating ambience of the decade. Examples include Tom Wayman’s Woodstock Rising, Keith Maillard’s Difficulty at the Beginning Quartet, and Douglas Fetherling’s Travels by Night. Whatever one might now say about the intellectual quality of the disputes around the...