Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto by Peter Graham and Ian McKay (review)

Works on the Canadian New Left are now sprouting plentifully and certainly a work on the country's major city is welcome. This one is encyclopedic, and Graham and McKay deserve thanks for their inclusive rendition of the youthful radical movements in Toronto from 1958 to 1985. The book is generous in its treatment of most of them, though it offers, as it should, analysis of why some groups achieved more in the short term than others while still others left a lasting legacy, for example, in preserving natural areas or working-class neighbourhoods that corporate interests wanted to bulldoze.

My quibbles with these authors began on the first page where they claim that "in contrast to older formations, new leftists emphasized solidarity with national liberation movements challenging imperialism around the world." Much of the old left, Stalinist, Trotskyist and to a degree the social democrats, though not so much in the early Cold War, had opposed imperialism. The authors supply abundant evidence, in any case, that many new leftists, whatever their reasons for becoming anti-capitalists in the first place, emphasized the local over the global. Graham and McKay are on more solid ground when they define the amorphous new left in terms of their preference for "direct, grassroots, community-based democracy" in their organizational style, a style which they believed prefigured "the liberated world of the future." (1)

The book demonstrates the impact of the Cold War on limiting growth of left-wing thought and organization after World War II and the debates that occurred within the new left about allowing participation by Communists and Communist fronts in non-partisan organizations even when the positions of the Communists and the new leftists on particular issues varied little. While the authors are no doubt right in suggesting that new leftists often rejected working with communists because of potential smears that their organizations would face, it is also true that the new left generally regarded the Soviet Union as a negative example for socialist transformation and disliked Communists both for their relentless apologetics for that country and their personal stodginess. While the new left shared the Communists' political passions, they diverged on sex, drugs, and rock and roll and there was little acceptance of the grey-haired Reds' view that hippies were evidence of capitalist degeneracy.

This book is at its best in discussing new left strategies and debates regarding protests against American imperialism in Indochina, efforts to protect and strengthen neighbourhoods and organizations of marginal workers and the poor, the early second-wave women's movement, movements of Indigenous people and non-whites, and movements of the early lgbtq2s community. It confronts as well the ongoing issue of free speech and freedom to pursue legal activities versus the protection of life and dignity of oppressed peoples. A high point of new left activity in Winnipeg was the 1968 padlocking of the office at the University of Manitoba where Dow Chemicals, which produced the napalm used against Indochinese people, was interviewing engineers. The job-seeking engineers claimed the protesters deprived them of their right to seek whatever jobs they wished. Given what Dow was all about, their claims that the protesters were "like Nazis" spoke of an inverted world.

Mention of other cities in this review may seem a digression. But this book would have been helped by more efforts to place Toronto events in broader contexts. For example, the discussion of women fighting to remove male preserves from the University of Toronto campus, to attend debates at male-only Hart House, and to attend concerts without escorts, all in 1966, while treated sympathetically, is also treated as a halfhearted enterprise. A comparison with other campuses across Canada would likely show that such feminist organizing was rare in 1966. Certainly that was true for all three Manitoba campuses and would remain true for three more years. So the University of Toronto women, one of whom these authors suggest was rather defensive...