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

In recent years, a number of new social movements have emerged in North America, from Idle No More and Black Lives Matter to Me Too and Shut Down Canada; people have been organizing in the streets, in their communities, and at the ballot box to bring about change. Though the tools and tactics these activists use differ somewhat from those of their predecessors, their movements share many similarities with the great wave of left activism that swept across western Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s, often referred to as "the new left."

In Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto, historians Peter Graham and Ian McKay look at the movements, issues, and people that made up the new left in Canada's largest city between 1965 and 1985. Fights over freeways, demands for daycare, efforts to establish co-operative housing and elect progressive politicians, and struggles to transform education and end racial and gender inequality: these are just some of the battles waged by Toronto's new leftists during these years. Radical Ambition provides a broad and accessible overview of these activists and examines how they shaped the city of Toronto during a pivotal period in Canadian history.

Radical Ambition is the latest addition to the scholarship on the 1960s and the new left in Canada. The book joins the ranks of other important works on this topic, such as Bryan D. Palmer's Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, Ian Milligan's Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada, and the edited collections Debating Dissent: Canada and the 1960s and The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style. In contrast to much of the literature on the 1960s and the new left, however, Radical Ambition focuses on just one city, allowing the authors to explore what was unique about left activism in this particular place and to trace the connections between the various individuals and groups that comprised Toronto's new left. As Graham and McKay explain, people moved between organizations and, at times, issues united seemingly disparate groups. The focus on Toronto also enables the authors to identify activists' effect on that city. Indeed, Graham and McKay's central argument is that "Toronto new leftists were historically significant people" and that the city's "new left made a lasting difference to the lives of its militants and a subtle but perceptible difference in Toronto politics more generally" (23–24). That said, the focus on one city, at times, gives the impression that activists in Toronto operated in isolation from their counterparts in other parts of Ontario and regions of Canada.

Radical Ambition is organized chronologically and traces the origins, development, and demise of the new left in Toronto from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. Thematic chapters focus on particular issues, from efforts to transform the Ontario education system and the emergence of Black Power and women's liberation in the late 1960s, to calls for the creation of more egalitarian cultural institutions and greater community control over housing and development in the 1970s; the authors also look at the rise of other identity-based movements, including the gay liberation movement. To complete their study, the authors analyze a wealth of primary source materials pertaining to the new left in Toronto and Canada, including newspapers, magazines, newsletters, bulletins, memoirs. Alongside the extensive bibliography, the authors have included a useful guide of further readings for each chapter.

In terms of methodology, Graham and McKay rely on the latter's liberal order framework, an analytical approach that views Canada as a "historically specific project of rule" focused on spreading liberalism. In an article published in the The Canadian Historical Review in December 2000, McKay called on scholars to use "a strategy of 'reconnaissance'" to "study those at the core of this project who articulated its values, and those 'insiders' or 'outsiders' who resisted and ... reshaped...