MYRNA
KOSTASI
LONG
WAY
FROM
IOME
The Sixties — a decade of upheaval and change for the generation of
Canadians who had grown up amidst the comfort, security and political
complacency of the Fifties. Everything in their world was held up for
questioning and a new way of life evolved, with its own language, music,
ideas and values: flower power, love-ins, drugs, anti-war demonstrations
and a built-in suspicion of anyone over thirty.
The first sign of things to come were the peaceniks of the early Sixties,
who took to the streets when Canada, bowing to pressure from the U.S.,
agreed to have nuclear warheads. Then came support for the civil rights
and women's movements, "new left" politics and opposition to the
Vietnam war. While profoundly influenced by American attitudes and
events, the Sixties generation in Canada looked to their own country's
problems, raising their voices to support Quebec separatism, Canadian-
ization of universities and native rights.
The politics and lifestyles of the Sixties generation seemed to present a
direct threat to bureaucrats, politicians and parents. The "establishment"
was under siege; new kinds of relationships evolved, as did new ways of
dealing with a world felt to be in desparate need of change. For many, it
was a turning point; for many life would never be the same.
"This is a welcome document of a decade that needs to be recorded
before it is forgotten."
— London Free Press
"... an admirable, readable account that will be a valuable record
whenever history decides to assess the 1960s."
— Books in Canada
"A social document of rare clarity and insight."
— June Call wood
jfl
m
m m
• i
I
y
Myrna Kostash researched the story of
the Sixties generation — her generation
— by crossing Canada several times,
interviewing hundreds of the people
who shared the struggle for change in
the Sixties.
Born and educated in Edmonton,
Myrna Kostash is the author of the best-
selling All of Baba's Children.
0-88862-617-7 paper
0-88862-380-1 cloth
James Lorimer & Company, Publishers
LONG
FROM
HOME
MYRNA
KOSTASH
The story of the
Sixties generation
in Canada
LONG
FROM
HOME
James Lorimer & Company, Publishers
Toronto, 1980
Copyright • 1980 by Myrna Kostash
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
ISBN 0-88862-380-1 cloth
Design: Don Fernley
6 5 4 3 2 1 80 81 82 83 84 85 86
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kostash, Myrna.
Long way from home
Bibliography: p.294
ISBN 0-88862-380-1 bd.
1. Youth - Canada - Attitudes. 2. Youth - Canada -
Political activity. 3. Canada - Social conditions -
1945-1965.* 4. Canada - Social conditions - 1965 - *
I. Title.
HQ799. C3K67 305.2'3'0971 C80-094675-8
James Lorimer & Company, Publishers
Egerton Ryerson Memorial Building
35 Britain Street
Toronto M5A 1R7, Ontario
Printed and bound in Canada
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Foreword xi
Introduction XV
Portraits xxix
Part I Peace and War
I Peace now! 3
II War is good business, invest your son 31
III Hell no, we won't go 55
Part II Student Power
I Knowledge for whom? 71
II Be realistic, demand the impossible 81
Part III Counterculture
I Back to the garden 107
II Hope I die before I grow old 131
Part IV The Third World Within
I We hold the rock 147
II The rising of the women 166
Part V Two Nations, One Enemy
I Create two, three, many Vietnams 191
II Le Quebec aux Quebecois! 209
III Free Quebec, free Canada 223
Part VI This Is Not a Revolution, Sir, This Is a Mutation
I Movement nation 243
II Portraits revisited 261
III It's my fight, it's my life 265
Notes 277
Bibliography 294
For Mort Newman, keeping the faith
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the
Explorations Program of the Canada Council in the preparation
of this book; and of the following people who gave so
generously of their time, memories and ideas:
Sally Albert, Hugh Armstrong, Pat Armstrong, Rose Auger,
Pam Barrett, Sarah Berger, Bernie Bloom, Anne Boody, Peter
Boothroyd, Barry Boyd, Viola Braun, Caroline Brown, Duane
Burton, June Callwood, Maria Campbell, Gerry Cannon, Tim
Christian, Bob Collins, Patrick Connell, John Conway, Bill
Coull, Gary Craig, Diane Crawford, Claire Culhane, Betty
Deegan, Roger Deegan, Mark Dolgoy, Reevan Dolgoy,
Daniel Drache, Gordon Drever, Corky Evans, Jeff Eyre,
Derek Fox.
Gerry Gilbert, Cy Gonick, Fred Haake, Lynn Hanley,
Nancy Hanum, Michael Harcourt, James Harding, Ray
Harper, Robin Hedley-Smith, Bill Hoffer, Kay Hohn, Patricia
Hughes, Robin Hunter, Steve Jones, John Juliani, Peter
Katadotis, Alan Kellog, Roy Koob, Don Kossick, Milly
Lamb, Rob Landreth, Victoria Langton, Marc Laurendeau,
David Leadbeater, Dolores Macfarlane, Cam Mackie, Sally
Mahood, Bruce McLellan, George Melnyk, Michel Mill.
Don Mitchell, Bill Monro, Joann Monro, Richard Moore,
Sheila Moore, Graeme Moorhouse, Muck & Linda, Bill
Nimtin, Arthur Pape, Ken Pappes, Kathy Payne, Bob
Perkins, Jean Perrault, Stan Persky, Holger Petersen, Kevin
Peterson, Tom Pocklington, Mitch Podaluk, Helen Potrebenko,
Gail Price, Richard Price, Liora Proctor, Chris Purdy, Tom
Radford, Jean Rands, Harry Rankin, Robert Reece, Jim Robb,
Ann Roberts, Sean Rooney, Russ Rothney, Dimitri Rousso-
poulos, Clayton Ruby.
Rick Salter, Donaleen Saul, Andreas Schroeder, Lydia
Semotuk, Verna Semotuk, Harvey Shepherd, Mark Slipp,
Brett Smiley, Joan Smith, Jerry Sperling, Evelyn St-Croix,
Allan Stein, Terry Sulyma, Reg Sylvester, Linda Taylor,
Laura Tiberti, Martha Tracey, Peter Turner, Bronwen Wallace,
IX
X LONG WAY FROM HOME
Doug Ward, Mel Watkins, Andy Wernick, Anne Wheeler,
Don Whelan, Peter White, Jim Woodward, Kathy Woodward,
Dale X, Irene Zalinsky.
Thanks also to Jane Gutteridge of Canadian Filmmakers
Distribution Centre; to the staff of the University of Alberta
Archives for their cooperation; and to Mark Budgen.
And to Howard Davidson, Laura Hargrave and Wm. Kostash
for their inestimable labours on behalf of this book, a special
thanks.
FOREWORD
In a screening room in Toronto, I am watching, one after the
other, three Canadian films made during the Sixties. What I'm
after is the sights and sounds of a historical period that shook up
me and thousands of others in Canada, and that some of us
strain now to recall in all its vivid and explicit alarm and
excitement. I stare at the screen, waiting for the Sixties I grew
up in to be evoked.
Here are the movies. Breathing Together. Allen Ginsberg,
the American poet, is feeding his chickens oyster shells. His
poem, "Moloch," is intoned over a scene of traffic in Chicago.
Jerry Rubin, the American yippie, is jumping up and down on
the black robes of a court judge. "We accuse America of
boredom!" Abbie Hoffman, another yippie, is giving a lecture.
"As you can see, the odds have shifted 7 to 5 in favour of the
kangaroos." Neon Palace. The Apollo moon shot. The Beach
Boys. Rin Tin Tin. The inauguration of President Nixon.
Poodles dancing to "America the Beautiful." The Sixties.
Nixon and Kennedy are on television, Adlai Stevenson is at the
United Nations, the Beatles are in New York. Martin Luther
King meets the cops on a civil rights march . Stokely Carmichael
is in Selma, Alabama. An army man says, "We have a
substantial military superiority" in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive
and a military graveyard. Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. The
Beatles sing "We Can Work It Out."
My question was: what did Canada look and feel like in the
Sixties? The answer the films gave me was: it didn't look like
anything. The Sixties took place in the United States of
America. Let's pretend, they say, we were all Americans.
Although I was well into my research by the time I saw those
films, they confirmed me in my project: to superimpose on their
images ones of our own experience; to throw light on the
featureless memory that is confined like the idiot-cousin in the
attic of the Americanized mental household. "The Sixties?"
some friends have responded. "We've heard all about that.
SDS, Bob Dylan, Haight-Ashbury, Black Panthers...." So
XI
XII LONG WAY FROM HOME
they have said, in Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, in the
houses and streets and parks where not so long ago they grew
up in the middle of the clamorous, exhilarating, even outrageous
disturbances of right here. The power of American events and
personalities of the period is not to be denied — it was felt
throughout the world — inasmuch as the centrality of the
American imperium is not to be denied. But alongside it is the
story of young people in a different country: as I argue in this
book, the "facts of life" in Canada (the presences of Quebec,
the NDP and the multinational) mean that to know about
Berkeley and Chicago and Columbia, about Panthers and
Vietnam veterans and rock 'n' roll stars, is not to know
everything. At the same time, of course, the two national
experiences are not unrelated. Where they touch and where
they veer off from each other is one of the things this book is
about.
It is also about the fact that we forget so fast It used to take a
generation of time to lose the story of our collective accomplish-
ments (my generation at the dinner table, mouths hanging open
as the stories of the Depression and Spain and Hitler came
out), but now I meet people a mere ten or fifteen years younger
than me who don't know what I'm talking about when I
exclaim: "SUPA! FLQ! the SFU 114! Abortion Caravan!" It
is very distressing to confront the fact that mine is a generation
of amnesiacs failing to pass on the story and its meaning.
There is a discernible tendency among us to dismiss the
period of the Sixties as the historical equivalent of our own
romance-besotted youth, as though to have been young in a
period of international upheaval is to have been histrionic,
untenably idealistic, and, well, ridiculous. If this is true, it can
only be by contrast, it seems to me, with the constricting
compromises and shabby bargains one has struck with life
in one's maturity. It is, however, the evaluation that various
pundits of the media have delivered on the Sixties. "Where
are all the hotheads now?" they ask rhetorically, implying
that if the hotheads have now been tamed by the exigencies of
life as it is (and ever shall be), then their earlier rebelliousness
can only have been spurious. It is interesting to ask the
question, in return, whose interests such an evaluation and
FOREWORD XIII
such amnesia serve? For they are lies. In the course of doing
this book, it was brought home to me that there are thousands of
people in Canada who have not forgotten how they grew up and
what they learned then, and who are continuing to refine and
apply this learning in their everyday work and family lives, in
their emotional, political and cultural lives. Everyday life in
1980 is not as spectacular as it was in 1968 — the whole world
has changed since then — but there is no law, either, that says
the times will never again erupt into revolt, or that there will
never again be a generation of hotheads.
Finally, I wrote this book because I am in love with the
Sixties, with the passions and ideas, friendships and loves,
music and dance and poetry, stoned highs and sorrows the
period generated. I "came of age" in 1965:I turned twenty-
one, and threw myself into the great learning about camaraderie,
war, imperialism, rock 'n' roll, the Godhead, vagabonding,
lust, appetite and woman power; and I consider myself blessed
to have been young in a period when the vision of the good and
the true was up for grabs. In seeking our re-vision, thousands
and thousands of us wandered very far from "home," from our
families, our communities, the values with which we were bred,
the ideals with which we were entrusted, the country we were to
inherit. Along the way we experienced corruption, disillusion,
pain and death, as well as joy, but these were tracks to
another "home," lives of our own construction. This is true for
every generation, of course; what is special about having grown
up in the Sixties is how close our learning came to being
revolutionary. You can't get much luckier than that.
A word about how I wrote this book. I ransacked new and used
book stores from Montreal to Berkeley (it was a poignant
experience to come across literally bins of discarded copies of
The Thoughts of Chairman Mao and The Medium Is the
Message) in search of both contemporary and recent writings
on the Sixties period. (For the limitations of this material, see
the Bibliography.) I pounced on whatever people had mouldering
in cardboard boxes in their basements: old movement news-
papers, posters, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, newsletters
and magazines. I spent hours over yellowing university
XIV LONG WAY FROM HOME
newspapers and going through back issues of magazines and
journals that took seriously the events of the period. Most
importantly, I interviewed people, for I counted on them to fill
the gaps and draw a map through the written material. And to
tell the stories, idiosyncratic and passionate and full of
character, that are subsumed within scholarly generalizations.
Because of the sensitive nature of the details of people's lives
from that period, and because there were so many individuals
interviewed, I have not used their names in the text. All
unattributed quotes come from them.
I have also told the story from the point of view of
anglophone Canada. Therefore, the history of Quebec in the
Sixties has been told as it was perceived by anglophones.
This book represents the most difficult labour of my life, not
least because to this point so few Canadians have sat down to
write about and make sense of the Sixties. I like to think my
book is only one volume in a Sixties encyclopedia to come.
M.K.
Edmonton
July 1980
INTRODUCTION
The Sixties, as forecast by Maclean's magazine in 1959: no
war but no real peace either, and "grave defeats for the Free
World"; man on the moon by 1966; two-thirds of Canadian
business profits to American corporations by 1969; Montreal
and Toronto as "megalopolises, traffic-choked, water-short
snarls of humanity"; a substantial proportion of workers on a
thirty-five-hour week; the family living "more as a unit" with no
change in the divorce and abortion laws; the United States as
"our greatest and most dependable friend," the Soviet Union
"our most dangerous enemy." "Conformity will continue to be
a cherished goal."
1
The way we were, circa 1960: supermarkets, laundromats,
parking lots and television sets had redesigned the landscape
and interior of North American life. The year 1954 had seen
the introduction of the electronic digital computer (there would
be thirty thousand in North America by 1966), the transistor-
ized portable radio and automation at Ford plants. Sociolo-
gists, pop and academic, addressed themselves to the con-
sequences — abundance, leisure — of the anticipated freedom
of the "post-scarcity" society. The Canadian birthrate was
dropping off, and the boys and girls of the celebrated "baby
boom" of the Forties were teenagers: the hope, promise and
dread of an earlier generation who had had no choice but to
defer their gratifications during Depression and war.
The family consuming the automatic washers, record-
players, four-door sedans and frozen Chinese dinners was a
model of sexual repression, female subservience and the sexual
division of labour. When the model didn't work, it produced the
bugaboo of the Fifties, the "juvenile delinquent." Better the
kids should be at home, watching television. By the time of their
adolescence they had consumed twenty thousand hours of it—
Ozzie and Harriet, Milton Berle, Hopalong Cassidy — had
become stupid, stupified.
All this and the assembly line, the file-card cabinet and the
briefcase too.
xv
XVI LONG WAY FROM HOME
Yet it was, even as the mythology has it, an expansionist
time. From the Fifties through to the mid-Sixties, incomes
were rising faster than prices, and corporate profits were rising
fastest of all.
2
 The unemployment rate was hovering around 4
percent. Investment of foreign capital in the resource and
manufacturing sectors of the Canadian economy proceeded
with alacrity. By 1962, 63 percent of the petroleum and natural
gas industry, 62 percent of the mining industry and 54 percent
of the manufacturing industry were foreign owned.
3
By 1964 the Montreal subway was under construction, the
Winnipeg airport had a mural, Charlottetown had a new
theatre and library, Dartmouth had a refinery, and the
government of Ontario decided to build at Pickering a nuclear
power station.
The self-employed worker or professional was a vanishing
type. In 1960, 78 percent of the labour force was earning a
wage or salary, compared to 65 percent in 1946. As the
percentage of the Gross National Product (GNP) represented
by government revenue grew greater and greater, so did the
percentage of the labour force employed by the state: 12.6
percent in 1956, 16.3 percent in 1962 and 19.1 percent in
1966.
4
 Besides the professionals, these workers were the
clerical staffs and the service and support staffs. By 1964 the
Canadian Union of Public Employees would be the second
largest union in Canada after the United Steelworkers of
America.
The data are Canadian but the phenomenon, advanced
capitalism, the "new" capitalism, is global — which is to say,
American. Coinciding with the creation of the European
Common Market and with the regime of CD . Howe, minister
of trade and commerce in Ottawa, American foreign invest-
ment expanded between 1958 and 1964 as it had never done
before. While the American share of the GNP in Western
nations was declining from its immediately post-war peak, it
still represented half that wealth: a staggering productivity.
5
This was a capitalism dominated by the expansive, multi-
national corporation, by flexibility and self-correcting mechan-
isms, by dependence on sales and investments abroad and by
the coincidental monopolization of markets, centralized gov-
INTRODUCTION XVII
ernment and the decline of small businesses.
6
 Unrestrained in
their home base by a docile labour force and spurred on by a
belligerent Cold War foreign policy, the American multi-
nationals deployed their wealth on arms manufacture, adver-
tising and the built-in obsolescence of commodities.
Money, jobs, refrigerators, defence systems: the triumph of
the Free World over the alternatives. A veritable colossus of
stability.
As the liberals would have it, the West was witnessing the
(welcome) end of ideology, in which revolutionary mass
movements would be without foundation, socialist ideology
without credibility and class struggle without content. Not only
were these developments held to be self-evident, they were held
to be desirable. (It was an assumption of these end-of-
ideologists that "ideology" described only the idea system of
socialists and socialist societies and not, for example, the idea
system of North American capitalism.) It was assumed that
post-war North American capitalism had succeeded in trans-
muting the conflicts, alienations and aberrations of class
society into a generalized prosperity and welfarism under a
"regime of experts"
7
 and technocrats.
In Canada, liberalism assumed the decisive authority of
electoral democracy, the political primacy of Parliament, the
equitability of free enterprise, the inevitability of social stabil-
ity and material progress. Damage was infinitely correctable.
And the individual, standing "above the state," was autono-
mous and self-determining. And beyond class. In Canada there
were no classes, only hierarchies.
Further, in her international relations Canada, free of the
taint of colonialism and imperialism, could be trusted by Third
World and Old World alike. To call her relations with the
imperial United States "dependent" would be to misconstrue
them. They reflected, rather, mutual expediency and benefit.
Neighbourly continentals, Canadians and Americans "natur-
ally" saw eye-to-eye on most issues. A Canadian ambassador
to the United States: "I regarded the Canadian-United States
alliance as our most precious international asset. . . ."
8
There were, however, ideological and political disjunctions.
Note these. In 1954, Alan Freed, Cleveland, Ohio, disc
XVIII LONG WAY FROM HOME
jockey, played to an audience of white teenagers records of
what was called "rhythm and blues." Black music. "A sound
that told of dirt and fear and pain and lust."
9
 Rock and roll
("My baby rocks me with a steady roll") was mesmerically
rhythmic and single-minded, over and over the shout of the
sexually aroused, street-wise outsider. Neither frothily es-
capist nor swooningly sentimental, rock 'n' roll rubbed your
nose in the sweat of your life. In the dance to Little Richard,
Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley was the move-
ment toward an alternative unity and community to the
classroom and the lonely crowd. In 1956 Jack Kerouac's The
Dharma Bums was published, one star in a constellation of
work by writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Synder,
Allen Ginsberg — the Beats, the Beatific Generation — who
repudiated suburbia and the desk job, who got stoned, got
drunk, fornicated and intoned the disciplinary measures of Zen
and the open road, who against "Moloch whose mind is pure
machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!"
10
 postu-
lated jazz, delinquency and the camaraderie of poverty. In
1957, in Murdochville, Quebec, nine hundred miners in the
United Steelworkers went out against Gaspe Copper Mines.
Seven months later, by the combined force of the company and
the Union Nationale provincial government, the strike was
smashed — as would the Duplessis government itself be, three
years later.
In 1960 the CCF government of Saskatchewan introduced
medicare, and in the fight to institute it, the idea of community
self-administration was reborn. In 1961 the New Democratic
Party, an amalgam of the CCF and organized labour, was
founded and two years later had a national membership of
209,034. By this act, the Canadian Labour Congress, unlike its
American counterpart, the AFL-CIO, committed itself to
political intervention.
At the same time, throughout the Fifties, the American
sociologist C. Wright Mills was publishing books critical of the
assumption of liberal sociology regarding the structural and
functional "inevitablity" of power relations in modern society.
Mills denounced ideologies of "political complacency," the
"fetishism of empiricism" and the "pretentious methodology"
11
INTRODUCTION XIX
of North American social science. The American writer Paul
Goodman was exploring the various absurdities of growing up
in America and the Utopian alternatives to the technocracy.
And in 1961 the first English translation of the early writings of
Karl Marx was made available in North America. And here
those who read it encountered the Marxist notions of "alien-
ation," atomization and the "division of labour" as cleavages
between the human being and the human deed, none of it to be
remedied without the "emancipation of society from private
property, from servitude," which is to say the "emancipation of
the workers."
12
1954. The French army surrenders its garrison at Dien Bien
Phu in Vietnam to the Viet Minh, Vietnamese national
liberation army. The Geneva Conference produces an agree-
ment on the cessation of hostilities in Indochina.
1955. Rosa Parks, a black, refuses to give up her bus seat to a
white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.
1956. England, France and Israel invade Suez, the colonial-
ists' last naked waltz in the Middle East. At the twentieth
Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, Premier
Khrushchev speaks of the crimes of Joseph Stalin. In Poznan,
Poland, there are worker uprisings. In Hungary, a completely
corrupt Stalinist party collapses; there is no Communist of any
popular credibility to step forward. Soviet tanks and troops fill
the vacuum in Budapest. Fidel Castro and a handful of
guerrillas land in Cuba from the boat, Granma, and ascend into
the Sierra Maestra. In Montgomery, Alabama, the preacher
Martin Luther King organizes a boycott of the segregated bus
lines; it will last 381 days.
1957. Federal troops are ordered into Little Rock, Arkansas,
to enforce the integration of a high school.
1958. The government of China begins the reorganization of
the agricultural communes, further socializing property and
accelerating the transition to communism.
1959. Fidel Castro's guerrillas overthrow the U.S.-backed
dictator Batista and enter Havana in triumph. Maurice Duplessis,
repressive premier of Quebec, dies.
1960. Fifty-six black demonstrators are killed by South
XX LONG WAY FROM HOME
African police in Sharpesville. In South Korea and Turkey
student demonstrations provoke the collapse of corrupt and
repressive political regimes. President Eisenhower declares
economic war on Cuba by slashing the sugar import quota; and
the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is founded. Black students in
Greensboro, North Carolina, begin lunch counter sit-ins at
Woolworth's. The Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Com-
mittee (SNCC) is organized. The birth control pill goes on
public sale. In New York the Student League for Industrial
Democracy becomes Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS). In Quebec Jean Lesage and the Liberals form a
government: "la revolution tranquille" begins.
1961. Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba is
killed by Western-supported assassins. The United States
breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba and sponsors an inva-
sion at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion is a flop. Chou En-Lai
walks out of the Communist World Congress in Moscow.
Freedom riders from Washington to New Orleans test the
segregation of interstate buses and are beaten and arrested.
SNCC begins a voter-registration campaign in Mississippi.
President Kennedy announces the formation of the Peace
Corps and sends the first combat-level troops to Vietnam. The
New Democratic Party, endorsed by the Canadian Labour
Congress, is founded in Ottawa.
1962. The Algerian War of Independence successfully ends
132 years of French colonialism. Students participate by the
thousands in the civil rights movement; SDS meets at Port
Huron, Michigan, and issues a sixty-three-page manifesto.
Defence Secretary Robert McNamara confirms that U.S.
troops are exchanging fire with the Viet Cong of South
Vietnam.
1963. Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, is
assassinated. U.S. military "personnel" in that country num-
ber 16,800. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. sign a nuclear test ban
treaty. In his encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII
calls for world peace and church-initiated social reform. Four
black girls are killed in the dynamiting of a Birmingham,
Alabama, church. Martin Luther King speaks to 250,000
rallying at the Lincoln Memorial at the end of a civil rights
INTRODUCTION XXI
march on Washington. "I have a dream." SDS begins its
Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in poor
neighbourhoods of northern cities along the lines of SNCC in
the south; ERAP is supported by a grant from the United
Auto Workers. President Kennedy is assassinated. Timothy
Leary and Richard Alpert are dismissed from Harvard for
testing LSD on undergraduates. Bob Dylan writes "Blowin' in
the Wind." The Feminine Mystique is published. Canadian
Dimension magazine brings out its first issue. Canada accepts
nuclear warheads.
1964. There are 917,000 college or university students in
Japan, 455,000 in France, 3.6 million in the U.S.S.R., 5
million in the United States and 158,000 in Canada. In a
fifteen-year period, the global student population has increased
2.7 times.
At 22 miles from ground zero of the explosion of a hundred-
megaton nuclear bomb, winds of 110 miles per hour blow
wood-frame houses apart; at 18 miles, brick houses collapse;
within a 39-mile radius, exposed clothing is set aflame: there is
no protection from burning of the retina — the radiation hits
sooner than the eye can blink. At 8.7 miles you are in the
fireball:
13
 like the citizen of Hiroshima, you are a shadow baked
into the cement of the sidewalk.
The nightmares of a child ten years old in 1955: radiation
sifts silently, sightlessly through the air, through the window
and door frames of home, onto the food at the supper table
where you eat it like a mysterious salt; sirens howl in the dead of
night and do not stop; they howl and howl while the glass
windows melt; your parents die, their blank, white eyeballs
turned up to the searing flash in the sky, and the Russians — big
men in long coats — chase you down the alley; faster and faster
they chase as your short legs move ponderously to carry you
one more yard — oh, this takes forever — to the gate of your
house.
Childhood pastiche: the Bomb, the fallout shelter, the school
desk you are to crawl under when the siren goes off, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, Strontium 90, cancer, Intercontinental Ballistic
Missiles, the death, hurray, of Stalin (on the front page of the
XXII LONG WAY FROM HOME
newspaper, in headlines) and of George VI (mother is crying).
"Mankind Must Abolish War or War Will Abolish Mankind!"
Thousands upon thousands of placards were hoisted at Alder-
maston, England, at Easter time in 1958 as men, women and
children clogged the streets on their way, grimly, to the nuclear
weapons plant. A year later, in Canada, when the Diefenbaker
government announced that it was entering into a Defence
Production Sharing Agreement with Washington* and would,
in place of the scrapped Canadian-built Avro Arrow jet fighter,
purchase the American Bomarc B anti-bomber missile, a group
of students and professors in Montreal remembered Alder-
maston. For the Bomarc B was designed to carry a nuclear
warhead.
"Let Canada Lead the Peace Race!" As the Combined
Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CUCND),
the group marched at Christmas 1959, the first student
demonstration since the end of the Second World War, and
again the next Christmas. They circulated petitions, vigilled,
sang out for peace. In 1961, CUCND launched a journal, Our
Generation Against Nuclear War, to "give a theoretical
dimension, an historical dimension, a philosophical dimension,
if you will, to the nuclear disarmament movement. We wanted
to create a theory of peace."**
For the post-war generation at this point, the "movement"
was CUCND. It was the "peace houses" like Humanity
House in Saskatoon where CUCNDers lived cooperatively, and
Peace House in Toronto where they had meetings, did mailings
and strategized by the seat of their pants. It was meeting with
*The agreement provided for "long-term equality of defence expendi-
ture" by each country in the other and for access by Canadian defence
contractors to the American market. By 1962 American purchases in
Canada had reached $254 million, twice what the Canadian govern-
ment spent in the U.S. that year. By 1966, as the war in Vietnam was
escalating, U.S. defence expenditures in Canada reached $317
million.
14
**Also active in the movement were the Canadian Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (CCND), Voice of Women, the Peace Research
Institute, Sanity newspaper, the Canadian Peace Congress and
Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
INTRODUCTION XXIII
the Quakers at Grindstone Island, Ontario, for workshops on
non-violence and simulations of attacks on pacifists. It was
debates over the value of "positive neutralism" and withdrawal
from NATO as foreign policies for Canada, of unilateral
disarmament, of direct action, civil disobedience and mass
demonstrations (reminiscent of an earlier generation's exper-
ience in workers' and socialist movements)
15
 that went beyond
petitions and resolutions. It was intensely moralistic and
obsessed with ethics, as well it may have been in a world
seemingly prepared to blow itself, the various political camps
included, up. A world of the Cold War and the time of the
witch-hunters and red-baiters — people were being taunted and
slandered and hounded out of unions, school boards, political
parties, government jobs , on suspicion, sometimes evidence, of
affiliation to or sympathy with the Communist party.
I was taking a political philosophy course at the University of
Saskatchewan, 1961, and the professor announced he was
going to be discussing Marxism. An engineering student at
the back of the room got up and said, "There are those of
us, Sir, who are mature enough to appreciate that such
things must be discussed to gain a better appreciation but
there are many young people in this class whose minds
have not yet formed and who may be injured by hearing
these things." And I would sometimes wear my CUCND
button — that was a sign of participation in the movement
— when speaking to groups on campus and people would
catcall from the audience, "Hey, Commie!"
In San Francisco, in 1960, the House Un-American Activities
Committee opened hearings on the alleged subversive influ-
ence of "Reds" in the schools and unions of the Bay area.
Student demonstrators, yelling "Down with HUAC!" and
refusing to disperse, were handed over to the "goon force," the
city police, and clubbed to the ground, kicked down the stairs, and
smashed by water hoses into the walls. In Canada no such
drama took place but there were bravery and superb defiance
enough in the students and youth of the peace movements that
were organizing in an atmosphere of fearfulness and bad faith
throughout North America. In a country where even the CCF-
XXIV LONG WAY FROM HOME
NDP (the social democratic party in which the peace move-
ment participated) was virulently anti-Communist, at a time
when confrontation and armament were the strategies of
"peace," it was then with the perhaps lunatic courage of the
politically innocent that the movement activist said: Stop. Ban
the Bomb, do it unilaterally, repudiate the spurious patriotism
of the warlords, turn your swords into ploughshares and go home
in peace and fraternity.
In October 1962, photographs taken over Cuba by a U-2
plane revealed the presence of intermediate-range missiles.
President Kennedy, grim on the television screen, announced
that these missiles endangered the "peace of the world and the
security of the United States" and proclaimed "that the forces
under my command are ordered... to interdict... delivery of
offensive weapons and associated material in Cuba."
16
 Cata-
tonic, North America, and the Canadian peace movement with
it, watched the inexorable drift of missile-cargoed Soviet ships
towards the American naval blockade in the Caribbean Sea.
This was it, then, the end of the world. We were all going to die:
the young and the peaceful and the ethical included, under a hail
of nuclear hardware. The demonstrations and the resistance,
the efforts to force an independent foreign policy, the appeals to
the ultimately common interest of human kind, were as chimera
compared to this very palpable scenario of a showdown
between the super-imperial powers of East and West.
In the spring of 1963, after the federal election, Prime
Minister Lester B. Pearson visited President Kennedy at
Hyannis Port. On 16 August 1963 an agreement was signed to
bring "special ammunition" into Canada. The first nuclear
warheads were secretly delivered to La Macaza, Quebec, on
New Year's Eve.
17
If there had been no more content or context for CUCND
than ban-the-bomb, it would have gone the way of all middle-
class, liberal and pacifist groups of the time: dissolution.* But
by 1964 the student "peaceniks" were already extending the
issues of war and peace to include questions of the institutions
and systems that create them. At this point it became the
*By 1965 most of CCND's branches, for instance, were inactive.
18
INTRODUCTION XXV
Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) and the first
genuinely "new left" formation in Canada.
He comes from a liberal, middle-class family. He is told that
the world is a very progressive place where human energy is an
irresistible force that overcomes immovable objects. He grows
up in absolute bliss — no Red menaces or crises or blockades in
his world — where a Hungarian refugee is a tourist. He goes to
university. He joins a fraternity. He takes history. He meets
shaggy-haired kids in turtlenecks who talk about Cuba and
Vietnam. They are very "interesting" and he is fascinated. He
is thrilled. He never goes back to the fraternity.
She trudges through the snow on her way to classes, aching
to go to Mississippi, to witness there, to fight and be hurt, give
her life over to a cause, something that would release her from
the deadening little world of Chemistry 30.
He knows the world is in convulsions and he takes a look at
Diefenbaker and Pearson and Douglas and he sees the
depressing gap between their policies and the revolutionary
possibilites. So he dreams of being a revolutionary: in Afghanis-
tan or Cuba or Vietnam or anywhere but here.
He decides to take a year off and travel. To Bangkok he goes
and sees an old man and his grandson pick food to eat from a
garbage heap. To Singapore and the eleven-year-old prostitutes
in the marketplace. To Hiroshima and the Peace Museum
where he stares in shock at the photograph of a child five
minutes before his death. He turns around. A group of
Japanese people are staring at him. What's he going to say?
I'm a Canadian, I didn't have anything to do with this?
She is eight years old and she likes to look at the titles on all
the books on her mother's bookshelves. There is one that
fascinates her. It's called Das Kapital. She goes into the
kitchen and asks her mother: What is this book? This, her
mother says, is my Bible.
She goes to a hootenanny in the residence, and a political
science student stands up to announce that at lunch hour every
Tuesday there's going to be a seminar on non-violence.
Curious, she joins the seminar. They are reading Sartre and
Camus and Bonhoffer and it's all over her head but she sticks it
XXVI LONG WAY FROM HOME
out because people are talking about things she's never heard in
lectures. One day she summons the nerve to ask what "those
buttons" are about, those black and white buttons with the
semaphore sign, for N and D, and learns that the logical
extension of non-violence is the campaign against nuclear
weapons. That sounds good to her. She buys a button and
wears it to a cocktail party.
Political and ethical formations are idiosyncratic as well as
social. One can explain and describe at length the milieu in
which an individual lives and works and has being. One can
account for the historical, socio-economic, political and moral
dimensions of that milieu and delineate their tendencies which,
in retrospect, are particularly meaningful. One can do all this
and still be faced with a mystery: how is it that this person here
and not that one, in 1964, became a radical? Even when the
differences of class, sex, region, ethnicity are accounted for, it
is the person himself or herself who in the end becomes
conscious. In other words, it is perfectly dialectical: biography
and society interpenetrate and the radical is made. Timing is
all.
In sum: Canada's post-war youth were coming to maturity at
the conjuncture of several portentious developments. The
gargantuan wealth and influence of multinational, corporate
capitalism, the interventionist state, and the ideology of
liberalism induced a generalized belief in the "system's"
libertarian potentialities and its capacity to produce and
distribute prosperity and well-being (in marked contrast to
socialism). Youth, the "golden girls and boys," were to inherit
a rising standard of living, jobs of their choosing, a variety of
divertissements, and, more than ever, were to be educated, and
liberated from the determinisms of class, race and sex.
Against this full tide of rising expectations, however, other
trends were developing, swelling, in contradictory force.
Abroad, in the Third World, movements of national liberation
confronted neo-colonialist regimes; in Eastern Europe, aspir-
ations for workers' control of industry and for artistic and
intellectual freedom of expression shook the Stalinist monolith,
the Communist party. In the West, students and intellectuals
INTRODUCTION XXVII
assailed the "hypocritical" investment of democracy in arma-
ment and paranoia. Nothing, in short, was as hegemonistic as it
seemed.
If there was one moment in which all these deviances came
together, it was that day in 1959 when Fidel Castro, in battle
fatigues and a beard, surrounded by a mass of jubilant
humanity — companeros! venceremos! — entered Havana. He
was this: the man of action; the virile revolutionary riding "the
beast of his revolution," as Norman Mailer put it,
19
 scorning
the effete and useless word-mongery of ideology; the humanist-
communist, heretical and compassionate. "Capitalism sacrifices
man," he said. "The Communist state sacrifices man Our
revolution is not red, but olive green, the colour of the rebel
army that emerged from the heart of the Sierra Maestra."
20
 It
was not a Marxist-Leninist vanguard that had scrabbled in the
rocks and bush and graveyards of the Sierra, but the "people,"
the soldiers and the peasants who would come in the dead of
night with fifty pounds of food on their backs for the guerrillas.
It was a seemingly spontaneous act of encouragement to
alleviate those "moments when death was a concept a
thousand times more real, and victory a myth that only a
revolutionary can dream of."
21
 Yet they had won and the
boasts of capitalism and Stalinism were vainglorious things.
And in North America — civil rights workers, pacifists,
demonstrators, strikers, peaceniks, beatniks and greasers, all on
their various routes to "that freedom land," which was
manifestly not here and not now.
And in Canada — campuses bulging with students and
construction, a restless faculty and restive administration,
students grieving about their residences, their meals, their
poverty; new organizations — Canadian Union of Students
(CUS), CUCND, Front de Liberation du Quebec; music, sex
and parties; boys who would not be chartered accountants and
girls who would not be wives.
The NDP was founded in Canada at the same time as the
CUCND was gaining popularity, and indeed the two organiz-
ations had close links, mainly through overlapping membership
in New Democratic Youth. For a generation radicalizing itself,
the NDP could not be avoided: it was the "left" of Canadian
XXVIII LONG WAY FROM HOME
electoral politics; it was linked to the trade union movement; it
had over a million voters and a "respectable record of
resistance to the schemes of big business."
22
 Far from avoiding
the NDP, in fact, hundreds of peace activists were deeply
involved in it as the one place in adult Canadian society where
they could hope for a sympathetic hearing.
Compared to American radicals, who found sustenance in
individualistic heroes, outlaw mythologies and high-minded
sentiments (Jeffersonianism, Woody Guthrie and the imperish-
able folkways of the down-and-out, Billy the Kid), the Canadians
took encouragement from a political organization, a political
collectivity, and thus were never to be quite so orphaned as the
Americans whose continuity with radicalism had been devas-
tated by the Cold War and McCarthyism. It would be the
judgement of the Sixties whether the NDP was able to sustain
the long haul of revolution but in 1963, poised at the border of
a new left, the Canadian radicals had the advantage of one foot
in history.
PORTRAITS
Gail Price Douglas, "artist, mother and westerner":
Waspish. Middle-class. This was the neighbourhood and the
family she was born into, in 1946. A close family. Dad a
manufacturer's agent, a salesman really, mum the ideal mother
who stayed at home to raise two children and entertain her
husband's clients. Close, and argumentative. Father and son
would have a go at each other every Sunday night at the dinner
table. Political arguments. It was here the daughter learned to
hate politics: from her point of view it generated nothing but
tension and stress among people. What did it have to do with
the good life? The good life. Needs taken care of— education
and travelling — as though this were normal. Some people had
more money than her family did and others had less. Normal. It
would not be until 1967, and her first trip abroad, that she
would ask: Oh my God, where have I been all my life?
She was not, however, to think only of marriage as her future
work. She was to have a career. Her father was adamant about
this, and because the family was committed to the ethic of
service, she was to choose a career in which she would serve
others. So much for her girlhood dream of a life as an artist: she
would not be able to support herself this way, the family said.
She decided to study social work.
Campus life, circa 1964. She joined a fraternity, Kappa
Alpha Theta, for girls of good family, rah! rah! Fraternity
parties, dates, getting drunk on ethanol in the grapefruit juice.
But there was something here in the fraternity that would
endure. She made friends with women, strong, loyal and
unquenchable friendships that would sustain her long after the
romances and the fun had dried up and blown away.
The politics of the day passed her by. She would walk past
earnest young people passing out pamphlets in the quad and
wonder what on earth they were bothered about. (Her brother,
in the meantime, had gone off to Berlin and then returned, a
Marxist. Marx this, Lenin that. She thought it was a lot of
bullshit.) Quite completely unaware of the issues burning up
the brains and hearts of some of her fellow students, and not at
XXIX
XXX LONG WAY FROM HOME
all curious about them, she was, she says, a good little girl. Her
parents' values and her own were identical. There was,
however, one moment when they were challenged. She went to
a conference on minority groups and was accused there by a
black Jamaican of being prejudiced. She was depressed for
days afterward by the possibility that this was true.
Then, in 1968, she went to the University of British
Columbia to do her master's in social work and walked right
into the storm around the issues of student participation in
university committees, the relationship of faculty and students,
student input into courses and methods. For the first time the
fact that a fellow student was a radical impressed her. If this
was politics, then she was intrigued.
In the summer of 1969 she was a member of an interdis-
ciplinary group of students who lived together in an old church
in the inner city of Vancouver and worked on projects with
community self-help groups. They painted up an old bus and
drove it around the neighbourhoods. A perambulating drop-in
centre. Italian kids. Drop-out kids. Glue-sniffing kids. At night
the students would sit together and rap for hours about what
was happening out there in the streets, what was happening
inside here to their social worker spirits. Once a young man,
very excited, rapped enthusiastically about social change and
violence, and she, listening, freaked out. She started to cry, she
was so scared. What had she got herself into?
Fall of '69 in Vancouver. Kitsilano and Fourth Avenue. The
final flourishing of the hippies. She loved them. Loved their
style and their sensuality and their humour. In a communal
hippie house she learned to relax, to turn on, to make love with
abandon and indulgence. Here at last was the break with
discipline! duty! guilt! Here at long last was a space in which the
long-repressed artist in her unfolded and stretched out. Among
the hippies it was "okay" to express her own self. She began to
weave. In 1969 Gail Price came into her own.
Lydia Semotuk, "single woman, self-employed researcher on
western Canadian populist movements, consultant and
lecturer in business administration, a 'seeker' still":
Social Credit Alberta in the Fifties was not the most hospitable
PORTRAITS XXXI
environment in which to grow up Ukrainian, left-wing and
working-class, but this was precisely the milieu that engendered
her. To her chagrin at the time, her father spoke with an accent
and was only seasonally employed, as a carpenter, and neither
parent was what you could call an intellectual. There was a
decidedly pro-Soviet bias in the household. What it came down
to for her father was windows and sugar. Before the Bolshevik
revolution the Ukrainians didn't have windows in their houses
or sugar to eat. After the revolution they had both. At the same
time, her parents' message to her was: "We want you to have
all the good things this society here has to offer but you must
never forget where you came from. You are a Ukrainian." And
they bundled her off to the Ukrainian Centre (Communist) for
Ukrainian language and music lessons, the textbooks wrapped
in cloth so the kids on the bus wouldn't see this "funny"
language she was studying. It was okay to be Ukrainian but
only among Ukrainians.
In public school it was her great good fortune to have a few
teachers who quickly picked up on the fact that she was never in
the "in-group," who broke through her lack of self-worth, and
who introduced her to music and to politics. They were
articulate and unconventional teachers trapped in inner-city,
"jock-type" schools. One teacher lent her a portable record-
player and the records of Kathleen Ferrier; another brought
Time magazine to social studies class and made sarcastic
references to its contents; yet another stopped her in the
corridor one day and said, you know, there is a field of study
called political science. And a man from the Ukrainian
Centre, who was a humanist and a Communist, told her — it
was at the height of the civil rights campaign in the southern
United States — that just because some people have black skin
doesn't mean they aren't the same as you or I, that they don't
hurt or cry, that they smell any different. She had never thought
of that before.
In high school, she knocked on doors for the NDP and
enjoyed arguing with people while pamphleteering. Her parents
were CCF supporters and she herself had a burning conviction
that what the party said was right. She called herself a socialist,
meaning humanist (people are created equal and have the right
XXXII LONG WAY FROM HOME
to equal justice and protection) and unionist (her father used to
say about the old days that if he'd had a union his employers
wouldn't have been able to get away with the things they did).
With the execution of convicted murderer Caryl Chessman
in California in 1960, a recurring theme is triggered in her life.
The world is made up of two classes, those who have power and
those who don't. Chessman was a man utterly without power
and she was absolutely taken with him — and with Fidel
Castro, the man who fought, against formidable odds, on behalf
of the poor and weak of his people, and won. Not only that: he'd
taken on the United States, and she'd been anti-American
since those first lessons about Time magazine.
From Day One it was understood that she would go to
university. It was a big thing: she would be the first one in her
family to go. She loved those first couple of years on campus.
Finally she had found her place, where it was acceptable, even
encouraged, to be an egghead, to enjoy sitting around talking
ideas and politics. It was even better to be a left-winger. And so
at last she had friends. (They were mostly men. Women were
peripheral. They were introduced as so-and-so's girlfriend.)
And a discipline. She studied politicial science, even though
the department chairman tried to convince her that as a woman
she would be happier in some other field of study.
In the summer of 1964 she travelled to Europe and
discovered that she felt comfortable there, that she could make
her way through the wide and lovely world beyond home. And
discovered that she was sexual and that it wasn't a bad thing,
this being attracted and attractive to men. Her self-confidence
soared.
But back at university she began to waffle. Her liberal arts
education was having its effect: it was becoming ever more
difficult for her to say what was absolutely right and absolutely
wrong about anything. She quit the NDP. Drifting into the
"movement," feeling strongly committed to the issues of war
and peace and justice, she nevertheless was afraid to speak up
at meetings. What was happening was this: in her gut she knew
the movement spoke to her beliefs, but intellectually the
system she had in place was falling apart. She could march in
an anti-war march but couldn't write a hard-hitting speech or
PORTRAITS XXXIII
organize. She could be articulate with three friends over dinner
and speechless at a strategy session. On the one hand her
education was telling her there are no answers. On the other
hand the movement was saying there certainly are.
In the middle of this perplexity she met the Toronto student
radical Peter Boothroyd. He was a graduate student in
sociology, a radical superstar, a keynote speaker for the
Student Union for Peace Action across the country. A heavy.
And now here he was in Edmonton, organizing the masses. She
met him at a political science club meeting, and when he came
around asking for names and phone numbers of volunteers for a
teach-in, she gave him her first name. But would not give him
the second, the Semotuk, the Ukrainian name. No, not to this
Anglo superstar. A year later they were living together and this
was the most momentous decision thus far in her life. To break
strong family ties and the family's morality. To decide, at age
twenty-one, without social or sexual experience, to live with a
man outside of marriage.
Living with Peter, she had whole worlds of politics open to
her. Through her own choice, her self-image, she subordinated
herself to him, to his vision, his ego, his society. In the summer
of 1967 they moved to Toronto for a few months and there,
surrounded by his circle of radical friends, her self-confidence
became a puny thing. They intimidated her, these male
movement personalities, these friends who took it for granted
that her place was to cook and keep the apartment clean and
who would not even make eye contact with her in discussions.
They helped themselves to her generosity and never said
thanks.
By 1970, back at the University of Alberta, she hadn't even
done her thesis, so turned off she was by the "liberal arts"
approach to political science and by the department's American
orientation. In the midst of dramatic events right there on the
campus, they were studying voter patterns in Massachusetts!
In order to take a course in Marxism, she had to go over to the
philosophy department and there, of course, were all the
superstars again, so she didn't dare say anything in those
classes either. The male radicals were the darlings of the
Marxist professors.
XXXIV LONG WAY FROM HOME
If she were to put a label on what she became as a result of
these experiences it would be "feminist." Civil rights, Cuba,
Vietnam, yes, she had powerful feelings about all these issues,
but they were not her issues in the end. Neither any longer were
the issues of her ethnicity and class origin, for they had ceased
to be troubling when first her friends' interest and admiration
and later her own reawakened consciousness of her father's
history and convictions had made her proud. In their place the
woman's pain emerged. Around the issues of birth control and
abortion and women in the workplace, she could finally speak,
she, Lydia, not the superstar's appendage anymore.
Robin Hunter, "regretfully independent, revolutionary
socialist":
He came into the world in 1943, sucking dead air, people trying
to blow him apart, in an air raid shelter jus t outside London. He
was born into a working-class family, and when his father
joined the Canadian army, for a job , the whole family moved to
Canada.
Of course the family was Labour. In high school, when he
became aware of the differences among the Canadian political
parties, he understood that of course he was CCF-NDP.
A girl in high school, the daughter of the family they were
renting rooms from, came home one day with a comic book
put out by Swift Packers. It was all about the virtues of the free
enterprise system. His dad overheard the conversation, butted
in and said, "Oh, that's just capitalist propaganda." That stuck
with the boy. Now he had a label for the thing he was opposed
to.
At school there were teachers who encouraged his reading
(Upton Sinclair, G.B. Shaw) and a gang of bright Jewish kids
who challenged him: one kid was reading Freud and another
claimed to have read Marx in the original German. In the
eleventh grade (enough was enough) he marched down to the
CCF offices downtown and announced to those war horses of
the party, Nellie Peterson and Bill Irvine, that he was a
socialist They were very nice to him and sent him home with a
copy of Monthly Review. He took Das Kapital out of the
PORTRAITS XXXV
library, with his father's encouragement. His dad read four
pages of it back in his wild youth.
To be able to get to university, he joined up with the Reserve
Officers Training Plan. This quickly became a grotesque
contradiction, for he had also just become a member of the
Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
His idea was that if he could make contact with the peace
people, he could bring them into the CCF-NDP. Then he read
Bertrand Russell's Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, and
the peace movement acquired a justification all its own. Russell
called Kennedy and Eisenhower swine and murderers and laid
on them the responsibility for the fate of the whole human race.
Up to then, the nuclear bomb had been, to him, a fact of life.
Now it was outrageous.
Now began a lively time. Lots of different political theories,
lots of discussion. There was music. Folk songs. From when he
had started hanging out with CCF Youth to the time when the
Beatles made it big in North America, he never listened to AM
radio. No. He was listening to Pete Seeger and the Weavers.
And the young Bob Dylan. He went to a student conference in
Guelph, singing "Blowin' in the Wind" with great gusto the
whole way there.
Summer 1964. He went to Cuba with a number of other
young Canadians, and that was the first time he heard anyone
talk about dope. And separatism. The separatists from Quebec
bloomed in Cuba — the Cubans were very sympathetic to them
- and they became more articulate than they had ever been in
Canada. It was a separatist who first argued with him that the
Labour party road in Britain was not the way to socialism, that
the worker in the British factory does not feel any more in
control of that factory than does the American worker in his
free enterprise factory. He had to admit that was true. And that
the NDP did not have the answer to it. A revelation.
Fall 1964. He went to study political science as a graduate
student at Indiana University, and, casting about for the
campus socialists, joined up with Students for a Democratic
Society. SDS would eventually become a mass student
movement across the whole of the United States. In 1964 it was
coming into being in Indiana over the Vietnam war issue. In
XXXVI LONG WAY FROM HOME
fact, its first big anti-war demonstration took place right after
the Selma civil rights protests. One right after the other. The
slogan was: "Take the Troops from Saigon, Move Them to
Selma." It seemed the right slogan at the time. The fraternities
mobilized against the demonstration and broke it up. Another
revelation.
There were SDSers who were "red diaper" kids, who, like
him, had grown up in families and communities sympathetic to
socialist and Communist ideas. There were SDSers who were
in anguish over what was happening in America and who
wanted to relieve that anguish through politics. To them, the
"half-way houses" of the traditional socialist parties were too
moderate, too circumspect and compromised. They wanted a
community of and for themselves. They sought to overcome
their alienation through mass actions.
He was much more developed than any of them. He knew he
was a socialist and he could argue why. He argued with them.
"Yes," he said in SDS, "we're right about the war but we can
only achieve our aims if we're socialists as well." That
position grew and grew in SDS so that by 1968 SDSers were
asking not do we need socialism, but how are we going to get to
socialism? what do we have to build? And the answer to that
became more and more often: the working class.
There was another strand of radicalism, the "action faction,"
those early demonstrations against Chase-Manhatten bank for
holding shares in South Africa and the "burning, moral" thing
about the war, where it was more important to put your body on
the line than to get people to join you there. And then there were
the spiritual people. Back in 1964, when Maclean's inter-
viewed some of the students who had gone to Cuba, a girl had
said, "Canada needs a revolution." Hunter was still in the
NDP then and he thought that was ridiculous. But by 1968 he
understood that she had been talking about the need for a whole
turning around in our assessment of each other. And she was
right.
Classes, meetings, arguments: they were his whole life. And
music. Still he kept himself open to music. In his household
there was a bluegrass band, and when he was at home he heard
the blues, bluegrass, guitars, banjos, some fine voices. And
PORTRAITS XXXVII
read poetry — William Blake. And smoked dope. Dropped
acid. From inside the maelstrom of a "trip" he began to worry
about his cosmic consciousness. A close and unsparing look
inside told him he was in danger of dying within. He began to
hector his political friends, interfering in their daily business
with questions. He'd say to them, "You realize what we're
trying to do here. It's going to be a hell of a fight. It's going to
tear our souls apart We've got to be ready. We've got to get in
touch with how beautiful the mass movement can be." The
drugs had given him clarity, a glimpse into the present, into how
things can be right now if you want them to be.
He was involved in the anti-war marches to Washington, in
Angela Davis and Chicago 7 defence work, in Panther support
work. He became aware, along with some other SDSers, that
the tremendous talent of the women was not being used, that
the men were being developed as leaders, the women as den
mothers. The movement was dissipating its energy. Weird
relationships, in and out and up and down, lovers going crazy.
He married. It seemed iffy. He couldn't relate to this person,
his wife; was it something about him? Why couldn't he get
along with women? Of course he supported women's liberation
but he worried that it wasn't taking place in his own life, in the
lives of his women comrades or in those of the men. In 1967,
when the SDS women raised the issue, a big Texan got up and
drawled, "Well, folks, our gals are pretty liberated. They fuck
who they want and nobody gives a damn about it." He was
aghast. He knew this wasn't what the women meant.
When SDS fell apart in 1969, the Trotskyists picked him up.
PARTI
PEACE AND WAR
I
PEACE NOW!
December 28 [1964]-January1 [1965] marked the end
of Canada's student peace movement known as the
Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Dis-
armament. At its annual conference, held for the first
time in Regina, the CUCND decided to constitute
itself the Student Union for Peace Action ....
The conference attracted perhaps the most
impressive group of young Canadians that has yet
been assembled in anyone place. And many of them
had their credentials: Howard Adelman, czar of the
growing university co-op residences; Richard Guay,
vice-president of UGEQ [Union General des
Etudiants du Quebec], the powerful runaway French-
Canadian student federation; Doug Ward, head of
the external affairs department of CUS [Canadian
Union of Students], the federation of English-speaking
students; Hardial Bains, founder of the dynamic
UBC [University of British Columbia] Student
Federation; Jim Harding, president of the Saskat-
chewan NDY [New Democratic Youth]; Dimitri
Roussopoulos, editor of Our Generation Against
Nuclear Warfare [sic]; and of course, Arthur Pape,
chairman of CUCND
But before the conference was one day old, it was
clear that they knew nothing about the power
structure of this country, how decisions are made
and who makes them. And nobody could help them,
for the answers to these questions are not found
in any textbook or learned treatise. In fact, nobody
knows how power works in this country, or even
who has power. Observing this conference, I could
not help feeling that this is the most challenging task
before the peace movement and anyone else who
wishes to advance social change.
— Cy Conick (from "Students and Peace,"
published in Canadian Dimension,
January- February 1965)
4 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Labour Day weekend, 1964. The Bomarc base in La Macaza,
Quebec, was heavy with nuclear warheads. To the base came
members of the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament and the Student Christian Movement (SCM), to
juxtapose against these emblems of the strategy of death their
strategies of civil disobedience and personal witness. They
would sit in at the barbed-wire gates of the base as hostages for
the security of "the people."
For forty-eight hours they sat in, with placards and songs,
and slept in sleeping bags on the road in the rain; thirty-one
times they were removed from the road only to retake their
places. When, the demands of gentlemanly conduct having
been met, the base commander ordered base traffic to move
again, truckloads of guards were brought in. And, kicking at the
vigillers, pulling their hair and forcibly dragging them off the
road and throwing them into the ditch, the guards cleared the
gates.
It was a scenario from the Fifties, a script assembled by an
older generation from whom a personal and singular commitment
to hold the state accountable in a time of general fear and
helplessness was the essence of strategy: anything more
aggressive or hostile smacked of violence, authoritarianism
and brutishness. To large numbers of CUCNDers, however, the
handshakes, prayers and limp bodies had begun, in their dreary
repetition, to smack of futility and inadequacy. At best they
made the protesters feel better and created something of a
nuisance for the authorities, but at worst they deflected into
pacifism and non-resistance the best rebellious instincts of the
people.
What the Bomb represented was not just megadeath (although
this would always and rightly be its most horrific significance)
but also society's powerlessness to effect change. And it was
precisely here that the student peace movement could begin to
move beyond homilies of non-violence and human dignity. To
subsume all social and political issues within the urgency to
ban the Bomb was, CUCND argued, to succumb to mere
strategies of survival.
1
 The point was to ban the Bomb with the
power of the people; to act against, to struggle with and to
prevail over the power of the warlords where they held that
PEACE NOW! 5
power — in the "basic structures and attitudes"
2
 of society.
For their inspiration CUCNDers took the instructions of the
American civil rights movement, the Cuban revolution,* the
community and tenant organizing of the American Students for
a Democratic Society** and their own experiences in North
Bay, Ontario, where they attempted to organize the community
to reject the military foundation of the local economy. "Peace"
was inseparable from social action, militarism from monopolis-
tic power. If you were to live without war, you must first usurp
those at the levers of the war machine.
Accordingly, 150 "peaceniks" assembled in Regina*** in
December 1964 — CUCNDers, New Democratic Youth,
Quakers, young Communists and unaffiliated youth looking
for a base for their yearnings for a commitment — to bring the
strands of people's diverse experience together in a coherent
statement of radical purpose. In spite of the lack of ideological
unanimity on the issues of the priority of disarmament, the
efficacy of electoral politics, the role of decentralized organ-
izational structures in "democracy" and the context of peace
action, the group did coalesce around the felt need to act. To get
out into the streets and the neighbourhoods and there to make the
connection, in direct action and community organizing and the
information of everyday life, between nuclear weapons, tech-
nology and powerlessness. As to which actions should be
undertaken and for what purpose, it was further agreed that" all
social issues were related" and so people with concerns from
disarmament to education to psychotherapy "were all shown to
be equally working for 'social change.' "
3
They left Regina, having set up the Student Union for Peace
Action. Completely independent of any other radical formation,
SUPA grandly, even grandiosely, committed itself to the
*In the summer of 1964, forty-five Canadian students travelled to
Cuba under the auspices of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and
were deeply impressed by the Cubans' pride of achievement in their
anti-colonialist revolution.
**The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).
***". . . because it was in the middle of the country and because that's
where the Regina Manifesto was written when the CCF was formed.
It was an historic site."
6 LONG WAY FROM HOME
panoramic aim of working toward the fundamental changes in
institutions and attitudes that would abolish war, racism,
poverty, undemocratic political and technological procedures,
and bellicose and belligerent values.
I got interested in SUPA because it was an attempt to
change the world. There's no point in putting it narrower
than that.
I wanted the world to be just like SUPA, only bigger.
Loving, warm, intelligent, bright, sensitive, non-exploitative,
lovely. We were less concerned with the vision of what
was going to happen than any other group I know. Which I
think is very healthy. People would always say, "What
vision of the world do you want? What are you building?
Tell me what it is so I'll know if I like it or not." The answer
would be, I think quite properly, "Help us build it the way
you want it. And as we go along we'll build it."
SUPA was a movement, with all the spontaneity, flexibility
and diffuseness that characterize movements and not organ-
izations or parties. It was inevitably a movement: the medley of
youth drawn to it, the nature of their commitment, and the
principles of their conduct made it so.
There were four "types" of SUPA activist.* The "disillusion-
ed liberals" hoped, through protestant action, to force bourgeois
society to realize the liberal rhetoric concerning freedom,
justice and equality. The "cultural anarchists" posed the
student peace movement as a popular and democratic alternative
to the authoritarian, hierarchical and exclusive structures of
the rest of society. And the "red diaper babies," the people out
of working-class or Communist or CCF backgrounds, familiar
with the vocabulary of anti-capitalist perspectives, hoped to
hook up the energy and ideas of the pacifist and civil rights mass
movements with sympathetic elements in the left-wing parties
and in the unions. And there were the scores of drifters, the
ones who, profoundly moved by the courage and principled
conduct of the ban-the-bombers, the civil rights workers and the
*Typology of Daniel Drache, political scientist.
PEACE NOW! 7
Cuban revolutionaries, knew only that they too wanted to
commit their body and their spirit to such honest battle. "We
were like secular evangelists, people with commitment, faith, a
set of beliefs. We were shock troops, running here, running
there, throwing caution to the wind in the name of social
change."
There was a glue that held such an ideological hodge-podge
together. Called "commitment," "intensity" or "chutzpah," it
was the capacity to serve heart and soul in a project the full-
time dedication to the group, the engagement with ideas and
principles that changed your life, determining the household
you lived in, the people you made love with, the ways in which
you used your spare time, not to mention how you dressed, the
books you read, the music that moved you. What you believed
and how you lived were inseparable. Politics was not just a set
of ideas and arguments; it was also a way of being, an
instruction in how to live well and an invitation to determine
values through action. ".. . many of the values of SUPA can
only be validated if people begin to 'live the movement,' 'live
their values.' "
4
 And the first place in which the movement was
to be lived was in SUPA itself.
Because the movement was committed to non-violence,
democracy and self-determination, it proposed for itself equality
of participation, non-hierarchical structures and open-ended
objectives. At one level this meant, for instance, that there
never was a formal SUPA membership — it was a mailing list,
it was whoever put in some time at the Gestetner or on a project
— and there never was more than a shoestring budget,
haphazardly administered: staff salaries of twenty-five dollars a
week, unpaid telephone bills, people prodded to write some-
thing, get it down, run it off, buttons and bumper stickers for
sale, ten cents, please, for "Scarce Resources: The Dynamics
of American Imperialism" by Heather Deans.*
At another level, SUPA was "lived" in its meetings. "It was
a generation that would rather talk than read. Instead of writing
things, we discussed them. At meetings, meetings, councils,
*SUPA's Research, Information and Publications Project, which put
out research papers and reprinted pamphlets, was a major fund raiser.
8 LONG WAY FROM HOME
conferences, meetings." Two principles prevailed: participatory
democracy and consensus (adapted from the Quakers' "sense of
the meeting" and from th e practice of the civil rights movement).
These principles allowed participants an experience that was
the opposite of their experience in the larger society, where
they were intimidated and disregarded. Here in the movement
meeting they were encouraged to speak openly about feelings
as well as ideas. There were no rules of order. Rather than take
votes, the group would discuss until there was unanimity or
consensus of thought so that a decision taken would reflect the
feeling and idea of every person present. There were no
designated leaders, for leadership means authority and authority
means people with a vested interest in maintaining their power
over others. "The notion that any one bunch of people can
always have correct ideas is mad. It doesn't happen in real life
so why should it have happened in SUPA?"
These were the principles. In practice, however, they were
distorted. The rhetoric of absolute equality of participation
obscured the fact that some people were more articulate, more
self-assertive and more socially adept than others and so were
able, through manipulation of group dynamics and through
striking political and personal alliances with other "high-
powered" members, to assume leadership in all but name.
And, of course, because the group was held to be structureless,
it became impossible for aggrieved individuals to appeal to any
structure or apparatus or office for redress: "There wasn't any
place you could go to draw up a resolution, say, to have the
rascals thrown out." People would drift away or fall into glum
reserve at the point they could see no way to influence the
decision of the de facto leadership.
As for consensus, this arduous process, requiring great
patience and tolerance, of "getting the sense of the meeting"
was sometimes bypassed by the "heavies" who would meet at
parties, say, come to an agreement among themselves and then
later at the meetings "proceed to ram their decisions down
everybody else's throats."
The process was not always so abusive, but it was bewildering
and hurtful and alienating often enough to undermine in the
rank and file of SUPA supporters their faith in the rectitude of
movement praxis.
PEACE NOW! 9
There were tensions, too, among chapters. In spite of the
autonomy of SUPA chapters (yet another movement character-
istic) there was still a feeling among the Saskatchewan
members that Toronto was high-handed and arrogant and full
of self-importance ("They'd come out to see us, thinking they
would 'organize' us") quite unwarranted by the facts. Relative
to its population, Saskatchewan boasted more SUPA adherents
than Toronto. Furthermore, because so many of them had
come out of CCF or union homes, they saw themselves, in
contrast to the Torontonians, as rooted in their community and
naturally as continuous with it, and did not see SUPA as a
creature of their generation alone. "The Torontonians seemed
to be just skilled organizers without a base." The Montrealers,
grouped around Our Generation, looked askance at the style of
the "national office" in Toronto, at the people going off in all
directions with no more complex questions to ask than, "Is
there energy here? Commitment and intensity?" What the
Montrealers asked was, "What is the relationship of one action
to another? How is an action chosen? Is it a correct action?" It
was, in fact, the combined pressure of the Saskatchewan and
Montreal groups, dating back to CUCND, that "decentralized"
the movement and enhanced its democratic ethos.
5
In March 1965 thousands of civil rights demonstrators
twice tried to march the fifty-four miles from Selma, Alabama,
to the state capital in Montgomery in support of black voting
rights. Twice they were turned back; there were some who
died, beaten back by the nightsticks and tear gas of the state
troopers. Over the next few days hundreds and hundreds
more demonstrators rallied in Selma to demand an end to the
violence. On March 21 three thousand people marched out
again from Selma; accompanied by federal troops, they
reached Montgomery four days later, singing "We Shall
Overcome."
SUPA, with members of its own who had been in the South
with the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee
(SNCC), put out the word in Toronto: the news from Selma is
appalling, get down to the U.S. consulate and sit in. And they
did, for a week, at first a handful with the press looking on. But
when the Globe and Mail ran a picture of young protesters
10 LONG WAY FROM HOME
being ejected from the consular grounds as they attempted to
present a petition, hundreds more demonstrators "started
coming out of the woodwork" to sit in too. All kinds of people,
but most especially university and high school students, who
had, before Selma, never dreamed they would do something
like this: sitting on the sidewalk of University Avenue, huddling
under blankets, singing their hearts out,* listening raptly to civil
rights workers who had been "there," and charging the doors of
the U.S. consulate right under the noses of the mounted police.
And still more people came. So this was the movement.
The demonstration galvanized SUPA. Suddenly they were
responsible for the well-being and the education of a thousand
people, and they were scared. How many of these sitters-in,
they wondered, had been trained in non-violent civil disobe-
dience? They sat down with them, explained the philosophy,
described the tactics; they took them by the carloads to the
Student Christian Movement (SCM) office and ran them
through a "quick session on how to do a non-violent demon-
stration," returned them to the sit-in, and picked up another
carload.
Back at the SUPA office, a law student was delegated to be
the "administration."
It followed as the night the day that there had to be an
administrator, and that was me because I was in law. But
really I was just hopeless. There I was sitting in the office
coordinating phones and food and blankets and donations.
People brought in all kinds of stuff; they brought
chickens and bought hamburgers for us — it was quite
dramatic. It really captured the entire city. I was totally
inadequate in the job, and the guy who set up Rochdale
College later, Howard Adelman, walked in one day, about
the fifth day that I'd been sitting there, struggling out of this
mountain of paperwork and junk and empty hamburger
packages, and he walked in and said, "Who's the adminis-
*They sang "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the civil rights
movement; some, more leftist than civil libertarian, sang "We Shall
Overthrow."
PEACE NOW! 11
trator?" I said, " I am, who the hell are you?" He said, "I'm
Howard Adelman and I'm going to clean this place up." So
he walked in and he just took over. He had been an
administrator for years; he had run corporations and done
all kinds of stuff. Here I am on a mountain of junk with
clothing and bedding in one corner and hamburgers in
another. It was just pathetic. He sat down and did what I
now know an administrator does. He put together a task
force of twenty people to clean the office up, which was
step one — it was just that basic. Step two was to prepare
flow charts and step three was to start delegating.
Some SUPA people were up in Ottawa attempting to lobby
the government, put pressure on it to "take a stand"; others
were on the phone with SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael,
getting from him the stories out of Selma that SUPA then
released to the Toronto press where it was picked up by the
American press ("There was a blackout of news in the U.S.
itself so we felt, in the SUPA office, that we were right there, in
the centre of the world"); and others hosted the black kids from
the South who came to check things out, Rennie Davis of SDS
and people from ERAP of the American north-east.
Right in the heat of the thing Davis came up and gave a talk
in our Peace House. It felt like the revolution was finally
here, what with all the people out in the street. Davis told
everybody to quit school. He said we were just in training
for the system, so if we were really serious we should get
out of school. A number of people proceeded to renounce
school right there on the spot. It was like a conversion
experience. . . . The movement fever had caught.
Immediately following upon the sit-in, supporters of SNCC
in Toronto (among them were several SUPA people) set up an
office and staff right next to the SUPA office and called
themselves Canadian Friends of SNCC. They channelled
down to SNCC in the South the money that had come in as
donations from Canadians; they wrote letters to make contact
with any Canadians working in the South and passed their
stories on to the press; they sponsored benefit concerts; they
put out a newsletter in which they "anthologized" the news
12 LONG WAY FROM HOME
from the civil rights movement and reprinted letters received by
the office from Canadian civil rights workers.
They dispatched Rocky Jones to work among blacks in
Nova Scotia ("We sent him down without any money. I think
he must have eventually given up on us") and sat through
interminable meetings.
The meetings tended to go on and on and on for hours and
hours and hours, which was all right for me but a little
difficult on the people who had to go to work in the
morning. The theme of these meetings was what to do with
this tremendous, huge mass of people who had foregathered
as a result of the Selma sit-in. There were those, who we
called Trots — this was probably unfair, because our
definition of Trotskyism was quite sweeping in those days
— who wanted to recruit these masses of people into union
work and socialist types of activity. But we thought that the
purpose of the organization was to support the people in
the South, period. We thought we were responsible to a
group of people in Alabama, say, who in fact didn't even
know we existed.
There was an uneasy tension between the two offices:
SNCC and SUPA. SNCC had all the glory and all the
excitement of Selma attached to it, while SUPA was seen to
be simply plodding along in the unglamorous and, to some,
less-than-radical pursuit of Canadian social issues. What were
data on the lives of native people, stuck away on reservations
far from the gluttonous maw of the media, compared with the
spectacular scenarios of poor blacks set upon by dogs, two feet
from a camera? SNCC people would wander into the SUPA
office, "laying trips of all kinds." "What are you doing at that
desk? You're not really people, you don't have any heart.
You're just typewriters." A year later Stokely Carmichael
assumed chairmanship of SNCC, expelled its white activists,
and in Toronto "radicalism" was once again the charge of
SUPA, for better or worse. The fevered novices would have to
engage themselves with Canada, or not at all.
When SUPA broke with the single-issue campaign for
nuclear disarmament, it had assigned itself the task of looking
PEACE NOW! 13
into the roots of war, which is to say, had assigned itself social
analysis. There was a tendency in the first year of its activity to
draw this analysis in very broad strokes, as though SUPA
inhabited a meta-society in which the categories of action,
violence, class and power applied not to any particular social
place but to all places. SUPA was in the world, among people,
alongside communities, working for social change. Where?
Here. Where is here? Anywhere. SUPA defined the Cold
War as the "central problem"
6
 of the age and envisioned a
Canadian foreign policy of non-alignment. SUPA prescribed
vigils, demonstrations, sit-ins and sit-downs as the action of
dissidence. SUPA sought new answers for the new age,
declaring national loyalties to be outmoded. SUPA called for
the creation of "unions of people" as a new form of political
grouping. Nevertheless, for all SUPA's gaseous abstractions
of "policy" from international economic relations, of the
"new age" from anti-colonialist revolution and of the "people'
from cleavages of class, sex and race, its vision of harmony,
unity and peace did contain an explicit critique of capitalist
society and did postulate the means by which this society
might be subverted.
According to the social analysis of the movement at mid-
decade, post-war technological society has developed along
lines of increasingly monolithic structures — the state, the
military and police, big business, the university, the unions
— that concentrate power and authority and wealth in the
hands of an inaccessible elite. This is a dangerous situation.
"The threat of World War III cannot be separated from the
trend towards centralized undemocratic decision-making, both
political and technological, nor from the restrictions imposed
on civil and academic freedom, as these are inexorably related
to the growth of the war-fare state."
7
 The people who pay most
heavily for this arrangement are those who can least afford it—
the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless — who must pay in the
coin of their poverty, their lack of status, their powerlessness.
Electoral politics are an illusion of popular participation in
decision making. "Despite all our glorification of democracy
in Canada, the real centres of power remain far out of the reach
of the electors and remain intact and totally undisturbed by
14 LONG WAY FROM HOME
elections no matter who is elected."
8
 Liberals and Conser-
vatives come and go but the directors of the Bank of Montreal,
the CPR, General Foods and McGill University are with us
forever: they cannot be dislodged at the ballot box. Conclusion:
a society of materially comfortable, self-determining and
fearless people is unrealizable in the present socio-economic
and political system. "Therefore SUPA is dedicated to a
revolution which would create in Canada a new and self-
directing order."
9
What, then, is to be done? If the "system" is centrist, elitist,
inaccessible and violent, then the "revolution" must be
populist, democratic, non-violent and inclusive. It must come
from the grass roots, that place where the people are; as
demoralized, apathetic and despairing as they may be, the
extent of their hopelessness is the measure of their dissaffection.
Poor people, Indians, blacks, Doukhobors — these have not
been assimilated into the economy or value system of the
mainstream society but are, in fact, its detritus, the debris of
urbanization, homogenization and industrialization. In their
life-styles and values and attitudes and self-images is the crack
in the "system" in which the young activists can insert
themselves. Chipping away with the tools of participatory
democracy, community organizing and non-violent confront-
ation, activists would eventually widen that crack into a great,
gaping hole through which the revolutionary multitude would
step, reversing the old order in the path of their forward
movement
It was very much to the point that students would undertake
this organizing function, for they are critically situated in
modern social relations. Economically dependent, patronized
by the university administration, passively absorbing the
corporatist world view of the intellectual body politic, students,
like the dispossessed, lack self-determination. Unlike them,
however, they are temporarily members of a critical community
wherein they may learn skills of potentially liberating value.
10
Addressing the question of the relationship between the
university and social change, SDS had instructed that a "new
left"* must start "controversy across the land."
11
 SUPA
agreed. From the campus would radiate ideas and proposals
critical of social and political "inadequacies."
12
 From the
PEACE NOW! 15
campus into the community would come the bearers of
perturbing news, and of scenarios of emancipation.
Summer 1965. High on the success of the Selma sit-in, hearts
and minds on fire with the idea of democracy and the possibility
of community, confidently equipped with the skills of non-
violent action and consensus decision making, SUPA prepared
to do work in its own backyard.
As to the precisely correct approach to community organizing,
this, like so much else in the movement, was up for grabs. The
argument went back and forth between those who would limit
the approach to "enablingship," to bringing people together
without coercion and without interference in their perceptions,
and those who called for a more active "leadership," a leading
of people up against the power structure with the tools of
analysis and agitation. Nor was there anything structurally
fixed about the SUPA community-organizing projects. Other
than sponsoring them, doing a lot of fund raising and giving
moral support, the national office steered clear of any kind of
executive direction of the projects. It was up to th e field-workers to
find their own funds, work out their own methodology, make
their own mistakes and score their own successes. It was
important that the field-workers not only seem to be but in fact
be independent of any bureaucratic control. SUPA activists, it
must be clear, were neither missionaries nor social workers.
As for the field-workers, there was no unanimity of values
among them either, beyond the agreement that "peace cannot
be imposed from the top. That was understood." Further than
that was every position from "confronting capitalism" to
"equalizing opportunity" to "helping the poor Indians," reflec-
ting the diversity of experience of people in Saskatchewan, say,
who had cut their teeth in the co-op or medicare movements
and the people of Toronto, say, who had gone straight from
their middle-class homes to university to the slums of Kingston.
And so off they went. A bunch, on the Student Neestow
Partnership Project in Saskatchewan, to Indian reservations
*As far as I can tell, this is the first reference to a "new left" in the
literature of the period (1962). It would cease to be a generic term
only later as the new left.
16 LONG WAY FROM HOME
and Metis settlements, to "do something about" the appalling
poverty and demoralization of these communities. Off they
went, nine project workers, mainly but not exclusively from
Saskatchewan, to live in tents or sleep on floors, wash clothes,
milk cows, bake bannock, chop firewood, and blister and fester
alongside their constituents; to sit in kitchens drinking tea and
waiting for something to happen. What happened was that in
the age-old manner of such visitations from white folks, the
native people kept their silence. What happened was that field-
workers were snared in webs of rumours (that they were secret
agents of the welfare department, for instance) and caught in
the cross-fire between jealous families or involved in the
competition of young native men for the status that accrued in
hanging around white women. The native culture they had
idealized as a deeply rooted resistance to the barbarity and
crassness of their own seemed rather a culture of "passivity,"
"submissiveness" and "utter impoverishment"; the social
action they had dreamed of taking now seemed an unconscion-
able intrusion into a closed and self-protective community.
"All power is white power. What am I doing here with my
vocabulary of participation and facilitation? What do I know
beyond my outrage and my anguish?" This they did take away
with them: an insight into the colonialism of the white
bureaucracy enmeshing native lives and an utter contempt of
the liberal rhetoric of democracy.
On the Kootenays Project they went, eight of them, driving
from Ontario to Castlegar and Krestova and Ootoshenie, to
the communities of the Doukhobors, the quintessential pacifists
who understood the unity of social action and the inner life. In
temporal action, in hospitality, pacifism and communalism,
humanity may be rejoined in love. To the Doukhobors they
went, hoping to persuade them to see themselves "as agents of
social change, as allies of the poor, the Indians, the labour
movement, the intellectuals."
13
 They vigilled together on
Hiroshima Day, ate together, planted gardens together. That
was fine a s far as it went. But it did not go much further than the
old people. Young Doukhobors, the SUPA activists discovered to
their chagrin, were educated in public schools and employed at
PEACE NOW! 17
the pulp and paper mills; were taking out loans for a car and
getting loaded every second night at the bar, unregretfully
discarding Doukhoborism just at the point when the young
"Anglos" from outside were picking it up, like the dollar that
falls out of somebody's pocket in the parking lot.
"Finally we want to emphasize that it very soon became
clear to us that a project of this kind cannot be terminated after
a summer."
14
 They never went back.
Twelve, mainly from Queen's University, were assigned to
Kingston, to the north end among the poor working-class and
welfare families. They moved into two big, old houses (our
place is at the bottom, as ordinary people in a neighbourhood,
eschewing privilege, and clearing out a space where people can
take a stand) and knocked on doors: Hello, can I come in? I'm
from the Kingston Community Project. At the kitchen table,
over cups of coffee, and weaving in and out of chores and
squalling children, came the stories: complaints about the
housing, grievances against the landlord, fears for their children's
safety, worries about the boyfriend, the police, the food budget,
the heating bill. Would they come to a meeting? Some would
never. Others, visited again and again, the conversation
dribbling off into gossip and baby talk, said yes, they might.
The meeting: a handful of tenants, a row of SUPA field-
workers. SUPA wrote up a petition, SUPA circulated it,
SUPA organized a tenants' council, SUPA did all the talking
in a confrontation with a landlord (who threatened to evict his
tenants unless they apologized).
This was very discouraging. The project workers weren't
supposed to be bloody social workers, do this, do that, tell me,
tell me, they were "enablers," working alongside people to
collectively, collaboratively, figure out how to fight city hall
and the landlord. Gradually it dawned on the project workers
that to the residents they looked, acted and sounded like the
middle-class interlopers they were ("Maybe we should all have
got jobs in the area"), asking a lot of questions — here's another
survey, so smart, so confident, they must be in charge.
If only they knew. Back at the houses where the project
workers lived there was much confusion and despondency.
18 LONG WAY FROM HOME
We started out with a rule that men couldn't sleep at the
women's house or vice versa but that broke down. Then we
all began to eat at the one big house. There were twelve
people on the project and we had forty dollars a week to
feed people. We were really into suffering. We ate
incredibly bad meals. We were into some kind of Christian
moral fervour although we wouldn't have called it that
Everybody was supposed to have a part-time job and
pool all their money, and that was what was going to go to
people's tuitions the next year because nobody was going
to have a summer job that would earn them enough money
for their tuition. All this money was to be pooled and then
divided up. So I got a job, this real shit job, working from
ten at night to two in the morning in this really, really
horrible restaurant and I would work all day on the project
and Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights at the
Tropicana Restaurant Oh, it was awful. And I pooled all
my money. All my tip money, everything. I remember a
meeting in which I thought I should be allowed to keep my
tip money and was told, "No, it's got to all be pooled." Now
some of the people never did get jobs and others never did
pool their money. I can remember being really angry
because some of the men didn't do any work. Myself and
two other women did virtually all the cooking. The men
didn't do any of the housework and the place was always a
mess. They would come over for dinner and would
sometimes do the dishes, but badly. People were getting
colds all the time so another woman and I said, "We've got
to start putting Javex in the rinse water," and we were
accused of being middle class because, after all, poor
people had colds all the time.
Ironies in triplicate. Tenants intimidated by the cleverness of
the field-workers, the field-workers b y the power of their own
project "leader," and the project itself by the superiority with
which they endowed their model, the SDS ERAP projects.
(Fourth irony: ERAP in turn was an adaptation of community-
organizing strategies of SNCC in the South.) By the time that
the idea of community organizing had arrived in Montreal
PEACE NOW! 19
Street in Kingston, it had travelled a circuitous, not to say
tormented, political and psychological, route indeed.
During the project Tom Hayden came and talked about
what ERAP was doing in Newark. Newark was our
model, our idea of heaven, of what we could do. We were
so caught up in Tom's charisma that it never occurred to us
that our situation was different, that there is no "ghetto" in
Kingston, that Kingston is not an industrial city, that
poverty in Kingston has its own very peculiar generation,
that there weren't high-rise tenements in Kingston where
rent strikes could be carried off with a lot of punch. We
never analysed where we were. Newark was like a grid we
laid on top of Kingston's north end and it was supposed to
work the same way.
Of course it didn't work. And they paid for it with depression,
self-deprecation and guilt; with exhaustion and bewilderment;
with a terrible feeling of being torn between listening more
closely to what their neighbours had to say (even when it didn't
sound very radical) and to the directives of the "leader" who
had his own agenda; with the realization that "we were
weekend organizers."
The field-workers went back to school. Five full-time
organizers (three ex-students and two housewives) took over
and "cleaned it up." Months later they pulled off ATAK
(Association for Tenants' Action, Kingston) and voted a
member onto city council. Weekend organizers they were not.
The summer-project field-workers gathered at St. Calixte,
Quebec, for SUPA's Fall Institute. They came bedraggled,
exhausted, hungry, bursting with stories and with the need to
purge their frustration and sense of failure. But they came high
and hearty, too, with every moment that had been comradely
and revelatory and creative. " I cannot tell you what kind of an
experience it was." And here in their conversations, quiet and
confessionlike, extravagant and prolix, in the sunshine by the
water and in the basement with beer and instant coffee, in the
meetings looking for consensus, crawling hand over foot to an
agreement, a myth about SUPA was born. Yes, there had been
very bad times in the community projects, but these were
20 LONG WAY FROM HOME
washed away by this coming together of comrades to build
something out of the beginnings, this finding "in the truly
human and basic things a real opening to communication and
trust"
15
 — ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around
— and so on, ten days of this, "dignity," "human potential,"
"liberation,""change," "revolution" and so on.
The myth was that SUPA had just begun to construct itself
as the new left movement of social change and passionate
commitment. The fact was that already at St. Calixte, in 1965,
were the undercurrents of its collapse a mere two years later.
Present at the meetings were observers from the Company of
Young Canadians (CYC), the government-created and govern-
ment-funded youth corps, who were casting about for a
constituency.* "They floated in on the excitement of our
meeting. They said that CYC believed in community organizing
and had government backing for it. They said we could not
afford not to join them." Those SUPA activists who were
confident of their ability not only to sustain the enthusiasm and
commitment of that summer but to deepen and enrich it
repudiated CYC, saying that a government agency could not
make the revolution. But others were tempted. CYC had
money, it offered salaried jobs and consultants' fees and all the
*By an Act of Parliament in 1966, the Company of Young Canadians
was established as an independent Crown corporation to be governed
by a council of fifteen. Ten of these councillors were to be elected by
the volunteer field-workers an d the rest appointed by government In fact,
a provisional council, all government appointees, governed the CYC
until 1969. In the words from the Speech from the Throne, through the
CYC the "energies and talents of youth can be enlisted in projects for
economic and social development in Canada and abroad."
16
 The
example of President Kennedy's Youth Corps was very much in
Prime Minister Pearson's mind. Unfortunately, during its first years
of operation, the CYC was the subject of numerous disputes regarding
the administrative role of the volunteers, the top-heaviness of its
bureaucracy, the inaccessibility and irresponsibility of some of its
staff, and the fact that in 1967 two CYC volunteers were discovered at
an anti-war demonstration! By the early Seventies, several CYC
staffers had become civil servants in Health and Welfare, Manpower,
Secretary of State, the CBC and Information Canada. In 1975, CYC,
along with other community-action projects funded by government,
was closed down.
PEACE NOW! 21
accoutrements of a real office, and it had lots of publicity.
When SUPA's report on the summer projects was compiled
with CYC money for the CYC, it was the beginning of the end.
Present also were activists who saw in the general euphoria a
substitute for analysis, in the niceties of the democratic process
an evasion of a critique of the decisions disgorged by that
process, and in the fetishism of participatory democracy and
consensus a dreamy side-trip away from the hard questions of
program.
I can remember Jim Laxer dropping in and saying, "This
is either the greatest thing that ever happened or the biggest
crock of shit that ever was." I can remember Dimitri
[Roussopoulos] looking over a group of apple-cheeked
young idealists and saying, "Let's not forget that the brain
is also part of the human anatomy." I can remember
somebody-or-other from the U.S. saying, "I would assess,
from this meeting, that this outfit has about a year to go."
It was downhill from St. Calixte. As SUPA fell upon hard
times, as funding sources for projects dried up, as CYC plucked
off its stalwarts one by one, breeding suspicions and paranoia,*
and as people cracked under the strain of holding down jobs
and community organizing, SUPA began to turn around and
around and in on itself, looking for the idea that would save it.
Saskatoon conference, December 1965, freezing on the
hard, wooden benches in the basement of a Unitarian church.
The excitement of the summer dissipated in worry and anxiety
and doubt. How can a middle-class kid sink deep enough
roots in a community to break through the suspicion and
narrow self-interest of Indians, blacks and workers? Maybe
community organizing wasn't, after all, supportive of "basic
revolutionary change," whatever that was? Why are the
projects falling apart? Are they just artless patch-up jobs on
situations of gross social dislocation, the proportions of which
were beyond the calculations of an "enabler?" What's SUPA
*A false rumour that one political "heavy" had taken a CYC job
caused Our Generation to cancel publication of an article he had
written on the CYC called "Cash In or Drop Out."
22 LONG WAY FROM HOME
for anyway? Newsletters, reprints, literature, tables, study
sessions. Big deal.
Waterloo conference, December 1966. "Waterloo, like it or
not, was an ideological conference."
17
 Burned out or stunned or
"lost in the field," many felt that community organizing was
bankrupt. Reluctant to make yet another leap of faith into mid-
air, the rank and file of SUPA activists called for an effort to
"clarify ideology, policy, program and structure. That is,
where, how and with whom to work in this culture. Leave us not
cathart again. Leave us do some work."
18
 In the workshop on
class analysis: had or had not the labour movement "sold out?"
Paul Goodman's session: an impatience with his courteous
counter-communities of self-education.* A plenary on organizing
the middle class: revolutionary "cadres" should be prepared
among students, professionals and white-collar workers. An
open caucus: SUPA must outgrow its apolitical approaches.
19
Gone, the heartfelt themes of non-violence and world peace,
the giddy hopefulness of organizing the communities of the
dispossessed, the intense scrutiny of procedures. In their place,
a Draft Manifesto Committee was charged with coming up with a
" statement of aims, to articulate a new left ideology, to offer the
youth of this country a political manifesto."
20
 It never did get
written: there was no "consensus."
Ideology: ideas at the basis of some economic or political
theory or system; also "visionary speculation." In both senses,
SUPA had an ideology, in spite of the best efforts of some of its
members to resist systematizing their ideas, to resist "labels"
and to value their practical experience over their ruminations.
For all that, everything SUPA people did, from their projects
among the dispossessed to sitting in at the American consulate
to writing papers on student syndicalism, contained an "implicit
definition of reality, a view of human nature and deep
convictions of right and wrong."
21
 It remained to make them
explicit.
"SUPA is at present an ethical movement in search of
*Goodman was heard muttering, as he left the conference, that
compared to the American movement there was an awful lot of
"Marxism" among the Canadians.
PEACE NOW! 23
analysis."
22
 That the search was often halting and fruitless was
a measure of the movement's discontinuity with the body of
socialist thought of the old left. There were no ideological
givens; one began only with the givens of one's political
experience and from that extracted an idea of what was going
on. Those widely read in socialist literature were exceptional,
and those who had grown up in socialist milieux were by no
means unaffected by the virulent anti-communism of the Cold
War period and by Budapest, 1956, and the revelations of
Stalinist horrors. One read The Communist Manifesto in an
undergraduate political science course but otherwise regarded
Marxism as "irrelevant" to the modern world. As too abstract
or too theoretical or too programmatic. As austere and anti-
people. Rather one read C.Wright Mills, Paul Goodman and
George Grant, in whose studies of power, disclosures of social
absurdities, and forebodings about the dissolution of the
Canadian nation in technological "homogenization," respec-
tively, the movement heard resonances of their own inchoate
yearnings and deep dissatisfactions that the vocabulary and
categories of Marxism did not evoke. "The word 'radical'
meant a great deal to us because it had a kind of generic
excellence. It meant we were determined to go to the root of
understanding the crisis of our time."
This meant, for instance, that in regard to the revolutionary
role of the working class SUPA disregarded the accumulated
wisdom on the subject and postulated instead the revolutionary
potential of the poor, the coloured, the anti-social. Here with
the irremediably alienated an alliance could be struck — and
not with a working class that had seemingly assimilated the
acquisitive, selfish and licentious values of the middle class.
This meant, too, re-evaluating the role of the CCF-NDP —
for, whatever it had been in its glory days of organizing the
farmers and "progressives" in resistance to the abuses of
capitalism, it was now a bureaucratic and hierarchical party
that distributed authority from the top down, shamelessly
neglected the grass-roots supporters* and avoided any head-on
Th e Saskatchewan NDP government lost the 1964 election to the
Liberals in part because "many of us had seen the NDP 'sell out' the
24 LONG WAY FROM HOME
challenge to the capitalist status quo. How was it possible,
asked the new left, that the parliamentary process and welfare
statism could ever incite the revolution? How was it possible,
as "revolutionaries," not to be down among the people, taking
the measure of consciousness and opposition from the data of
everyday life? From there one could see their pacification at the
hands of social democracy. "If the NDP continues to move
toward mainstream politics, as sure as anything the need for a
new radical people's party will develop in this country."
23
And it was precisely in response to this need that some in
SUPA, by 1967, impatient with the movement's "looseness,"
its haphazard program and analysis after the fact, demanded
that at the forthcoming conference in Goderich, Ontario,
"ideology" be discussed and related to "programmatic ac-
tivity."
24
 To tighten up the slack in new left thinking, a coherent
and scientific ideological discipline was required, something
like Marxism, for example. "We cannot improve on The
Communist Manifesto in .. . the economic analysis of our
society."
25
 They would not yet call themselves Marxists, but
they were at least prepared to acknowledge that the hundred-
year-old socialist idea could teach them a thing or two about
where they lived and how to go forward out of the "realms of
necessity."
The Goderich conference, September 1967. It was the
last SUPA conference. Where there had been a couple of
hundred at earlier conferences, here there were forty; it seemed
that those who had joined up with CYC stayed away. And by
the end of the week those forty were no longer a union, for peace
action or anything else. The glue that had held the disparate
elements of SUPA together had dried up and the elements fell
away from each other under the pressure of "ideology."
Ideology: was Marx "correct" and should SUPA become a
Marxist organization; could one live as a petit bourgeois and be
radical; wasn't it time to have a dues-paying membership and a
national board answerable to members; was there not a "new
working class" taking shape under modern capitalism, and
community clinic movement in its backroom deals with the doctors in
the medicare crisis."
PEACE NOW! 25
could it not be radicalized; how much longer were the women of
SUPA expected to tolerate the contradiction between the
rhetoric of democracy and equality and their own second-class
status in the group? There was no agreement. Here, finally,
"consensus" would only have violated the discrepant convictions
of movement radicals.*
Those who rejected Marxism and could not live with a
SUPA transformed from an informal network into an "organiza-
tion" quit. Those who could not wait for a male-dominated left
to take up women's liberation quit. Of those remaining, twelve
were named to the New Left Committee to "engage in
ideological communication and other activities designed to
further the New Left in Canada"
26
 and to report back on what
should be done next. The SUPA newsletter became the New
Left Committee Bulletin for a couple of issues. But the
committee itself was not heard from after that. SUPA:
December 1964 to September 1967.
The New Left, and SUPA, has reached the end of a
particular phase. It can be described as the phase in which
a small part of this generation attempted to break away
from the politics it had grown up in; to act out its anger at
the complacency and hypocrisy of society; to develop the
basis of a politic that would fundamentally transform that
society. In large measure, it has failed in this attempt "
27
Why, at the same time as the American SDS was consolidating
itself as a national radical student organization, did SUPA fall
apart? The comparison is not gratuitous — Canadian radicals
made it all the time, for better or worse. To some, SUPA had
been, unfortunately, the "major instrument for drawing
American New Left ideas into Canada,"
28
 an instrument, that is,
of de-Canadianization. To others, however, these "American"
ideas were no more influential than, say, the ideas of syndicalism
*"There were a whole lot of splits then. The Trots were getting heavy
and there were the Hegelian phenomenologists and the hard-line
Marxists. I remember one night at the NDY house when people were
screaming, roaring, practically having fist fights over the issue of
where we were politically. This was supposed to be a party."
26 LONG WAY FROM HOME
and anarchism that flourished in Montreal, or the social
democratic idea in Saskatchewan, or Maoism on the West
Coast. Besides, there were SUPA members who were all too
aware of the inadequacy of American radicalism. "Were
Americans interested in Saskatchewan populism? Nyet. In the
Quebecois? Nyet. In the Maritimes? Nyet."* American radical
analysis did not go very far, the Canadians discovered quickly
enough, in explaining the Canadian particularities of Quebec
and the native peoples, of regionalism and Prairie socialism.
When it came down to confronting these features of their
situation, the Canadians were on their own.
And on their own, at the end of 1967, they concluded their
movement had largely failed to revolutionize Canadian society.
Why? Because, said the New Left Committee which succeeded
SUPA briefly, SUPA had failed to develop a coherent analysis
of Canadian society. Mere "naive populism" and "radical
sentiment" did not begin to get close to the heart of the matter
— "the structure of modern capitalism and .. . its specific
characteristics in Canada"
29
 — with which they had to contend
before they could proceed with a truly radical program.
We must, said the radicals, finally deal with who we are. And
what we are is cultural amnesiacs, people deprived of a sense of
our historical specificity, people incapable of defining Canada
as something more than "some sort o f post-industrial society
in which poverty and alienation "for some reason" still
bedevil us and in which the working class has "somehow" been
put out to pasture. " I would add," wrote Dimitri Roussopoulos
in the SUPA newsletter at the end of 1966, "that.. . SUPA, for
example, is an urban, middle-class youth group in a sophisti-
cated colony, recently referred to as a branch-plant society
We must repeat this description to ourselves until it fully sinks
in, and we understand all of its implications."
30
They had also to deal with the fact that, in rejecting the
organized industrial working class as the most promising
*"SDS people used to come up to Toronto to rest. Tom Hayden came
up and Carl Oglesby. Tom stayed with Clay [Ruby] a week and didn't
say a word. He was overdosed, burned out; he came up to rest and
never said one word to us."
PEACE NOW! 27
agency of social change, SUPA was stuck with a group of
social "marginals." Oppressed, these marginals surely were,
deprived as they were of education, employment and organiza-
tion, but they were also, as a result, demoralized, isolated from
each other and far removed from any consequential place in the
economy. "SUPA relying on the 'oppressed' for a power base
was really a bunch of ephemeral petit bourgeois 'good guys'
trying to nail Jello to a wall."
In terms of its own internal dynamics, SUPA was too often
incapable of handling the psychological "baggage" people
brought in with them. The ideal of the group was to put back
together what the society had ripped apart: the personal and the
political experience. The ideal was to create authentic com-
munity; but "to get to the point where one knows how to do this
requires experimentation and trust and commitment, and often
what happened was that one's initial attempts fell very short of
the goal. For a lot of people this meant simple betrayal."
Betrayal. Feelings of hurt, feelings of rejection, feelings of
inadequacy. Who am I and what am I doing here and why am I
with these people and not those over there? Feeling declasse
and that the bridges had been burned on the road to getting
back. Yet stuck here too in a morass of rivalry, jealousy,
resentment: I feel put-down, I feel dumb, I feel unattractive,
compared to so-and-so I'm a real loser. This is politics? "I
don't think politics can be a place to do therapy, but we were
mixing them up all the time. If you don't come to terms with
that, a great deal of political arguments are simply a cover for
personal pathology."
But the coup de grace was the intervention of CYC. Opacity
of motivation, ideology and practice blurred the line between
the function of CYC and SUPA, and as SUPA floundered
many activists simply went over to CYC, thinking to continue
there what SUPA had begun. They argued they would
"radicalize" CYC and would put together a network of radicals
working in "crucial constituencies" right across the country.
Their critics, however, charged them with careerism and
compromise. They said CYC's money was tainted and that the
state was moving in to social sectors of the oppressed on the
backs of movement idealists.
28 LONG WAY FROM HOME
They went over. They became an agency of state. I can
remember when CYC came out to Saskatchewan to court
us: they picked us up in their big, beautiful van, took us to
the hotel, fed us filet mignon and wine and asked us, would
you like to work for us, we pay well, and blah, blah. We
said, no, this is an attempt to co-opt us, it's crap, it's
bullshit.
By the end of 1967, CYC had absorbed most of SUPA's
Toronto-based leadership in staff or consultants jobs, had hired
half its project workers into its own volunteer groups, and had
linked up with most of SUPA's extant projects. By the end of
1967, SUPA was dead and the chance to mature politically
was forfeited.
Those SUPA members who had not joined with CYC
dispersed into the Canadian Union of Students,* local com-
munity organizing, magazine and newsletter publishing, the
CBC, graduate school. Through them a radical critique of
Canadian capitalist society was in fact disseminated right
across the country and around them the new left would be
re-formed.
The tasks of this second wave of the new left — the
organization of a movement for an independent socialist
Canada, and for an independent socialist Quebec — were
already on the agenda, as it were. The war in Vietnam had
shocked the peace movement out of its woolly aspirations for
"international peace" and forced it to come to terms with the
operations of American corporate capitalism in Canada as well
as abroad.** The growth of nationalist and separatist movements
in Quebec had forced a revision of the Canadian new left's
historical antipathy to nationalism and the nation-state. ("How
could we be nationalists in Quebec and internationalists in
English Canada when everywhere was the same enemy?") By
1966 they had discovered the nationalist George Grant and had
had a "passion for the nation" awakened; had read a working
*CUS was the national umbrella organization of English-Canadian
university students' councils.
**See next chapter.
PEACE NOW! 29
paper on the data of American control of the Canadian
economy; and had sat through long, late and soul-searching
meetings with the people from Montreal . They came to understand
that in Quebec was a "subject people" organizing to take
control of their own political, cultural and economic life: had
this not been precisely the ideological justification for SUPA's
activities, this right of a community to self-determination?
.. . the anti-authoritarian current in the peace movement
was one of its ways of finding its way to the Quebecois, I
think. . . . The capitalist world's youth, in Berkeley and
Berlin wanted to wear shaggy clothes, smoke forbidden
substances, eat natural food. They wanted these things
because they wanted to be themselves. Well, the Quebecois
were also trying to be themselves.
31
But first the new left would regroup on the campuses of the
universities, refer again to the constituency from which it had
extended itself, tendril-like, into the scattered communities of
the dispossessed, and propose for itself the project it had
assigned to those communities: power, its theory and its
strategies.
"Even when we ourselves would be forced to call ourselves
'liberal,' we have retained a peculiar, almost unshakable will to
be radical, not to compromise with power,"
32
 For all of
SUPA's inadequacies and failures and ill-conceived strategy
and ill-fated programs, it had been a cathartic experience for its
adherents, purging as it did the politics of the Cold War and the
ideological hegemony of capitalism in North America. It was
the beginning of the renewed debate in Canada on the nature of
capitalism and imperialism, and never again would the social
critics on the left be so politically and intellectually artless as
they had been when they first, in indignation and in sorrow,
walked back and forth in silent accusation at the gates of the
warmongers' enterprises.
Nor would they ever be so exquisitely tenderhearted again.
There was a period when, in their anxiety for rigour and
discipline, they excoriated themselves for the liberalism and
sentimentality of their first protest , but they need not have been
so stern. In the morality of outrage and bearing witness, in the
30 LONG WAY FROM HOME
oaths of commitment, in the exuberance and excitement of
conviction that this was a new age, that the ancient, abusive and
ignominious order of illegitimate power was vulnerable,* in the
candid need for a community, a place to feel at home with the
first brothers and sisters of one's life, were some of the new
left's finest moments. They need not have been ashamed for
such passions.
"Actually," says a former SUPA activist, "we were a
prophetic minority trying to call into being a mass movement."
Until such time as the movement of the masses would roll over
the landscape, crushing inequity, malfeasance and despair, the
determination of a handful that life could be otherwise would be a
reminder: where there's smoke, there's fire. Next time.
*"There was a very real feeling that something was going to happen.
Any day. It felt as if one would be a fool to assume that nothing was
going to happen. Nobody would have considered taking a five-year
subscription to a magazine. It was pointless. You wouldn't get full
value, you wouldn't get all your issues. We all lived very marginally
because we expected society to change. We didn't save money or
think about our futures very much and when we did we felt badly about
it. Because it represented faintheartedness."
II
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS,
INVEST YOUR SON
This is the war story of a boy who grew up in Calgary, the
toughest guy in his high school. Not that he'd been born that
way. Time was he'd get his ass kicked by the bigger guys. Then
he put a punching bag in the basement of his parents' house,
went down there every night for two months, beating the hell
out of that bag, freaking out his mother, but building up his body
into a fighting machine . Proud of it he was, emerged proud and
without fear, cleaned up his tormentors, went to California and
two months later was a Screaming Eagle in the 101
st
 Airborne
in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He had enlisted. Then he
volunteered for Vietnam.
We had films and classes. They showed us a map of
Vietnam, said Americans were there to stop Communist
infiltration from the North and that the South had asked
for help. There was a treaty the U.S. had signed — they
were obliged to help. That's it.
Out of the 140 guys that went over [in 1966] two came
back. I'll tell you how we were wasted. Dak To, for
instance. We were coming down a ridge line and we ran
into what we thought was a point. Just three or four guys.
Our point ran into theirs. So we thought, okay, the thing to
do is flank ou t and hit them from the sides and take them.
We did that but the trouble was it was their point all right
but behind them was a battalion, 640 or more of those guys
and 140 of us. We locked horns. It was eight o'clock in the
morning and we fought until eleven o'clock that night. I
was a machine gunner and I melted three barrels on my
machine gun that day. Literally dripped off. Got another
barrel, screwed it on. I was crying, I couldn't even see who
I was shooting. I just kept saying, "I don't want to die, I
don't want to fucking die," and I'd start shooting again. I
was pissed off. "You bastards, you're not taking me." We
31
32 LONG WAY FROM HOME
were surrounded. You couldn't run. All you could do was
fight.
One of the things that always boosted our morale was
knowing that if you ever got hit, you were going to get the
hell out of there, the Angels of Mercy would come get you
and you could count on going home.*
I helped put the wounded on the choppers. One was a
friend of mine. We're throwing him into the chopper and
he says, "Where's my boots?" I says, "Shit, don't worry
about your boots, you're going home." He says, "I want
my boots. Goddamn it, Craig," he says, "give me my
fucking boots!" His legs had been blown off at the knees
and I couldn't see why he was worrying about his boots.
He says, "Goddamn it, my feet are still in them!" His feet
were still in his boots and that's what he cared about. A
hundred yards away, his useless, bloody feet.
I saw napalm used, gelatin gas. It was delivered by
aircraft and dropped in a bomb. They'd bomb the area and
it would spread out like a blanket. And everything it
landed on went up in flames. Sometimes they'd spray it
and it would adhere to everything. If it hit you your whole
body would be blanketed with this jelly and just like that go
up in flames.
We used white phosphorus, "whiskey papa," as a
marking device. It was packed into big bullets and
wherever they hit the ground they would burn, immensely
burn, and send up clouds of white smoke. That stuff was
deadly. Where it lands it consumes whatever is in its way.
If you got a piece on your leg, it would eat the bone out
without destroying the outside of the leg. But the bone will
just melt away.
At first, the way I looked at what I was doing was that I
was on a hunt. I did a lot of hunting when I was a kid and
now I was finally trackin g a prey that was worth something.
The only thing I really worried about was I didn't want to
die with my face in the mud. You can't imagine how
muddy it was sometimes. In the Mekong Delta, in the rice
*Angels of Mercy: medical evacuation helicopters.
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 33
paddies, you'd be walking up to your waist in water and the
mud would be past your knees. It was the river silt. It was
pretty hard fighting in stuff like that.
There was grass that grew eight feet tall. We called it
elephant grass. It grew wild in the meadows and the
clearings and was very sharp. If you grabbed at it, it would
cut your hand open. Ants were a real menace. They'd
make their nests over the jungle trails. So you'd be walking
through the jungle and all of a sudden, thirty, forty of these
things would drop down on your back. They called it the
three-minute strip. You had all this stuff on you, this
backpack and your pistol belt and your harness that you
held your backpack on with, and in three minutes you'd
have it all off because in no time they could take chunks of
meat right ou t of your body. That was the worst. Fire ants I
hated the worst. A lot of the guys couldn't stand leeches.
You got them when you waded through the rice paddies or
waded across the rivers. Guys would pass out before they
made it from one side to the other because they lost so
much blood, if you can believe that.
We went into a village once and it seemed that it was
deserted. But looking around we thought there's some-
thing wrong here. We looked a bit further and saw ants
gathered in patches on the ground and you wonder what
they're eating. You kind of know but you don't want to
know. You look a little bit more and it was blood patches,
dried blood, that the ants were eating. We thought, well,
something took place here. We could see that a scuffle had
taken place. It was maybe a village of thirty families,
maybe forty, it's hard to tell. Thirty hooches, they call
them, grass huts. We checked around some more. Finally
one guy went over to the well. You don't usually drink out
of the well because a lot of times they'll poison it before
they pull out. This guy was just going to wash his face. He
lowered the bucket and brought it up and it was red with
blood. He said, "Come here you guys, I think I'm on to
something." We took a hook, a meat hook almost, which
was sometimes used for dragging the dead off the battlefield.
You'd put a meat hook in their shoulder and then you
34 LONG WAY FROM HOME
could drag them a lot better to the chopper. So we put the
meat hook on the well rope and sent it down there and
pulled it up — part of a lady's body, arms cut off, legs cut
off, head cut off. Her tits were cut off. We just kept digging
around in the well and we pulled out half a dozen kids, half
a dozen women and then we just threw them all back in.
There were no men in that well. We guessed what had
happened.
When I first went over, keeping alive was the most
important thing. I didn't have any feelings one way or the
other about fighting. I'd kill somebody because I was
trained to kill. I don't know if you can understand that.
Keeping alive was the most important thing. But after a
couple of months I saw that my buddies were being
wasted, I saw what was happening in the villages, and I
started to hate. I hated the enemy. They were just like
dogs, and I'd just as soon kill one of them as look at him. I
killed and mutilated. I'd cut off their ears and wear them
around my neck along with my dog tags.
Then one night something happened. We came upon
three North Vietnamese sitting around a campfire getting
stoned. They smoke a lot, those Vietnamese. They were
sitting around a campfire and we killed all three of them
before they even knew what hit them. They were just
sitting there, these guys in the firelight, they're sitting
around laughing and talking and they were people all of a
sudden. They weren't just dogs anymore. That's when I
started thinking, shit, just what the hell am I doing?
The thing that made it worse still was the attitude of the
officers. Straight out of officer candidates' school. Really
gung-ho. They're going to get a bunch of medals and make
a lot of brownie points. You try to tell them, "Look, we're
here to do a job and stay alive too and we know some
things about that they don't teach you in school." But
you're just a grunt, a private, and they're officers, and they
don't go for it. One particular NCO, a sergeant, a coloured
guy, was a real asshole. He was really bad. Getting a lot of
guys killed is what he was doing. He was sending guys out
when there was no need to send guys out ahead. He'd tell
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 35
guys to move, when he knew that it was impossible, just to
create a movement, just to get the enemy going so that he
could see where they were at. He'd sacrifice guys' lives.
Everybody talked about it and said we've got to get rid of
him. So back in base camp, somebody wired a grenade to
the guy's bunk, underneath his bed. You know how a bunk
sags when you sit on it. The grenade was taped to one side
and a wire was tightened across it and taped to the other
side. The idea was when the sergeant sat down on the
bunk, this would pull the pin out of the grenade and that
would be it. The handle flies off and boom! Well, what
happened was the guy he was rooming with went to mail
call, picked up his mail from home, came back to the
hooch — we slept in "hooches" — which we weren't
expecting and instead of sitting down on his own bed sat on
the sergeant's bed to read his letter. It was sickening. We
wasted the wrong guy. There was an investigation but it
was thought he did himself in. A lot of soldiers shot
themselves so they could get sent home. Some even pulled
the plug on themselves because they couldn't handle it
anymore.
It got to the point where I didn't know what I was there
for or why. I saw what the "dollar" was doing to the South
Vietnamese — never mind what the Communists were
doing. We were messing up that country for a dollar.
One day I'm in the jungle, the next day I'm in San
Francisco. Out of the plane, onto the street. There was no
parade for us. Just a couple of shrinks in white coats
asking, "Did it bother you? Would you like to talk about
it?" No, I didn't want to talk about it. I agreed with the
anti-war demonstrators. All these kids saying they didn't
want to go. I was right behind them. "Right on. Don't go."
What had I accomplished in Vietnam? Not a goddamn
thing. All the guys that had died over there had died for
nothing.
Some vets joined the marches. Suddenly we weren't the
army anymore. We were "the people" and the police and
the National Guard were kicking us in the face. They had
billy clubs and were beating us up. One day we were
36 LONG WAY FROM HOME
marching with candles, we were singing, "Give peace a
chance," and they turned the firehoses on us — said we
were a fire hazard — and sent us flying ten feet down the
concrete.
There came a time I figured I had been fighting the
wrong war. I came back to Canada. It was that, or buy an
M-16 and hit up the police, one by one.
Not since Auschwitz had the word "genocide" resonated so
expressively in North America. A whole people were the target
of a total war as the American government and American army
boasted of "bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age." There
were no half measures in this. On the one side were industrial
and technological development, massively destructive weapons,
and a society permanently riven with the antagonistic need for
economic and ideological supremacy. On the other side was an
entire population mobilized to fight a "people's war"; a whole
society supported strategically and tactically the manoeuvres
of the guerrillas, for the struggle was for the life of the nation
itself. The only response possible to this militant unity of
Vietnamese men, women and children was the liquidation of
the people in toto. Genocide. "When a peasant falls in his rice
paddy," spoke Jean-Paul Sartre to the International War
Crimes Tribunal in 1967, "mowed down by a machine gun,
every one of us is hit. The Vietnamese fight fo r all men and the
American forces against all."
1
The very concrete possibility that a people could be utterly
devastated by the American war machine focussed the peace
activists' heretofore generalized horror of war on the specific
history of the Indochinese War. "War" now had a chronology,
a place of operations, statistics, and its victims had a name.
Canadian students began to familiarize themselves with Vietnam.
They were to learn by heart.
With the decisive defeat of the French by the Viet Minh
guerrillas at the garrison of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and with the
convening of a cease-fire conference in Geneva, it seemed that
the last of the colonialists had been driven from Vietnam and
the task of reuniting the northern and southern territories into a
nation could be undertaken. The most important of the Geneva
Agreements provided for the military withdrawal of the French
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 37
to the south of, and the Viet Minh to the north of, the seven-
teenth parallel, for elections to be held within two years
for a national government, and for the establishment of an
International Control Commission (made up of India, Poland
and Canada) that would supervise the implementation of the
agreements. It was widely assumed that because the Viet
Minh, at cease-fire, controlled half the country and more than
60 percent of the population, its representatives would win the
forthcoming election. The United States, it was to be noted, did
not sign the agreements.
That same year the provisional government of Ngo Dinh
Diem, with U.S. backing, was installed in Saigon. In 1955
Diem proclaimed a republic in South Vietnam. From this point
the great unravelling of peace began.
In 1956 Diem unilaterally renounced the Geneva provision
for elections and reunification. He issued an ordinance pro-
viding for "all persons considered dangerous to national
defence or collective security"
2
 to be interned in concentration
camps, and he set up kangaroo courts that summarily handed
out death sentences for every manner of opposition. Fatefully,
he replaced with his own appointees the elected local village
chiefs and village councils. And, although he expropriated over
a million acres of privately owned land, less than half was ever
redistributed among the peasants. The rest was held by the
government and sold to the highest bidder: 45 percent of the
land remained in the hands of 2 percent of the landowners.
Feared, hated, isolated from the 80 percent of the population
that lived in the villages, the Diem regime spawned its own
assassins.
In 1960 the South Vietnam Veterans of the Resistance
Association* and a group of Buddhist and Catholic leaders
called for resistance to the Diem regime. Guerrillas, chiefly ex-
Viet Minh cadres, more or less systematically kidnapped and
killed Diem's village officials. In December 1960 the National
Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam was proclaimed and
its military arm, the Viet Cong, organized. The Vietnamese
were at war again.
*Veterans of the anti-colonial wars against the French and Japanese.
38 LONG WAY FROM HOME
It was about 1963 that the war in Vietnam sank into the
consciousness of Canadian radicals. The escalation of U.S.
military personnel (16,800 "advisors" in 1963), the suicidal
protests of Buddhists {monks, for God's sake, setting themselves
aflame), the "pacification" of NLF-controlled areas by the
rounding up of peasants {farmers, imagine it, their pots and
pans on their backs, ducks waddling at their feet) into fenced-in
"strategic hamlets," guerrillas who struck without warning and
disappeared facelessly back into the jungle (and for every
thousand who were killed or captured, a thousand were
recruited), finally the assassination of the tyrant Diem: there
were instructions here in the nature of American power and the
system that buttressed it. At home, against the righteous
uprising of the blacks, squads of police and mobs of segrega-
tionists; in Vietnam, against the freedom-thirsty guerrillas and
peasants, the U.S. Army.
If at first this was merely disturbing to the Canadian
onlooker, it quickly became appalling. Between 1963 and
1968 civilian casualties approached 150,000 a year, American
troops had increased to 464,000 and their dead to 19,670. The
U.S. government was spending $4.2 billion and detonating
700,000 tons of explosives a month. And the only declaration
of war that Congress had made was to ratify the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution.*
"It changed my life." For the twenty-year-old, with liberal
fantasies of state-sponsored reform already dead in the dust of
Dallas and the Bomarc missile base, Vietnam was a radicalizing
rebirth. In magazine and newspaper articles, in television news
reports, in pamphlets and speeches, the grievous catalogue of
American infamy was a daily event. "Oh, my heart was
hardened." And, later, the mind enflamed when it was
understood that this was not so much America as imperialism
letting loose its dogs of war.
*The resolution was declared in 1964 when two U.S. destroyers,
ostensibly on intelligence patrol, were allegedly attacked without
provocation. The facts that they were inside North Vietnamese
territorial waters at the time and that the CIA had already made
clandestine attacks on the North only came out much later.
3
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 39
The war in Vietnam inspired fear, loathing and contempt.
The president of the United States, who once had said he would
not send "American boys" to do the dirty work of "Asian
boys," now proclaimed his people would not be defeated,
would not tire, would not withdraw. Against a Viet Cong
commissar, who had come out of the peasantry, spoke their
dialect and confronted their exploiters, the government of
Saigon sent officers trained by the French, who spoke French,
who during the first Indochines e war of liberation had stood on
their aristocratic balconies watching the Viet Minh take on the
French army. Small wonder the troops of the ARVN (Army of
the Republic of South Vietnam) deserted (in 1965,93,000 out
of 600,000), refused commands and to the consternation of
their American "advisors" left great gaping loopholes in battle
through which the Viet Cong made their escape. Later, of
course, at the press conferences, the American officers would
claim "a great victory." "We have them in a trap and we're
about to spring it," they said, while the Viet Cong were long
gone and the ARVN were killing their own men by blind
shelling.
4
Inside the wire fence, the "pacified" village. Immediately
outside its perimeters, a battalion of Viet Cong, cutting roads,
ambushing convoys, overrunning outposts. In 1967, in national
elections in South Vietnam, the government won an abysmal
one-third of the vote, this in spite of having jailed or otherwise
disbarred its opponents. Graft and bribery were widespread:
the going rate for appointment to the police force was $250 and
for an import-export license, 8c for every dollar of imports.
5
 By
1964, 74 percent of South Vietnamese districts were delinquent
in delivering their taxes to Saigon:
6
 either they were not being
collected, period, or they were disappearing into the maw of
officials on the take.
The troops were not home by Christmas 1965, as every
American had believed in that first optimistic glow, thinking
Vietnam was a skirmish, easily and tidily wrapped up, the sort
of thing the American army was good at, nor by Christmas
1966 — no, not for a decade of Christmases. Simply, the
Vietnamese were indomitable. If the B-52 bombing raids did
not wipe them out, then surely the napalm would, and then the
40 LONG WAY FROM HOME
flamethrower tanks, and the machine guns and grenades, and if
the Viet Cong still survived, hiding perhaps in their underground
burrows in the jungle, or just melting away into that thick and
dark foliage, why then the army would simply bring in
bulldozers and plow the whole thing down, scrape the earth
clean of its jungle, and the VC would just have to find another
hiding place. Which they did.
For the American soldier it quickly became a question of not
going raving mad — forget the heroics — in this jungle war; of
hanging on to even a shred of morale when it was clear the VC
knew the territory and you did not, the VC planted the mines
and you stepped on them, the VC picked the ambush and you
walked into it.
You had to find your way of coping. There were those who
mentally resigned from the army and signed up for their own
war where you look after "your own ass first, then your buddy
and fuck the mission,"
7
 or who, blood-crazy and pressed
against their breaking point, would not stop killing until the
body count equalled the population count Some learned how to
"detach" themselves emotionally, to find a cool place in
themselves from which they gave themselves orders and into
which no grief or rage could enter. Some joined the anti-war
movement in sympathy, wearing the black armbands of
solidarity while on patrol or declaring their own private cease-
fire with the enemy or signing a petition as did sixty-five men of
Bravo Company, First Battalion, Twelfth Cavalry, First
Cavalry Division, declaring they would not go out on suicidal
night ambushes, orders or no orders.
8
You had to cope too with being wounded, with that
conviction that no wound was worse than yours, not even that
"slab of meat" in the next bed, its arms and legs blown off by a
booby trap, wildly thrashing its bleeding stumps and shrieking
for help.
9
 One way out of here was in the rubber bag to Saigon
and, finally, home. "Be the first in your block," sang Country
Joe, "to bring your boy home in a box."
But at home it was the pictures. On the quad, in the lobby, some
group or other had a table, a booth, and there, fluttering in the
breeze of passersby, were the colour photographs of war. The
dead soldiers in long-shot, monstrously littering the plains of
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 41
battle, devastated landscapes, the close-ups of GI's eyes, even
in the shadow of their helmets drilling you with their terror —
these images, as dreadful as they were, one had seen before
from other wars. It was the children of Vietnam who blasted the
parameters of sympathy.
They are skinny and barely clothed. They stand behind
barbed wire, holding their baby brothers and sisters. They are
orphans, asleep in the squalor of a camp. Their slender, perfect
limbs have been shattered and blown off, their flesh gouged
with shrapnel, their faces pitted, torn at, burned away, infested.
In the hospitals, on muddy mats, they lie in their own blood, a
hole as big as a fist in the back, a broken bottle shoved up the
vagina, the hand melting away from the burning phosphorus,
and die, their malnourished bodies incapable of resistance.
They are weeping, they are staring into space, they are,
unaccountably, even trying to smile.
Through to the mid-Sixties, the war in Vietnam was understood
to be an American event, indeed, a quintessentially American
event, the representation in bloody 3-D of the American
character and American way-of-life. Vietnam was the Western
movie writ large, the last frontier extended one more kilometer,
production and consumerism played out in the most insatiable
market of them all: war. Canadians clucked their tongues and
shook their heads and wished Americans could be more
reasonable in their politics, perhaps take a lesson or two from
the Canadians, but, in the end, it was their problem.
Peace activists knew better. Analysing the root causes of war
and researching the institutional basis of poverty, exploitation
and social unrest, first as ban-the-bombers and then as
community organizers, they had already understood how
deeply implicated the Canadian state was in militarism and
the war industries. Their reading had turned up a twenty-year-
old record of Canadian-American collaboration in defence
systems, from the Joint Board of Defence in 1947 to expenditures
on the Pinetree and Dewline radar systems, the relinquishing of
an independent foreign policy in favour of the "block politics"
of NATO, the setting up of an integrated North American Air
Defence system (NORAD) in the Fifties and the signing of the
42 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Defence Sharing Agreement of 1959. This latter agreement
was to figure sharply in the debates about the war in Vietnam
for it provided for equal defence expenditures by each country
in the other and for the dropping of "Buy American" require-
ments for American contractors. "For all purposes Canadian
industry would be regarded as an extension of American, the
logical accompaniment of a foreign policy which was but an
extension of the American. The Department of Defence
Production could set to work drumming up competitive bids by
Canadian business, using the Canadian Commercial Corporation,
a crown corporation dating back to 1946, as the go-between
between the Pentagon and Canadian contributors."
10
There's no business like war and the Canadian contractors
cleaned up. The figures started to come out in 1966. Canadian
Industries: exported to the U.S. small arms, rocket and cannon
propellants, plastics and other explosives; Cyanamid Canada:
artillery propellants for the U.S.; Dorothea Knitting Mills:
green berets for the Special Forces in Vietnam; de Havilland
Aircraft of Canada: the U.S. Army Caribou and Buffalo
aircraft.
11
 In 1967 Litton Systems (Canada) was awarded a
six-million-dollar contract for weapons equipment for the F4
fighter aircraft, used extensively in Vietnam; Valcartier Industries,
a three-million-dollar contract for ammunition; Canadian
Acme Screw and Gear, a three-million-dollar contract for
parts for 4.2-inch shells.
12
 Our Generation reported that by
1966 U.S. defence expenditure in Canada amounted to $317
million, up from a paltry $25 million in 1964, contracted out to
over six hundred Canadian (and Canadian subsidiary) com-
panies.
13
The "dirty little war" was ours too. We supplied it and we
propped it up at home. In 1965 Prime Minister Pearson, in a
speech at Temple University in Philadelphia, reassured his
audience that "the government and great majority of the people
of my country have supported whole-heartedly U.S. peace-
keeping and peace-making policies in Vietnam,"
14
 whatever
those might be. In 1966 he agreed with the American position
that Hanoi had been "unresponsive" to the idea of negotiations,
dismissing the fact that the U.S. refused to negotiate with the
NLF.
15
 In 1967 Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau was con-
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 43
vinced that "the imposition of an embargo on the export of
military equipment to the U.S. [as had advised a group of
University of Toronto professors]... would have far-reaching
consequences that no Canadian government would contemplate
with equanimity."
16
 As indeed they did not.
Student newspapers uncovered the relationship between the
Defence Research Board (an agency of the Department of
National Defence) and the universities. Research funds from
the DRB were channelled, in 1967, through 385 projects in
forty universities across Canada. Among these projects was
one to "investigate the influence of genetic change on the
stability of airborne microbes," a problem in the functioning of
biological weaponry, and another developed a more effective
and powerful nerve gas than CS, which was already being used
by the ton in Vietnam.
17
But it was the revelations concerning the part Canada played
on the International Control Commission that confirmed our
government's duplicitous posture vis-a-vis the people of Vietnam.
(Incredibly, in the midst of the military mayhem, the ICC was
still charged with its function of supervising the implementation
of the Geneva Agreements.) The Montreal Star charged the
ICC's Canadian officers with "acting as informants for U.S.
intelligence agencies," and the CBC claimed that an officer had
passed along to the Americans valuable photographs of a
bombing raid on the oil storage dumps near Hanoi.
18
 In 1965
Hugh Campbell, who served on the ICC from 1961-63,
admitted in a political science forum at the University of
Victoria that he had received orders from his political superiors
to "ignore" the delivery of aircraft and other war material to
Saigon from the U.S., a flagrant violation of the Geneva
Agreements.
19
In 1964, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk visited Ottawa.
Ottawa agreed that its ICC delegate, Blair Seaborn, should
"plan to spend much more time in Hanoi than have his
predecessors," and in due course Seaborn went to Hanoi,
bearing instructions from the Americans that an intransigent
North Vietnam could expect only destruction. "At that point
Seaborn had ceased to be a dispassionate intermediary... and
had become a virtual spokeman for the American policy."
20
 It
44 LONG WAY FROM HOME
was as much as Hanoi expected. "The Vietnamese people
know that the Canadian government has always supported and
tolerated the intensification of the armed aggression of the
United States."
21
O Canada. How was one to live within her? Like the young
man in the David Lewis Stein story, lying on his bed and
covering his face with a blanket, we tried at first to keep the
"little brown men" of Vietnam at bay by pleading that there
was nothing we could do for them, absolutely nothing.
22
 Yet,
like the narrator of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies, we knew that
"yank and gook and hogtown" were "linked in guilty genesis,"
we knew — it was in the newspapers — that we were fashioning
"other men's napalm," we were "burning kids by proxy," we
were abominable.
23
 Like the American refugee worker in Ian
Adams's article from Vietnam, the "good guy" in a tea shop
watching a shuffling, horrid parade of mutilated women,
children and old men outside the window, we also were
surrounded by the silence of staring, accusing Vietnamese.
24
There were two solutions. One was to attempt to exculpate
the nation through personally assumed guilt, to breast-beat and
pay penance in the coin of depression, self-disgust and
nightmare. The other was to accept responsibility and fashion
that into the tool of consciousness, analysis and resistance with
the thousands of others who would just as soon hit the streets as
sit in front of the television, weeping.
In 1965 seventy thousand people marched in Washington in an
SDS rally against the war. Later, twelve thousand people
participated in a Berkeley teach-in organized by the Vietnam
Day Committee, and in front of the Pentagon, three Quaker
pacifists burned themselves to death in symbolic solidarity
with the immolated Vietnamese.
In 1966 three soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, refused orders to
ship out to Vietnam. SNCC denounced the war and gave
encouragement to those who would resist the draft. Students
began sit-ins at local draft boards, and the first conviction for
draft-card burning was secured.
In 1967 the Spring Mobilization Against the War culminated
in a 200,000-strong march in New York, a vigil at the Pentagon
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 45
ended in violence, tear gas and arrests. Men and women
stormed Selective Service offices, destroying records, refused
to pay income tax and attacked politicians with balloons filled
with blood and urine.
In 1968 Chicago police and National Guardsmen brutalized
thousands in demonstrations organized by the National Mobili-
zation Committee to End the War. Draft deferments for
university graduate students were abolished. And veterans of
the war in Vietnam held a peace march in San Francisco.
From the beginning, the concern of the Canadian anti-war
movement was to make the connection between Canadian
citizenship and the suffering of victims of war. In this global
village of a world, no one was non-partisan, no one could climb
down off the hook. As the delegates of the Voice of Women said
to the leaders of the Canadian political parties:
The Canadian government and people must accept the full
implications of their claim to be a peace-making nation —
an independent nation — and express openly their disap-
proval of the United States' actions in Vietnam... which
are causing unimaginable suffering as well as violating the
principles of the United Nations and the right of all
peoples to self-determination.
25
It was in this spirit that SUPA organized a protest vigil at the
University of Toronto in the late spring of 1965, a silent ring of
students and professors, staring sternly at Adlai Stevenson on
his way to Convocation Hall to pick up an honorary degree.
(Adlai Stevenson! erstwhile liberal, U.S. spokesman at the
UN, apologist for the Bay of Pigs and for bombs over Hanoi!)
Rather more aggressively, it was again SUPA that set up on
campuses the tables layered with pamphlets and photographs
documenting Vietnam (let no student later say s/he "didn't
know" about the war) and ignored, in an act of "civil
disobedience," the ban at the University of Alberta on
"political booths."
26
 In November SUPA arranged bus
transportation down to Washington ("As citizens of the vast
American economic and cultural Empire... we must travel to
the heart of that Empire and we must protest")
27
 for peace
46 LONG WAY FROM HOME
activists wishing to join the multitudes organized by SDS and
the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In
Toronto, in Ottawa and in Regina, on Remembrance Day,
SUPA members "vigilled" at the cenotaphs. Again that silent,
accusing posture before the dead, for the benefit of the living.
But these events, as symbolically important as they were,
were feeble in comparison with the coup that was the Interna-
tional Teach-in at the University of Toronto in October 1965.
Backed by the university administration (indeed, President
Claude Bissell was honorary chairman), faculty and student
council, the guts of the thing were the organizing committee of
professors and students who first met in June. (Among them
were SUPA activists.) And while it was the consensus of the
committee that a teach-in "might make possible a confrontation
between speakers who would not meet together under any other
auspices,"
28
 it was also the hope and ambition of SUPA that it
would be the place where the peace movement and the
university would coalesce. For the teach-in was to be called
"Revolution and Response," and in 1965 that meant only one
thing to the peace activists: Vietnamese social revolution and
American military response.
It was a phenomenon, this teach-in. Held at the university ice
rink, it drew 4,000 students, 120 journalists and, by radio
hook-up, an additional one million listeners; it went on for three
days with seventeen speakers and cost $35,000.
29
 It was the
intention of the liberal members of the organizing committee
that a teach-in be a debate, a presentation of conflicting
"philosophies and policies," a means to "focus concern,
expand understanding and stimulate constructive, realistic
thought and action,"
30
 — not, perforce, a demonstration or
rally. And so it was that the students listened to both Robert
Scalapino, chairman of the Department of Political Science at
Berkeley, and Phuong Margain, secretary general of the
cabinet of Cambodia. Thus:
Scalapino: There can be no question that large-scale
guerrilla activities in the South were started on a signal
from the North, and in accordance with a revolutionary
strategy that stems from Chinese communist teachings
and has been attempted in many areas of Asia.
31
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 47
Margain: Whatever this participation of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam in the war effort of the NLF be, it is
far from attaining the gigantic dimensions of the American
military investment in South Vietnam. It is this investment
which constitutes the only true foreign intervention.
32
Heady stuff for a student mass up to then educated on the
subject by Time magazine and press releases from the Depart-
ment of External Affairs. And indeed there were SUPA
members who were pleased, even elated, by the educational
achievement of the teach-in.
It was international news. It was a huge political event at
the university. People came with banners, they came with
literature and slogans, classes were cancelled. I mean it
was huge. Sure, the organizers brought in some big Yanks
but they also brought George Grant, the Red Tory, who
talked about nationalism and technological empires and
multiversities and dehumanization and manipulation by
the social sciences. This was the first time those issues
were brought back home; we returned to our roots there.
Isn't that interesting? Vietnam forced us back to ourselves
and opened us up to the ordinary people at the university
who were being politicized for the first time . This was their
point of conversion, this was the moment they came into
the left.
But, according to other student critics, the teach-in had also
made serious errors. When the aforementioned Scalapino
refused to appear on the same platform with Michael Myerson,
a Berkeley graduate student who had recently visited Hanoi
and was to speak for its policy, the organizing committee
dropped Myerson. (Angry students created disturbances during
Scalapino's speech as a result.) Similarly the committee made
no effort to protest or even publicly discuss the fact that the
Canadian government would not issue visas to representatives
of the NLF unless the committee also invited representatives of
the Saigon government. (In the end the NLF did not participate.)
Hard on the heels of the teach-in and inspired and instructed
by it, SUPA pressed the issue of Canadian responsibility
towards and complicity in the Vietnam war. That winter of
48 LONG WAY FROM HOME
1965-66, following the membership conference in Saskatoon,
SUPA proposed an Ottawa/Vietnam Action for the spring.
Originally envisioned in very grand terms — busloads, train-
loads of Canadians, Americans, even Mexicans — this action
ultimately consisted of an "open letter" to the House of
Commons, a two-day teach-in at the University of Ottawa, and
civil disobedience on Parliament Hill.
The fruits of the preceding several months of discussion
between SUPA and the Red Tory nationalist, Professor
George Grant, were delivered during these days of the Vietnam
action. In their open letter, SUPA not only enumerated the
data of complicity (armament sales, performance on the ICC,
et cetera) but situated them historically in the colonial relations
between Canada and the United States, arguing that in the
"basic structure and fabric of Canadian society," in economic
dependency, in the enlistment into the priorities of another
nation, in fear of reprisal, we are condemned "to complicity in
this cruel war."
33
As for the civil disobedience, there was an anguished debate
about how it should be done. (People sit in on the roadway to
the Houses of Parliament to block traffic; the RCMP drags their
limp bodies six, seven times off the road; an officer, in
exasperation, yells, "Arrest them," and so they arrest sixty-
one of them, dragging their limp bodies to a paddy wagon.)
34
On the one hand were the so-called "politicos" in favour of a
well-planned and well-disciplined action, and on the other the
"personalists" more interested in an action that would develop
as it went along.
35
 In the end it seemed to be a bit of both. One
enthusiastic participant felt that the action had demonstrated
that "SUPA is one of the very few organizations whose
members possess the level of analysis and degree of commit-
ment" necessary to spearhead a "mass all-inclusive citizens'
movement" against the war,
36
* Our Generation announced that
the trial of the sixty-one arrestees (they had all pleaded not
*More immediately, the aim of the sit-in had been to persuade the
House to debate "the Vietnam issue." The only response they got was
a donation of coffee from Tommy Douglas.
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 49
guilty to charges of obstruction) "will be an important political
trial in the history of this country."
37
*
Anti-Vietnam war actions erupted across the country in the
next two years, 1966-68, as often as not initiated by university
students with sometimes only a casual affiliation with SUPA.
At the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Internation-
alists, a hodge-podge of new and old leftists who had been
meeting together since 1961, often were the instigators of the
marches into downtown Vancouver that brought all kinds of
anti-war elements together, from members of the Communist
party to members of the Unitarian church, to make speeches,
do some singing and get shoved around.
In Winnipeg, Young Socialists (Trotskyist) were active and
effective in the Vietnam Mobilization Committee: they organized
marches and burned the American flag.
In Montreal, in 1967, eighteen hundred students were
demonstrating in front of the U.S. consulate when they were
forcibly broken up by mounted police; forty-eight were arrested
and charged with unlawful assembly.
In Calgary, twice a year, once in the spring, once in the
fall, we took to the streets and had a very pleasant march
downtown. The authorities invariably obliged by calling
out mounted forces. But no one was hurt. It was great fun,
actually. It was always against the war in Vietnam that we
marched. For one thing, we could get more people out for
that than anything else. It was all very well for us students
to sit around living rooms and talk forever about American
penetration of Canada's oil industry, blah, blah, blah. But
you couldn't organize a march around that. We made the
connection anyway. We were reading [Harry] Magdoff**
and knew that what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam was
practising imperialism.
Toronto, 1968. Pickets demonstrated at the offices of
*A majority were found guilty and took a short jail sentence.
**Well-known Marxist economist associated with Monthly Review
journal.
50 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Hawker-Siddeley and of Litton Industries. The Ontario October
21 Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam called a mass rally
at Queen's Park. "Speak up if you value your life. Silence is
approval." In 1969 the Welcoming Committee for the NLF
sponsored a meeting in Massey Hall where they hosted two
NLF representatives. "It is not only by your blows against the
enemy," the Vietnamese visitors had said earlier in Montreal,
"but by your heartbeat that we will win."
And in the heart of the Canadian student, the will that the
Vietnamese should win was strengthened and renewed again
and again by the Dow Chemical issue. Dow Chemical of
Canada supplied polystyrene to the napalm plants of California,
and once you had seen that photograph of the Vietnamese
youth, victim of napalm, his chest a mass of open flesh, his
mouth and chin melting down grotesquely into his neck, his
eyes and nose black craters — and yet he was still alive — you
had no choice but to interfere with Dow Chemical and all its
works.
Between 1963 and 1968 the U.S. air force dumped more
than 100,000 tons of napalm on Vietnam. In 1966, the year the
tonnage jumped from 17,659 to 54,620, a new, hotter com-
pound, Napalm B, had been developed. It burned at 2060°
Fahrenheit, was impossible to scrape off and could melt hands.
The Save Lives in Vietnam Committee in Toronto and Voice
of Women nationally mounted a campaign to boycott Dow
Chemical products: Saran Wrap and Handi-Wrap. At the
University of Toronto in November 1967, the student paper
Varsity publicized the Vietnam-related activities of companies
including Dow Chemical, that recruited students into profes-
sions, and in response students sat in on the porch of the old
house on campus that was used as the job-recruitment centre.
The man from Dow was inside, barricaded, and there he stayed
for several hours while the students talked and heard speeches.
That same week students at the University of Waterloo
leafleted their recruitment centre, UBC students blocked the
doorway of their centre and in Winnipeg, they were outrageous.
It was the only demonstration at a Canadian university
that actually forced Dow off the campus — opposed to
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 51
having a sit-in and getting nowhere. Here we used our
brains and we pulled off a number. We had seventeen
people at the demonstration initially, which is not a hell of
a lot. Dow was using the Canada Manpower Centre at the
university; so we went by to case the joint and we noticed
these two outward handles on the door. I said, "What
would happen if we wrapped a chain around them and
locked the fuckers in?" So we went out and we bought a
two-inch chain, the heaviest chain we could get, and a big
padlock. I went inside and said, "Hi, I'm from the
demonstration and I want to talk to the guy from Dow."
They said, "He doesn't want to talk to you." "Look, if you
let me talk to him, we'll be gone in five minutes." So they
let me talk to him. The guy was just perfect. He was like a
cartoon character of what an imperialist warmonger
should look like. A big, tall guy with an eye patch and a
straight-out chin and high cheekbones. He looked like a
member of the SS. We couldn't have asked for a better
character. So I did the very liberal routine. I said, "Listen,
there's seventeen people out there, all we want to do is
read you a statement and then we're going to go away. So
why don't you step outside?" So he steps outside and we
read him our statement: "You fucking imperialist war-
monger, you get the fuck out of our campus! That's our
statement." The guy was shocked. I had set him up. He
stood there for a minute, you could see the blood draining
from his face, it was great. He turned around and walked
back inside. Out came the chain and the padlock, "click"
on the doors and the shit hit the fan. It was marvellous.
First of all, the Commerce and the Engineering students
came down to fight with us. We had fist fights. Really
heavy duty fist fights right in the hallway. Hundreds of
people came to support us and hundreds of people came to
oppose us. So that the whole foyer of this building was like
one gigantic cacophony. Arguments and fights. People
getting into shouting matches and punching each other
out. The administration chickened out and ordered Dow
off campus. That night we had a debate with about three
thousand people in the student building. An active debate
52 LONG WAY FROM HOME
which we won. Our opponents tried to make the argument:
Do you have the right to interfere with our personal lives if
we want to go to work for Dow? We smashed them in the
debate.
By 1968 Canadians were marching in front of the U.S.
consulate in Toronto, bearing the flag of North Vietnam and
shouting, "Victory to the NLF!" They had come a long way
from guilt.
Where had this nerve, this courage and commitment in the
Canadian middle-class students of the anti-war brigades come
from? And why this passion in defence of the Vietnamese (a
race and culture of strangers) and in horror of the Americans (a
nation of cousins) in those whose emotional and political
geography heretofore had mapped out only the names and
places of cozy home and family?
The answers are first of all in the Vietnamese and the
Americans themselves. As the anti-war movement, interna-
tionally, spawned literature and spokespersons and disseminated
the point of view of the Vietnamese, Canadian protesters were
able to make that very important intellectual and emotional
shift out from under the prevailing ideological perspectives of
their society to see the war from the point of view of the
Vietnamese. And so they understood that, for the NLF and for
the North Vietnamese, Communist ideology, of all ideologies,
was anti-imperialist and committed to the liberation of oppressed
colonialized peoples; and that, armed with it, these people were
simply carrying on, by an intensified means, an ancient
struggle.
Even if we are to carry out the struggle for ten, twenty
years or longer, and have to suffer greater difficulties and
hardships, we are prepared and resolved to fight an d fight
to the end until not a single U.S. soldier is seen in our
country The people and liberation armed forces of South
Vietnam have written a golden page in the glorious history
of their people.
38
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON 53
From the program of the NLF the Canadian radicals learned
that in contrast to the Diems and General Kys of the Saigon
government, the liberation front was committed to a "national
democratic coalition government," to a thorough land redistri-
bution, to a foreign policy of neutrality, to the reunification of
the nation. From observers who travelled in Vietnam, they
became aware that the resistance of the Vietnamese was
profoundly self-motivated. It was the South Vietnamese them-
selves, not the Northerners or the Chinese or the Russians, who
first took up the arms of revolution against the hated Diem
administration. It was the 230,000-strong Viet Cong (compared
with 50,000 North Vietnamese regulars in the South) who
suffered 100,000 dead and 182,000 wounded by 1967.
39
 It
was with the sustained American bombing of the North that the
war in the two halves of Vietnam became a single war. From
the French journalist Bernard Fall's sequence of books, they
became convinced that the NLF, contrary to American claims,
was an indigenous force, which could not be "simply blasted off
the surface to the earth with B-52 saturation raids, or told to
pack up and go into exile in North Vietnam."
40
 From Pham
Van Dong, the prime minister of North Vietnam, who was
interviewed in Hanoi by the American anti-war activists
Herbert Aptheker, Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden, they
heard:
There is no hatred between our peoples — we have no ill
will toward American people— Please, if you should see
President Johnson, ask him why is he bombing my
country? Let him explain exactly how the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam is threatening the United States of
America?
41
Confronting a people such as these — resolute, heroic,
popular freedom fighters — were the Americans, the bureau-
cracy, the military, the multinational corporations, who repre-
sented violence, aggrandizement and falsehood, for whom
"peace" meant the "elimination of nationalist and socialist
threats to the established order" and "freedom" meant the
"maintenance of 'liberal' governments offering no opposition
to the large-scale investment of American capital. . . . "
42
54 LONG WAY FROM HOME
America, profit-obsessed, war-hungry, hate-ridden, draining
its blood into the machines of death, "screaming ceilings of
Soap Opera/thick dead Lifes, slick Advertisements/for
Gubernatorial big guns/burping Napalm on palm rice tropic
greenery."
43
 America. There was no choice. "The rising cry for
justice would pierce Heaven itself."
44
From the American anti-war movement we began to
discover things about our own community and actions we
could take right here. Like the Safeway store. All my life
this was a place at the end of the street where I bought
Coke and doughnuts and now suddenly it wasn't just
Safeway anymore but Tenneco Industries and Tenneco
was an investor in Southeast Asia. It was a moment of
being confronted with the untruths of our dreamy lives.
The war in Vietnam was a series of moments where you
either turned your back on the truth or you went with it and
doing that you could never go back to where you had been.
To the protests of the American movement, Canadians added
their own, demanding the accountability of our own institutions,
denouncing the duplicity of our own politicians, exposing the
Achilles heel of our economic subordination. Ourselves as
deputy war-traders.
The war in Vietnam "discredited the ideology of the status
quo, the complacent tone of affluent capitalism. The conven-
tional wisdom is no longer trusted; it has brought too much evil
into the world, and Vietnam is its great abomination."
45
 The
war. Against the American capitalist monolith, the Communist
cell organization and the guerrilla in sandals. The war.
Suddenly we were vulnerable to Asian peasants who told us we
had had our hour in history and now was the time of the little
brown people who would seize from us the time.
"The people of Vietnam changed my life."
Ill
HELL NO, WE WON'T GO
Q. Well, suppose we close with what seems to be
the important question. The man in the United
States who is drafted and is unwilling to serve —
what are his alternatives?
A. The alternatives for a person who conscientiously
opposes the war in Vietnam are few. If, as with most
people, he is unable to obtain the status of a
conscientious objector, then he is faced with making
one of the following choices. He can either violate
his own conscience and go to Vietnam, committing
in his own mind immoral and despicable acts of
murder; or else he is faced with the alternatives of
refusing to fight and being sentenced to about five
years in prison, as is now the common procedure.
What we wish is to provide Americans with a third
legal alternative, and that is the possibility of immi-
grating to Canada. But it should not be considered
that this is necessarily an easy alternative, and I think
Canadians should think back to their own parents
and grandparents. We live in a nation which was
founded and developed primarily by immigrants,
and we should be able to realize that immigration —
leaving one's family, friends, familiar surroundings and
the security of a home — is a difficult choice It is
not to be undertaken lightly, and in this regard it is a
complete misconception to use the term "draft-
dodger." .. . My contact with the persons who have
come to Canada convinces me that this is an
extremely difficult choice and that it is being taken
on the basis of a profound conviction of the
immorality of the war in Vietnam and a dedication to
one's own moral scruples.
1
— Morton Brown (from the interview
"Vietnam, Professors and Draftdodgers,"
published in Student Advocate,
Simon Fraser University)
55
56 LONG WAY FROM HOME
For all the pain and outrage that the war in Vietnam inspired in
Canadians, there was one horror we did not have to face: a boy
we knew going to war, a boyfriend, a lover, a member of the
family become killer, a boy we knew dying. We did not have
dead to bury.
What we did have were young Americans arriving among us
to stay alive. This we could do: open up social space for
refugees, people who had quit their country and now, homeless,
needed some new place in which to begin again the labour of
citizenship.
Who, after hearing their stories, would not let them in? These
were tales of desperados, men living underground, identities
discarded at the first whiff of the police closing in, men
brutalizing their bodies — starving themselves, chopping off
their own fingers or dropping rocks on their toes, contracting
diseases — and men choosing the stockade before they'd
choose boot camp. Men and women of the anti-war movement,
to whom it had become clear that America was going to kill
them. . . .
It was October 1966, and I was at a demonstration at the
Oakland army induction centre. We were there to stop
that induction process for a day. It was melodramatic. It
was scary. It was still dark when we moved over to
Oakland. Thousands and thousands of us, you could
hardly move, sitting down and singing in the dark. Cops
were arriving by the busload, the tactical squads from all
eleven towns in the Bay Area and the California State
Highway Patrol and the total Oakland police force and
Berkeley police force. Then when dawn came, I'll never
forget it, there we were, sitting on the ground, waiting for
the sun to light us up as targets.
The cops were walking from one end of the street to the
other, wave after wave of them, they had batons — it was
the first time I'd ever seen a three-foot lead-weighted stick.
It was clear they wanted to break people's heads. It sounds
like a watermelon sounds when it hits the pavement when
those things take people's skulls and crack them. It just
goes thwok. Rose and fell and rose and fell, sounding like a
HELL NO, WE WON'T CO 57
watermelon somebody dropped, fell again. You'd see
them hit somebody's head and it would be like ripples
going away like the lines on a map and then the blood
would start to come up four inches from where the stick
had landed on their head. People couldn't leave because
they couldn't see because they had both hands over their
face. I found myself standing on top of a car screaming
"Sieg heil!" at the cops.
Riots, tear gas from helicopters, Black Panthers busted, shot
up and busted again, the Fourth of July and more riots,
National Guardsmen on your block, streets cordoned off with
rolls of barbed wire, bayonets. There must be some way out of
here.
Men and women in the Peace Corps, realizing "we were
instruments of American foreign policy," were humiliated and
ashamed by that realization. Stricken by the contradiction
between official history and what they witnessed in the Third
World of the effects of the intrusion of American dollars,
military personnel and the CIA, they too stopped wanting to be
American.
There were as many women war-resisters among the
immigrants as men. Sometimes they left by themselves, having
come to the end of their own rope, their own moment of nausea
when not a single more American event could be tolerated, and
sometimes they left with refugee mates. In either case, each
woman had to sit down in self-examination, review her needs
and her motivations, assess her relationships, analyse her
politics and determine her own reasons for staying or leaving.
What a choice. To stay in America and fight, i n demonstrations,
marches and rallies, and to pay the penalty of loneliness and
getting hurt, or to leave with the loved one, give and receive
support and consolation, and pay the penalty of irrelevance to
the struggle.
War-resisters came to Canada because it was English-speaking,
because they didn't need a passport, because they had visited it
as children on holidays to Montreal or to the mountains, and
had found it pleasing. They came to Canada because they
58 LONG WAY FROM HOME
believed they would not be hassled here: Canada was so
"liberal," what with its friendlier relations with Cuba and
China, its peace-keeping role in the United Nations and Suez,
its "British" sense of fair play. They came blind, on buses with
a few hundred dollars in their pockets, a bus to anywhere, a bus
to get across the border; they came well-rehearsed, in Volks-
wagons stuffed with clothes and books and a job already lined
up; they came by plane, "just to have a look around."
They left with their parents' disappointment and chagrin
still ringing in their ears (" 'Don't make waves,' they told me,
'go into the army, it's the right thing to do, you'll be an officer,
they'll keep you in an office with a typewriter, a boy like you' ")
and the knowledge that they would never be coming back. This
emigration was irreversible.
As soon as I crossed the border, I was considered to have
evaded the draft. That's a five-year felony . I'd crossed an
international border to avoid prosecution, that's another
five years. I'd left the country without permission of my
draft board, that's a third offence. I'd failed to notify my
board of my change of address — fourth offence. I
wouldn't be going home for a visit.
They had done the unimaginable: "Americans do not really
see the rest of the world as habitable." All those years and years
of earning their "Americanship," the books and papers they
sweated over, the examinations on history, government, the
constitution and the Supreme Court — years of this — the
patriotic speeches and songs, flags an d oaths, learning to be this
precious thing — an American — and now they were telling
their family, their friends, their community, "I'm leaving."
They called themselves anti-imperialists, critics of American
culture, pacifists and, as such, the only authentic repository of
American ideals: all those who would consent to fight th e war
had corrupted the content of democracy and freedom and
betrayed the revolutionary inheritance. In Canada the war-
resisters would find fo r their American idealism a second lease
on life.
Officially, the Canadian government regarded the draft-
resisters as immigrants like any others (offences against the
HELL NO, WE WON'T CO 59
American Selective Service laws were not extraditable offences).
In this one respect at least, in its refusal to treat draftable
American males as criminals, the government of Canada could
be seen to pursue a policy independent of Washington's
interests. On the other hand, because no special case was ever
made of any of the American draft-resisters, the government
could not be accused of sheltering "undesirables" and "law-
breakers." Prime Minister Pearson: "I am sure . . . each
individual application [for landed immigrant status] has to be
considered on its own merits and all the factors... will have to
be taken into consideration."
2
It was this ambiguity in policy that provided the loophole
through which the middle-class, educated American immigrant
entered Canada and, once here, established him/herself in a
manner to which s/he was accustomed. A job in a bookstore, a
teaching position, acceptance into a graduate program, place-
ment at a social work agency. Some, desperate for immediate
security and funds, vulnerable to exploitation, took jobs at
minimum wages from employers who "specialized" in immi-
grant labour. But not for long. These Americans, too, quickly
settled into mainstream Canadian life, not ostentatiously by
any means, but comfortably, with a widening circle of friends, a
growing library of Canadian magazines and books, and a
blossoming sense of commitment to their new community:
starting up a photography workshop, joining with neighbours to
fight an "urban renewal" project, organizing an alternate
school. The good life, in peaceable, laid-back, old-fashioned
Canada. The good life, among progressive and enlightened
Canadians. "When we got to Vancouver a provincial election
campaign was winding up. People were saying the NDP had a
good chance of winning. Oh my God, a socialist government,
this must be Nirvana!"
But it was terribly lonely, especially for the women. The men
submerged their sadness in the adrenalin rush of sheer relief at
having made good the getaway and by work, which they were
required to get to keep their status secure. He would go off to
work in the mornings, and she, in their basement apartment, the
flat, grey light of interminable winter at the windows, would go
through the classified ads of the local newspaper for something,
60 LONG WAY FROM HOME
anything, she might do that would let her meet people. Her
father had quit talking to her, and the letters from her friends,
who thought that what she had done was "weird," grew thinner
and more infrequent. She had begun to notice that, in company,
people didn't really see or hear her, as if she had come up to
Canada as part of the man's baggage: she was as interesting to
them as that. Like the generations of pioneer women before her
in Canada, she longed for a female friend. "There was a big,
empty feeling. There was nothing to fill up the space of what
I'd left behind."
Impressed by the Americans' courage in fleeing the "world's
number one police state" and their commitment to non-
violence, touched by their vulnerability as rootless strangers
stripped of friends and family, invigorated by their tales of the
movement and the resistance, Canadian sympathizers gladly
and generously made room for them. Let's show our stuff, they
said to each other. Each war-resister we welcome and take
home is one less soldier for that infamous war, one more
comradely link with the international uprising against American
imperialism.
In 1966, in Toronto, SUPA set up an office next to its own to
house an anti-draft program that would aid and abet draft-
resisters and deserters in their desire to immigrate to Canada.
According to Clayton Ruby, who was involved in the program
throughout its existence, the notion to set it up came from
SUPA's reading of the escalation of the war and the inevitability
that "the American government would start drafting students
on a large scale, and we had to be prepared to smuggle people
out of the U.S. on a large scale." SUPA established a
telephone roster and a counselling service, and temporarily
housed resisters with sympathetic families in the city.
We smuggled tens of thousands of people into this
country. Sometimes we dressed ourselves up as priests
and nuns or used real priests and nuns, and we'd drive over
the border and back with no hassles. Or we'd use the Maid
of the Mist boat at Niagara Falls. We'd have someone get
on from the American side and someone from the
HELL NO, WE WON'T CO 61
Canadian side. In those days you were issued a different-
coloured ticket depending on which side you got on, and
they'd only let you off on the side you got on. We'd simply
have our person switch tickets with the American. Easy.
As this kind of work became more important and more in
demand (in 1966, 2,447 draft-age Americans were landed; by
1969, 4,405),
3
 the program required more than SUPA resources
could handle. They "farmed" it out to American immigrants
themselves and to the scores of volunteers who were coming
forward to lend a hand, from draft and employment counsellors
to lawyers and doctors, from church groups to university
teachers. At this point SUPA's anti-draft program became the
Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and among its most successful
operations was the publication of the Manual for Draft-Age
Immigrants to Canada, an exhaustive book on immigration
procedures. Its first edition in 1968 sold 5,000 copies in two
months; its second edition sold out at 20,000 copies, and sales
kept doubling until 1970 when it had sold a total of 65,000
copies.
4
Across the country aid groups sprang up wherever American
immigration warranted a support structure. (By 1970 there
were thirty-two such groups.)
5
 In Vancouver the Committee to
Aid American War Objectors operated out of an old warehouse
near Chinatown. Through its services — a job and housing
bulletin board, a mailbox system, magazine and newspaper
subscriptions, fund raising, as well as the usual counselling
6
 —
it was a place in which to ease the culture shock of immigration
and on which to call for help.
Young dodgers would arrive with no idea of where to go for
help, with no money or anything else. I'd put them in touch
with appropriate organizations, I'd board them, get them
jobs, arrange a taxi license for them or whatever. Get them
welfare. Legal counsel when they were stupid enough to
get caught smoking marijuana. I did all this because I
thought an American boy in Vancouver is one less gun in
somebody's back in Vietnam.
62 LONG WAY FROM HOME
The Alexander Ross Society in Edmonton provided immi-
gration counselling* and sometimes escorted Americans across
the border into Alberta. In Regina the Committee to Aid
American War Immigrants raised money for the operations of
a local American Deserters' Committee and its two hostels. In
Winnipeg the Committee to Assist War Objectors rented an
office in the CRYPT building (Committee Representing Youth
Problems Today) for one dollar a month and employed a
former youth organizer for the NDP as a counsellor. "Yankee
Dodgers and Deserters, Welcome to Canada — Don't crash at
office, see someone at desk. You'd better dig it here, you're
stuck!"
7
 In Ottawa the United church operated a drop-in centre
and coffee-house for exiles and refugees, and in Montreal the
Council to Aid Resisters provided counselling and a battery of
legal, social work and psychiatric services. The Union General
des Etudiants du Quebec provided, rent-free, office space to
the local Deserters' Committee and offered to hide deserters
and war-resisters in the woods.
8
And Americans themselves set up organizations of self-help:
in Toronto, in 1968, the Union of American Exiles (its
newsletter eventually became the independent magazine AMEX :
The American Expatriate in Canada); in Montreal and
Vancouver as well as Toronto, American Deserters' Committees;
in Toronto, in 1970, the Committee to Aid Refugees from
Militarism and Red, White and Black. ("It can't happen here
— without help. Like, Help! Wanted! at the RW&B office:
typists, artists, decorators, chauffeurs, typists, envelope stuffers,
phone answerers, typists, writers, a bookkeeper, typists, publicists,
— oh yes, typists!")
9
I was editing a community newspaper in Ottawa called the
Centre Town News, a four-page tabloid. We'd hire
dodgers and deserters to distribute it door to door. Guys
from Tennessee and Florida in skimpy leather shoes and
threadbare jackets out in the Ottawa snow, delivering
papers. We paid them a cent a copy and gave them a bowl
*I was told that one of its members, an NDP activist and wife of a
professor, had even collected blankets and socks for the "refugees."
HELL NO, WE WON'T GO 63
of soup. They were living three, four to a one-bedroom
apartment, they were homesick as hell. It made me very
sad. That's why I agreed to drive one of them across the
border back into the U.S. so he could turn around and
apply at the Canadian border for status — he was in
Canada only as a visitor and was wanted by the FBI for
desertion. He'd only been through Grade Ten and had a
job offer as a night cleaner, but there are lots of people who
will work as night cleaners and it's not a hell of a skilled
position. So he didn't have enough points; they wouldn't
give him status. I had to leave him in the States.
In 1967 new immigration regulations went into effect
designed ostensibly to "achieve universality and objectivity in
the selection process."
10
 There were nine factors of immigration
suitability and units of assessment for each factor — 20 units
maximum for "education and training," 15 for "occupational
demand," 15 for "personal assessment" and so on — to be
assigned at the time of application for landed immigrant status,
usually at the border. To qualify for such status, the applicant
would have to have a minimum of 50 out of 100 assessment
units.
While the regulations did eliminate the arbitrariness of the
individual immigration officer's assessment, they functioned in
fact to institutionalize the biases and prejudices of the officer
(and by extension, of Canadian society) in regard to the
characteristics of the "suitable" immigrant, and reinforced at
the level of policy what was de facto the procedure anyway.
Clearly, the university-educated, highly skilled, neat and
attractive-looking, bankrolled, married, bilingual (or at least
English-speaking) applicant would amass an impressive
number of points and would be landed without difficulty. By
contrast, a working-class applicant typically had 10 points for
age, 5 for speaking English, 10 to 12 for high school education,
5 for willingness to settle in smaller centres, and 5 to 10 points
for his occupation. This meant that the remaining 15 points that
would qualify him for his landed status had to be earned from
the highly subjective "personal assessment." Canada's immi-
gration regulations quite neatly replicated the class and race
biases of the United States' draft laws.
64 LONG WAY FROM HOME
The middle-class (and, almost invariably, white) student
with his draft deferment came in contact with the anti-war
movement while at the university. Refusing to be inducted into
military service, he crossed the border to Canada, received a
healthy number of points, and entered middle-class Canadian
society with relative ease. The working-class (very often black
or brown) youth, on the other hand, "who filled the local draft
board quotas"
11
 and learned about the nature of war in training
and in combat, deserted, and, at the border or subsequently,
discovered that he did not have enough points to qualify for
landed status. (He was poorly educated, un- or semi-skilled,
impoverished, "unreputable.") At this point he became a
fugitive, a man underground, haphazardly employed, fearful
and desperate. In a word, vulnerable.
In Vancouver the RCMP raided five, six times the American
Deserters' Committee home, ransacking files and copying
down names.
12
 At Simon Fraser University, anti-draft activists
discovered that
the University was being dishonest in the way it was
dealing with applicants who were war-resisters or deserters.
We were demanding greater accessibility for them but the
university was lying by saying that there were no openings
and even failing to forward their applications to the
department involved. They were just sitting on them. We
discovered the RCMP would look through student appli-
cations from time to time.
In spite of the fact that by 1968-69 the influx of deserters was
reaching crisis proportions for the exile community (they were
being picked up by the police for drug-dealing, vagrancy and
shoplifting; they were "starving in the streets"; they were
committing suicide),
13
 the government passed the buck of
responsibility to the individual immigration officers, instructing
them to decide at their own discretion the admissibility of a
deserter.
14
 Finally, in 1969, five students from Glendon
College, posing as deserters, presented themselves at five
different border-crossing points and applied for landed immi-
grant status. Not only were they all rejected, two were handed
over to American authorities by the Canadian officers.
15
 The
HELL NO, WE WON'T GO 65
resulting hue and cry in Canada, raising the question of
Canadian bureaucratic collusion with American authorities,
the question of the right of the Canadian government to
penalize "political refugees who have rightly or wrongly been
repelled by the American military and the war it is fighting,"
16
the question of the Canadian people's right to policies
determined independently of American pressure, the govern-
ment buckled under and announced that as of 22 May 1969, "if
a serviceman from another country meets our immigration
criteria, he will not be turned down because he is still in the
active service of his country." The law could not turn the
deserter into a middle-class kid, but at least he would not be
hounded.
The underside of the solidarity between the Canadian anti-
war movement and the draft-resisters was that "it was easy to
impress Canadians. All you had to do was say you had lived in
New York and everybody gasped in admiration." Which is to
say that Canadians trivialized their own experience. It was all
very well to be, say, a student at the University of Toronto (the
country's largest) and a participant in the Vietnam Mobilization
Committee there, but this was small potatoes compared to
Berkeley and the SDS; it was one thing to take pride in one's
"Canadian" liberalism and pacifism and another to be volun-
tarily affected by the Americans' "aggressiveness," their
assertiveness, their pride and anger, in the conviction that
"Canada would be greatly improved by this influx of Americans
because we were getting the best of them"; it was one thing to
make them welcome, another to be persuaded that
the draft-dodgers represented a new way of looking at
things, new ideas and a new style. They were people who
were interested in issues, in the arts, in experimenting with
relationships. They took more risks. I associated all this
with being American.
Even the more politicized Canadians, the ones who were active
in aid programs, for instance, found the war-resisters romantic
and larger-than-life, and were reluctant to be politically
critical of them because after all, "it was they, not I, who had
had to make such a heavy decision. I was in awe of them. In awe
of the fact that they were here among us at all."
66 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Therefore, the political relationship between the American
war-resister in exile and the Canadian radical was, to say the
least, problematic. There was the initial period of "shaking
down," when the Canadian struck an alliance that was based in
part on a romanticization of the American — so courageous, so
principled, so sexy! — and in part on an acceptance of the
American movement's priority of halting the war in Vietnam.
Then a period when, contrary to some Canadian fantasies, the
draft-resister turned out to be not an ultra-militant, superlunary
being but a deeply offended middle-class moralist, just like
them. A period when the American, exhausted, released from
the dreadful pressure of anxiety and paranoia, withdrew in
relief from "politics" altogether — or was strongly advised to
by the community — and went about the business of setting up
a new life. Or, still "hooked," tried heroically to keep up with
the news "back home," reading every American publication
s/he could get hold of, utterly absorbed by the data of the war in
Vietnam (pressing the war on the heart, the brain, so as never to
forget the cataclysm that had forced this trial-by-exile). A
period when the ego of the American grew expansive under the
admiring approval of "socialite leftists" who liked to invite
"draft-dodgers" to their parties and hear stories of cops-and-
dodgers derring-do.
But this period passed, and the question of the integration of
the Americans into Canadian radical political activity was
confronted. Under pressure from anti-war groups in the United
States to continue to serve, however they might, the struggle
"at home," some resisters confirmed that their first responsi-
bility was to "war-resisters in the army, potential deserters and
to the men and women of Indochina,"
17
 rather than to
Canadianization and accommodation. Apparently oblivious to
the absurdity of trying to be a combatant in absentia and the
insensitivity of their image of Canada as an undifferentiated,
impassive holding tank for American revolutionaries, they
would speak of schemes to keep in touch with the "mother
culture," the womb of all consciousness, and would agree with
Tom Hayden, the SDS activist, that to be "politicized" in
Canada is to "insist publicly that all political exiles should be
allowed to come home, that you intend to return by whatever
HELL NO, WE WON'T GO 67
means necessary."
18
 Others, rather more oriented to the fact
that they lived among Canadians, spoke grandiosely of the
possibility that".. . as the U.S. is the oldest and closest enemy
of Canada, perhaps it is our role to lead the fight, physically,
against the U.S. from our exile,"
19
 or even, as in the case of a
group of immigrant yogis, to "help Canada into the Aquarian
Age."
20
It was these kinds of postures that drove some Canadian
radicals mad and others to serious reconsideration of the
politics of the American exile. Mere "libertarians" the Canadians
could deal with — the draft-evader who emigrated from a sense
of having been personally interfered with by the U.S. military
— and the "middle-class shits who didn't give a goddamn about
Vietnam or anything else" except to carry on in Canada where
they'd left off in America, in a career and life-style into which
they vanished unremarked. No, the problem was with the
putative comrades, the brothers and sisters of the resistance,
for whom the place called Canada was ephemeral, impalpable,
a mere shadow cast across the north of a continent pre-empted
by the beast America, a refuge and sanctuary (thanks very
much, folks!) in which to reconstitute the battered troops for the
decisive struggle back in the belly of the beast (y'all come and
see us, y'hear!), for there is no place as real, as awesome, as
prodigious, even in its depravity, as America.
At a time when Canadian new leftists were in a struggle of
their own to take their history and their being seriously, to raise
the fundamental issues of social power and economic control of
the society, to extrapolate from the war in Vietnam the broad
outlines of American imperialism and lay them across the grid
of Canada, such an attitude on the part of the American exiles
was not helpful. In fact, it was labelled, by a Toronto anti-draft
program activist, as "American imperialism of the left," this
"look[ing] at the struggle in Canada as inconsequential,"
21
 this
blinkered vision of the scenario of anti-imperialism. If the
American truly wanted to engage with imperialism, well, then
let them look under their feet. They were standing on the
soil of the colony par excellence. Let them embrace Canada
with the righteousness they now sent in the mails to the
"motherland" and take on the beast where it was most sly and
meretricious.
68 LONG WAY FROM HOME
From under the weight of the Americans, their war, their
resistance, the Canadian new left struggled for the project that
was its own.
PART 11
STUDENT POWER
I
KNOWLEDGE FOR WHOM?
In science young people learn to do research that
will make a bigger profit for the bosses. If young
people learn social sciences like psychology,
sociology and political science, they are taught to be
spies for the bosses. Sociologists and psychologists
and political scientists are always studying the
workers and especially the poor and the native
people and asking them questions. And when they
find out things about the people, the social scientists
go to the bosses with the information. The social
scientists never study the bosses and give the
information to the people. And the bosses are
always using the information they get about the
workers and the poor and the farmers and the native
people to come up with new ways to shove the
people around.
— from a manifesto of Students
for a Democratic University, University
of Alberta (Gateway, 19 September 1969)
Although it would be a couple of years in the gestation, the idea
that students as students were an oppositional force to reckon
with had already been evoked by 1964. In that year a CUCND
pamphlet, "The University and Social Action in the Nuclear
Age," decried the university as a place that merely trained
personnel for industrial society, as though students needn't
concern themselves further than acquiring the tools of employ-
ment and salary. At the same time, the president of the
University of California at Berkeley, Clark Kerr, wrote a book
that was widely circulated and discussed. In The Uses of the
University he noted that a modern university had been
produced by the intervention of the state,* by the preponderant
*The state intervened with grants, subsidies and, as anti-war activists
had uncovered, research contracts.
71
72 LONG WAY FROM HOME
prestige of scientists over humanists, by the enormous growth
of the university administration and by the great increase in
classroom size which frustrated the personal contact of teacher
and student. In short, "the university has become a prime
instrument of national purpose"
1
 basic to which was the
expansion of the "knowledge industry." But: "the process
cannot be stopped. The results cannot be foreseen. It remains
to adapt."
2
Student activists would have none of that. That same year, in
1964, at Kerr's own campus the Free Speech Movement
(FSM) clashed head-on with the machinery of the "knowledge
industry"; the malaise of the university of the Fifties, the
"notorious 'inner emigration'" of students to a "place of
commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it
cool," as the SDS Port Huron Statement had it,
3
 was overcome.
In September 1964 Berkeley students who had spent the
summer in the South, on freedom rides and voter registration
drives in the civil rights movement, set up tables in the open
campus mall to distribute literature and to solicit donations for
the movement's projects. The university administration countered
with a ban on the use of the university grounds for political
activities. On October 1, a student collecting money for the
Congress of Racial Equality, who had refused to fold up his
table and go, was carried limp-bodied to a police car. The Free
Speech Movement began at that moment when a noisy student
crowd surrounded the police car and would not let it move for
thirty-two hours.
Three months followed of assemblies, vigils and marches.
Joan Baez and her "freedom songs." Five thousand picketers:
"A Question of Dignity!" "Welcome to Mississippi!" Speeches
about the inhuman machinations of the system in the South and
the system at the university. Blacks and students: fodder for the
machine. "I am a UC student. Do not fold, bend or mutilate."
As it was necessary to the machine-system that blacks be
enfeebled and exploited, so it was necessary that students be
regulated and depersonalized. As blacks had resisted, so must
students. So said Mario Savio, an FSM activist who had been
in the South.
KNOWLEDGE FOR WHOM? 73
There is a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you sick at heart, that you can't
take part, you can't even tacitly take part, and you've
got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to
indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it,
that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from
working at all.
4
A sit-in. Eight hundred arrested. A strike. "Shut This
Factory Down!" The relationship of the student to this
intellectual production was analogous, said FSM, to the
relationship of the worker to the assembly line. FSM demanded
"meaning" in their education, the "right to know" aboutworld-
scale realities, the right to political self-expression and the right
to assume the consequences of their speech. Activists were
serving notice to the bureaucrats of the university, as they had
done earlier to the southern racists, that they would just as soon
die* as be "standardized, replaceable and irrelevant."
5
 And the
militant who would just as soon die is fanatical with impenitence.
Quebec, 1964. The labour unions were being "deconfes-
sionalized" from the Catholic church, and the first operatives
of the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) were in jail, the
explosions of their Molotov cocktails and their slogans,
Students, workers, peasants, form your clandestine groups
against Anglo-American colonialism!, still ringing in the ears
of the Quebecois. The provincial Parent Royal Commission on
Education issued its report and recommended that the old
system of elitist, church-administered, classical colleges be
dismantled and a new public system of pre-university colleges
be put in place. (They were to be called Colleges d'Enseignement
General et Professionel or CEGEPs.) In November, having
split from that "bi-national" organization the National Fed-
eration of Canadian University Students, Quebecois university
students set up the Union Generate des Etudiants du Quebec
(UGEQ) along syndicalist principles. Quebecois students had
*This was no mere metaphor. Several civil rights workers, among them
students, were murdered in the South.
74 LONC WAY FROM HOME
been deeply influenced by the concept of student syndicalism
in France, and UGEQ accepted the syndicalist charter of
Grenoble University as its charter. Resolved:
that syndicalism is characterized equally by its recognition
of the fact that student problems, in particular problems of
education, have their origins in the socio-economic struc-
tures, and consequently their solution lies in the recasting
of these same structures.
6
It followed, then, that UGE Q would involve itself as a pressure
group and as a negotiating body for students in the massive
public debates concerning the proposed reforms of the educa-
tional system.
In March 1965 students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in
Montreal, fed up with lack of materials, with the hazardous
environment of the very old building in which they studied, and
with the antiquarian modes of teaching arts, went on strike.
Delegates to a special UGEQ congress empowered the
executive to call a general strike of all students in Quebec if the
provincial government did not respond to the arts students'
demands for reform. Three days later the government began
negotiations with the strikers.
In November 1966 a group of radicals within the students'
union of Strasbourg University in France ran off, using union
funds, 10,000 copies of a pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student
Life, and distributed them at an official university function.
Three weeks later the students' union was closed down by court
order, the judge citing the "eminently noxious" character of the
ideas expressed within the pamphlet. The pamphlet became
very famous.
The student, if he rebels at all, must first rebel against his
studies— At the same time, since the student is a product
of modern society just like Godard or Coca-Cola, his
extreme alienation can only be fought through the struggle
against this whole society The revolt of youth against
an imposed and "given" way of life is the first sign of a
total subversion. It is the prelude to a period of revolt —
the revolt of those who can no longer live in our society.
7
KNOWLEDGE FOR WHOM? 75
Between 1964 and 1967 students and police rioted in
Argentina, Bolivia, Panama, Venezuela, Japan, Italy and
West Germany. The issues were, variously, university autonomy,
relations with the United States, government repression, land
reform, solidarity with striking workers, sexual freedom, police
brutality, the war in Vietnam and the lack of democracy in
university government. In China the Red Guard movement had
been launched to challenge the bourgeois character of education
and the alienation of the intellectual from the manual workers.
In June 1967 a SUPA member attended the annual
convention of SDS and later reported that an ideological
debate was taking shape between "proponents of two views of
the nature of fundamental internal contradictions of American
capitalism." One camp argued the classically Marxist position
that the industrial proletariat, because of its centrality in the
economy, will be the vanguard of the revolution. The other
argued, still tentatively, that there is a "new" working class
taking shape in modern capitalism — white-collar, intellectual
and cultural workers — as alienated, exploited and dispossessed
as the proletariat and numerically preponderant.* "This is, of
course," wrote the SUPA observer, "a very fundamental
question — the most fundamental one, I think, for U.S.
socialists (and probably Canadian socialists too). . . . "
8
In the ashes of the peace movement's projects among the
powerless lay the regenerate core of its vitality: youth's refusal
to accept the necessity of unfreedom. From the university
campuses they had originally carried the message of their
resistance to the measures of war; beyond the campuses they
had learned of the universality of these measures; back to the
campuses they would go, for it was true that, just as the
warmongers were everywhere, so the struggle against them
*Already by 1960 only 23.4 percent of wage-earning Canadians were
employed in manufacturing jobs compared to 26 percent in service
jobs. The vast number of jobs that had opened up in the post-war
economy had been the professional, managerial and clerical jobs,
while the blue-collar sector had been stable since 1941. In fact,
between 1951 and 1961, "professional" jobs (including teachers,
nurses, engineers, technicians) had grown by 64.5 percent.
76 LONG WAY FROM HOME
could be waged anywhere, and one might as well take it up with
the given of one's life: the university.
In this they were supported and driven on by the international
uprising of students against the state and its institutions of war
and learning, by the extraordinary nationalist agitation in
Quebec with its evocations of the national liberation struggles
in Cuba and Algeria, by public outrage at the sickening
collaboration of the Canadian state and business in the
American war in Vietnam, and by the grass-roots experimen-
tation throughout the Western world with alternative life-
styles. The singular and consistent presence of students in all
these phenomena pointed to their revolutionary potential, not
as surrogates of other more "strategic" classes, not as mere
harbingers of others' upheavals, not as vanguards or animators
of other social forces, but as who they were, a social formation
all their own, a mass of self-conscious and alienated young
people collected at a very sensitive point in the web of capitalist
relations, the university-factory. From the detours through the
missile sites, Selma, the Indian reservations, the proletarian
neighbourhoods and the Dow Chemical offices, the radicals
were brought back to where they had started: to the university,
and to the power that could be mobilized there for its own sake.
If the SUPA phase had taught the activists anything it was this:
that it is all right to fight in your own interests.*
Their interests were concrete and the fight for them unan-
swerable. Just as the universities were becoming mass institu-
tions under pressure to rationalize and "industrialize" like any
other large capitalist enterprise, so too were students, under the
same pressures, becoming a social mass who "in absolute
terms have come to constitute an autonomous social force."
9
(It was projected that by 1970 there would be one hundred
thousand full-time university students and tens of thousands
more in the community colleges of Ontario alone. The 1969-70
budget of the Ontario Department of University Affairs was
*SUPA, in fact, had never really left the university. Students were its
project personnel, money was raised from among them and literature
sold there. CYC, on the other hand, transformed students into civil
servants.
KNOWLEDGE FOR WHOM? 77
close to $500 million.)* These developments were not to be
wondered at. New industries and technologies and the swelling
bureaucracies of enterprises and the state require for their
functioning a new "working class" of intellectual labourers.
(As earlier, industrialization had required a proletariat for the
mines and mills.) It is the university's job to incubate and hatch
this new class: members of an intelligentsia that would forget they
had once been self-disposing professionals, an intelligentsia
that would relinquish control over the content and development of
their work and submit uncomplainingly to specialization and
fragmentation. Worse, to only a privileged few would it be
given to have, even within these parameters, "meaningful
work." Everyone else at the university was destined for
salaried or waged work as technicians, clerics, low-level
administrators. Like the "old" working class, the new one
experiences the dreadful separation of the person from his/her
labour and sees the products of that labour snatched by the
employers and squandered in the marketplace. "There is an
unwillingness to understand," said the Marxist economist
Ernest Mandel, "that man's chief productive force will be his
creative intellectual power. This intellectual power is only
potentially productive today because capitalist society beats it
down and stamps it out pitilessly as it beats down the
personality and creative impulse of the manual workers."
10
Within the institutions of education, grievances multiplied.
At many campuses, a snobbish and conformist fraternity elite
continued their stultifying domination over the student body
politic. Campus security personnel seized leaflets that de-
manded lower residence rates so as to alter the university's
*As impressive as this development was, however, it still touched only
on an elite. A survey undertaken by the Canadian Union of Students
in 1965-66 showed that only 35 percent of the undergraduate
population came from the working class.
11
 The implications of this
statistic were drawn by the sociologist John Porter in his massive
study of Canadian social stratifications, The Vertical Mosaic, which
was being read at the time: the university was the instrument with
which the upper and middle classes placed their children in the
governing echelons of society and the working class thwarted from
so doing.
12
 The regulatory mechanism of this placement was student
fees. And so it was to become a demand of student radicals that
universities be universally accessible. Abolish fees!
78 LONG WAY FROM HOME
status as a "preserve for the rich," and administrations
accumulated "secret" files on the trouble-makers among
students and faculty. Faculty were segregated from students in
their own lounges and clubs,* not to mention washrooms.
Herded into vast lecture halls of stupefyingly tasteless design,
students were "lobotomized" by mechanical lectures, an
inflexible examination system and the abiding fear of failure.
They were systematically excluded from the planning and
operation of the institution, never consulted in the drawing up
of curricula, and obfuscated by the separation of data from
theory about "why things are the way they are." Economically
dependent, the student was confirmed in his/her dependency
and "infantilization" in the classroom.
Finally, the elitism and authoritarianism of the university
were endemic to the institution. If the university was indeed an
"instrument of national purpose," then the soulless bureaucracy
and the competitive values of that purpose operated as much on
campus as outside it. Here students were trained, by the
content and methodology of liberal education, to accept the
goals of their society and their role within it. Here were
prepared the grey-flannelled cadres of the legions of technocrats,
bureaucrats and hacks. And here were linked the interests of
the "business-administrative clique" as represented by the
composition of the university boards of governors (or trustees
or regents).
With some simple research, students discovered that the
twenty-seven members of the Board of Governors of the
University of Toronto, for instance, represented sixty-seven
international corporations (thirty-one American, twenty
Canadian, fifteen Britis h and one Dutch), among them Honey-
well (with its unsavoury connection with the Vietnam war
industry), Argus, and Allied Chemical;
13
 or discovered that
there wasn't a university worth its name that did not solicit
funds from corporations and institutions with investments in
South Africa, Iran and Brazil. It took no extravagant leap of
*At the University of Alberta in the mid-Sixties, radical faculty
disdained the plush Faculty Club for the steamy and clamorous Hot
Caf [Cafe] where Arts students hung out.
KNOWLEDGE FOR WHOM? 79
analysis to draw the conclusions from the evidence that on the
one hand a university was funded in part by a corporation with
interests in Vietnam, and on the other the same university's
administration denied tenure to faculty involved in anti-war
work. It was important to understand, as Clark Kerr did, the
integration of the university into the military-industrial com-
plex and the state bureaucracies, but beyond that, it was also
important to contest this integration, to undermine the ideo-
logical underpinnings of the process and to mobilize its
casualties.
If we look out across the world each morning and think
honestly about what we see; spend our day in persistent
and radical activity to gain freedoms in our local situation;
and keep working to relate the two, the human community
we all require will grow out of our common action.
14
The struggle for control over education was no petty
struggle. The demand of the student power movement for
student control of curriculum and course content, for instance,
was the result of a critique of that curriculum in which the
connection between "knowledge" and the objectives of that
knowledge was made explicit. The academic disciplines of the
"educational plant" were in the service of the system: "consul-
tation for the American war machine, apologia for Canadian
junior partnership, counter-insurgency studies of dissenters,
schemes for pulverizing social conflict, research for corpora-
tions."
15
 Clearly, by such learning students were being prepared,
"softened up," for their roles as intellectual managers of
society." Student power" was a way to throw a wrench into this
process by redirecting the aims of education from repression to
emancipation, first of the students themselves and then of the
society as a whole. Because students are not "outside" society,
said the student power activists, because they are in fact
embedded in society as the transmitters of the values and idea-
systems which permeate every social cell, their refusal to play
that transmitting role would have repercussions throughout
society. Student power was no simple self-contained appeal for
special privileges or exemptions; it was one front, among many,
in the broad opposition to the impoverishment of daily life.
80 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Finally, with its strategy of democratically conducted direct
action "from below," the student power movement contained
the promise of overcoming the "natural order of things" —
alienation, insularity, despair and cynicism — by furnishing a
praxis. Power is recovered in the unity of theory and practice.
And where more decisively and significantly than here among
the young intellectual labourers who, with their skills and
scholarship, understood the nature of the forces arrayed
"behind the facts" and the depth of their insidious intrusions
into social life? Because they were knowledgeable, because
they were insightful, because they were visionary, the students
were precisely those, as Marcuse said of them, who "no longer
wish to contain the revolution within the framework of the given
reality."
16
 They demanded, in the name of imagination, the
transcendence of that reality in the integration of "eros, poetry
and politics"
17
 in the here-and-now of dissentient, graceful and
loving action.
The movement did not foresee the uses to which its rhetoric
would be put by those who were in revolt simply to recover the
privileges lost to them in the transformation of the university
from a "guild" to a "factory"; and by those who aspired to be
the managers and technical experts of the future socialist
society, as happy to substitute, in the new regime as in the old,
their own emancipated activity for social emancipation.
18
Most importantly, in the excitement and melodrama and
brouhaha of its most violent moments of confrontation, the
student power movement dreamed it had become "the revolu-
tion," forgetting the more modest claims of its own theory of
student power as an instance of contradiction in the system.
But what the hell. The dream was just the icing on the cake.
II
BE REALISTIC,
DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE
Experience on campuses all across the continent in
the past five years clearly points to one fact: this
system and those who run it cannot tolerate any
legitimate opposition, that is, any attempt to trans-
form this pattern into one which shifts control over
economy and society — including education — to
the level of each and every one of us. And the
opposition to these attempts to de-bureaucratize,
de-centralize and humanize is fierce! What is
happening at the University of Alberta is one blatant
expression of this opposition; like a dying dinosaur
whose time has come, thrashing about against the
smaller but more evolved creatures who will one
day dominate.
— from a manifesto of Students
for a Democratic University, University
of Alberta (Gateway, 26 March 1969)
The era of the student power campaigns in Canada — through
1967 to the end of 1969 — was a period of extraordinarily
imaginative and vigorous youth revolt around the world: the
convulsions on Canadian university campuses may be seen as
part of an international phenomenon of youth's refusal to take
its appointed place in the great machine of capitalist enterprise
and organization. This accounts for the very high degree of
identification there was among all the national youth and
student groups and movements. The excitement and pride with
which news was received about the Zengakuren in Japan, say,
who took on the police in hand-to-hand combat with helmets,
shields and javelins. Or about the students choking the streets
of Poland to publicize their slogan, "Without Freedom, No
Bread!" It accounts for the grief and rage expressed at the news
of the murder of Che Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia at the
81
82 LONG WAY FROM HOME
hands of fascist police (Che! the prototype, the new man, the
socialist as impelled by love as by hate), and the murder of
three black students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, one of
them shot in the back with a shotgun shell, as they gathered to
march in protest against the firing of faculty members.
But the student power movement was not only in Canada
(and in Japan and France and Mexico, et cetera), it was also
Canadian. It was as much engendered by Canadian society as
by international developments, and it generated indigenous
structures of resistance. Two such recur throughout the events
of the period: the Canadian Union of Students and Students for
a Democratic University (SDU). In 1966, at its fall congress
in Halifax and following upon its survey of fees and accessibility,
delegates had impassionately debated the future direction of
CUS: as the "dance committee for the dance committees" or as
the spearhead of student engagement in social issues. Pro-
ponents of the former position argued that a students' union has
no "authority" to speak on any issues but those which strictly
concern students (that is, the quality of student life). Proponents
of the latter had asked: Where does a student issue end and a
social one begin? "The issue of residence fees gets you into the
cost of building residences, into the cost of money, into
inflation, into the dependency of the Canadian economy on the
American economy, into inflation rates in the U.S., into
Vietnam." When, a few months later, CUS issued a Declaration
of the Canadian Student ("The Canadian student has the right
and duty to improve himself as a social being and to contribute
to the development of society"), the University of Alberta
students' union had already pulled out of CUS. Its president,
Branny Shepanovich, accused it of being "Communist tinged,"
1
and the fight for the life of CUS was on.
SDU, or Students for a Democratic University, was not a
national organization. There were, however, at several campuses
across the country, groups that identified themselves as SDU,
but were "affiliated" with each other only by a certain style and
by the similarity of their campaigns. Much more than SUPA
(upon whose demise SDU groups sprang up) and CUS, SDU
was influenced by certain Americanisms of the international
student power movement, notably "yippie!ism" (Youth Inter-
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 83
national Party) with its emphasis on the politics of outrageous
life-style and extravagant gesture. SDU generated "personal-
ities" rather than "leaders." It had no fixed membership (people
came in and went out of SDU depending on the campaign of the
moment) and frequently overlapped with the membership
of New Democratic Youth and Student Christian Movement
groups. It included in its ranks advocates of the priority of
alliance with the working class, of women's liberation, of Third
World struggles, of "touchy-feelyism," of revolutionary culture;
published manifestos rather than programs; and adopted a
strategy of confrontation through mass meetings, rallies and
marches rather than of party politics — "all kinds of sympathizers
came out of the woodwork, counterculture people, foreign
students, draft-dodgers, radical faculty, just because we were
not involved in party politics." In short, it took the theatricality
of protest as seriously as its rhetoric. SDU could be ferociously
entertaining.
Spring 1967. Perched on top of a mountain in working-class
Burnaby, British Columbia, the architecturally magical and
structurally experimental campus of Simon Fraser University
has been attracting left-wing faculty, politically seasoned
graduate students, and drop-outs. "It was one big happy
family, compared to other universities where your friend could
become your enemy on a throw of the Bell curve."
Five teaching assistants from SFU circulate an open letter
condemning the attack on the right of free speech of a
Vancouver high school student who has been suspended for
writing a poem critical of his teacher. When they join in a
protest at the high school, one of them, Martin Loney, is
arrested and the board of governors of SFU, without so much
as a hearing, fires all five. The students' council issues a letter
to SFU president, MacTaggart-Cowan, informing the board of
governors that should it fail to reinstate the five "the student
society would call for immediate strike action by all students,
graduate and undergraduate, all teaching assistants, all faculty
assistants and all faculty members."
2
 After an all-night
emergency meeting (to get in and out of the meeting, board
members must step across the bodies of hundreds of students
84 LONG WAY FROM HOME
camped outside the doors), the board of governors backs down.
October 1967. "Stop Press Bulletin: Premier Thatcher [of
Saskatchewan] intends to assume direct budgeting control of
the university. . . . Our education will be subject to financial
censorship. This is a frontal assault on the university.... The
faculty must take a stand and consider such actions as mass
resignations. The students' union must take a firm leadership
stand, explain to the students the implications of this action and
consider class boycotts and demonstrations." A mass meeting
of students at the University of Regina moves that Thatcher
retract his proposal for control. "Autonomy, Not Autocracy!"
3 November 1967. The McGill Daily reprints from the
American satirical paper the Realist a piece by Paul Krassner,
"The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book." The
Daily's editor and two journalists are hauled before the Senate
Disciplinary Committee on charges of "committing obscene
libel."* The SDU, which has been involved in campaigns for
course reform, for open university government meetings and
for student representation on departmental committees, organizes
a rally in defence of the Daily's action ("Students have the right
to publish a newspaper without administration control") that
terminates with the occupation of all six floors of the adminis-
tration building. The campus is in an uproar. SDU heats up the
protest with a call for a general strike and some of the sitters-in
occupy the principal's office. The police are summoned.
Nightsticks flying, they arrest and knock unconscious Stan
Gray, SDU chairman, and injure several others.
January 1968. SDU organizes at SFU. Over the semester it
raises the issues of openness of university government, adminis-
*The offending portion:
That man [Lyndon Johnson] was crouching over the corpse [of
President Kennedy], no longer chuckling but breathing hard and
moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be per-
forming some mysterious symbolic rite he'd learned from Mexicans
or Indians as a boy. And then I realized — there is only one way to
say this — he was literally fucking my husband in the throat.
In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax
and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember he was being
sworn in as the new President.
3
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 85
tration interference in student affairs, alternatives to elitist
student government (mass meetings and sit-ins), and senate
complicity in smears against left-wing professors in the Political
Science, Sociology and Anthropology (PSA) Department.
We fought against the grading system, we fought for more
open courses, we fought for students' rights in the
classroom, we fought for better food in the cafeteria. We
walked in and took over the Faculty Club, removed its
dividing curtain and "integrated" it, forcing the faculty to
look for a secret club. We were so politicized we had
militants register in the courses of professors who had a
rotten line on race or on women and engaged in classroom
struggle sessions with them.
23 April 1968. Students at Columbia University in New
York begin a sit-in at the first of five university buildings they
will eventually seize and occupy and maintain as "communes"
until April 30. They are there because Martin Luther King
has just been murdered and his memory demeaned by a
university administration that refuses to pay a living wage to
Puerto Rican support staff; because the university has grabbed
Harlem land for a student gym, offering blacks literally a back
door into a portion of the facilities; because the university has
expanded over the years by summary eviction of black people
from their houses; because the university fired workers who
tried to form a union; and because the university, with
connections with the CIA and with the Reserve Officer
Training Corps (ROTC), has implicated itself in genocide.
4
They demand that the construction of the gym cease and the
university break its tie with the CIA. Everywhere are red
banners and the slogans of the resistance: "Create Two, Three,
Many Columbias!" "All Power to the Communes!" and "Up
Against the Wall, Motherfucker!"
24 April 1968. Occupiers break into the office of the
president and seize it. The image of the young ruffian, feet up on
the polished desk of Mr. President, at once a contemptuous and
hilarious gesture, sends frissons of indignation through America.
30 April 1968. New York City police break into the
occupied buildings and arrest 712 people. One hundred and
86 LONG WAY FROM HOME
forty-eight are injured in the process, assailed with clubs,
billyjacks, sticks and even fenceposts.
3 May 1968. Students at Sorbonne University in Paris meet
in the campus courtyard in a show of solidarity with students of
Nanterre University who have been demonstrating against
campus conditions. Police charge in and arrest several hundred,
dragging them off in police vans. Infuriated, students attack the
police and the riot spills out into the streets of the Latin
Quarter.
6-10 May 1968. Students strike, demanding full political
and trade union rights for students. Enormous processions
surge along the Champs-Elysees; they are bearing red banners
and singing, until their throats are hoarse and raw, the
"Internationale"; at night there are bloody and desperate battles
in the street between students at their barricades and police
with their riot gear and tear gas (residents sympathetic with the
students provide them with food and shelter and give them their
cars for the barricades); and all of this is apparently coordinated
and refined with no visible "leadership" or program or
bureaucracy.
All we knew was that we had to defend ourselves where we
stood; we split into small groups, so that the police
services were unable to launch a single, directed attack.
Every barricade became a centre of action and of discus-
sion, every group of demonstrators a squad acting on its
own initiative. Barricades sprang up everywhere; no one
felt the lack of a general in charge of overall strategy; mes-
sengers kept everyone informed of what was happening on
the other barricades and passed on collective decisions for
discussion. In our new-found solidarity our spirits began
to soar. For the first time in living memory, young
workers, young students, apprentices, and high school
pupils were acting in unison. We could not guess what turn
the events were going to take, but that did not bother us —
all that mattered was that, at long last, we were all united
in action.
5
14-27 May 1968. Inspired by the revolutionary elan and
audacity and the politically libertarian atmosphere of the
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 87
student rebellion, workers occupy their factories, at Sud-
Aviation, at Renault, at Citroen; strike committees take over
the administration of whole towns and control prices and the
distribution of food and gasoline; schoolchildren and teachers
take over schools; printers refuse to print the "lies" of their
bosses; waitresses, taxi-drivers, soccer players, bank clerks, all
strike. Students (but not the union functionaries) join the strike
committees and together with the strikers call for the expro-
priation of the factories by the workers in the name of a new
society. Power to the workers' councils / Abolish the class
society/Abolish alienation/Humanity will not be happy till
the last bureaucrat is hanged from the entrails of the last
capitalist.
27 May 1968. The Communist-controlled union leadership
signs an agreement to accept the arbitration of the Gaullist
minister of labour. ".. . while the workers as a whole have
decided to take over their own factories and to expropriate the
owners," wrote a student occupier, "the Communist union has
decided for the workers that the expropriated factories are to be
returned to their owners in exchange for higher wages."
6
June 1968. It takes three weeks for the Communist union
functionaries to tame "their" workers to the point they finally
all go back to work. At an open assembly at the Sorbonne,
students publicize their theses: "We must make the revolution.
It will be long and hard. We must not allow ourselves to be
duped."
7
June 1968. Two hundred delegates attend the annual CUS
seminar in Winnipeg. Excitement at the events in Paris is
palpable: at a demonstration attacking the campaign platforms
of Conservative leader Robert Stanfield and Prime Minister
Pierre Trudeau (both men are in town for rallies), a placard
exuberantly summons "One, Two, Three More Sorbonnes!"
and, at the seminar itself, well over half the delegates press for
free-wheeling discussion about the role of a student movement
in revolutionary change in Canada, about spontaneity versus
discipline, grass-roots activity versus centralization, the rela-
tionship of theory to practice, the function of the multiversity in
preparing the "new working class" and so on.
8
 Electrified by
the news from France, the delegates confront the staggering
88 LONG WAY FROM HOME
implications of an insurrectionary working class (so much for
its co-optation and complacency) and of the detonating dreams
students have of free and joyous activity in the democratic
collectivity of the barricades; of self-directed action by the
masses (bye-bye vanguard parties!) and of the coming together
of the campus and the factory {real factories!); and of Daniel
Cohn-Bendit's exhilarating exclamation: "There is only one
reason for being a revolutionary — because it is the best way to
live."
9
 Here, surely, in the facts of May-June is the confirmation
of the new left project.
The spectacle of a momentarily insurgent working class
apparently sparked into motion by student upheaval —
this popularized the notion that the student movement was
not just ancillary but was of strategic importance. The
March 22 Movement of Nanterre seemed to demonstrate
that you could unleash a revolutionary-looking train of
events simply by challenging curfew regulations! The
student project was thus validated quite independently of
any links with the working class.
Summer 1968. Spurred on by the events in France, SDU at
SFU runs a student power slate of radical candidates for
student council, and wins ten of thirteen seats. SDU pushes for
abolition of grades and for making the connections between
university democracy, continentalism, imperialism and the
national liberation of Canada; and from within it emerges the
women's caucus that "raises political issues relevant to the
experience of females in this society."
10
20 August 1968. Czechoslovakia is invaded by troops of the
Warsaw Pact nations, and its head of state, Alexander
Dubcek, is arrested. "The force that sends young Poles and
Russians, Germans and Hungarians into Czechoslovakia is
the same force that sends young Americans into Vietnam, that
beats up young people in the streets of Paris, Madrid, Chicago,
Berkeley and Rome."
11
 The invasion is the boot grinding the
human face into the ground; it is an iniquitous and gloomy
event and haunts the daydreams of the radicals in the West who
had rejoiced along with the youth of Eastern Europe when the
"Prague spring" only a few months earlier had signalled the
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 89
revival of the country's political life. The Stalinist political and
ideological monolith had begun to crumble under the pressure
of hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file socialists who
demanded that socialist democracy fulfill itself. The Czech
Youth Federation had demanded representation in all state
bodies and the right to criticize party policy, and mass meetings
of young people had denounced censorship and the monopoly
of power and information and demanded the "thorough-going
democratization of public life." And now it had all come down
to this: clandestine meetings once more (workers standing
guard at the doors), sabotage, and students burning themselves
to death in the track of the Soviet tanks.
25 August 1968. About ten thousand demonstrators are in
Chicago to support the call of the National Mobilization
Committee to End the War in Vietnam for anti-war manifesta-
tions and to celebrate a yippie Festival of Light alongside the
morbid proceedings of the Democratic party and its convention.
They are here to remind this bloated bulk of a party that the war
it is pursuing in Vietnam will bring its own house down. They
are in the parks, dancing and chanting, defying curfews, defying
12,000 cops, 6,000 National Guardsmen, 6,000 army troops,
bazookas, flamethrowers, jeeps entwined with barbed wire,
tanks, and Mayor Daley's order that looters will be shot on
sight. On this Monday night the cops chase the kids out of
Lincoln Park with tear gas, and others wait for them as they
careen through the side-streets trying to get away, wait for them
with billyclubs, not arresting them but clubbing their skulls
open; cops are pulling people out of cars, breaking into bars and
restaurants and throwing patrons out into the street where more
cops are waiting for them, bursting into houses to drag out the
occupants for a beating. It is a total, complete police riot.
12
27 August 1968. The demonstrators are pursued to the
Hilton Hotel, where women are hurled through the plate glass
windows and the cops go berserk in the lobby, smashing
anyone who looks "funny," while the peach-fuzz carpet soaks
up blood and people kneel in prayer. "We were absolutely
gripped by what was going on in Chicago. Here was a
sophisticated political movement mounting massive demon-
strations in a direct political engagement with the American
state. We were very impressed."
90 LONG WAY FROM HOME
September 1968. The annual congress of CUS takes place in
Guelph. In spite of a number of withdrawals of small campuses
from the organization, delegates endorse several controversial
resolutions, including one from the University of Toronto that
"Canadian society is not self-determined; our cultural, political
and economic lives are dominated by giant American corpora-
tions." Resolutions from the Education Commission blast the
Canadian university as an "imperialist institution" and demand
that universities refuse money intended for military research,
turn curriculum control over to students and faculty, and
abolish the practice of tenure, which is a "guild professionalist
concept." They pass a resolution that the citizens of the
"sovereign nation" of Quebec be permitted to decide whether
or not to establish a "bi-national" government with English
Canada.
On the second day of the congress a plenary session is
interrupted by a file of militants.* Bearing the red flag of
socialism and the black flag of anarchism, to the tune of
"Solidarity Forever," they hang a portrait of Ho Chi Minn, the
Vietnamese Communist leader, over that of Queen Elizabeth
and address the crowd. "We've come four thousand miles to
this congress to discuss what is happening in the world," says
Martin Loney from SFU. "We want to discuss how this affects
students. Just look at Czechoslovakia and Chicago and tell me
you can't be concerned. . . . CUS exists as a national voice, a
place for discussion, a forum, a place to mobilize students." A
few days later, Loney is president-elect of CUS and delegates
vote three-to-one to support the National Liberation Front of
South Vietnam.
Fall 1968. After four years of an intense public debate on
education reforms, the CEGEPs are set up throughout Quebec.
They are, it turns out, too little too late.
*"Some of those calling themselves radicals had long hair. A number
wore khaki jackets not unlike those worn in the armed services of
countries. Others wore sandals with no socks. None looked like an
average Canadian university student whom they insist they represent.
Still fewer spoke like the student seen every day on the Canadian
campus." (Gateway, 11 September 1968)
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 91
By the time the reforms are applied, the "Quiet Revolu-
tion" has collapsed, the provincial government is in a state
of financial crisis and the application is anarchic. The old
buildings are simply turned over to the new system with
the same old administration, no money comes in for new
structures or libraries or labs. The illusions turn into
bitterness.
The syndicalist illusions — that the interests of student-
workers coincide with those of the progressive Ministry of
Education* in the need to modernize and corporatize education
for the up-and-coming professional classes — crumble in the
face of the actual situation of students. The system continues to
stall working-class youth in the CEGEPs, and both openings in
the universities and jobs upon graduation are denied them.
Under the "tremendous influence" of the May-June events in
Paris, of the developing national movement in Quebec, of a
series of strikes by bus drivers and teachers, and of UGEQ's
leadership of mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam
("Quebec aux Quebecois! Vietnam aux Vietnamiens!"), the
students of the CEGEPs sit in and occupy their colleges. They
demand job guarantees, teacher and student control, increased
access to the universities. They demand that the bursary and
loan system be scrapped and students be paid a salary. But the
occupations are first of all an explosion of anger, anger at the
way they have been shoved around and cheated and duped by
the state, anger at the betrayal of their expectation that they
would be able to propel themselves out of the dead ends of
Quebecois society. "S'instruire c'est s'enricher," said the
slogan, but it wasn't true: the state could not deliver; the
security of the students was not theirs to control. The
occupations last a week and a half and are followed by mass
student and teacher expulsions and a regulation banning
political rallies and leafleting in the majority of CEGEPs.
13
October 1968. When Pierre Trudeau comes to Regina to
unveil a statue of Louis Riel, twelve hundred students demon-
*There had never been a Ministry of Education in Quebec before
1964.
92 LONG WAY FROM HOME
strate, demanding that student loans be made available to all
academically qualified students. Trudeau tells them they are
"selfish."
October 1968. At the University of Waterloo students
occupy the students' centre and intend to stay until they secure
legal control of the building: "We regard the board of governors
as an illegitimate authority." At the University of Calgary
SDU activists reject a proposal that the students' union
building be run by the administration, the faculty and the
students jointly: "It's our building," they say, "we paid for it,
we'll run it ourselves."
October 1968. Wearing gas masks and yelling "Thought
police! Thought police!" members of SDU invade and disrupt
the Faculty Club at the University of Alberta. At UBC, two
thousand chortling students, one squealing pig and Jerry
Rubin, American yippie, crash the "faculty only" restaurant
and bar.
Fall—winter 1968. CUS is in a national struggle with
campuses that are holding referenda on whether or not to stay
within the organization. Field-workers fan out across the
country, making contact with sympathetic students — SDUs,
university newspaper staffs, co-op groups — and agitating at
assemblies, workshops, debates, in the cafeterias: "We'd stand
up on a table with a bullhorn and start talking." They point out
what the student gets for the sixty-five-cent CUS dues: a travel
plan, regional exchange scholarships, publications, research.
But more: discussions situate the university in the political
economy of Canada. "Increasingly there is the feeling that we
will have an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist university or no
university at all." The university is inseparable from the
undemocratic structures of the economy and from the inter-
national struggles for national liberation: "Our feeling was that
CUS wasn't worth preserving as just a dance committee, even a
social democratic dance committee, if it wasn't anti-imperialist"
The university and society overlap: "Looking at the university is
another way of looking at society." A student cannot ask that
her/his union be in the one and outside the other. There is no such
thing as a student problem.
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 93
November 1968. Student research at SFU turns up the (not
unrelated) facts that only 17 percent of SFU's student
population comes from the working class and that sitting on the
SFU senate are, among others, W.M. Hamilton, president of
the Employers' Council of British Columbia; Cyrus McLean,
chairman of B.C. Telephone; Mark Collins, a director of
MacMillan-Bloedel; and Jack Diamond, co-operator of the
B.C. Jockey Club. There are on the senate and board of
governors no representatives from labour, nor from the native
community, the teachers' organizations, and tenants and welfare
organizations. Research also indicates that students who are
turned away from SFU go to the community colleges where
they accumulate credits that are in turn "disqualified" by SFU.
Thus is the working class streamed into the two-year colleges
and away from SFU.
There is a hue and cry among students demanding an "open
admissions" policy to SFU from the colleges. The demand is
formulated as a motion to the senate (there are three student
representatives to the senate), where it is defeated. Immediately,
more than a hundred students occupy the administration
building and for three days and nights sit in,* eating peanut-
butter sandwiches, watching Mickey Mouse cartoons, singing
and arguing. They rifle through administration files where they
discover and disclose that the RCMP is operating in consider-
able force on campus as plainclothesmen and has been given by
the university administration some six hundred files o n students
and faculty, including draft-resisters. The demand continues:
public negotiations with President Strand for open admissions.
At 2:15 A.M. of the fourth day of the occupation, 150
RCMP men hit the campus, which is deserted except for the
occupiers and some "crazies" from the drama department who
are rehearsing Coriolanus. President Strand is shouting through
a bullhorn, "The university will not tolerate any longer any
interference with the use of its property. There are two options:
each of you may leave the building or the RCMP will remove
*Earlier in the fall, the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse had
spoken to some three thousand students. "We loved it. It was very
inspiring. He lectured on the Great No, the negation, the Great
Refusal; the logic of his position was, resist! fight!"
94 LONG WAY FROM HOME
you. The decision is yours." Sixty students leave voluntarily.
The 114 remaining decide to be arrested and are led out one by
one through a cordon of police who are holding back a crowd
that has by now gathered. The crowd is shouting, "Keep the
faith, baby!" and the occupiers are singing "Gimme that Old
Time Religion," and, over the public address system, which the
crazies from Coriolanus have installed on a roof, comes the
"Horst Wessel Song" and "The Party's Over," over and over
again. The 114 are charged with the felony of "mischief: the
unlawful and willful obstruction of the lawful use of private
property," which carries a penalty of up to seven years
imprisonment. "The experience was very humbling: you
challenge the university with what seems a very simple issue;
you just give it a little tap on the shoulder to see how it'll react
and wham! Imagine what it'd do over a big issue."
December 1968. Seven hundred students at an Arts teach-in
at the University of Alberta give a rousing ovation of approval
to a philosophy professor who urges them to organize an Arts
union to function independently of the administration and the
students' union. "Nobody is going to emancipate you. You've
got to emancipate yourselves." One hundred and fifty students
forthwith march over to the Sociology Department and
demand it answer their concerns about the "suppression of
democracy" in the department at the hands of a five-man
faculty "junta."
February 1969. More than one thousand students boycott
classes at the University of Regina in order to attend a teach-in
on the interrelated problems of students and the community.
Representatives from the labour unions, from faculty, CUS
and the NDP observe the meeting. One motion supports the
university's employees' union in its contract negotiations with
the board of governors, and another calls for the abolition of
tuition fees.
February-March 1969. Two politically active, Marxist
sociology professors at the University of Alberta, Don Whiteside
and Seth Fisher, are denied tenure. The department chairman
admits they are being dropped not as bad teachers or researchers
but as elements who are not "capable of working effectively as
a member of this department and of the university." Student
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 95
supporters translate this to mean that Fisher and Whiteside are
being penalized for their "minority views," and a campaign by
an SDU student defence committee starts up, charging the
university with authoritarianism, rigid conservatism, secrecy
and abuse of due process.
28 March 1969. Fifteen thousand demonstrators are outside
the gates of McGill University chanting, "McGill francais!
McGill aux Quebecois!" while police, helicopters, riot trucks
and cruisers seal them off from a handful of students within
singing "God Save the Queen." The demonstration is the
culmination of a first wave of protest against the Union
Nationale government's Bill 63 which proposes to institution-
alize English-language education "where there is a need for it."
Arrayed against the bill are the Mouvement pour l'Integration
Scolaire (which demands French unilingualism in education),
the Front de Liberation Populaire (an above-ground version of
the clandestine FLQ), the Comite Independance-Socialisme,
the Montreal Central Council of the Confederation of National
Trade Unions (CNTU), CEGEP students and a number of
McGill students who denounce the privileges of McGill.*
McGill's SDU exposes the university as an institution of
anglophone privilege guilty of helping sustain "more than two
hundred years of economic exploitation and national oppression"
in Quebec.
14
Spring 1969. At the convention of UGEQ, neither the
"left" tendency of political unionism nor the "right" tendency
of business unionism commands a clear majority of delegates.
UGEQ collapses and the left tendency becomes the "mouve-
ment syndicale politique" and heads for the streets.
Spring 1969. Karl Dietrich Wolff, of the German new
leftists' SDS, visits Canada. In his many interviews, from
Montreal to Vancouver, he reiterates the themes of the
international new left: that radicals must understand the
structures of their own society as continuous with imperialist
Th e 17 percent of the population of Quebec that is anglophone
occupies 42 percent of all university places, one-third of government
grants goes to English-language institutions of higher education and
less than 5 percent of McGill's population is francophone.
96 LONG WAY FROM HOME
structures ("Vietnam is not a mistake"), that people must be
mobilized to struggle at the place where they live and work, on
issues of local control, and that such struggle must be
decentralized because "that is the only way to keep in touch
with the spontaneity of the masses."
A week after Wolff's visit in Toronto, Clark Kerr comes to
speak to education administrators. The Toronto Student
Movement,* a group of Marxist-oriented students' union
activists at the University of Toronto, decides to stage a
contestation on the occasion of this visit: "Stop the spectacle!"
Kerr, after all, is not only the theorist of the " multiversity"; he is
an advisor on industrial relations to U.S. presidents and a
proponent of the "post-conflict" industrial society. Together
with students from Glendon College and York University,
TSM members stage a psychodrama in the hall where Kerr is
speaking.
In the middle of his speech we stage a silent replay of an
incident in Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement
days. Kerr had come out to address the students; Mario
Savio came forward to rebut him and was seized by
security personnel before he could speak. This is what we
replay in front of Kerr. In the middle of it we ourselves are
seized by security guards! Pandemonium breaks out.
Summer 1969. TSM splits, between Maoist "workerists"
and neo-Marxist "student powerists." The latter reconstitute
themselves as the New Left Caucus and commit themselves to
the development of a "mass revolutionary student movement"
responsive to the industrialization and proletarianization of the
student, the massive disaffection of youth from middle-class
values and life-style, and the international momentum to stop
the war in Vietnam. Inspired by the anti-Stalinist resistance in
socialist societies such as Czechoslovakia, the NLC rejects
centralism and party discipline. Inspired by the student-
worker alliances in France a year earlier, the NLC begins
*Not to be confused with the Maoist Canadian Student Movement
groups that were being organized on campuses, the TSM in fact "pre-
empted" the Maoists when it took that name for itself.
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 97
reading about the history of the Canadian working class, and
opens up again the pages of the Regina Manifesto.
August-September 1969. The thirty-third annual congress
of CUS meets in Port Arthur, Ontario. With only eight student
councils committed to CUS membership for the coming year,
the organization's finances are thin indeed and its credibility as
a national union stretched to the snapping point. Politically too,
CUS is shaky: there is no ideological consensus. It does
manage to pass a motion in opposition to Americanization of
Canadian universities (but rejects the idea of a quota system to
regulate the number of Americans teaching here); a resolution
denouncing the authoritarianism in the classroom that "pre-
pares the student to fit uncritically into the corporate capitalist
structure"; and a recommendation that campus bookstores,
libraries and food services be reorganized as co-ops.
But the organization is under attack right and left. From one
wing come charges that it is impossible to implement the
radical policies of CUS among the mass of "unconscious"
students. From another comes the charge that it is not policies
but structures that must be re-examined, that CUS's base must
be shifted from "elitist" students' councils to a voluntary,
radical, grass-roots membership. From yet another comes the
recommendation that CUS once again organize students
around "student" issues, like housing and employment. And,
finally, from the University of Waterloo, comes a proposal that
CUS affiliate with the International Workers of the World (a
radical syndicalist union effectively smashed in the Twenties
but carrying on with a handful of sympathizers). Because of the
irreconcilability of these critiques, the congress shuts down
with a third of its agenda unpresented. Delegates leave to fight
the critical referendum campaigns at Carleton University and
the University of Toronto.
At the University of Toronto the New Left Caucus engages
in classroom provocations, challenging the ideological direction
of some social science courses, and resisting the "professionali-
zation" of graduate studies (that is, the speed-up of Ph.D.
"production," rigidity of deadlines and the introduction of
comprehensives). Having developed a critique of "spectacular
radicalism" (by which radicals provide "entertainment" while
98 LONG WAY FROM HOME
the university proceeds with its business as usual) and counter-
proposals for disruption of and intervention into the "processes
of reproduction of the industrial forms of higher education,"*
the NLC decides to test these ideas at Fall Commencement
ceremonies at the University of Toronto. At University
College, authority figures at the high table address platitudes
about education to the serried ranks of passive students down
below the long tables. "You, the graduands of this estimable
university are about to take up the tasks to which the society of
free men calls you " In the midst of these perorations the
NLC begins to heckle, students pick it up, others begin to
counter-heckle, and the ceremonies conclude in confusion.
NLC repeats the intervention at Victoria College, but here the
administration knows they are coming and invites them to
speak. A member does so, and talks of sexual repression and
the female orgasm. NLC, as a result, grows rapidly: more than
a hundred people show up at its next meeting and leave,
wearing an NLC button, "Bring U of T to a Climax."
Fall 1969. Panicked, the University of Toronto administration
calls for a hardening of university disciplinary procedures and
warns that any further disruptions, in or out of classes, will
result in expulsion. At the same time, the disciplinary code is
being rewritten and the old Disciplinary Committee has been
replaced by a provisional committee on which students'
council representatives sit. These representatives happen also
to be NLC members; they show up at the next committee
meetings in red armbands and announce they are withdrawing.
Through them the NLC demands that the administration's
threats of expulsion be rescinded. Wanting neither an occupa-
*The idea was that the "spectacle" of university processes must be
ruptured and discredited if a climate for serious ideological struggle
with the institution is ever to take place. Students must be won from
the mesmerizing spectacle. "This was a vulgarization of the notion of
'contestation' but not quite as vulgar as the American idea of
confrontation. The American idea was to do something so terrible that
the agents of the state — the police — would be brought in; the
violence at the hands of the police that people would experience would
finally disabuse them of their liberal illusions about the nature of the
state."
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 99
tion of Simcoe Hall nor to call in the police as a result, the
administration relents and a liberal disciplinary code wins the
day.
At the University of Alberta a united front of SDU, SCM,
the Maoists and assorted free-lance leftist s decides to resist the
implementation of a Law and Order Committee charged with
revising the disciplinary code of the university. Taking the
position that the very existence of such a committee is
offensive, the front arrives at a public meeting of the committee
and, at a pregnant moment in the proceedings, unfurls onstage a
bedsheet painted with an enormous swastika. "People went
mad."
September 1969. Tuition fees go up yet again, and at the
University of Regina the Students' Representative Council
calls on all students to withhold their fees until further notice.
24 September 1969. Teachers and students in the Political
Science, Sociology and Anthropology (PSA) Department at
SFU go on strike. "The Focus of the strike," reads the
Statement of Strike Principles, "is not to stop others, outside
PSA, from going on with a bureaucratic education. Rather by
developing active and relevant learning and research, as
'counter-courses,' we can begin an alternative to Strand's
university."
15
 And indeed they do, in discussions on women's
liberation, communes, critical social science, sexuality, the
colonization of Canada, at the "Louis Riel U."
The strike culminates a process of rupture in the corporate-
liberal consensus of the university, a process that goes back to
the bust of the 114 and proceeds through administrative
interference in PSA when the department was placed, in July,
under "trusteeship" because of its alleged "administrative
inefficiency."
The fact is — and this is what brings the students out on strike
along with the faculty — the administration can no longer
tolerate the functioning, radical democracy of PSA. Responding
to the clamours of students and faculty for self-government and
participation, PSA for several months up to the imposition of
the trusteeship had instituted: faculty-elected committees and
chairman; a student plenum with elected committees parallel to
those of the faculty and with equal powers to initiate meetings
100 LONG WAY FROM HOME
and to veto policy (in fact, every decision of the one plenum had
to be ratified by the other); open files and records of meetings.*
"Parity came from a belief held by large numbers of students
and PSA faculty that, despite differences in knowledge and
experience, teaching and learning are best accomplished as a
two-way process requiring discussion and argument rather
than coercion and obedience."
16
 Here in PSA, students are
experiencing real collectivity, the give-and-take of intellectual
and political partnership, the excitement of explosive ideas
being nurtured and cultivated,**and the realization, in the
concretions of democratic committees and radical analysis in
the classroom and everyday involvement in the processes of
government, of their struggle as students.
The four demands of the strikers are: an end to the
trusteeship and the reinstatement of its elected chairman;
acceptance of the recommendations of the PSA tenure com-
mittees (faculty and student); reinstatement of four professors
whose contracts have not been renewed, contrary to the wishes
of the PSA committees; and fundamental recognition of PSA's
experimental practices in organization and educational pro-
cedures.
24 September-3 October 1969. The strike is on. Students
boycott classes and form picket lines outside the classrooms;
mass assemblies of hundreds meet every day to discuss the
execution of the strike; strikers sell T-shirts emblazoned with a
drawing of "The Little Man," Karl Marx, who gets his ass
kicked at "Seven Flavour University," and propaganda is
produced and distributed in town.
People want to control how they work, when they work,
*When the trusteeship was imposed, PSA was also at the point of
involving secretarial staff in departmental discussions and policy
decisions.
**"We brought in Marcuse and the students brought him flowers and a
big kiss, we brought in Ernest Mandel, and D.F. Fleming who'd
written the first revisionist history of American foreign policy. He
came up from Tennessee in his 1941 Chevrolet. It wasn't an easy
thing, you know, to get the hippies, with their dope and spouting
revolution, together with an eminent old man."
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 101
the conditions in which they work — not just the wage-
packet for which they work. Students too are no longer
willing to be bought off with a degree-packet . The y want to
control how they work, when they work, the conditions in
which they work. And the administrators and the boards
of governors, the same as the owners and managers,
oppose it. .. . This is your struggle too.
3 October 1969. The administration of SFU suspends eight
of the striking faculty, relieves them of all teaching and
committee duties, withdraws their voting privileges, and moves
to obtain an injunction against the strikers. The non-striking
(minority) PSA faculty elect a new chairman and adopt a new
constitution for the department, eliminating all student parity
arrangements. The strike has been decisively extinguished.
23 October 1969. The students of the University of Toronto
vote in a referendum to withdraw from CUS. Its financial base
shattered, CUS dissolves.
The post-mortems are replete with recrimination. The
national office failed to act on its own resolutions, they say,
neglecting follow-up work on the resolution of support for the
Vietnamese NLF, for instance. Harassed by right and left, it
drained out its precious energy in referendum battles rather
than fulfilling its policies from campus to campus. While the
union was rhetorically anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist
(especially during the term of the second-to-last president, Pete
Warrian), calling on student unionists to become a "national
liberation front" for Canada in solidarity with other national
liberation struggles, the majority of rank-and-file members
manifestly were not. "The Canadian student in his or her broad
general context did not want the revolution. They went to
university to get an education and a job. In three years, in
dropping in on CUS seminars and congresses once or twice,
you don't necessarily come out an anti-imperialist revolutionary."
The revolution is not something that is accomplished by fiat
after a conference of "heavies." It is painstakingly cultivated at
the base, at the "indigenous" level of the campus, program by
program, action by action, until the mass of students "organically"
confronts authority with the will to stop the machine.
102 LONG WAY FROM HOME
CUS turned up its nose at the student issues of travel, ex-
changes, discounts, bus fares, all those things every
human being has at least some passing need for. At the
same time they were romantic and adventurist. Typical
meetings were euphoric with delegates passing motions to
smash the bourgeoisie or whatever, radical measures that
would require socialism tomorrow to implement. But the
leadership didn't have to go back to the individual campus
to explain such policies and fight for them.
They particularly did not have to go back to the "regions," to
Brandon, Calgary, Wolfville, Port Arthur, beyond the support
system of the national office (located in Ottawa), beyond the
heady abstractions of anti-capitalist rhetoric to the concrete
details of a particular situation in a locale where specifics of
class and ethnicity and region militated against the adoption
holus-bolus of CUS policy. "Delegates knew all the answers
when they were sitting at the conventions, listening to the
arguments back and forth. But that didn't mean they could
defend at home on their own their vote for victory for the
NLF."
Still there is much mourning at the demise of CUS. Gone the
one forum where students could communicate as a national
body and experience the solidarity of resistance expressed en
masse. Enter the fragmentation of the collective refusal. "The
forces of repressive reaction have won a major battle."
29 October 1969. Thirty thousand people march in the
streets of Montreal against Bill 63. In spite of this, in spite of a
strike in half the post-elementary schools in Montreal, in spite
of the protest of delegates to the general councils of the QFL
and the CNTU, in spite of the "total social and political
effervescence" these protests signal, the bill is passed.
"Students cannot make a socialist revolution. Students cannot
even establish a red base on campus without considerable
support from the surrounding population. . . . The role of the
student movement in Europe has been primarily as a catalyst.
Its effect has been by example. Its tactics call to mind the early
militancy of the working class. Its cultural concerns find a
response in the crushed conditions of life and work of members
BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE 103
of the new working class. Where social contradictions are
acute the student movement can act as a spark." So wrote the
New Left Caucus in Toronto in 1969. So it wrote, still hopeful,
still purposeful, still mindful of its assignment. And even when
the social tensions are not "acute" enough to shoot off sparks,
there is still this for the student movement to do: "To grow, to
expose, to contest. In some cases even to inspire." For, just as
the activists themselves had been inspired by the revolutions
and liberations that had preceded them, who was to say that
they in turn would not inspire some wave of students yet to
come? Battles may have been lost in 1969 but the war was still
theirs to win.
PART III
COUNTER-
CULTURE
I
BACK TO THE GARDEN
Between October 1967 and May 1968 the Georgia Straight,
underground newspaper in Vancouver, printed the following
items: interviews with Mick Jagger ("Do you feel different
from other people in any way?"), Jimi Hendrix and Eric
Burdon; news about the provincial government's probe into
narcotics use, about the biggest bust in the city's history (fifteen
drug squads versus fifty denizens of "hippie haunts" and "skid-
road drug hangouts"), and about the bust of seventeen
"loiterers" at the courthouse fountain; "Imaginary Space"
columns by poet Gerry Gilbert, and columns by socialist
alderman Harry Rankin — for example, "The Tenant as
Nigger"; articles about the June War in the Middle East, about
the "unified life" by Mishra, and "God's Secret Agent .005"
by Timothy Leary; and an obituary for Martin Luther King.
First there was the music. The great waves and rolling of it,
smashing to smithereens the decorous cadences of the life of a
middle-class teen-aged girl, her drudgery over textbooks, the
constant supervision of her life, calf-length skirts, and blouses
buttoned up to her neck, no jeans allowed! sit straight, knees
together, smile, use deodorant, shave your legs, watch your
language young lady! the benumbing fear of bad boys, blood
and going too far; nothing else was ever going to happen: being
a nice girl, a good girl, doing her duty, forever and ever plain,
shy and afraid just like this; and then came the music, circa
1958.
One o'clock two o'clock three o'clock rock rock rock, the
saxophone shouts woo wah woo wah; the throaty catch and
quiver in the baritone of Buddy Holly's voice breaks your
heart, pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue he sings over a
thrumming drum roll and electric guitar that, twenty years
later, is still unbearably erotic; " I feel like I could die," aching
and yearning with the straining melancholy of the harmonies of
the Everly Brothers, thump, thump, thump, the risk and thrill
107
108 LONG WAY FROM HOME
of daydreams of falling in love with these boys who were not
nice, boys with slick, thick pompadours and tight pants and
black leather jackets and accents from the wrong side of the
tracks. Elvis straddles the microphone and grinds his hips, take
me, take me, and all of this is pale-faced romance compared to
the roller coaster rock 'n' roll of Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
It was the music of rhythm and blues, the pain and the
humiliation of the Mississippi dirt farm merged with the sexual
arrogance, the outrageousness, the shout of independence from
the city ghetto. But with the mass production of the phonograph,
the phonograph record, the transistor radio and the jukebox, it
was consumed en masse. And everywhere. It meant get up
there and dance! Shake and roll and jump and slide and kick,
stroke and clutch and swoon, in a ritualized pre-sexual play at
the beach, in creaky ballrooms and community halls that had
just been emptied of their bingo games, in waxy gymnasiums
and in the rumpus room where, oh boy, you necked in the dark
corners. It was intensely communal, bodies packed to the four
walls, and exclusive of grown-ups. And in its defiance of class
and racial conventions it was, this eruption of rock 'n' roll in the
schools of the Fifties, the first sign of the appetite of the
emergent declasse for the material of the life of the forgotten
and the oppressed.
29 December 1963: the CJCA Radio 93 Fabulous Forty
Survey listed songs by Bobby Curtola, Molly Bee, Roy
Orbison, the Singing Nun and Bobby Rydell in the Top Five.
So much, by 1963, for rock 'n' roll. But the generation was in
university now, or would be in another year or two, and its
concerns had matured past those of the lovelorn, acned punk
snarling at his parents. For the first time, one had an
intellectual life and, through the news of the civil rights
movements in the United States, a quickening of political
interest. And here one's life intersected again with music.
Baez, our lady of the ministrations; Angelina, the sky's on
fire and with it her voice, its timbres shaking her body as she
stood up for all of us and addressed public men and their deeds
and informed them they had miscalculated; for here she was,
and all of us in ranks behind her, to show they would have to
march over our bodies if they would advance to the war. She
enspirited our virtue; how could we fail her?
BACK TO THE GARDEN 109
With his plain, rhetorical guitar, Donovan evoked freedom
fighters and the seas of blood and bones in which they
wallowed, the universal soldier and the sacrifice of his body,
and more tenderly, the lover surprised by his love, the hash
smokers on sunny Goodge Street and that recurring male
archetype that was finally to estrange women, the ramblin' boy,
collar up to the wind, thumb out on the highway. Babe, I gotta
be free but, babe, don't you ever forget me. And the war drags
on.
Ian and Sylvia: the lady in the velvet dress from the manse in
Southern Ontario and her consort, the dude in a cow-roper's
jacket from the ranch in Alberta. It was passion that mated
them and passion that drove them back and forth across the
country, spinning their songs — our songs — of the lay of this
land. It was splendid when people around the world sang "Four
Strong Winds": we knew the sensation of those winds.
Folk music, handed down from one voice to another,
embellished by each personality that took up the song,
replenished by the new singer-songwriters, re-created by
whatever instrument or skill lay at hand, was a protest against
commercialism, mass culture and the cynical relations of the
marketplace. In its recitation of disasters, calamities, deaths
and burials, it would not let us forget the catastrophes of the
weak and the exploited. In its naming of towns and valleys and
the heroes of the folk, it rescued our collective past and our
landscape from anonymity. In its anecdotes of the workplace
and in its celebration of poor people's tenacity and their coming
together, from fragmentation and loneliness, for one more
family reunion, it reminded us that in community there could be
goodness. Folk music was the wailing wall at which we made
atonement for the historical culpability of our class and our
race.
1965: the "folkie" Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar at
the Newport Folk Festival, the Byrds electrified "Mr. Tam-
bourine Man" (Dylan's acoustic ballad), the Grateful Dead
and Big Brother and the Holding Company were formed in
California and Buffalo Springfield — rockers all — sang, I
think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound, everybody
look what's goin' down. Another intersection: rock 'n' roll
takes up the modes of contestation.
110 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Tough guys, born in Chicago, lean up against the peeling
wall of a storefront and pick their teeth: Paul Butterfield and his
blues band. The violence of the city, dead friends splayed in the
street, the rules for survival ("Shake your money maker" and
"Get a gun") are matched by the aggressiveness of the
amplified harmonica, the ricochets of the drums, the guitar
licks that are like a punch to the side of the head. This is blues
shoved through a tunnel of wire.
In the songs of the Rolling Stones is the apotheosis of the
male ego in its resentful solitariness, its bloody-minded
sexuality, its disposable commitments and its clamorous
demands for satisfaction. But in their picking up where Chuck
Berry had left off, in smashing the limits to what a rock 'n' roll
band could muster in power and propulsion, all else was
disregarded as we danced exultantly to their anthems of
aggrandizement.
"The rock'n' roll that came out of Liverpool wasn't telling us
to organize; it was telling us, twist and shout!" But then came
Revolver and where were the loveable moptops in the songs of
lonely people, all the speakers without an audience, all the dead
without mourners? With George Harrison's admonishment
that you don't "hang a sign" on him and in John Lennon's
droning seducements to surrender to the shining void, the
Beatles had become the great wizards, conjuring up the yellow
submarine in which we could cruise in ease and plenitude
below the worldly waves of disturbance.
About Bob Dylan. With him, many went to the limits of their
speech and their emotions. In his acceptance of the chaos of
language and being that was roaring at the boundaries of "logic
and proportion," in his apocalyptic vision of a world depleted
of order, habit and convention,* in his proposition of the
ascendancy of personality over society, he claimed for subjec-
tivity a power and authority counterpoised with those of the
"real" world.
On our own and homeless, street-wise and street-used, invis-
ible, our secrets stolen long ago, oh yes, we knew how it feels to
*"As far as I'm concerned," he once said, "I don't consider myself
outside of anything, I just consider myself not around."
1
BACK TO THE GARDEN 111
be a rolling stone, foreclosed on our psychic debts, stuck in the
ditch of the killing ground of Highway 61, chilled to the bone in
the rain of Juarez; yes, this is all true, this is as it is. It was late
afternoon, I was drying dishes, and from the radio came a song,
a song by Bob Dylan, and I stood transfixed, hand with plate
poised mid-air, as the light went out of the room and, yes, I said,
the war, the naked, the dead and the dying, the lies and the
treachery and the filth heaping up in the streets around my
room, yes, we are targets of the riot squad and ambulances of
Desolation Row, we are the rearranged faces and assumed
names of Desolaton Row. Yes, we accept this grotesque and
suffering self these songs make us an offering of. And all the rest
of my life I will know I had this hour.
In its celebration of the self over institutions, its adventures
along irrational routes to freedom, its release of repressed
behaviour even at the cost of disrupting social codes and
arrangements, its resolute rejection of prettiness, niceness,
good taste and subtlety, rock was thoroughly and viscerally
anti-bourgeois. "Erotic politicians, that's what we are," said
Jim Morrison, "we're interested in anything about revolt,
disorder, chaos, and activity that appears to have no meaning."
2
You can take your middle class and shove it.
As much as it was an anti-social phenomenon, it was also, in
its best moments, an attempt to regroup into community. It was
the music that drew young people in their masses into the halls
and stadiums and fields, there to take note of each other and to
share in dancing, embracing and getting stoned. It was music
that played to their little circles in the parks, their parties in
their hippie pads, their fairs and festivals and carnivals. And it
was music that provided the anthems, the chants and the shouts
("Give me an F! Give me a U!" et cetera) of many of their
political assemblies. To this day there isn't one of us who
cannot hear "C'mon People Get Together" or "Mr. Tambourine
Man" or "With a Little Help from My Friends" without
reliving in perfect clarity the moment when the song first sank
into our consciousness, and we are there again, with the friends
and comrades with whom we first broke bread.
112 LONG WAY FROM HOME
From its very beginnings, rock 'n' roll was inextricably
associated with sex. As adolescents we used the music and the
dance to circumvent the strictures on sexual expression. In our
twenties, we used them to elaborate our sexuality. For in the
Sixties men and women had become historically new sexual
partners (the contraceptive pill and the explosion of student
populations meant that for the first time ever women were in
some control of their destiny) and the new ideological climate
of liberalism generated what was reasonably termed a sexual
revolution.
Taboos against pre-marital sex were devastated and the
institution of marriage subverted every time young people
made love outside the relations of property. Taboos were
broken against sexual display and the erotic deployment of the
body. "The young are trying to eroticize the world around
them, to make it into an organic or whole experience,"
3
 as
indeed they were, with their pleasures of textures of skin and
velvet, of the self-expressive dance, of sensual contact through
embrace, of sensual smells and tastes.
If there were an ideology to this "revolution," it was this: if
personal freedoms and self-determination of the personality
are good things, then, inasmuch as sexuality is inextricable
from the personality, a person has the inalienable right to
sexual self-expression and self-creation. Furthermore: a person's
sexuality belongs, not to society and its marriage-brokers, but
to that person.
In their devaluation of monogamy and their refutation of the
sexual double standard (by which male sexual anarchy was
tolerated, even encouraged, and female sexuality confined to
marriage), these new values opened a space in social behaviour
in which women could act independently of the hierarchical
and dominant-submissive relations of the patriarchal family.
"We believed that the traditional practice of taking one lover
for life was ridiculous, that sex was as nice and necessary as
breathing fresh air, that bodies are beautiful and that a woman
should be able to be sexually aggressive and orgasmic and not
be put down for it." It was as an extension of this celebration of
the beauty and worth of everyone's sexuality that the jubilant
dancing and so much of the rock music, its alternately
BACK TO THE GARDEN 113
mesmeric and convulsive rhythms and its lyrical and elaborately
symbolic and straightforwardly erotic verse, were performed.
However, it was the women's liberation movement of some
years later that would expose the operations of much of the
sexual revolution for what they were: fraudulent. Double
standards prevailed in the vocabulary of sexual put-down,
responsibility was evaded in the rhetoric of non-possessiveness,
and the insistence on the personal construction of sexuality
foreshadowed the propaganda that would take the legitimate
demands of people for self-determination and hand them back
as pornography.
Again, it was the women's liberation movement that would
fully make the connections between this false consciousness of
sexual liberation and the content of much of the counterculture's
music. It was a primordial feminism, I suppose, that made
women self-protectively blank out the words to "Under My
Thumb" or "American Woman" or "So Long Marianne," or,
failing that, to pretend that we were men. Anything to keep on
dancing.
If love making was the sensual concomitant of music, dope was
its spiritual accompaniment. A group of friends smoking grass
together while the Beatles on the record-player sang "Lucy in
the Sky with Diamonds" was, arguably, the archetypical
counterculture moment. If rock 'n' roll was the propaganda of
resistance to bourgeois culture, getting stoned was its exercise.
When Dr. Timothy Leary was dismissed from Harvard
University in 1963 for administering the hallucinogenic LSD-
25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) to students, he went on the road
as a kind of circuit preacher, sermonizing on the miracles of
"acid," in particular, and of the consciousness-altering drugs in
general. Through these drugs, he said, the modern person could
replicate the visionary experiences of the ancients and in this
way release the ages-old wisdom of oneness with God (or with
the Godhead or the ground-of-being or Nature), a wisdom
disparaged and despoiled by monocular, one-dimensional and
atomized Western civilization.
Naturally, bourgeois society and its custodians would be
afraid of these visions and would seek to inhibit, if not prohibit
114 LONG WAY FROM HOME
them. (Leary himself was arrested numerous times and
prosecuted.) For the nature of the experience was the shutting
down of rational, logical and mechanistic modes of thought, the
abandoning of ego-awareness and the loss of delusion regarding
the seriousness and portent of the everyday "games" of life,
from love affairs to education to politics. The shutting down, in
other words, of the very mental processes required by our
civilization for its perpetuation. In its frantic attempts to stop
these defections from its territory, bourgeois society would
distortedly characterize the altered consciousness as "psy-
chotic," would penalize its practitioners and ridicule its
pretensions; but, Leary said, these attempts were the hysterical
rearguard actions of a disintegrating world order that was
doomed by the wretched excess of its own violence, materialism
and cerebration.
A Canadian writer, Robert Hunter, in noting that the
experience of altered consciousness breaks the mind and the
imagination out of the narrow confines of "Aristotelian logic,
Christian dualism and the concept of length,"
4
 perceived in this
new mode of consciousness the means by which we may avoid
the world-wide destruction that the "old," aggressive, fear-
ridden and ignorant consciousness is surely visiting upon us. In
seeing the interrelatedness of all life and behaviour — no act is
without consequence and effect — the new or "ecological"
consciousness "confronts the penultimate question of how man
must order his existence in relation to his planet. It sees over the
mountain-sized garbage heap and treasure pile of human history
and begins to perceive the world again, its view no longer
walled in by what has been wrought in the last few thousand
years."
5
 The new consciousness must prepare to do battle with
the old for the life of the planet.
For all these reasons, the act of getting stoned was to be
performed with a solemnity and a ceremony appropriate to the
gravity of its implications. Ideally, in the presence of a guide
who had already undertaken "trips," the subject of the
experience would arrange for sensuous and tranquillizing
surroundings, devotional objects of contemplation, agreeable
music, simple refreshments, and texts that might be consulted
for clues to the meaning of the astonishing sensations, visions
and intuitions provoked by the drug.
BACK TO THE GARDEN 115
Such careful preparations were particularly important for
the ingestion of the hallucinogens, LSD, mescaline, peyote.*
Marijuana and hashish could be smoked more playfully. In
point of fact, it was difficult to get high on smoke and not fall
into hilarity. But even here there were rituals o f conduct friends
would assemble in a circle on the floor, a reverent hush would
descend as the bag of dope was opened and the joints rolled in
Zig-Zag or fruit-flavoured papers and passed around as an
offering to everyone present (it was considered bad taste to
"hog" the joint). Candles and incense were lit, a strobe light
turned on, the music turned up (Bob Dylan, the Moody Blues,
Iron Butterfly, the Doors) and everyone lay back to savour
private and idiosyncratic perceptions and sensations or to
share an unverbalized moment of oneness with a friend. (It was
not acceptable to talk too much or to power-trip on anyone.) It
was a ritual of fellowship and concord, all the more piquant for
the shared risk in practising this form of civil disobedience, the
use of an illegal drug. "He gave me two very tired joints of some
kind of grass and said, 'Here, try this.' It was your uproarious
grass experience, laughing 'til you beat yourself. It was
incredible dope. It flattened you out until you were like a piece
of paper sitting in a chair. It was amazing dope."
While for many young people in the drug culture the
pretensions of the psychedelic**gurus held true in their
experience, in others they were caricatured. The vocabulary of
liberation and human potential, in the mouths of the fatuous
*While it was possible to have a "bad trip" on LSD — horrifying
hallucinations and grotesque sensations — the negativity was considered
inherent, not in the drug, but in the subject. The hallucinogens were
drugs of ecstasy, marvel and purification unlike, say, the ampheta-
mines, which were drugs of dread and pollution. A "speed freak"
described her condition this way: "My mind operated like a spider
web connected to freeways and overpasses, upside down newspapers,
dead cats, twisted elevators, people with three feet and hollow
tomatoes." {Georgia Straight, February 1968)
**From a letter from a friend: "The term 'psychedelic' was coined in
Saskatchewan where Dr. Abram Hoffer was pioneering research in
the therapeutic uses of LSD. Ah ha! The U.S. counterculture was a
CCF branch plant!"
116 LONG WAY FROM HOME
and exploitative, became a justification for "doing my thing" to
the exclusion of any consideration of the needs and rights of
those affected by the action. Even Alan Watts, a scholar of Zen
Buddhism and popularizer of the religious import of the
psychedelic experience, cautioned that the existential posture
of "anything goes" does not necessarily translate well to a
social posture; in which case it is merely hooliganism and
cynical self-interest.
In emphasizing the need of Westerners to "get in touch" with
their deepest selves, to become aware and sensitive and
communicative as "authentic" beings, the ideology of the
stoned high evaded the question of the social genesis of
alienation and anomie and became, in its later manifestations
in therapies and encounter group philosophies, a containment
of social conflict. For collective political action against the
agents of oppression, it substituted elaborate ruminations of the
self. The solipsism inherent in this insistence on the primacy of
subjectivity emerges in the failure to see where the self ends and
other orders of being begin, in confusing physical and meta-
physical categories: "I once had a perception on acid, when I
was really high, that when I died the universe ended."
6
The busting of friends and associates would send waves of
paranoia through the community, an omnipresent and nagging
anxiety that knotted the stomach and corroded the brain as
people imagined that they were being followed by plainclothes-
men in their daily meanderings; that their telephone was tapped
and their mail surreptitiously examined; that their new friends
were undercover narcs and their old ones unreliable under
pressure; that no matter how elaborately concealed was the
stash of dope, the police would find it. This paranoia was a form
of culture shock as the children of the middle class confronted
the unthinkable: they would go to jail. By this singular act of
smoking or swallowing a substance deemed offensive by
authorities from whom in any case the "heads" had withdrawn
assent, they, with stereos in their apartments and peace in their
hearts, had become criminal.*
*By the provisions of the Narcotics Control Act of Canada, the penalty
for simple possession of marijuana was $1,000 or six months or both;
BACK TO THE GARDEN 117
Their homes were no longer inviolable as police came
crashing in through the door, real tough, throwing their weight
around, their big hands on your shoulders spinning you around
to face against the wall, "You'd better tell us where your dope
is, kid, we know you're holding," rifling through drawers and
shelves, "Ah ha, what does this mean, this poem here, yeah
you, this poster here, looks pretty obscene to me." They came
crashing into a coffee-house and shut it down and busted
everybody inside, unplugging all the band's equipment, "Put
that fuckin' guitar down or I'll bust it over your head," parading
an undercover narc with a paper bag on his head and holes cut
out for eyes, "Okay, pick 'em out, the ones you scored from" —
and just plucked these kids out one by one and into the paddy
wagon. A guy is driving down Main Street, minding his own
business, stops at a light, when whack! two sledgehammers
come through the windshield and two hands around his throat
— that was the routine, grab 'em by the throat before they can
swallow whatever they're holding under their tongue — and
they drag him out the windshield, slam him up against the car,
shove his head back, and pry open his mouth with a flashlight.
Nothing. "We'll get you next time," and take off, leaving him
bleeding from his mouth beside the ruin of his car.
Consistent with the movement's critique of the repressiveness
of government and industrial bureaucracies was its refusal to
work in those milieux; consistent with its desire for a non-
alienated community was its desire for meaningful work. Once
they had chosen the work they would do, movement people
worked devilishly hard: teaching in free schools, publishing
from underground, operating a food co-op, making and selling
handicrafts, manning a movement office, even peddling dope.
Or take this one: working on the land.
"Drop out. Start your own country." Gluttony and greed,
forecasts of the holocaust and horrid catastrophes, unendurable
for conviction upon indictment, prison for seven years; for trafficking,
up to life imprisonment. LSD was not a restricted drug until 1968 at
which point the penalty for possession and trafficking was imprison-
ment and ranged, depending on the seriousness of the case, between
eighteen months and ten years.
118 LONC WAY FROM HOME
cacophony, odours, insult in the city. Leave. Retreat into the
country and "learn the berries, the nuts, the fruit, the small
animals and plants. Learn water."
7
 Slow down, take a deep
breath, listen to the silence and begin the purge of the
accumulated garbage of industrial/technological urban life
clogging the nerveways of your being. Buy a little piece of land,
it doesn't have to be grand, just a few acres of wood and water,
join in self-supporting, self-sustaining community with others
and in respectful equipoise with the spirits of the land, and get
real, take responsibility for your own survival, for your food
and water and heat and clothing. Pay back to earth what you
owe.
To the West Kootenays they came. From Vancouver,
Calgary, down east, California, especially California, they
came to this paradise valley, green mountains, smell of cedar,
sun shafts through the feathery foliage, sound of cold, clean
water spilling down rock beds. They came in their twos, fours
and sixes to settle where Doukhobors and Quakers and gold
miners had already carved out little farms and villages. They
came to Crescent Valley, New Denver and Salmo, Slocan,
Riondel and Winlaw.* For $3,000 they could buy 150 to 200
acres, an abandoned farm with a clearing, a ramshackle cabin
and chicken house, a creek.
They dug in. Scrounged boards and tools and fixed up the
cabin, borrowed a broken-down tractor and dull old plough and
ploughed up a whole field for a garden (ah, and then the
laborious weeks of weeding), hauled water from the creek and
bought a cow. In winter they hauled one-hundred-pound bags
of rice, flour and lentils up the slope from the road on sleds, and
one morning, when they woke up to twenty degrees below zero,
they discovered they must have not jus t a stove but a heater too.
And the truck broke down. In the spring, pockets empty, the
men went to work, at the sawmill, with the Department of
Highways, tree planting, driving the school bus; and it was up
to women and children to turn this acreage of sod and cedar into
a farm. The family farm.
*Between 1966 and 1971 the population of Slocan Valley increased by
420 to 2,861. It had been declining steadily since 1956.
8
BACK TO THE GARDEN 119
These new farmers were not pioneers. They were taking their
place alongside settlers of an earlier immigration, alongside an
established society. Their mutual relations were ambivalent.
On the one hand some contacts were very friendly and
supportive. At one commune, Doukhobor neighbours "took us
to heart," brought over a plough and an old cook-stove and
freely gave advice about gardening and animal husbandry.
"Their own kids weren't interested in Doukhoborism but here
we were, middle-class ex-professionals from California, putting
the garden in in the nude, looking for alternatives to materialism
and possessive relationships, and working very hard."
Initially skeptical, neighbours watched the greenhorns gradu-
ally transform abandoned and ruined farms into settlements
again, prop up the buildings, clear out the junk, put in a lawn,
fruit trees, berry bushes and flower beds, cut hay and milk goats
and harvest honey. There were children again in the valley and
talk again of schools and libraries and a community centre.
"We'd been here a year when my neighbour up the road came
down and said, 'I've got to take my hat off to you.' "
On the other hand there were other neighbours with whom
there was little or no spiritual or political affinity. As far as the
communards were concerned, they had moved into paradise
and paradise it would remain. But for their neighbours, the
Kootenays simply happened to be where they lived and made a
living. From the perspective of the older inhabitants, who were
these kids, so recently privileged in their cities, their jobs, their
schools and now self-righteously chopping firewood and
growing organic tomatoes, to tell them they should not want
their money and their share of the goods of the twentieth
century?
Who were these Americans to tell a Canadian what the good
life was? If it weren't crazy Doukhobors and Japanese aliens, it
was American hippie crazies taking over the valley, high on
drugs and living together without regard for cleanliness or the
diseases they could spread or for marriage and raising kids with
discipline, without regard for the feelings of others — these
hippies swimming nude for all the world to see, inviting their
friends to set up camp on other people's property and growing
marijuana plants, brazenly, like it was just like another crop.
120 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Who were they to lecture us, they who knew how to get the
government to give them grants and then, when the grants ran
out, to give them unemployment insurance? Insurance we paid
for by our weeks and months in the pulp mill, eleven months
working, two weeks holiday, so they could, months on end, lie
by the river talking with God. They got $24,000 for the
Vallican community hall. We built ours with our own labour,
our own pool of money and little bits of board — $24,000 and
they never got further than the foundation.
It was really arrogant of us, I guess, to come here to a
logging economy and say, "You guys can't log because it's
beautiful and I don't want to look at your clear-cuts. I
don't want any clear-cutting behind my land where my
water is." To tell them we didn't want to look at their clear-
cuts when this is how they've been making their living for
longer than we've been here, well, that's arrogance.
There were other miscalculations. They stripped the sod
right off the ground, and in the hardpan of clay beneath, without
a thought of applying manure, they tried to grow a garden. They
got the cow in August and got rid of her in March. They
couldn't take it: two people without close neighbours tied down
to milking, twice a day, every day. The chickens didn't work
out very well either. They hated killing them and then would kill
the ones still laying. At one commune the garden was planted
while consulting a book and the bugs got it all anyway. When
they should have been weeding, they were meditating.
The whole communal thing of course was a disaster. In a
culture that represents 6 percent of the world's population
and consumes two-thirds of the world's wealth, the young
people are bound to be spoiled rotten. Growing up, they
never had to wash a dish. They didn't know the first thing
about work and they didn't know how to put it all together.
They weren't project oriented, they had no linear skills.
They couldn't add, subtract, multiply or divide and they
couldn't drive a nail in straight.
Being close to the land, in harmony with it, being free of the
garbage of the city. The woman in the house, literally barefoot
BACK TO THE GARDEN 121
and pregnant (they practised astrological birth control), kneading
bread dough, canning the garden produce, preparing meals for
however many mouths were around that day to feed ("Basically
the work I did was eaten — nothing to show for it"), taking care
of the babies, washing diapers on a scrub board, sewing and
mending under a kerosene lamp ("Electricity was a no-no and
of course it would have been 'unnatural' to go to town to the
laundromat"). The man was outside with his friends, building a
shed, a root cellar, cutting wood with a chainsaw ("Nobody
said a chainsaw was unnatural"), learning about tools and
lumber, foundations and insulation, roofing and finishing ("Hi s
job was always more important than mine"). There was almost
no outside wage work for women. The man would work at the
mill, take the truck and go. She was left in the house, stuck.
Winters were the worst Isolated! Snowbound with no electricity,
no telephone. She would trudge uphill through the snow, a baby
on her back, another following, wailing, in her tracks, to visit
her nearest neighbour-woman.*
To the extent that the people of the back-to-the-land
movement failed to overcome the sexual divison of labour (and
the attendant disproportions of status, personal authority and
social power), they failed to establish a genuinely "new
community." What they tended to construct instead was a
nostalgic throwback to the social organization of the frontier,
where pre-industrialized society was speciously secured in the
servitude of women.
Notwithstanding the groups down on the farm, the counterculture
was an urban affair. It was in the cities that hippies congregated
to live in communal houses, work at odd jobs, deal dope, hustle
gigs and just hang out; they would hit the highway to get to
another city and there join precisely the same hippie society
they had left behind. From one end of the country to the other,
these were their own public places: in Vancouver, Kitsilano
Th e situation of women was rather better at the commune-farms
where labouring jobs were rotated and women had a chance to learn
carpentry and mechanics and were freed for days at a time fro m child
care.
122 LONG WAY FROM HOME
district and Gastown; in Calgary, Riley Park; in Edmonton,
Middle Earth coffee-house; in Saskatoon, the Ritz and the
Senator hotels; in Winnipeg, the Experiment head shop and
655 Broadway (a house where dope could be purchased — it
had cachet: it was busted weekly); in Toronto, Yorkville
district; and in Montreal, Mountain and Crescent streets and
the notorious Swiss Hut tavern (the FLQ liked it too). These
were all adaptations, to some degree, of San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury district, the quintessential hippie village of
North America. In 1967 the "Summer of Love" was proclaimed
from San Francisco, and from that date the continent was
crawling with trekkers.
A house in Kitsilano, a few blocks from the beach. A job for a
few weeks, waitressing, driving a delivery truck, and then
welfare.* Get up late and go down to the beach. Meet
somebody. Bring them home for dinner, barley stews, cold
hamburgers and out again, up and down the avenue or over to
English Bay, up and down the beach, rapping, offering tokes,
listening in on someone with a guitar. A party back at the house.
Dark, smoky rooms, music from the record-player, lying on
your back, thinking, "Far out, far fucking out." Crashing right
there and next day back to the beach.
Hanging out . A t the Robson Street Library, at the courthouse,
Stanley Park, the corner of Fourth and Yew. Just sitting there,
on steps and sidewalks, slouching, watching to see if anybody
you knew would go by. Fourth Avenue: meandering in and out
of the Psychedelic Shop, Positively Love Street record store,
Horizon bookstore, Rags and Riches used clothing, Phase 4
coffee shop, a snooker parlour. "All that people around Fourth
want is to have a lot of warm loving going on... . We're pretty
tight. Everybody is just trying to work out an okay life."
9
*"The only thing that got us through that nauseating experience of
going to the welfare office for our cheques was the reminder that we
didn't have to be there. Like, we could go back to university any time
we felt like it or write home for money. But for the mothers with their
kids — the place was screaming with kids — it was awful. Waiting,
waiting in line-ups only to be told, sorry, we don't have your cheque,
come back tomorrow. Back on the bus for them, another precious
dollar and maybe tomorrow still no cheque."
BACK TO THE GARDEN 123
With a little bit of money, there was coffee and folk music at
the Bistro, black walls and candles in Chianti bottles, light
shows at the Retinal Circus and rock bands, folk music at the
River Queen. Down in Gastown, near the waterfront, there
were "freak" bars, the Gastown Inn, the Dominion, the
Alcazar, comfortable places in which to drink and rub shoulders
with old winos, to deal and to score. "Dealers walked among
the tables like street vendors: Hash anyone? Acid, grass,
MDA?"
The Easter be-ins at Stanley Park brought the tribes out in
their Sunday best, streaming out of Kitsilano in flowers and
beads, bearing balloons and sticks of incense, to congregate on
the grass in little circles of friends, drumming and chanting and
singing, handing out to each other the yellow daffodils that had
been blooming gloriously in their beds. Of course there was
much dope. It was here that many out-of-town dealers made
their connections — and there were cops. But when the cops
moved in on someone with a joint, the freaks surrounded the
smoker and the pressure of their presence, utterly non-violent,
made the cops back off.
Given that in that summer of 1967 many businesses refused
to serve hippies and the media were predicting the disintegration
of Kitsilano into a "psychedelic slum" and an alderman
recommended that the "Communist" hippies be deported
holus-bolus to a district more easily policed,
10
 it fell upon the
countercultural community to take care of its own. The IWW
dispensed free clothing; the Radha Krishna Temple, free food;
the Georgia Straight and Yellow Journal, survival information.
And Cool-Aid provided a place to crash, but especially help to
get through a "bad trip." Kids came in in various stages of
freaking-out, laid their sleeping bags on the floor and through
the long night moaned and thrashed, their hand held, a soft
voice talking them through and down from the trip, while
phones rang and the kid in the next sleeping bag had his
knapsack ripped off and someone else, starving, fed herself
with peanut butter and white bread from the kitchen. Talking,
talking, what did you do today? What's your mother's middle
name? What's your favourite band? No psychoanalysing, just
anything to keep the kid from walking out the door and in front
of a bus.
124 LONG WAY FROM HOME
When kids ran into a bad drug trip they used to be taken to
the Vancouver General Hospital and if they started to act
up on bad acid they'd be arrested for creating a disturbance.
They'd end up in Riverview Mental Hospital for the rest
of their lives. There were kids with hepatitis going
untreated. There were kids that were suffering from
malnutrition and pneumonia and the existing agencies
would treat them as criminals or as runaways and
wouldn't give them a breathing space. That's what Cool-
Aid was all about, to create a breathing space between the
kids and their families and the authorities and help them
get it sorted out and stay alive.
There were ninety-two raids on Cool-Aid in a year and
a half. I'd get woken up at two in the morning as the lawyer
and chairman of the board to go down because there were
two paddy wagons, police dogs, cops with shotguns,
looking for dope dealers and runaway kids. I'd see a
policeman with his gun drawn and ready to kick in the door
and I'd say, "Excuse me, officer, this is a door and it has a
doorknob. It's a new invention and if you turn it like this,
it'll open real nice."
1967: the Summer of Love in Yorkville, Toronto. On the
face of it, why not? Yorkville Avenue and its cross streets were
close to the heart of the city and yet were still the avenues of a
neighbourhood. Funky old houses, big trees, the requisite
head shops, sidewalk cafes, clubs, the Riverboat, the Penny
Farthing, the best of the bands, the Paupers, Kensington
Market, the milieu of artists, craftspeople, poets, film-makers,
theatre people. And Toronto, although it was not a beautiful
city, was a cosmopolitan city: it had a large, politically alert
student population, an astonishing ethnic mix, large parks,
islands a short boat ride away and nearby, every summer, the
Mariposa Folk Festival, one of the largest, tastiest, happiest of
its kind.* That May there was a love-in at Queen's Park,
languorous crowds meeting under the sweet greenness of the
Th e 1967 line-up of performers included Tom Rush, the Staple
Singers, Leonard Cohen, Murray McLaughlin, Buffy Sainte-Marie,
Ritchie Havens and Joni Mitchell.
11
BACK TO THE GARDEN 125
newly leaved trees, in long skirts and denims and hand-painted
rubber boots, carrying enormous paper flowers and kaleido-
scopes, there to play music for each other and join in large
dancing circles around the flute players, to admire young men
with earrings and a rose behind their ear and, in a soft suede
jacket, Leonard Cohen, to whom one presented a sparkler,
sighing. (L. Cohen, poet and songster, lyricist of melancholic
marriages and sorrowful dissolutions and mocking self-disclosure,
whom we shrove.) Yes, flower power in Toronto too.
The summer of 1967 Yorkville was overrun. With hippies
and their admirers from across the continent and from the
middle-class suburbs of Toronto. And with tourists driving
along Yorkville, bumper to bumper, to have a gawking look.
Yorkville was in crisis: it needed shelter for the runaways, the
hitch-hikers, the vagabonds, the penniless street kids sleeping
on park benches and in the laundry rooms of apartment
buildings. It needed medical clinics, legal aid service and a
counselling centre, and it very badly needed the avenue closed
off to the noxious traffic.
As in Vancouver, it was the community itself that took care
of its own, with help from friends. Digger House, for instance,
at 117 Spadina, inspired by the Diggers of San Francisco who
had come to the aid of the homeless and hungry in the Haight
with a free clinic, free stores, free meals, free communes.
("Do not ask what free can do for you; ask what you can do for
free.")
The house had nothing — a few radios, a record-player, a
few chairs, twenty bunk beds, some food and clothing —
all donated. We had only two rules: no drugs, and you
couldn't stay longer than three months. Kids kind of
collapsed there. We had hundreds at first in a five-
bedroom house. One hundred kids. Then we set a limit
of only twenty in the house. They didn't have sleeping
bags or anything. They just came in to get warm. They'd
come to Yorkville in the summer and they hung around for
the dope and the groovy times and then they'd get sick.
Then the girls would get splashed by Satan's Choice or the
Vagabonds. And we had a hepatitis scare, infectious
hepatitis, passed on by dirty needles.
126 LONG WAY FROM HOME
And the kids thinking that they were so emancipated, so
free, and they had been spooked out of all the little towns
by this dream of all this love that was going to happen. This
youth world, a children's crusade all over again. I thought
all we needed to do was to be kind and be fair to these kids,
just for five minutes and it'll save their lives. But these
kids, you'd have to hold them in your arms for the rest of
their lives one way or another to do anything meaningful
for them. So I had to learn to stop thinking that I was going
to be able to help any of them and just do whatever it is
they wanted me to do. Bail, a meal, twenty dollars for an
an overdue hydro bill, simple things, and quit thinking that
by extending this warm, middle-class friendship that I was
going to be important to them.
Towards the end, the house was absolutely wrecked. I
don't know how many thousands of kids had been through
there. The plumbing didn't work, the basement was
flooded, the furnace wasn't working, sparks came out of
sockets, walls were coming down. And the city owned it.
We stopped paying our rent because we said they had to
make some repairs like the broken windows. In the end we
moved out because they refused to make the repairs, we
had no more money and the house was too dangerous for
kids to live in. By that time they were all heroin addicts.
The Summer of Love had faded into the bitterness of police
harassment, vagrancy charges, by-law charges, civic hostility
to hippie merchants, developers sniffing the air for investment
in "chic."* On the edge of Yorkville, on the other hand, was the
experimental educational commune, Rochdale College, big,
free, unstructured, nurturing Rochdale. Hungry, sick, stoned,
on the lam, of course the hippies were taken in. All that space.
The lounges, the corridors, the suites filled up with them. The
*An extensive campaign, led by Diggers, to have Yorkville Avenue
closed to traffic had involved hundreds of hippies in a mass sit-in,
protest marches, love-ins, arrests, head bashings and inconclusive
meetings with Mayor Dennison. "It just blows the mayor's mind
when we go in and sit on the edge of his desk," said David DePoe,
Digger folk hero. The mayor recovered his mind, however, and
steadfastly refused the hippies' demand.
BACK TO THE GARDEN 127
kitchen fed them all, losing $12,000 a month to do so, not to
mention the trays of eggs, say, they'd carry out with them to a
window just to see how crazily they splattered on the walk
below. Drugs. You could deal and smoke and shoot and
swallow in Rochdale with impunity. And with the street kids
came the speed merchants, bikers and thugs with killer dogs,
who sold them the dope, stole it back and sold it to them again.
Weekend hippies too, thousands of them, draining the life out
of the place with their nonchalance and frivolity, refusing
participation and responsibility, leeches, free-loaders on the
commitment of the residents ("This is a free school, we can't
throw them out"). Vandalism. Suites like garbage heaps; the
plumbing broken down; walls punched with gaping holes; in the
kitchen, dirty needles; in the bedroom, radios, televisions and
record-players stolen from other residents. Illiterates, their
education experience a devastation, hung around these others
— the ones playing chess, reading science fiction and dis-
cussing God (Wow! I can be a poet too, an artist, a lover, we're
all longhairs and freaks) — never knowing what hit them when
they failed at this too.
Manoeuvring judiciously around these catastrophes, one
could still have an exhilarating experience in Rochdale. Think
of it: in the middle of millions of utterly lonely and hungry urban
lives was a community — the door's open, come in —
conversations in the hallway, by the elevator doors, with
perfect strangers; on the edge of an intellectually cutthroat
society of scholars, this collaborative cross-pollination of
ideas, people seated cross-legged on the floor of the lounges,
here a Hesse seminar, there a mathematics seminar. Into and
out of this, coming potters, video artists, modern dancers,
actors. You could live your whole life here with your friends:
cooking for each other, putting dances and parties together,
showing movies, turning each other on, sharing books and
manuscripts and, while just outside the doors was disappro-
bation and ill will, holding each other in small circles of
solicitude and admiration.
The visionary communities of the "new consciousness" (urban
and rural communes, production co-ops, food co-ops, free
schools, drop-in centres, alternate media and artists' collectives
128 LONG WAY FROM HOME
and so on) were deeply concerned with ethics of organization
and behaviour. Against the ethical system of mainstream
society they proposed precisely opposed equivalents.
The violence of society would be countered with a pacifist
community in which all life was revered, relationships would
be non-coercive, habits peaceable (dope was a drug of serenity
and reconciliation; alcohol, a drug of turbulence and discor-
dance) and tools creative. "There is no excuse," said Leary,
"no explanation to God or the DNA code, which can justify the
existence of one distance-killing machine on this earth."
12
 In
place of competitiveness and hierarchy, the commune or co-op
attempted cooperation in work and in decision making and
egalitarianism — no one person was more "important" or
"useful" than another. And in this possibility of immersion in
the collective and in the principle of mutual service — you give
each other a hand, you make yourself available to the
neighbourhood — the group struck a blow against isolation and
atomization.
Where bourgeois society was organized around the insular
nuclear family and private property, the commune was tribal —
we are all each other's brothers and sisters — and owned
property collectively, whether this was land or a printing press
or pots and pans. By extension, commodity fetishism was
severely criticized and the massive waste of middle-class life-
styles deplored: the alternate community purchased only what
was needed for the dignity of the household and tolerated
people who, having opted for a marginal economics of
existence, panhandled, shoplifted and "crashed" for weeks on
end in a sleeping bag on the living room floor.
The moral and emotional strictures of "straight" society
perpetuated the repression of desire and delight and possessive-
ness towards one's friends an d mates, and deferred gratification
ad infinitum while one's life petered out in joyless labour and
obligation. Rejecting such circumspection of fulfillment, the
commune opened up a space where its members could exercise
trust in each other — you are safe here — and learn in
fellowship how to "let go" of neurotic needs, and indulge
heretofore censored ones, and where it was "okay" to do now
what the spirit moved you to do.
BACK TO THE GARDEN 129
If the mass culture of bourgeois society was characterized by
the uniformity of industrial and corporate processes, by
mechanized and linear modes of expression, then communal
culture would be idiosyncratic and experimental—here people
dressed in bizarre combinations of garments in a theatrical
projection of the complexity of identity; here men wore long
hair and passed time in languid introspection, and women wore
army jackets and rode motorcycles to the Gaspe; here everyone
dabbled in music and fingerpainting and writing poetry.
Despising the straitened and mechanical mind-set of logical,
sequential, dispassionate "linear" culture — the culture of the
printing press, of science and industrialization, of order and
exclusivity and singularity — the commune valued instead
electronic culture, the culture of TV and the stereo, valued
sensory experience enveloping the subject in a "shower of
perceptions."
In sum: communal culture is revolutionary because "the
commune is the life-form of the future."
13
In the best of them, the commune was a comfortable place,
modestly furnished with old, overstuffed furniture from Good-
will Stores and decorated with prints and psychedelic and
political posters — Che, the "Desiderata" and the pinwheel
lettering of a dance poster — and the funky things that people
collected. People sat down together at healthy meals they took
turns preparing in a kitchen they took turns keeping clean. They
had house meetings in which they aired their differences and in
which they shared their eclectic interests, anarchism, Buddhism,
yoga, Maoism, Taoism, massage therapy, native cultures,
exegeses of the texts of Bob Dylan, and where men wept and
women cursed. Members were monogamous or not, as they
saw fit, and no one could be intimidated into doing or being
something s/he didn't want to do or be.
In the worst of them, the place was a mess: the furniture was
in permanent disrepair; the walls were streaked and grimy and
covered with vulgar graffiti; and people's possessions were
constantly disappearing out the door with a "crasher." People
ate sporadically on junk food; the dishes piled up in foul
disorder in the sink; and a carton of milk in the fridge carried the
inscription, "This is Brian's. Fuck off." In corners, speed
130 LONG WAY FROM HOME
freaks gnawed on their fingers and upstairs in the bedrooms
women were being raped. All organization was considered a
form of militarism; on cleaning day the men went to the park,
the women washed the floors. In spite of it all, it was, as a
woman said of a place in Vancouver known as Rat Hotel,
home.
II
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GROW OLD
The last few years I've been advising everyone to
become an ecstatic saint. If you become an ecstatic
saint, you then become a social force The key to
the psychedelic movement, the key to what's going
on with the young people today, is individual freedom
. . . .Liberals and left-wing people, Marxists, are
opposed to this individual pursuit... . They're
attempting to wash out these seedific energies...
the hippies and the acid heads and the new flower
tribes are performing a classic function. . . . The
empire becomes affluent, urbanized, completely
hung-up in material things, and then the new under-
ground movements spring up. . . . They're all sub-
versive. They all preach a message of turn on, tune in,
drop out.
— Timothy Leary (from an interview with the
California underground paper Oracle, October 1967)
1
Subculture, the underground, flower tribes, counterculture,
subversion: dissident youth cohered not simply around a
shared life-style but around a shared consciousness of their
collective integrity and of their incipient seditiousness. As
"freaks," as celebrants together of music, drugs, sexuality and
the commune, they were by self-definition simultaneously
critics of the social order and prototypes of a new one. They
refused cooperation with a post-industrial social, economic and
political order that required their emotional and sexual repression,
their joyless toil, loveless competitiveness, and suicidal sub-
missiveness to fulfill grossly expansionist, colonialist and
materialist imperatives. These they refused not only on their
own behalf but in the name of planetary needs as well. In
the arrangements of the status quo lay the prefigurations of
mass death. In the freaks, in their fantasies of love and beauty,
131
132 LONG WAY FROM HOME
their eroticism, their mysticism, their playfulness, in their
flexibility of life-style, adaptability to environmental changes
and in the quickness of their reflexes as danger closed in, a new
human personality was taking shape, along with new definitions
of family, community, productivity and responsibility. "Open
up your senses, shed your old skin, prepare yourself for an
evolutionary leap out of sight."
2
This sense of a special, collective and aggrieved identity was
not gratuitous. As a group, youth endured high rates of
unemployment;* minimal wages and salaries in low-skilled
jobs; the forced migration from hometown s of poverty; enforced
dependence as students; the repressiveness of the narcotics
laws; and police harassment in their own communities. Unsur-
prisingly, they were smoulderingly resentful of the smug
paternalism of adults that would "keep them in their place."
Their demands for social services were similarly collective:
youth hostels, drop-in centres, crisis centres, free medical
clinics and labour education.
3
 They were not merely insubor-
dinate when they felt deeply offended by the procedures of
bourgeois society and looked to themselves and each other for
alternatives.
An American freak called the youth and its culture a
"colony," a territory of discrete "post-industrial" institutions,
technologies, and economic relations that was nevertheless
threatened with abduction into the "mother-country culture"
and that could save itself only with a movement of "national
liberation" from the "colonialists."
4
 In Canada, in an essay
that provoked much interest among politicos at least, two
academics in Toronto argued that inasmuch as youth "occupy
the critical workplaces," the army and the universities ("the
war machine and the idea factories"), and are exploited and
impoverished in them, youth is a "class in itself." Inasmuch as
youth are moving away from "individualist passivity" to
"collectivist activism," they are also becoming a conscious
*In 1968, 42.6 percent of the unemployed in Canada were in the
fourteen to twenty-four age group. Of this age group 20.4 percent were
unemployed.
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GROW OLD 133
"class-for-itself."* In its confrontation with the "administrative
imperialist system" a revolutionary youth is aborning.
5
And indeed there were elements of the counterculture who
saw themselves as potential revolutionaries. In their flight from
the "living death of bourgeois culture," they were undermining
the authority of that culture and its custodians. It was a
German political philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, who saw this
refusal to cooperate with the system as a whole as a "total"
rebellion, sexual, moral, intellectual and political, an all-
encompassing consciousness of "how much cruelty and stupidity
contribute every day to the reproduction of the system."
7
 But
the counterculture was also politically creative. Envisioning an
alternate society, one that tapped into the "great subculture"
that runs subversively through all of human history — from
"Paleo-Siberian Shamanism and Magdalenian cave-painting;
through megaliths and mysteries, astronomers, ritualists, al-
chemists and Albigensians; gnostics and vagantes"
8
 — the
freaks submitted themselves to the rites of the underground,
rites of deconditioning and purification, and emerged reborn,
as prototypes of a new civil order. (You can't take acid, they
said, and want to be a used-car salesman or to save money or to
join the army or to hide inside the nuclear family household
anymore.)
Self-conscious, the freaks were the new mutinous minority
group — diggers are niggers, said Abbie Hoffman — and as
such, the new recruits for the civil war that was raging in the
heartland of capitalism. The culture of the commune, of
ecstatic rituals, of economic marginality was nothing if not
trenchantly critical of capitalism and its social relations. And
in the counterculture one learned the life-style, the attitudes
and values, however embryonic, of the post-capitalist, post-
industrial, post-scarcity future. In the future, as in the counter-
culture, truth would proceed from the experiential. All beings
*The argument was valid for American youth only, however. Given the
economic underdevelopment of Canada, the voluntary character of
military service and the relatively low enrollment of youth in higher
education, "young Canadians do not share youth-specific work
experiences and youth in Canada is not a class formation."
6
134 LONG WAY FROM HOME
would be interrelated in harmony and balance. All would have
the right to their self-expression and self-definition, and all
would have the right of access to the material surplus generated
by the new technologies, that is, cybernation. ("Why should
you have to work to get food?" the freaks asked.) The attempt
to practise this incipient, liberated society was the "method-
ology of the revolutionary process."
9
 It prefigured classlessness
and communitarianism and intensified, to the point of intolerance,
that "contradiction between the productive process which has
provided the most highly advanced material base yet in the
history of the planet and the anachronistic system of relation-
ships used to operate that process."
10
"Mankind has so far been restricted in developing its
innovation and creative powers," remarked one hippie, "because
it was overwhelmed by toil. Now we are free to be as human as
we wish."
11
 This is the revolutionary project, of course, this
liberation of the human from the realm of material and
historical necessity, and revolutionary authorities have as-
cribed to cultural renovation a revolutionary role: the critique
of bourgeois ideologies, the mobilization of the energy of all the
dissident forces of society, and the acquisition of "civil
hegemony" preceding the actual revolutionary seizure of
political power.
Those who articulated the ideals and claims of the counter-
culture may well have believed that these were precisely the
tasks they had assigned themselves in their visionary community.
But until they also articulated how broad masses of people were
to get from the enslaving, bourgeois "here" to the liberating,
post-revolutionary "there," until they articulated a strategy of
change beyond the individualistic action of dropping out, the
counterculture would represent nothing more than a pleasurable
holding tank for social misfits in the bourgeoisie's backyard.*
*It was to this strategic gap between critique and revolutionary action
that the American yippies addressed themselves. Melding the life-
style freakiness of the counterculture with the political objectives of
the new left, they came up with "pop terrorism." "Risk, drama,
excitement and bullshit," as the notorious Abbie Hoffman put it.
Revolution being whatever you can get away with, yippies behaved
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GROW OLD 135
In the fall of 1969, at a rock festival in Toronto, unruly
members of the audience break through the line of security men
surrounding the performing area and rush the stage. The
frazzled MC tries to deal with them:
Hey cats and chicks, like this is a groovy scene, right, and
we don't want to blow it. You know you can smoke your
grass and those narcs up there on the roof aren't going to
bust you. We're going to take over because the revolution
is coming so we don't want to blow our scene. You're
gonna hafta get back from the stage, all right.
12
The joining of the rhetoric of revolutionary struggle with an
incident of transcendant triviality underscores the bathetic
moment of the counterculture deprived of politics. Or, rather,
of the counterculture's confusion of its spontaneous act and
gestures of riot, mayhem and festivity with political strategy.
Alas, "capitalism is still as powerful and resilient as ever. No
winter palaces have fallen. No long march is being conducted
across the northland of Canada."
13
 By the end of the decade it
was becoming clear that for every freak who had managed to
carve out a space of tranquillity and self-sufficiency and for
every yippie who, in the catharsis of theatrical skirmish,
equated purgation with the strategic advance of the "revolu-
tion," there were hundreds and hundreds of youths stranded in
the no-man's-land of a life-style that was gradually being
reabsorbed into the mainstream of capitalist enterprise and
exploitative, demoralizing and even violent relations. A highly
conscious counterculture was degenerating into an unconscious
subculture of reaction.
and gesticulated with theatrical excess and manipulated the media
shamelessly, thereby circumventing the discipline, frustration and
guilt on which they claimed new left organizations were based.
Although yippie! ism took hold in Canada only on the West Coast,
even there it was tempered by"Canadianisms": while the yippies of
the Vancouver Liberation Front, for instance, performed an exorcism
on the police station, and clashed with police on the beaches of
English Bay, others, like the "structure freaks" of the new left, called
for their own "city government" of hostels, coffee-houses and free
schools and demanded that straight society fund it
136 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Style substituted for substance, gossip for communication,
guilt-ridden accommodation of irresponsible behaviour for
tolerance and compassion, and self-abuse for cultural disaffection
— sleeplessness, bad teeth, malnutrition, constant colds,
pneumonia and, from dirty needles, hepatitis. The adventures
of the life of the self-assigned economic exile had become the
bleak monotony of the economically dead-ended: no money,
no education, no skills, no job opportunities. No home, no
privacy, no sanctuary. Out there on the street, trying to find
shelter in parks or lobbies, they were prey. Out there at the
music festival, which cost them ten bucks to get in, it was a
scene of rip-off prices at the food concessions, bad dope, litter
and debris, clogged toilets and indifferent musicians who
imitated the Rolling Stones because "that's where the money's
at."
Cashing in. In Canada, the struggle for an indigenous pop
music and business was one of the more desperate cultural
campaigns. Legislation governing Canadian content of the
airwaves did not exist prior to 1971. During the Sixties,
Canadian musicians and their agents were battling uphill
against the status quo of the commercial music scene. The Top
Forty stations were locked into the American playlists drawn
up on the basis of the songs that were being played in the U.S.,
deejays took their on-air styles from Los Angeles and London,
and the vast majority of record companies were branch-plant
operations involved mainly in distribution, not in the recruit-
ment of local talent. The critic sensitive to the situation was
lamentably rare, and a public de-Americanized enough to take
its own artists seriously did not exist in large enough numbers
to materially support those artists. Given this context, it is not
to be wondered at that for every Canadian artist who made it to
the charts of Billboard and Cashbox* (the publications of the
music industry), there were scores who never made it out of the
local coffee-house/high school gym/tavern circuit. Or who,
*Among these successes were Moe Koffman's "Swingin' Shepherd
Blues," the Guess Who's "Shakin' All Over," the Irish Rovers' "The
Unicorn," and Gordon Lightfoot's album, Sunday Concert.
14
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GROW OLD 137
having made it as far as the recording studio of a local
company, lost their shirts on studio rental costs, engineer's
overtime, instrument rentals and taxes. Since the group was not
Crosby, Stills and Nash, the advances it received were token.
15
To add insult to injury, the predominance of Toronto in the
Canadian music business (such as it was in the mid-Sixties)
was a powerfully inhibiting factor in the development of artists
who were either not prepared to work in Toronto or unable to
"crack" its tight society. (With the exception of the Guess
Who who stayed in Winnipeg, every nationally successful
Canadian act was based in Toronto in this period.) Toronto
had four recording studios, several rock clubs, a nationally
powerful Top Forty station (CHUM's playlist, which was
itself compiled from American lists, was distributed to radio
stations across the country and used as their programming
guide) and a nucleus of rock entrepreneurs (managers, booking
agents, promotors and producers), some of whom did very well
indeed on the fees they extracted from their hopeful clients.
(Jack Batten, a Toronto rock critic, described in 1968 one such
entrepreneur, a twenty-five-year-old who was clearing $50,000
a year for himself.)
16
 Sooner or later, any musician or group
who wanted more than local or regional play and attention
would think of going to Toronto. And over and over again their
stories are the same: "We had no connections and the people
inside the scene, who've known each other five or six years, had
no time for 'outsiders' and treated us very condescendingly."
"The competition was rough — every band from Halifax to
Vancouver was converging on Toronto." "There was a lot of
hype involved, double-faced, double-dealing ripoffs, and just
to get them to listen to our tapes was a major battle, they had
such preconceived ideas of what a Vancouver or Calgary band
would sound like. I think we scored three gigs in nine months."
And went home.
In November 1966, the CJCA Radio 93 Fab Forty list
showed, right under the Troggs, Gordon Lightfoot's "Spin
Spin" at number six. The situation for Canadian folk artists
was rather different from that of rock and pop groups. Folk
music, by definition, is rooted in particularity, in locales and
events and personalities which are historically specific and are
138 LONG WAY FROM HOME
named, and the singer-songwriter was valued precisely for the
individuality and personality s/he brought to the corpus of the
tradition. Thus it was not anomalous that an Ian and Sylvia, a
Lightfoot, a Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Humphrey and the Dump-
trucks, should sing of the foothills of Alberta, of the CPR, of the
plains buffalo, of the Cargill Grain Company and still have a
national, if not international, audience. But rock music was part of
a continental culture produced by and distributed from the
commercial and political centres of North America (that is, the
United States) which, because of their metropolitan and
corporate character, were deemed to be of universal significance
and value. Thus it was that the Canadian consumers experienced
no contradiction in interpreting musical references to Chicago,
San Francisco or Baton Rouge as references to their own
experience but were decidedly jarred by the Guess Who's
"Running Back to Saskatoon." Saskatoon? Never been there.
Bad dope:
I guess it would be the summer of '69 that we started doing
junk. We'd been doing MDA very intensely and then it ran
out and a friend said, junk's a nice way to come down, here
let me show you what junk is. And as soon as there was
junk in the community there was also heavy-duty cops.
And paranoia. The police would pick you up and take you
to a dark place for a little beating, then let the word out
you'd talked. We started packing guns.
Then all of a sudden people were actually going to jail
for years at a time and people were starting to rip each
other off. People were going crazy. Robbing drug stores,
knifing other people. Putting together bags of milk sugar
and selling it as heroin. It's very easy to avoid any kind of
clear thinking when you've been hitting for weeks and
weeks.
The streets did not belong to the hippies who wandered them:
they belonged to the merchants, to the head shop proprietors
who dealt in pricey trinkets; to the coffee-house owners who
extracted profit from labour at a minimal wage; to the
department store magnate who ran a boutique called Rip-Off
("Some jerk had picked up this piece of slang and thought it was
hip"); to the record and music storekeepers who were agents of
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GROW OLD 139
Transamerica (owners of fourteen music-publishing companies),
American Telephone and Telegraph (owners of Gibsons
Guitars) and CBS (owners of Columbia Records). As early as
May 1967, Georgia Straight reprinted a warning from the
Diggers of San Francisco: "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Dead?"
"Look — the psychedelic merchants are shit, low-grade
deliquescent turds. . . . They are the System, playing the
System's games in the System's way and they don't give a
flaccid fuck about you or any of their sheep." To which the
merchants replied: "Marxist bullshit."
By exploiting the contradiction between the subversive
content of the counterculture and its dissemination through the
mass media, capitalist commerce was able to pick up the
"messages" of that culture and recycle them back into the
community as merchandise. It was able to lure the most
inventive, the most engagingly outre of the culture's exponents,
with the irresistible rewards of money, status and power, and
hand them to the community as entertainment packages.
Sabotaged by their own anti-intellectualism and their own
disdain of the political "hype"of the left, the hippies could not
distinguish between their own legitimate aspirations for cul-
tural alternatives and capitalism's "repressive tolerance" of
those aspirations — its permissiveness, which sucked the vital
juices from countercultural ideas and left only the dry husks of
advertising copy. Initially innovators and creators of their own
culture, the hippies became passive consumers of it as it
became more and more organized outside their own collective
relations.
(Theatre entrepreneurs produce the rock musical Hair for
the middle class who want to go slumming tastefully and for
hippie bubble-gummers who want to "discover themselves," to
"become" what Hair "is."
17
 Warner Brothers presents Wood-
stock, the film, and issues a special booklet for the occasion, a
compendium of corporate psychedelic rhetoric, "surrounded
by the wave/of the future/aquarian choral of mood," and in the
trade papers announces that "WOODSTOCK IS BEAUTI-
FUL": ". . . first week, New York, $65,654, Los Angeles,
$40,400 ")
Outside such ubiquitous mercantilism there was seemingly
140 LONG WAY FROM HOME
only the handicraft economy of the hippies in their storefront
workshops, where they produced lovingly crafted goods that
would somehow be distributed by some means of transportation
to a market somewhere. The only clear idea was that the
production would not depend on crass profit.
There was a lot of talk about alternate structures but
people never really thought through the ramifications of
what they were saying. How could this alternative market
work? Where was its raw material going to come from?
People would go down and "buy" leather, but without any
sense of where that leather came from. So all these raw
materials would arrive — from where? From whoever was
making them. How would the goods be marketed? People
imagined we'll simply open a shop. But of course once you
got to opening a shop you had to pay rent and utilities.
Indeed they were quickly integrated into shopping
centres. The old part of town was rediscovered from
whatever past any given city had and this was a great place
to incorporate boutiques. None of these people imagined
how these renovations took place so that the old historical
part of town was suddenly reusable. The boutiques
became just retail shops and the indigenous production of
items disappeared. We certainly had no conception of
how production was organized in the society. And nobody,
outside of a few obscure Marxists, thought that was an
important thing to know.
As critical as the counterculture was of the obscenities of
bourgeois society, it was not so much an assault on social
structures as it was a retreat from them. The mythology of
returning, even metaphorically, to the land was essentially
nostalgic (and American),* recapitulating as it did that Western
romance of the settlers' last stand against the barbarians of the
government. In retreat, the counterculture evacuated socio-
*This point was made to me by George Melnyk, regionalist: Canada's
"frontiers" were settled, not by adventurers, but by the CPR, the
RNWMP and by families.
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GROW OLD 141
economic spaces that capitalism filled all too enterprisingly.
July 1970: Festival Express comes to Calgary. If Canada
has a Woodstock,* this is it: a Woodstock travelling by train to
Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary, and on board are the magical
ingredients: The Band, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Robert
Charlebois, Ian and Sylvia, Tom Rush. The mayor of Calgary
sets aside, for the incoming caravans of festival freaks, Prince's
Island in the middle of the Bow River and here they camp out—
tents, motorcycles, painted vans — build giant bonfires, feed
themselves and pass the dope around. Meanwhile, outside the
gates of the stadium, a bunch of new leftists and high school
students, incensed at the price of the tickets (nine dollars),
galled by the fact that one of the festival's promoters is from the
T. Eaton family and another from the Maclean-Hunter empire,
and demanding the reclamation of youth culture from the
entertainment conglomerates, tangle with police as they at-
tempt to crash their way through the gates. They are vigorously
repulsed.
This was the swan song of the counterculture: young people
shouting hoarsely at the police who stand between them and the
artifacts of their own imagination. No admittance without a
ticket. Behind the police lines, death at an early age. "You
couldn't just hand somebody a joint and everything would be
cool. They'd take the joint and shoot you anyway."**
"Choose your weapons," intoned the Diggers, "guns or
flowers. Flowers shoot rotten bullets, guns make lousy flower-
pots." To the freaks, politics was only about information, and
about the processing of data, about material reality and the
historical dimension of existence. Politicians, even revolution-
aries, shortchanged the revolutionary future by ignoring the
*In September 1969 some 400,000 people gathered at Wood-
stock, New York, for a rock festival. Contained by the police and
confined within fences, they tolerated rain, food shortages and
garbage and cohabited peacefully for several days, stoned. The media
congratulated them fulsomely and the Woodstock legend took off.
**Quoted in "The Sixties," CBC, producer Terry Hoffman. This is a
reference to the Altamont, California, tragedy in later 1969: at a
concert of the Rolling Stones, a young black man was killed by the
Stones' bodyguards, the Hell's Angels bikers.
142 LONG WAY FROM HOME
power of awareness and of the liberated consciousness, the
complex of reality, inner as well as outer, and by insisting this
didn't matter. It mattered very much said the freaks and the
yippies. It mattered that people be able to break out of the
cultural mould in which are the imprints of egoism, possessive-
ness, aggressiveness, neurosis. It mattered that they free
themselves of the hypnotic pull of the historical forms of being
in order to open a space within themselves in which the forms of
the future personality could take shape. Without such "mental
mutants"
18
 the revolutionary generation would simply repeat,
in the shabby garments of the poseur, variations on the culture
of death. One could see these death-dealers in the movement,
people hung up on control and personal power, on the
refinements of arguments and the formalities of organization;
Philistines who supposed that only in politics was action
humanized and not, say, in art or in friendship; incipient
fascists, bullies, who advanced their politics through intimi-
dation and the cult of personality; shrivelled people whose
desiccated passions were useless in the joyous projects of the
tribe.
For their part, the politicos criticized the acolytes of
psychedelicism for being concerned only with the salvation of
the self — as if the self were not a social as well as psychic
construct — and for trivializing the desperately serious and
collective struggle (it was collective or nothing at all) for
liberation of oppressed peoples. A statement like "Every man
has his 'thing' and Che was merely doing his thing — making
revolutions"
19
 filled them with contempt for such an ethic of
laissez-faire, as though the socio-historical mission of colonized
people against the institutions and machinery of imperialism
could be reduced to this scenario of a voluntary, playful,
personal decision to take up arms. The politics of the nervous
system, the politicos charged, assume that one is unfree by
choice. That unfreedom need not be confronted but only side-
stepped by the retreat into a subculture where the values of
freedom and fulfillment would be nurtured income other place
than right here: in the everyday society of pain and perplexity.
That the person who is "aware" is "one for whom the
revolution has already been won":
20
 go tell these things, go
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GROW OLD 143
explain yourselves, said the politicos, go to the Vietnamese and
tell them that the war raining death on their heads is but a
manifestation of bad consciousness and that they can win if
only they'd "get in touch" with the syncretic mysteries of inner
being.
Yes, the life-style of capitalism is frightful, th e rat race, the
gluttonous consumerism, the predatory nature of human
relations, the tensions and frustrations and hostilities; and, yes,
the search for ecstatic experience to escape from the pains of
the world is the profoundly grave "sigh of an aching heart." But
if this pain does not associate itself with history, with the
possibility of human society freeing itself in the long run, then it
can only express itself in pessimism, escapism and defeatism.
In such quietism lies the real threat of fascism. As Warren
Hinckle wrote of the hippies, when you drop out of the arduous
task of attempting to steer a difficult, unrewarding society,
"you leave the driving to the Hell's Angels."
21
 If the conscious-
ness, the awareness, of human potential is not manifested in the
community of all souls, then it abandons that community to
those who would appropriate it with deception and terror.
Yes, it is important to develop alternate structures of
community, welfare and production. Indeed, these are a
necessary condition for the construction of the new society:
these materialized visions of camaraderie and reconciliation.
But they are not sufficient in and of themselves to bring about
the post-capitalist millenium. Unless there is direct political
struggle with the state, its military and police agencies and its
technological apparatus, the counterculture is doomed merely
to coexist with these forces. Furthermore, with its anti-
intellectualism, its anti-materialism, its mistrust of the uses of
science and technology and its impracticable methodologies of
change (mysticism, tribalism, subsistence farming, primitive
hand production), the counterculture hasn't a hope in hell of
terminating the rule of the bourgeoisie. Only the culture of the
revolutionary process itself can do it — "the totality of ideas,
politics, philosophy, morality, styles, art, methodology and
codified experience"
22
 — in the communalization of struggle.
These were the disputes between the hippies and the
politicos. Except for the extremists of each type — the
144 LONG WAY FROM HOME
perfectly anti-social, hopelessly addle-brained acid head on the
one hand, the utterly ruthless, unscrupulously demagogic new
leftist on the other — the disputes were in fact fraternal.
For pothead or activist, the goals of all behaviour were that
the dignity and worthiness of the person be confirmed; that all
human relations be transacted with love, compassion and
tenderness; that, in the morality and process of democracy and
participation, powerlessness, meaninglessness and alienation
be overcome; and that the split between the person and society,
between personal and political values, be healed. Revolutionary
change must embrace the whole of human potential, must
speak to the reunification of all being in clarity of awareness
and responsibility of action, if it is not to beach its warriors on
the shoals of atrophy. Such an embrace is passionate, greedy
and brawny with love. "If we are serious about our desire to
build a movement, we must opt for the intellectual, emotional
and spiritual freedom now. We must taste it and want it and
become jealous for its survival."
23
In the coherence of countercultural life-styles with the social
criticism of the new left, in the proposals for a society where
people live without illusions and beyond the cliches of egoism,
where they live released into the liberation of meaningful work,
free activity and modesty of consumption, in the balance of
"being" and "acting," was the integration of the political and
psychic projects: "Zen Marxism," as one new leftist called it.
24
The flower grows in the earth fertilized by the fire of the gun.
If
Indian activist Kahn-Tineta Horn speaking at the University
of Alberta, 1969.
Photo: University of Alberta Archives
f
1%
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Rock Festival at Mosport.
Photos: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
Demonstration in support of Civil Rights movement, 1964.
Photo: Public Archives of Canada
i
fllilsiiiiiiili
Plflitpttfli
•iltili
"Get stoned, end marijuana prosecution."
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
• v^-IBSF'- v %
The kids are alright: rock festival, Edmonton, 1969
Photo: University of Alberta Archives
•- : ." : " ' . /:; -.;
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/n support of Che and revolution.
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
pi I
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Trudeau in the Sixties, the philosopher king, loved bv all
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
Amex: The American Expatriate in Canada, a voice of
resistence to the war in Vietnam, Toronto.
Photo: Laura Jones — Baldwin Gallery
• ' • - m
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Demonstrating outside the gates of McGill University,
Montreal, 1969.
Photo: Public Archives of Canada
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Everdale Free School, Toronto, 1969.
Photo: Laura Jones — Baldwin Gallery
Rock Festival at Mosport.
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
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Pro- a«£f anti-war demonstrators at the U.S. Consulate,
Toronto, 1965.
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
• : • : ( •;-,
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Yippie Abbie Hoffman addressing students, University of
Alberta.
Photo: University of Alberta Archives
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Street Festival in downtown Toronto.
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
nALL
Unrest on campuses across the country.
Photo: Laura Jones — Baldwin Gallery
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Wedding celebration, Toronto, 1969.
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
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Protesting the war in Vietnam, Liberal Convention, Ottawa,
1968.
Photo: John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
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John F. Phillips — Baldwin Gallery
PART IV
THE THIRD
WORLD WITHIN
I
WE HOLD THE ROCK
Leaning on the lectern, the better to defy her
listeners, she launched a flood of complaints in the
name of Indian people of Canada and a string of
demands that left the room momentarily stunned
and silent.
Canadian history books, especially the French
ones, have always depicted the Indian as an evil
savage, she said. The French have been raised with a
hatred of Indians.
And now, along comes this French-Canadian gentle-
man, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, brought up on the hate
literature of French-Canadian scholars, and he says
he wants to tear up our treaties because he feels like
it.
"Imagine his calling the new government Indian
program a 'White Paper!' "
She stood in the glare of the SUB [Students' Union
Building] theatre floodlights, in moccasins and buck-
skins, her black hair flowing over her shoulders, eyes
shooting spears at her audience.
Confronting a packed house of white university
students Thursday afternoon, Kahn-Tineta Horn, a
former Indian princess of Canada and a full-time
crusader for Indian rights, tried to shout the white
man down and out of the country.
"Why don't you all go back to where you came
from," she cried. "We were doing fine before you
came. We own this land; we're your landlords. And
the rent is due."
— Elaine Verbicky ("Kahn-Tineta Horn Verbally
Scalps Whites," Gateway, 19 September 1969)
When the revolutionary Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was
speaking in the Audubon Ballroom in New York, in February
147
148 LONG WAY FROM HOME
1965 — his greeting (to the brothers and sisters), "As-salaam'
alaykum," ringing in the air — a bullet hit him in the chest and
threw him backwards across the stage, where he died. In
August, in Watts, Los Angeles, crowds of blacks, glaring
insolently at the police, would not disperse from 103rd Street
but set it aflame and looted it — the whole district going up like
a brush fire — and stoned and stabbed white interlopers and
careened jubilantly through the streets and parks that were
theirs; when the National Guard moved in like the force of
occupation it was, jeeps, machine guns and bayonets reasserting
white supremacy, it seemed after these events that the pacifist
Christian vision of Martin Luther King and of the hundreds of
thousands of blacks and whites who had pressed their claims
for justice had been eclipsed by the violence of murderers and
the counter-violence of desperados.
In 1966 Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student
National (formerly Non-Violent) Coordinating Committee,
said he was working not for morality or love or non-violence but
for power, black power, the power to get Whitey off his back
and to build a black community of self-government.
1
 And the
Black Panther party,* bristling with guns, ammo belts and
black leather, demanded "an end to the robbery by the
capitalist of our Black Community," and, quoting the Bill of
Rights of the United States, asserted the right of "black
colonial subjects" to decide by plebiscite to throw off the
despotic government of whites.
2
 Clearly, as long as black
people continued to suffer debilitating poverty in the ghetto and
genocidal slaughter in the army in Vietnam, then voting-rights
bills and anti-poverty programs had not delivered on their
promise and the militancy of black communities would have to
be stepped up. In 1964 Malcolm X had warned that if the white
government didn't do its job, then the blacks would have no
choice but to defend themselves: "It's the ballot or the bullet."
By 1966 the Black Panthers were encouraging blacks to arm
themselves in self-defence. And in 1968, in a speech in
Oakland, with magnificent passion, the passion of the gospeller
*When it was formed in 1966 from the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization, it had two members: Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.
WE HOLD THE ROCK 149
and the guerrillero, Carmichael issued a declaration of war:
We must first develop an undying love for our people, our
people, our people. .. . If we do not do that, we will be
wiped out We are a beautiful race of people, we can do
anything we want to do, all we got to do is get up, get up, get
up and do it We are building a concept of peoplehood.
We do not care about honkies, but if in building that
concept of peoplehood, the honkies get in our way, they
got to go. There is no question about it, there is no question
about it. We are not concerned with their way of life, we
are concerned with our people. We want to give our people
the dignity and the humanity that we know as our people,
and if they get in our way, they gonna be offed. They gonna
be offed.
3
By this point, white activists had been drummed out of
SNCC, but from a jail cell in California, Eldridge Cleaver, who
was to become a Black Panther on his release, wrote in Soul on
Ice that there were elements of honky society with whom black
national liberationists could usefully make an alliance, youthful
elements who, like the blacks, were standing up to the
colonialist Man, were shucking the culture and values of the
"slave-catchers, slave owners, murderers, butchers, invaders,
oppressors," and identifying instead with the heroism of the
Third World, of Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung: "There
is in America today a generation of white youth that is truly
worthy of a black man's respect, and this is a rare event in the
foul annals of American history."
4
In many of his speeches, Stokely Carmichael made reference
not only to the "brothers and sisters" of the black communities
of Nova Scotia but to the colonized peoples of the native
Indian nations as well and to the genocide visited upon them by
the white man. A Canadian Metis activist, Howard Adams,
studying at the University of California in Berkeley, heard
Malcolm X speak and himself participated in the civil rights
struggles. Black Panthers visited Montreal and Halifax in 1968
and met with local militants. In this manner were the ideas and
purposes of the continental "national liberation" movements
cross-fertilized. The American blacks were very inspiring in
150 LONG WAY FROM HOME
their appeals to racial pride and bonding, in their furious
militancy and in their vision of an emancipating nationalism of
the racially oppressed. The native peoples of Canada looked to
their own lives as a place to begin the subversion of Whitey and
the reconstruction of their own community.*
To be "native" in Canada: in 1965, 75 percent of Indian and
Metis families live on $2,000 a year or less in conditions of
absolute deprivation (in parts of northern Saskatchewan the
average income is $500 per family). More than half live in three
rooms or less; less than 13 percent of households have running
water. The infant mortality rate is twice that of the white
population. Only 15.9 percent of employable natives are in the
work force and then mostly in seasonal low-skilled, low-paying
labour.
5
**Alcoholic, tubercular, malnourished, suicidal, they
live on the social periphery, on reservations whose administration
and revenue are controlled by the Department of Indian Affairs
and Northern Development or in urban ghettos. (In Manitoba,
for instance, half the province's eighty thousand Indians and
thirty thousand Metis would be living in Winnipeg by 1970.)
6
In the ghettos they subsist likewise impoverished, dependent
on welfare and bureaucratic caretakers, and are berated for
"lack of initiative" and parasitism.
To be a native in Canada is to be despised and defamed: it is
to be called a savage. At school it is to be sermonized in a
foreign language about the depravity and barbarism of one's
ancestors and the shame of one's people's history, never
learning, of course, that it was starving and terrorized people
who had signed the treaties. Never learning that it was the
outraged and fearless ones who had fought back, had taken on
the Canadian army and its guns and died a champion's death at
*Because of limitations of space, I have confined myself to an account
of the native people's movement and do not deal with the civil rights
movement among Canada's blacks. That movement included SUPA
activities in Halifax, an identification with the ideas of black power
among American blacks, and with the struggle of the Vietnamese,
contacts with the Americans and, climactically, the occupation of the
Computer Centre at Sir George Williams University in 1969,
resulting in the arrest and trial of some ninety occupiers.
**Farm work, logging, fishing and domestic service.
WE HOLD THE ROCK 151
the end of a rope. Nor did they learn about the pre-eminence of
women in the pre-colonial native society, for the strength and
power of women had been subdued by three hundred years of
rape and concubinage and by a political edict that stripped
women of the Indian nationality should they marry a man who
was not a Treaty Indian.
The government's own Hawthorn-Tremblay study, published
in 1966, found that fully 25 percent of the budget of the
Department of Indian Affairs went to welfare payments to the
reserves as against 10 percent for "economic development" on
them; and that the total expenditures of the department
averaged out at $530 per Treaty Indian per year as against the
federal government's expenditure of $740 on the average non-
Indian Canadian (not including provincial and municipal
spending on schools, health services, roads, et cetera).
7
 The
vast range of responsibilities of the department — reserve
management, education, revenue administration, relief, inheri-
tance, treaty obligations, welfare projects, enfranchisement—
made of it a "version of colonialism," according to the report,
"... a quasi-colonial government dealing with almost the entire
life of a culturally different people who were systematically
deprived of opportunities to influence government, a people
who were isolated on separate pockets of land and who were
subject to different laws."
8
Although Indians formed only 3 percent of the population,
they represented a third of the population in the jails and
training schools in the late Sixties.
9
 Like ghettoized peoples
everywhere (patronized by bureaucracy, manipulated by social
agencies, infantilized by the church, harassed by the police,
brutalized by poverty), when they strike back they strike each
other and themselves. Hence the alcoholism, the suicides, the
beatings, the abandonments, the petty theft and the random,
raging destruction and demolition of their own households and
neighbourhoods. It may be that there was something in the
"ethos" of native culture that historically inhibited the assimil-
ation of Indians into the values and behaviour of industrialism.
It may be that, as a result, "native Indians were left far
behind"
10
 by urbanized, industrialized, capitalist society and
condemned to death by slow degrees at the periphery of the
152 LONG WAY FROM HOME
New World. But surely this is true only up to the point of
consciousness: "Because I postponed my confrontation with
[the] white oppressor, I postponed decolonializing myself."
11
At the point of decolonizaton, the native "ethos" suddenly is
revealed as a repository of values not of a pre-industrial
backwater but of contemporary resistance.
Politics were always good for lots of discussion around the
table with my family. We were half-breeds and people
talked about Riel and Dumont like they were still alive or
had just left the country a couple of years ago. We talked
about the idea of a land settlement and "colonies" like the
half-breeds have in Alberta, and the Saskatchewan govern-
ment's removal of about fifteen hundred families to one
such colony where they were supposed to farm except it
was totally useless land and they were starving. They
couldn't go back north because they'd sold everything and
now they were so poor they couldn't even afford to move
across the road. From what I know now, I can see that
these people were relocated to make room for the uranium
mining.
A lot of the people were hard-core Communists, as were
the Ukrainian farmers in the area. They were outraged and
energetic people but they weren't bitter. They simply
wanted to understand what was happening to them. When
I moved to Alberta the only vehicle for analysing the
situation was with the Treaty Indians. Because they had
land, they had a political base, so I started to study the
history of the Indian people and hang out with them. I'd go
to the library and come home with everything there was on
Indian history. And that's how I learned about the wars,
the smallpox epidemics, the treaties. I wasn't so dumb that
I couldn't put two and two together. I started to read about
the history of Mexico and the Indians there, the revolutions,
the slavery, and I compared this with North America.
Without realizing it I was accepting the fact that I was
an Indian. This was a shock. We half-breeds spoke the
same language as they, but they had always been "the
people across the road" who never fought back. With us
half-breeds it's a matter of pride that you don't let people
WE HOLD THE ROCK 153
walk all over you. Nobody can tell us what to do. We
might envy the Indians for the free medical treatment they
got, the free this and free that, but my dad and uncles
would say, well, at least nobody can come along and tell us
what to do with our lives. We might be poor but we own
ourselves.
In February 1965, 111 Slavey Indian men from Hay Lake,
accompanied by a police escort, marched in total silence from
the Friendship Centre near the downtown railway tracks in
Edmonton to the provincial legislature building. They carried
placards — "Help," "We Want Work," "We're People First,
Not Just Indians" — up the flight of stairs to the rotunda of the
legislature; and there, still silent, frightened, shabby, they
waited while their chief and band councillors talked with
Premier E.C. Manning, telling him of the band's starvation,
their leaking roofs, their children schooled hundreds of miles
away. The premier said these were federal responsibilities.
12
That same year, 1965, a group of young native people, fed up
with the treatment they were getting in Edmonton hotels,
stores, laundromats, restaurants ("The Riviera wouldn't serve
you if you were Indian, and because the downtown hotels
wouldn't let us in, we were forced to stay in skid-road places"),
held meetings to discuss what to do about this. "We didn't have
a clue about how to go about protesting, about contacting
media or getting sympathy. But we were all excited and
everybody was talking at once, with all kinds of ideas. And
anger, especially the Treaty Indians. Out of this came a Human
Rights Committee with no tie to whites."
Summer 1968:
I was feeling really mean about this time and I'd been
doing a lot of reading about Indian history — and all set to
go out and save the Indian nation. That's why I agreed to a
$600-a-month job with the provincial government to go
out to Saddle Lake Reserve and do a survey about social
service needs. What I didn't realize at the time was that the
government knew there was a lot of unrest among the poor
and they were bringing in "community development" to
take care of it. But the communities had to ask for
154 LONG WAY FROM HOME
community development first and that's where we re-
searchers came in. Our job was to ask a lot of questions
and then come up with a report that said the people need
community development.
I lived in a trailer right on the reserve with one of the
other researchers, an Indian woman who was really
bright, a university student, but she was no bush Indian.
The third researcher was a white male activist from the
university. Since I was the only one who spoke Cree, I did
all the interpreting, and I was embarrassed all the time. I
mean / was one of the people the questionnaires were
aimed at and I knew how I'd feel about somebody walking
into my house asking me what I thought about being poor
and did I have running water. It was spy work for the
government. In the end we filled the questionnaires out
ourselves.
In 1968, with a living allowance from the Company of
Young Canadians and training from the National Film Board,
a native film crew was put together as a project of the NFB's
Challenge for Change program. The film-makers would put
their expertise at the disposal of poor people, such as Indians
on reservations. The crew went to Faust, Alberta, where there
were people waiting for something just like this.
CYC workers had been up north in the Metis and Indian
communities, living in shacks and sleeping on the floors and
couches: "The little shack was a mess and I thought to myself,
how the hell can these guys help, they're so skinny and small."
They held public meetings, the white residents all sitting in a
bunch and scowling, where they told the people just what their
rights were, how much welfare they were entitled to, how to get
a clothing order, how to organize a timber co-op. "The whites
in the town wanted to kick the CYC out but I stood up and said,
every time Indian people try to help themselves, you just look at
us like we're dogs; we're not dogs, we're people and I say these
guys should stay. I was letting it all out and talking so strong."
The CYC had their eye out for potential militants, would talk to
them in their homes: Why don't you work for us, we'll help you
do whatever it is you think should be done, we'll help but you
have to do it. "I liked that. I wanted to learn how to organize, all
WE HOLD THE ROCK 155
I knew how to do was work and take care of my family, so, yes, I
said, I'd hire on." The CYC workers brought government
people and social workers up to listen and see, they brought the
press, they fought for health care and housing and then, when
they heard about the native film crew , they said, why don't you
come to Faust?
The idea was to use the crew to film expose s of the conditions
of native life in the north country, show the dying babies, the
intrusion of the oil and gas companies into the bush, the
pollution, the diminishing wildlife.
We went out with the crew to Loon Lake, a Metis
settlement, and the people came out to see us and the next
thing I know is the guys on the crew are working slower
and slower, they were getting drunk, they didn't show up
where they were supposed to be shooting, they were in
Slave Lake where the town put them in a hotel and gave
them credit and took them on airplane rides — that was
their way of buying them off. Next thing I know they've
shipped back to Montreal and I was left all alone in the
community with one crew member, Willie Dunn, who
stayed behind.
CYC kept on organizing, set up a drop-in centre in High
Prairie and were joined by Tony Antoine from the Native
Alliance for Red Power (NARP) in Vancouver. "Tony used to
say, 'I advocate violence in order to wake my people up and
also to shake society up for the suffering we do,' and people
were afraid of him." They would get run off the highway, they
would be insulted and harassed, run into court for every little
infraction of the law, they were threatened and even beaten,
and then one day they were in the bar at Canyon Creek: "There
was eight of us and fifteen white s and they started in on us, a big
horrible fight, and when the police arrived they arrested two
people, Willie and Tony, and grabbed me too, three of them
grabbed me but I fought until they knocked me out and threw
me in the car."
The three spent the night in jail in Slave Lake and next
morning were marched straight to court; they were dirty and
dishevelled from the fight ("They wouldn't even allow me a
156 LONG WAY FROM HOME
comb so of course I looked like a criminal"), were refused a
phone call, refused a lawyer. "I was charged with assault,
obstruction and resisting arrest. I got myself out on bail but they
wouldn't allow me to post bail for Willie and Tony so they went
immediately to prison and I went straight down to the
university in Edmonton where I'd heard there was a group of
radicals."
January 1969: Rose Auger of the CYC appealed to the
students' council of the University of Alberta for help acquiring
funds to bail out Willie Dunn and Tony Antoine — the council
committed itself to a $100 donation and then held it back
"under further consideration" — and then, together with
Harold Cardinal, Indian Association president, and an anthro-
pology professor, joined the appeal with the broad issue of
"institutional racism" of the police and courts. Sponsored by
the Student Christian Movement and the Students for a
Democratic University, this appeal for a "native defence fund"
ultimately raised enough money from the Native Alliance for
Red Power, NFB employees and York University students to
spring Dunn and Antoine.
13
 "It was the students who said,
we're going to get you the best lawyer we've got. That was
Gordon Wright. He came up to Slave Lake, made everybody
look stupid and got us off completely."
Summer 1969: in a continuation of the research project
begun the summer before at the Saddle Lake Reserve, three
researchers travelled to southern Alberta, to the beet fields in
the Taber, Lethbridge and Picture Butte area where Indians
may find summer employment.
We drove out to the fields. It was appalling. Nobody
wanted to talk to us because they were too busy getting
their work done — they get paid for as many rows as they
hoe. It was only Indians working there. We checked some
things out; found that the farmer who'd hired these people
also runs the commissary and sold used cars. When a car
broke down, he'd charge to tow it into town. So whatever
money he was paying out in wages he got back. The
workers were usually broke by the end of the summer and
had to borrow money to get home.
WE HOLD THE ROCK 157
The work, done by children as well as adults, consisted of
weeding by hand the long rows of sugar beets growing in
irrigated fields, for which the wages were: three dollars an acre
for light weeding and seventeen to thirty-five dollars for
weeding and thinning. If the farmer believed the workers had
done an inadequate job, he docked three dollars an acre from
their pay, and docked more for accommodation if the family
were using the "home" he provided (often a converted granary
or chicken coop without plumbing or electricity, water or
refrigeration). Such workers were ineligible for unemployment
benefits.
14
 "I started to understand some things. I remembered
that my parents always owed money for groceries at the
Hudson's Bay Company shop and it was to the HBC that my
father sold his furs — he had no choice. I learned that this is
what is called a monopoly."
July 1969: the Department of Indian Affairs released a
"white paper," the main recommendation of which was the
termination of "special status" for Indians, based on the
argument that the treaties struck between the federal govern-
ment and the Indian people are an "anomaly" in civil relations.
Without the special status accorded the Indians by the treaties
("As long as the rivers run...") , the reserves become likewise
anomalous, the federal services redundant and the guarantees
of the treaties abrogated. "Should the main recommendations
.. . be implemented," a writer objected, "the reserves will be
lost, and the native people will be permanently pauperized, a
skid-row culture."
15
Native activists immediately responded to the affront of the
white paper by publicizing its offensive and gloomy implica-
tions: extermination through assimilation ("The only good
Indian is a non-Indian"), legal and moral irresponsibility of
government, and official blindness to social reality. They gave
notice too that Indians would resist any attempts to implement
the nefarious policies suggested by the white paper.
The supposed new policy is no different than the arbitrary
dictations from Ottawa to the Indians that have been
repeated down through our history. .. . In spite of all
government attempts to convince Indians to accept the
white paper, their efforts will fail, because Indians under-
158 LONG WAY FROM HOME
stand that the path outlined by the Department of Indian
Affairs leads directly to cultural genocide. We will not
walk this path.
16
November 1969: native Americans and Canadians occupied
Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. "We are a proud
people! We are Indians! Our Earth Mother awaits our voices.
We are Indians of All Tribes! We hold the rock!"
17
The unrest of the internal "third world" was abroad in the land.
As it developed in consciousness and experience, native
protest moved from apologies and supplications to rigorous
demands and counter-proposals to assimilation. The movement
for "red power" rejected the paternalism of the bureaucracy
and the social welfare agencies and insisted on the development
of community self-reliance. Aroused by the vehemence of the
advocates of black power in the United States, native militants
in Canada defiantly reaffirmed their Indian identity: a cultural
revival replaced hopelessness and self-disgust with self-confi-
dence and self-esteem. Paradoxically, this insistence on their
racial and cultural specificity provoked a spirit of "internation-
alism": against the Man of white imperialist North America all
the oppressed races and nations of the world were united in
resistance.
No different from the white movement activists who were
demanding a fundamental revision of the distribution of wealth
and authority, as capitalism expanded and generated ever more
sophisticated forms of surplus, the native militants refused both
relegation to the economic and political periphery and assimil-
ation into a niggardly status quo. The more they understood of
the relationship between racism and capitalism — in the under-
development of their communities, in their formation into an
urban "lumpen" subclass, in the myths of white superiority —
the more they accepted the imperative of a social and economic
revolution that would transform the whole of North American
society.
We need to liberate ourselves from the courts, ballot
boxes, school system, church and all the other agencies
that command us to stay in "our colonized place." This
WE HOLD THE ROCK 159
oppression of the native people is so deeply rooted in the
capitalist system that it cannot be completely eliminated
without eliminating capitalism itself .. . as the struggle
widens, social class features will gradually become more
prominent and the movement will turn into a class
struggle.
18
Granted that such analysis was arrived at by a very few, it
represented nevertheless the tip of a broad refusal in the "third
world" to accommodate itself any longer to white bourgeois
society.
This refusal, apparent readily enough to the state, prompted
strategies of containment and co-option — a process already
underway with the establishment of the CYC. Particularly
through the promotion of "community development," the
state's manipulation of the burgeoning political restlessness of
youth was extended into black and native protest groups. As it
turned out, community development was a mechanism by
which the potentially explosive frustration and impatience of
an increasingly self-conscious dispossessed community were
redirected into short-term goals, interfactional disputes and the
launching of careers in the civil service.
Item: The community development people, who were
almost always white, would present themselves to our
organization as resource people; they were very egotistical,
macho men who had a perfect way of working a crowd, like
an evangelist does, and the reaction of the Indian leaders
was we should be damn grateful that guys like that want to
work with us because we sure couldn't afford to hire them.
Without anyone realizing it, they'd take over. They had
all the analysis and the solutions and they did all the
talking, but they were careful to praise the Indian leaders
in front of us and, what do you know, our guys started
parroting them, as though all these radical, militant ideas
were their own. In the back of their minds, of course, they
knew that without the advisors backing them up and giving
them ideas they would lose their positions. What had
happened is that the community developers had made
themselves indispensable to the Indian leadership.
160 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Item: The grants started coming in and suddenly all these
really strong people, for whom we'd bent over backwards
to get free babysitting and so on so they could get involved
in the organization, got greedier than hell, started hiring
themselves and giving themselves big salaries and expense
accounts. S would always wear a black suit be-
cause, he said, our people associate the black suit with the
Indian agent and the priest: they associate it with power.
This is one of the things you learn from community
development training.
Item: The community meeting would be called to order,
the speakers would be introduced and they'd get up and
they'd talk. Everybody would clap and cheer. When the
discusson would start, everybody would have something
to say but there'd always be one or two people that would
be really together and really strong and really talking.
Those were the people that we'd discuss on the way home
from the meeting. "You watch those people because
they're going to cause trouble." One of the things we'd do
then was go up to Faust, say, announce there's money for
housing but the house would go to that guy or two who'd
spoken the longest and hardest and strongest. Of course
everybody else would then get mad at him, jealous,
resentful, and that's the end of his local base of support.
We didn't have to do anything else.
Further, in June 1969, a memorandum was submitted to the
cabinet of the federal government by the minister of health and
welfare and the secretary of state, advising of racial agitation in
Nova Scotia since the fall of 1968, the growing threat of civil
disorder, and the existence of "extremist elements" planning
disruption of the Canada Summer Games. Its recommendation
to cabinet was that the Black United Front of Nova Scotia,
which represented the "constructive and moderate elements
within the Black Community," be funded by a grant of up to
$100,000 over five years. Without such support, there was a
possibility that "black militants" might take over a discredited
leadership. With support, the BUF could hold the militants off.
"... given the climate of unrest in society, further consideration
[should] be given by the Cabinet Committee on Social Policy
WE HOLD THE ROCK 161
and Cultural Affairs to methods of intervention by the federal
government in matters of this nature."
The most trenchant refusal to cooperate, or collaborate, with
the "hidden hand" of the federal bureaucracy and to play the
part of the "professional Indian" was in the mobilization
around red power. In casting off illusions about the capacity of
the system to deliver redress of grievances and in going beyond
the "ethnic nationalism" of the Indian cultural revival,* red
power became a political formulation. However it began,
whether in the simple fraternity of the reserve or ghetto or in the
articulation of an ethic appropriate to the values of native
culture or in the desire for separation from white society, red
power was about power: the power of a nation/collective/
people to take back its rights to self-determination and the
power to keep them once won. "We are learning from others,"
wrote Harold Cardinal, "about the forces that can be assembled
in a democratic society to protect oppressed minorities."
19
Such an assembly would by necessity occur in the public arena
of Canadian society and not behind the closed doors of
negotiation between white bureaucrats and "professional
Indians."
In contrast to the concentration of authority within an
isolated leadership and its white consultants that was charac-
teristic of the "official" native pressure groups (the federations,
brotherhoods, councils and cultural centres), red power was in
the neighbourhood. In contrast to the professional elites whose
power rested not on a base of communal support but on their
privileges (salaries, offices, staff, expense accounts, media
attention, et cetera), awarded for good behaviour by the
government, red power contested the authority and legitimacy
of racist, bourgeois government. Red power rejected any kind
*In native customs, rituals, mythology, folklore and spirituality, many
young natives rediscovered the idea that the native peoples of North
America knew how to live in peace with the environment and that in
this idea was the renewal of the race:".. . the world we live in today,
the electronic, tribal, total systems, cybernetic society, is the real
manifestation of the Indian personality."
20
162 LONG WAY FROM HOME
of assimilation into the processes of white capitalist society and
proposed that in "Indian nationalism" itself were the content
and spirit of resistance to colonization and of the brave new
world beyond.
In this revolutionary hopefulness, the young proponents of
red power were very much like those of flower power: in
Indianness, as in hippieness, the violent, greedy and ego-
maniacal strategems of "straight" society would be confounded.
"Red power is the spirit to resist. Red power is love for our
people. Red power is now." In militant Indianness the
inexorable dissolution of the Nation into the ideological and
social hegemony of whiteness could be forestalled.
Between 1969 and 1970 red power had several moments in
which it declared itself. Thousands of Indians from the United
States as well as Canada converged on prairie reservations to
dance to the drum, smoke ritual tobacco, consult the shamans
and pray."It gives me enough strength to go on for another
year," said Willie Dunn, who was a songwriter as well as an
activist. "What's the use of writing songs if you think you're
going to die?"
21
 Indians in Quebec began their agitation around
land-claims settlements. Mohawks from the St. Regis reserve
near Cornwall, Ontario, staged a sit-in on the U.S.-Canada
border, demanding official accession to their treaty right to
unobstructed travel across the frontier. The Native Action
Committee in Saskatchewan ran a red power candidate in
Meadow Lake constituency in the 1968 federal election. And
in its newsletter the Vancouver-based Native Alliance for Red
Power published its demands: abolishment of the "Indian Act"
and the "destruction of the colonial office (Indian Affairs
Branch)"; an end to the collection of taxes from the Indian
people by "racist government"; a cessation of the harassment
of native people by the police and the courts; and compensation
for the land lost by Indian bands who had not signed treaties.
"We want the government to give foreign aid to the areas
comprising the Indian Nation. . . . We want to develop our
remaining resources in the interests of the redman, not in the
interests of the white corporate elite"; Red power is nowl
22
The implications of red power were that, alongside the
revolutionaries, rebels, protestors, dissidents and drop-outs of
WE HOLD THE ROCK 163
white society, the Indian youth were rejecting the apathy,
resignation and fatalism with which the preceding generation
had sought to defend itself from genocide. They were advancing
— spiritual and ideological guns blazing — to that political site
of the reconstruction of the race in democratic self-government
and humanist "nationalism." In some white radicals, they had
sincere comrades in this adventure.
It seemed that in the agitation and militancy of native youth
was the emergence of a credible force of social change that
would unsettle the affairs of white-dominated society in a ripple
effect of transformation: start disturbances at the periphery of
mainstream society and eventually the waves of seditious
energy would swamp the core of (white-held) power. It was not
possible that the demands of native radicals would be met
without profound dislocations of the status quo. If this were
true, it was not because of the Indians' numbers, because they
were a handful, nor because of their geographic concentration,
for they were scattered, but because the demands represented
the aspirations of a group of people strategically situated at the
points of expansion of corporate capitalism in Canada.*
I've never been romantic about the Indian struggle. The
fact is their call for self-determination matches my own
political feelings about decentralization and about people
having control of their own lives. It also matches what I
think is a world-wide struggle against the power of the
transnational corporations. I always felt that a good part of
the struggle in this country was to cut the tentacles of the
corporations which operate from the United States. In this
country that means taking on the resource industries. It's
exactly these industries that the Indian people face in
direct conflict. It's the mining and pulp and paper and oil
and gas companies they're going to have to deal with in
their struggle for community self-determination. I also
know the exploitation that they put the Indian people
through. So part of it was theoretical in the sense that this
*This analysis of the native peoples' strategic location in the continental
economy is a far cry from the SUPA-type analysis of native power as
the "power" of the dispossessed and alienated.
164 LONG WAY FROM HOME
is a way to cut the tentacles, the other part was the absolute
oppression that the Indian people were suffering at the
hands of the resource corporations and so it is a simple
struggle for justice.
Like the white radicals, many native activists had little faith
in the probability of the organized working class taking up the
revolutionary struggle. Not only were the workers completely
absorbed by the economist imperatives of the bureaucratized
unions, the white working class was as racist as the rest of white
society and unlikely to serve a campaign snipping away at the
supports of their privilege. But from the example of their
ancestors' belief that this land was meant for the sharing and
the benefit of all humankind upon it, and from the example of
the strategic alliances of other national liberation movements
with white radicals, the men and women of red power were
prepared to accept from youth, women's liberationists and the
nationalist workers of Quebec, comrades in a "new revolutionary
class."
23
 Wherever there were people "up against the Man,"
there too were the Indian dreams of people who own themselves.
Natives as well as blacks were reading the literature of black
power and the writings of the Black Panthers ("Cleaver's and
Malcolm X's books were like Bibles for us"), noting what they
shared of the blacks' colonized situation and suspecting that
somewhere in the vocabulary and visions of the black guerrillas
was a key to their own release: "How did they get their people
so strong?" So when Fred Hampton, twenty-one, chairman of
the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panthers, visited groups of
native militants in Saskatchewan and Alberta in November
1969, he was received with enormous respect, admiration and
sympathy. Fred Hampton, the man in the black leather jacket,
standing in the cold wind of a grey day. Fred Hampton who said
the Black Panthers had come together as "peacemakers" to
challenge the corrupt and atrocious power of the "sheriff" as
Jesse James and his brothers had challenged him in the dusty
streets of an earlier frontier. Fred Hampton, who had written
that "you can jail a revolutionary but you can't jail the
revolution; you can murder a liberator but you can't murder
liberation," was murdered in his bed at four o'clock in the
WE HOLD THE ROCK 165
morning, December 1969, by Illinois state attorney's police.*
With shotguns, pistols, automatic rifles and magnum shells,
they tore apart the apartment, the walls and the furniture, and
Hampton himself, with two shots in the head and one to the
heart. A photograph of the bedroom, taken after the removal of
the body, shows a hanger on a nail in the wall, a plain wooden
chair with an ashtray, wads of paper on the floor, and a blood-
soaked mattress: somebody lived here, somebody was sleeping
here.
Hampton died two weeks after his visit to Edmonton. For
many who had met him, shaken his hand, rapped with him, felt
his "warmth and legitimacy," his death cut off the last retreat
they had back into their illusions. Behind them was the
romance of reconciliation, ahead of them fear, and resolution.
*Hampton was the thirty-eighth member of the Black Panther party to
be killed by the police in 1969.
II
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN
Every woman should have the right to choose
whether or not she wants to bear a child. Every child
should have the right to know that he or she is
wanted. As long as these rights are denied, thousands
of women and children are condemned to death and
thousands more to misery. Death comes to women
through self-induced or "quack" abortions — in
Canada there are at least 2,000 such deaths each
year. Death comes to unwanted children as the
constantly increasing number of "battered children"
affirms. Evidence recently collected indicates that
unplanned pregnancies can precipitate long-lasting
mental breakdowns and since therapeutic abortions
are so hard to obtain, the misery of many a woman
will lead to this too. This leads to our demand that
abortion be removed from the Criminal Code; any
woman has the right to an abortion if she so desires.
— from the pamphlet "Abortion Is Our Right!"
distributed by the Vancouver Women's Caucus, 1970
It was an ordinary morning in the cafeterias of the campuses,
slats of sunshine coming through the windows onto our coffee
cups, onto the hands of our companions gesticulating as they
spoke of Freud and Plato and Voltaire, onto the pages of the
book, a cheap paperback, dog-eared already, over which we
bent our heads and read in the little cocoon of silence we
hugged around ourselves. It was 1963 and we, the women,
were reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
We read there about the "problem that has no name," about
the women of North America who that very morning, as we sat
with our coffee cups between lectures, were making beds and
peanut-butter sandwiches and loading the laundry and mean-
dering through the supermarkets, fulfilling perfectly the expec-
tations of femininity. We read that these women felt tired all the
166
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 167
time, felt weepy and despondent, felt sexless and barren of
personality, and, in shame and guilt, got drunk in the afternoons
from the bottle of vodka hidden behind the cans of furniture
polish and spray cleaners, or sat in the armchair at the
psychiatrist's office, resignedly accepting the prescription for
tranquillizers as the appropriate remedy for their anxious
queries: "Who am I?" and "Is this all there is?"
We read there of the grotesque discrepancy between the
image of men in our society — men as revolutionaries and
space travellers and physicists and mystics — and the image of
women, of us — as childish, frivolous, empty-headed house-
keepers whose cultural task was to beautify ourselves; social
responsibility, to have babies; and economic function, to
consume household goods. We were cheated, wrote Betty
Friedan, of our self-esteem, disallowed our development as
intellectual and moral beings and forfeited of our personhood.
We had swallowed the lie of our inferiority and obliterated the
genetic memory within us of women who had been mighty with
the truth about women.
Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and
gathered into barns.. . and ain't I a woman? I could work
as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it—
and bear the lash as well I have borne thirteen children
and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried
with my mother's grief, none but Jesus helped me — and
ain't I a woman?
1
And weren't we women? But it was 1963 and there was none
of us who did not believe we would be different from the
brigades of defeated women in the suburbs. We were students.
We would be clever and we would travel and have adventures.
And then we would marry, and we would be in love. We would
build an interesting home and raise bright children. We shut the
book, shut out the plaintive women and shut out the forebodings
that our lives might after all be reined in within the order of
female prostration. Just a few years later, of course, the women
came back to haunt us, and we saw that we were their sisters.
In spring 1967, at a SUPA conference in Kingston, movement
168 LONG WAY FROM HOME
women met separately for the first time, marching off to have a
women's caucus in a room of their own while the men giggled
and made jokes.*
We weren't quite sure what we were going to talk about
when we decided to have our own meeting but it gradually
came out. We talked about how it was men who did the
writing and women the Gestetnering, about how our
political influence in the group was directly related to how
"heavy" the guy was that we were coupled with. We were
feeling our way into talking about our experience as
women but we weren't sure how to do it. For instance,
there was a woman there who was pregnant and she said,
"Yeah, all this discussion leads up to the fact that I'm
sitting here seven months pregnant and I'm scared to
death." I remember thinking, what does this have to do
with anything? Why is she talking about this? Everyone
wants to have babies so why is she saying this? We
brushed over it. And I kept on arguing that it was wrong for
us to meet separately because the only way we could prove
we were just as good as the men was by sticking it out in the
organization and arguing with them.
Which is what they did. By the fall of 1967, invigorated by
the reports of women's caucuses meeting within SDS in the
United States and by the appointment in Ottawa of a Royal
Commission to "inquire into and report upon the status of
women in Canada and to recommend what steps might be taken
by the Federal Government to ensure for women equal
opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society,"
2
Judy Bernstein, Peggy Morton, Linda Seese and Myrna Wood
presented a paper at the SUPA conference in Goderich. It was
called Sisters, Brothers, Lovers... Listen... and the women
would never be so supplicatory again.
The tone of the paper is hopeful, defensive and conciliatory.
3
"We hope that it will not be taken as vindictive.... We trust
that you will consider this paper with the seriousness with
*One such "joke" was that SUPA women, as their contribution to
support of the Viet Cong, bake cookies to sell.
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 169
which it was written." Sensitive to the devaluation of women's
intellectual capabilities, it defensively covers itself with a cloak
of references to Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, the British
Marxist feminist Juliet Mitchell and the French feminist
philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. "[Woman] realizes in her
subconscious what Marcuse says: 'Free election of masters
does not abolish the masters or the slaves.' " It is heartbreaking
in its need to argue the most self-evident of political truths
about women's estate: "Unlike lower forms of life, human
beings are capable of becoming . . . more than a living entity
that is enslaved to the creation and maintenance of the
species."
Nevertheless the paper raised themes that immediately
reverberated throughout the new left and quickly laid the basis
for the autonomous organization of women militants. Here
were the beginnings of revisionist anthropology (in the references
to the role of female labour and production in pre-capitalist and
industrial societies) and the hints at the revolutionary potential
of female demands. Here were the first expressions of the
political content of sexual relations ("Woman is the object;
man is the subject. Women are screwed; men do the screwing")
and of the fundamental importance of women's right to the
control of their bodies' use and function. And here, in the
pointed references to the role of women in SUPA and, by
extension, in the movement as a whole, was the proposition
that would challenge the very raison d'etre of new left
politics: a movement in which women are as exploited and
demeaned as they are in the society as a whole is a movement
that will continue to reproduce the oppressive relations of that
society. As such, the movement is a sham and a travesty of the
struggle for liberation. "It is our contention that until the male
chauvinists of the movement understand the concept of
liberation in relation to women... they will be voicing political
lies."
SUPA dissolved shortly after. And the women's liberation
movement took off. Women across the country began caucusing
separately within movement organizations (for instance, in the
SDU groups at Simon Fraser University, the University of
Alberta and the University of Regina) and from there quickly
170 LONG WAY FROM HOME
determined to make contact with women outside the campus
locales. Although university women continued to be the
support base of the women's liberation groups, it was not
unusual when their meetings included young working women,
high school students, middle-aged housewives, single mothers,
women from old left groups. And it was here, at such meetings
that two things happened. One was the formation of conscious-
ness-raising groups* and the other the organizing of action
projects around the related issues of sexuality.
Consciousness raising (otherwise known as c-r), getting
together in a circle to talk, to hear, to open oneself in an
environment of sisterly sympathy and recognition and to begin
the extended and difficult process of expressing the hurt and
anger and hate and fear in female experience that had been
denied legitimacy elsewhere. To speak of housework and living
alone and childbirth and body image and girlhood and bosses
and lovers. "The insight I remember most vividly from
consciousness raising was Christ! I've been crippled by the
totality of my experience as a woman, I've been frightened and
damaged and paralysed. As I began to acknowledge this I had
feelings of unspeakable anger and from there I began to repair
myself." Women read together The Feminine Mystique, The
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing and giggled and chitchatted over a bottle
of wine, debating the pros and cons of using deodorant
and shaving your legs and wearing make-up — the hilarity of it
as the ribald and preposterous confessions came out: "I
remember a lot of times feeling uncomfortable because we
should be more serious but another part of my mind realized
this was the first tim e I'd spent a whole evening with a bunch of
women and just had fun with them." Women learned how to be
articulate and get the ear of others for the first time, discovered
*"I remember countless SDU social evenings where the men talked
and the women listened — we weren't talking to each other. And one
evening I just got up and said,'This is boring.' Everyone was very
surprised. Shortly after that I joined a consciousness-raising group
where we talked about make-up, our bodies, our relationships. At this
point the men got paranoid and thought we were getting together to
talk about the size of their cocks."
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 171
that, like a cork out of a bottle of champagne, women, pulled
out from the confines of male-dominated groups, gushed with
literacy and eloquence and intellect and prefigured, here in the
sisterly circle, a politics all their own, a politics of absolute
commitment, of unqualified support, of innovation. "We
challenged everything that was male, their rationality, their
logic, their intellectualism, I mean we saw that even the way
buildings are built and streets are laid out is masculine; we felt
that in the entire culture there was nothing that had anything to
do with us because we had not made it, we had no history, no
art, all we had was ourselves, our sisterhood." And finally,
women dared to use the word "oppression" as the substantive
of their condition; yes, women are oppressed, we whom you
objectify and trivialize, abuse and humiliate, shackle and
deform. As it had proved for the oppressed of the Deep South,
the oppressed of the reservations and ghettos, the oppressed of
the colonies, the word was the "open sesame" of the ranks of
the women. With this concept they acknowledged that their
pain was collective, objectively rooted in history and in society,
and was redressable by action.
Arguing that female being has historically been defined and
limited as sexual and that "woman's body is used as a
commodity or medium of exchange,"
4
 the women's liberation
groups in 1968 determined that women's right to control the
sexual functions of their bodies was the sine qua non of their
liberation. And so began actions around the issues of birth
control and abortion.
As early as 1962 branches of the Voice of Women had been
campaigning for the legalization of birth control information-
distribution.* Deliberately disregarding the law, the new
groups set up birth control information and counselling booths
and centres on and off campus where they made available
printed literature on contraception, samples of available
contraceptives, and lists of sympathetic doctors who would
*Since 1892 the Criminal Code of Canada had forbidden the sale and
advertisement of contraceptives and the dissemination of information.
The code was amended in 1969.
172 LONG WAY FROM HOME
prescribe for single women. And when the Birth Control
Handbook, a comprehensive digest of information and
argument, became available in late 1968 from the McGill
Students' Society, they distributed some fifty thousan d copies of
this, too, by the summer of 1969. At the University of Alberta,
where since 1967 there had been agitation against Health
Services' decision not to make the birth control pill available to
students nor even to supply any information whatsoever about
contraceptives, the Committee for the Status of Women
accused Health Services of "abdicating its responsibility" to
students and disseminated the information themselves.
A number of us women were living together and we talked
among ourselves about the sexual double standard, about
our right to screw when we pleased, about all the women
we knew who were dropping out of university because of
accidental pregnancies. We were very frustrated because
we couldn't get information and the University wouldn't
budge: it was illegal, period. Finally, Lynn said, well, why
don't we do something about it? At first I was appalled: to
think one should do something about a grievance! And
then we just up and did it.
For all the embarrassment and consternation aroused by the
illegal actions around the birth control issue, the women's
groups were in fact tolerated and allowed to operate in this
regard. Their activities around the issue of abortion were,
however, a different matter. Logically and politically, the two
issues were inseparable, of course: as long as women were
denied access to birth control, they would have no choice but to
seek abortion in order to terminate a pregnancy they had not
chosen. Up to 28 August 1969, abortion for any reason was
illegal under the Criminal Code; therefore, in seeking an
abortion a woman risked prosecution , not to mention disfigure-
ment or death, as the result of putting herself in the hands of the
only person who could help her: the abortionist. There was not
a woman alive who did not fear the consequences of her sexual
activity; nor one who did not realize, even instinctively, that
this fear was a form of social control. Because she might
become pregnant at any time, and be reduced to economic
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 173
dependency within the family, she was denied employment of
equal pay and value to that of men, placement in professional
and graduate schools at the same rate as men, and mobility and
independence in carrying out life-decisions as she saw fit.
Clearly, women's liberationists were to argue, women's right to
abortion on demand had to be secured before any of the other
campaigns for the liberation of women could be undertaken.
Only when freed of biological determinisms could women
address themselves concretely as workers, intellectuals, artists
or politicians. "Abortion counselling dominated our activity."
They set up offices and publicized their phone numbers.
They answered calls from women who were hysterical and in
tears; would talk them into composure and determine what
their decision was; would give them the name of a handful of
doctors who would abort them; would accompany them to the
abortionist or would lend them money so they could travel to
the nearest "safe" doctor; would talk to them after the abortion
if they were depressed or fearful. It was agonizing work.
I was sent a fifteen-year-old pregnant girl who had been a
resident of Warrendale.* I couldn't get her into the doctor
in Kingston and I had never tried this guy in Brockville
before but I had been told that he was okay. His front was
as a chiropractor and the address in Brockville was a lean-
to on a house. I went in and he was sitting in this really
sordid room, that's the only word for it. And he was
drinking. I looked at the girl and she looked at me and I
said, "Are you sure that this is what you want?" And the
guy said, "Oh, don't worry about the drinking. I've done
these things when I was so pissed I couldn't walk across
the room." I looked at her again and I said, "Are you sure
you want to d o this?" And she said, "Yes." He went out to
the garage and he brought in one of those boxes that
carpenters keep their tools in and this is where he kept his
medical tools. He wouldn't let me stay in the room with
her. I went out and sat in the car for what seemed like
hours. Then she came out and she said that the only thing
*At the time, a treatment centre for children near Toronto.
174 LONG WAY FROM HOME
that he had said to her was that she had one of the cleanest
twats he'd ever seen.
In Edmonton, abortion counsellors were harassed by obscene
telephone calls, and in Regina the Women's Health Centre was
under surveillance by the Department of the Attorney-General.
Closely related to the issue of involuntary pregnancy was
that of child care: should a woman bear a child, she was held
totally responsible for its care. As more and more women were
employed, this responsibility assumed the proportions of a
social crisis.* Given that the median weekly earnings of women
in 1967 were fifty dollars, it was obvious that the typical child-
care arrangement of a babysitter ate up the mother's earnings.
Clearly, women required cheap and accessible day-care
facilities if they were ever to function independently and
remuneratively. The women's liberation groups took up this
requirement and made it a demand.
In Toronto, in the fall of 1969, the University of Toronto
Women's Group spearheaded the occupation of an empty
house near the campus as a cooperative nursery. When the city
demanded the occupants undertake $2,000 worth of renovations
and the university vice-president refused to make funds
available for them, the day-care people marched to the
administration building and occupied the Senate Chamber.
The number of sitters-in grew to two hundred, with the support
of the students' council and the New Left Caucus. "People are
singing, smoking pot, sleeping, and sharing sandwiches with
the campus police. Everywhere there are discussions and
arguments. The place is alive."
6
 The next day the university
capitulated and promised the $2,000. "Victory was ours! .. .
we now had the base for the further actions of committing the
university to the responsibility of providing day care. . . .
Women's liberation had engineered the first occupation at the
University of Toronto All power to the people — especially
women!"
7
* According t o a child-care survey made by the Dominion Bureau of
Statistics in 1967, 908,000 children required care arrangements.
5
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 175
In 1969, after two years of review, a bill was passed by the
House of Commons by which abortion was legalized under
certain conditions. The conditions added fat to the fire of the
abortion campaign and brought sharply into focus what had
been previously obscured by the universality of the issue: the
class discrimination of abortion legislation.
According to the reforms, abortion must be performed by a
qualified doctor in an accredited or approved hospital. The
doctor must first receive a certificate in writing from the
hospital's therapeutic abortion committee stating that the
continuation of the woman's pregnancy "would or would be
likely to endanger her life or health";
8
 and the committee must
consist of at least three doctors. No hospital is required by
this legislation to have a therapeutic abortion committee. It was
immediately obvious to the militants of the women's movement
that they had been cheated of the intent of their campaign, and
once again the women's liberation movement geared up for
another assault on the law. Women pointed out, in leaflets and
demonstrations and briefs and speeches all across the country,
that the hospitals' decision-making structures were entirely in
the hands of male professionals and of a bureaucracy that could
not be expected to act expeditiously and in the best interests of
the woman herself.
They argued that, with grounds for abortion being for
"health" reasons, "it will be the affluent middle-class women
who know about and have access to a sympathetic psychologist.
What help will such a law be for the women who are
intimidated or refused by doctors and psychologists because
they cannot pay?"
9
 Women living in isolated areas, in Roman
Catholic dioceses, in towns where no hospital establishes an
abortion committee, are effectively prevented from exercising
their right to a legal abortion. A legal abortion remains the
privilege of women with money of their own who live in large
centres close to liberal hospitals, liberal doctors and the
support facilities of the women's liberation movement. The
only humane and the only just solution to this cruel discrimination
was the provision of abortion on the simple demand of the
pregnant woman herself. Control of our own bodies! Repeal all
abortion laws! Abortion is our right! Every child a wanted child!
176 LONG WAY FROM HOME
In April 1970, a call came from the Vancouver Women's
Caucus* for women across Canada to join a caravan that would
travel from Vancouver to Ottawa, there to confront the prime
minister: "We consider the government of Canada is in a state
of war with the women of Canada. If steps are not taken to
implement our demands by Monday, May 11, 1970, at 3:00
P.M., we will be forced to respond by declaring war on the
Canadian government."
And so they set out from Vancouver, stopping in a dozen
towns and cities en route to Ottawa, holding public meetings
and swelling their ranks with supporters anxious to add their
bodies to the demonstration planned for Parliament Hill. In
Kamloops, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, the Lakehead,
Sudbury, Toronto, activists knew they were coming; they
greeted them, billeted them, cooked up hot suppers.** Up and
down the streets of downtowns, the caravan drove, blaring from
a loudspeaker the Judy Collins version of "We Want Our
Revolution," while women sang along and distributed
literature and talked to people in the streets. They travelled
with a coffin, symbolizing the women dead from illegal
abortions and filled it, in one town after another, with petitions
signed by thousands and thousands of women demanding the
repeal of the abortion laws.
They drove into Ottawa with placards pasted on their cars
and vans, drove in with women hanging out the windows,
shouting and singing, and in the streets women waved V's and
clenched fists back at them. Billeted en masse at a church, they
hunkered down for strategy sessions, trying to arrive, by
consensus and collective decision making, at a plan of action
for the weekend, while the menfolk who had accompanied them
cooked the meals and "did whatever we needed done to carry
out our strategy." They decided that, "disguised" as respectable
women and armed with forged passes to the House of
Th e core of the downtown-based caucus had, the year before, been the
women of the SFU SDU.
**Thirty-five years earlier, another generation of women militants had
done precisely the same for another on-to-Ottawa trek of insurgents,
travelling the same route.
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 177
Commons galleries (procured by sympathetic female support
staff on Parliament Hill), they would disrupt Parliament by
chaining themselves to their seats. Not everyone would go in:
the action could provoke arrests and prosecution; no woman
should feel compelled to participate. It was okay to be scared.
On Saturday, May 9, over five hundred women and their
supporters marched to Parliament Hill and demanded unsuc-
cessfully to meet with Trudeau, Health Minister Munro and
Justice Minister Turner. (Trudeau was "unavailable" as he
was preparing for a trip abroad; Munro was in Geneva; and
Turner was playing tennis.) Instead they held a rally. Woman
after woman stood up to denounce the abortion laws and the
bureaucracy calcifying their implementation. They stood up to
publicize statistics of death and sterility from abortion, to
describe their experiences with hosptial boards and doctors,
and to lead in songs and slogans: "Just Society Just for the
Rich!"
And then, angered and fed up, they all marched to 24 Sussex
Drive. Some, on the first march of their lives, came all the way
from Vancouver and Calgary to shout and sing along with the
women who had been in the movement for years; all of them
sensed they were part of the same historical motion now; class
and age and race and experience subsumed within this wave of
women united in sisterhood against the regime of the women-
haters and women-murderers and the women-crushers. "Woman-
Power to the Women-People!" They marched their way past
the dumbfounded RCMP guards at the prime minister's
residence, sat in on the lawn for an hour, and marched out,
leaving behind the coffin full of petitions — and coat hangers,
Lysol and knives.
Monday morning. They got dressed that morning in their
"disguises," wearing long-sleeved blouses over the chains
wrapped around their arms, and strolled over to Parliament
Hill, casually going into the galleries in their ones and twos,
while a large contingent gathered for a demonstration at the
steps of the Peace Tower. In the House of Commons, the
honourable gentlemen were discussing the condition of the
carpeting in the visitors' elevators.
178 LONG WAY FROM HOME
At a quarter past three I stood up and started making my
speech, demanding free abortion. It took the security
guard a fair amount of time to reach me so that I was
almost finished by the time he got to me. The woman
beside me who had been really nervous stood up as he
came towards her — one of those great decisions she had
made — and said she wasn't going to let him touch me. She
got totally into it. He grabbed me and he pulled me out and
I think we reached the door before the next person started
— I was shouting all the while. Outside he said, "Well,
dear, you've had your little say, haven't you?" It must
have taken us three or four minutes to walk down to the
main office. By that time bells were ringing and people
were screaming and running all over the place. Another
guard came in and said, "There's thirty of them in there and
they're all chained to their seats!" It dawned on him that I
was not a nut; or that if I was a nut, then there were a lot of
nuts in there with me.
As soon as she had been dragged out, the next woman,
chained to her seat by the ankle, stood up and shouted out a
statement about the right to the control of her body, and then
another woman and another, in this gallery and that gallery,
while the guards rushed frantically from one to the other,
unable to drag them out until they got hacksaws and cut them
free from the chains. As they chanted over and over, "Free
Abortion on Demand" and "Every Child a Wanted Child,"
the Speaker adjourned the session. It was the first time in the
history of the Canadian House of Commons that it was closed
because of a disturbance.
Still high and buzzing with the fervour of the united actions of
the Abortion Caravan, women's liberationists from across the
country convened in Saskatoon in November 1970 to answer
the question: What next for us? In the debates that followed, the
unity of the springtime dissolved.
There was a contingent in Saskatoon, largely Trotskyist, that
argued for a continuation and intensification of the free-
abortion-on-demand campaign. It made sense, they argued, to
concentrate energy on a single issue, given the appeal and
importance to every woman of the abortion issue. Besides,
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 179
though the battle may have been fought, the war was scarcely
won.
But there were militants who chafed at the limited aims of the
abortion campaign, and fearing the ultimate co-option of the
movement by liberal legislation, they wanted to press for
radical change across the broad spectrum of women's condi-
tion. The movement itself, well before the Abortion Caravan,
had already begun to take up the issues of women's work,
women's education, child care, socialization and sexism. The
women's caucus at the University of Regina had been divided
up among those who did work on campus, those who set up a
women's centre downtown, and those who organized a working
women's group. The Vancouver Women's Caucus had already
acknowledged the need to organize "beyond" abortion (their
first public action had been to involve themselves in a SFU
day-care centre) when they, two months earlier, had organized
semi-autonomous workshops: Women in Education, Women
in Teaching and Working Women.
And there were the New Feminists of Toronto who had
broken completely with the (male-dominated) left and with
(male-ideated) socialism, arguing that "we must eradicate the
sexual division on which our society is based if women are to be
liberated."
10
 They had worn red scarves on the Abortion
Caravan as a badge of distinction.*
It should have been no great surprise to anyone when no
single, broad, all-encompassing union of women's liberationists
emerged from Saskatoon, but, instead, a large number of
militants variously organized around this program or that, this
theoretical position or that. It may have seemed, depressingly
enough, mere squabbling at the time. The disputes were,
however, a sign that the women's liberation movement had
engaged the realpolitik of radicalism.
If it was female sexuality that first impressed the women's
liberationists with the distinctiveness of their oppression, it was
*"I remember asking somebody, 'Who are these people?' 'Oh, they're
the New Feminists, they're the people who think men are the enemy.'
I thought they were wrong because obviously it was capitalism that is
the enemy. I mean, it's one or the other."
180 LONG WAY FROM HOME
female labour that convinced them of its universality. As
women had always borne children, so too had they always
laboured, and it would be a superficial movement indeed that
did not seek them out where they worked, and were exploited.
The Royal Commission on the Status of Women, reporting
in 1970, learned that: pay is generally lower for traditionally
female professions than for other professions; equal pay laws
are inadequate; paid maternity leave is rare; few women reach
senior levels; women have less opportunity to enter and to
advance in many occupations and professions.
11
 Only 17
percent of waged women workers were organized in unions in
1967 — not that this did them much good. In 1969 only
between 3 and 5 percent of all collective agreements in force at
that time included clauses providing for equal pay for male and
female members employed at similar jobs.
12
 Housework, of
course, is unpaid labour,* and the housewife experiences
debilitating dependency. ".. . it should not surprise anyone to
learn that the women of this country are particularly vulnerable
to the hazards of being poor... . The Commission received a
great many briefs dealing less with abstract rights than with
economic justice."
13
**
Here then was the constituency for the women's liberation
movement working women, poor and isolated and distraught.
If, while still active within the male-dominated new left, the
women militants had shared their male comrades' low estima-
tion of the potential for radicalism of the working class, they no
longer shared it as they began their efforts among working
women. "I think," says a male activist now, "if you want to
locate the first analysis of the workplace done by the move-
*In 1967, pre-dating the wages-for-housework campaign of the women's
movement itself, delegates from the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan,
constituency to the provincial NDP convention moved that house-
wives be paid a salary.
**Of the 2,558,000 women in the labour force in the third quarter of
1969, fully 2,003,000 were employed in the service industries where
they earned an average weekly wage of $97.60 compared to an
average of $137 in the manufacturing industries.
14
 Although women
represented in 1967 roughly one-third of the labour force, they
received only 20 percent of all reported income.
15
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 181
ment you'd find it was done by women, on women in the work
force."
In these efforts the Vancouver Women's Caucus was
exemplary. In January 1970 the Working Women's Workshop
was formed within the caucus to "acquire the tools for
organizing" and almost immediately after were in contact with
women members of the Hospital Employees Union and of the
Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada. In March they
joined the picket line of the striking employees of Tilden Car
Rental, and in June set up a series of noon-hour meetings with
downtown office workers. In August they became involved in
what was to be an eighteen-month-long strike and boycott of
Cunningham Drugstores (workers at their warehouse were on
strike and trying to become certified). In fact the Working
Women's Workshop organized a boycott of the drugstores and
distributed "tens of thousands" of leaflets five months before
the B.C. Federation of Labour saw fit to do the same.
16
The campaign is meeting with mixed reaction. At some
stores the Caucus claims to be turning away from a third to
a half of the customers. At the Cunninghams outlet in
North Vancouver, however, the lone picketing woman
was assaulted by an M.D. who spluttered that" You're the
women who led the Abortion Caravan." The woman had
to knock the doc to the ground twice before he would fuck
off. And remember folks, "It takes a clever pig to be a
Cunning ham."
17
Also that summer, caucus and workshop members first
raised the question of organizing a union of working women
independent of the existing labour unions. As the caucus
newspaper, the Pedestal, argued, even organized women were
relatively inactive in their unions. They were unrepresented in
the leadership and were thus unable to have their needs (for
equal pay, for day-care facilities, for job de-ghettoization) taken
seriously. "The organization of working women must be a
major long-term task of the women's liberation movement."*
*At the Canadian Labour Congress convention in Edmonton earlier
that summer, of fifteen hundred delegates, seventy were women. Of
461 resolutions submitted by union locals, only the last 5 concerned
182 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Both the American and the Canadian women's liberation
movements initially began as women's or feminist caucuses
within the new left organizations, but the Canadian movement,
unlike the American, for all its splinterings and contradictory
tendencies, continued to operate within the orbit of left-wing
politics. (The exceptions to this were the New Feminists in
Toronto and, later, various lesbian feminist groups; but the
exception proves the rule — the New Feminists had a core
membership of Americans recently emigrated to Canada.)
American feminist ideas did, of course, circulate among
Canadian women, socialists and otherwise, and were taken
very seriously. It was from the American sisters that we
appropriated the concepts of "sisterhood" and our oppression
as a "class," of "male supremacy" as an ideology, of the
"matriarchy" as the prehistory of women, of lesbianism as
"politically correct" sexuality, of the women's liberation
movement as a form of struggle against "imperialism" in the
Third World.
But, in the same way that the Canadian new left as a whole
was never as alienated as the American from its socialist
antecedents, neither was the Canadian women's liberation
movement. For that matter, the Communist party and the
CCF-NDP had raised, a generation or two earlier, the issues of
women in the labour force, of equal pay, of the right to abortion,
birth control and day care. In the Women's Labour Leagues
and the Congress of Canadian Women "we saw the struggle
against capitalism as a struggle that would enable women to
take their place as full human beings and citizens." From this
generation of women radicals, the women's liberationists of the
Sixties inherited the expectation that the left would advance the
cause of justice for women. This meant, on the one hand, that
the Canadian movement avoided certain exaggerations of
rhetoric ("Housewives are political prisoners!")
18
 and solipsisms
("We question every generalization and accept none that are
discriminatory practices against female workers. The Reform Caucus,
a progressive grouping within the CLC, proposed a women's committee
but "the convention defeated the resolution with the rationale that the
problems of all workers were inseparable." (Pedestal, Vancouver,
June 1970)
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 183
not confirmed by our experience")
19
 that were inevitable
among the American feminists once the total burden of
revolutionary analysis and strategy fell entirely upon the single
contradiction of sexism. It meant, on the other hand, that the
men of the new left were held accountable to the women for
their failure to fight for the liberation of women.
This failure damaged women radicals, hurt them, humiliated
them, and for years diminished their effectiveness as political
cohorts. As unmarried sex partners, low-income earners (very
often a movement woman would work at menial labour to free
her man for political work), office staffers, charwomen,
confidantes, women were an anonymous and individually
invisible army of labour on whose efforts the "careers," the
charisma, the status of the male heavies were erected, but for
which the women themselves received little or no recognition
or reward. In fact, there was no prestige in the work that women
did, in the movement as well as outside it; there was prestige only
in intellectual work, in being able to argue and debate and
theorize and analyse, in writing position papers and drafting
manifestos and making rousing speeches. Socialized into
passivity and self-deprecation, intimidated by machismo, ill-
confident with the rhetoric of the new left, unfamiliar with the
jargon of political organization, the women of the new left were
neither seen nor heard by their male comrades.
If, as Ernest Mandel argues, one of the main aims of the
socialist movement is to abolish the distinctions between
manual and intellectual labour, within socialist organizations
as well as in the larger society (for they "cannot but breed
bureaucracy, new inequalities and new forms of human
oppression which are incompatible with a socialist common-
wealth"),
20
 then the organizations of the new left were pro-
foundly compromised in this aim.
During the occupation at Columbia University, demonstrators
engaged in "theoretical discussions of radical ideology, the
faults of the university and the nature of American life,"
21
while, nearby, "girls" managed food and housekeeping details,
made peanut-butter sandwiches, vacuumed the floors and
cleaned ashtrays. ("Girls," I suppose, are to be distinguished
from "demonstrators.") During the May-June events in Paris,
184 LONG WAY FROM HOME
a pamphlet, circulated from the Occupation Committee of the
Sorbonne, was illustrated with a photograph of a nude woman
on her back and printed with this text: "Some comrades from
the council for maintaining the occupations are going to
come and fuck me violently. Judging from their practice, their
theories must be truly radical."
22
Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther party, speaking before
an SDS convention, called on radical women to mobilize
around "pussy power," and David Harris, a draft-resister who
went to jail, when asked what women could do to effectively
protest the draft, advised they could refuse to sleep with anyone
who still carried a draft card.
Revolutionary women of Quebec pointed out in a manifesto
that not a single woman's name, apart from those associated
with the October Crisis, was known in movement milieux; that
in none of the FLQ manifestos, in none of the propaganda, was
a single line written on the situation of the women in Quebec;
that, while movement men had always had the time to go
drinking on weekends, they never had the time to help organize
a day-care centre; that in the minds of the leadership, women's
liberation was "not important" and could be postponed. "We
have typed their papers, painted their placards, listened to their
speeches, marched in their demonstrations, marked the measure
of their slogans 'Power to the Workers!' "
23
In the analyses of the collapse of SUPA, not a line was
written about the particular experience of women in the
organization, nor any insight provided into the function of
sexism in that collapse. Only in retrospect would the criticisms
of "elitism" and "liberalism" and "manipulation" in SUPA
seem to hint at the discouragement of women and to anticipate
their withdrawal.
According to the analysis that emerged from the theoreticians
of women's liberation, it was the sexual vulnerability of
women, the reduction of their personality to mere sexuality,
and the appropriation of that sexuality as "property" that
allowed men to patronize them, to exploit their labour, to
disregard their intellectuality and relegate them to anonymity
and indifferentiation. And indeed it was from the odium and the
anguish of their sexual experiences that movement women
THE RISINC OF THE WOMEN 185
made some of their first cries of rage and formulated some of
their first demands for justice. In the clamour and tremor of
sexual rage was the cutting loose from victimization and
terrorization at the hands of the sexual thugs of the new left.
Women, brought into new left organizations as the lovers of
male members, were the "camp followers" of the new left.
"There were a couple of good-looking, well-dressed sorority
women in SDU who were passed around the male leadership
like a tray of hors d'oeuvres." If a woman had any status, it was
the reflected one of being the property of an important man, and
in this role she was expected to be "loyal" and support his
views. The "sexual revolution," as has often been pointed out
since, simply served to increase the access men had to women,
without the attendant responsibilities of traditional male-
female relations. The woman was on her own with her fear of
pregnancy, her pregnancy in fact, her "frigidity" if she would
not consent to sex, and her desolation when she did. "In the
name of free love we indulged in orgies. Or more correctly,
gang bangs." It was the women's liberation movement that
exposed the fallacy of the sexual liberation movement that real
sexual liberation could take place without upsetting the social
superiority of men.
The women of the new left deserted the "male" organizations
in droves to continue and expand their work as radicals in the
autonomous women's liberation movement. The account of the
flourishing of this movement properly belongs to the history of
the Seventies. Contained still within the late Sixties is the
motivation for the final break with the sexist new left. As the
women developed their feminist politics, it became obvious
they were being forced to choose between these politics and the
new left organization. They chose their politics, which is to say
they chose growth, development and power. The constraints of
the new left milieux had become intolerable.
It was a commonplace of the first broadsides from women's
liberationists to draw an analogy between racism and sexism,
between the deprivations of blacks' lives and the spoliation of
female lives, between the righteousness of the civil rights and
black power movements and that of the women's liberation
movement In retrospect there is something appalling in this
186 LONG WAY FROM HOME
analogical impulse, for it speaks of the necessity of the women
to attract men's attention to the gravity of their grievances by
turning them into a metaphor: the metaphor had more power to
move men than did the undiluted concreteness of women's
oppression. Furthermore, the analogy evoked identification
with a movement that itself was profoundly anti-woman.*
Yet women's liberationists continued to identify their move-
ment with the liberation movements of other people and to
appropriate the militaristic slogans and symbols of guerrillas.
At one level this was an expression of healthy self-interest and
of genuine support for anti-imperialist struggles: "We are
engaged in the same struggle as the Vietnamese, the Laotians,
the Palestinians, the Koreans, Black and Brown people, Gay
people and Native Americans. It is a wealthy, white male
authoritarianism. We have begun to feel that when bombs
strike Vietnamese bodies they strike our own bodies and when
they win, we win."
25
 Imperialism is, after all, a system that
exempts no one from its effects. But at another level this
identification was a posture of self-contempt and defensiveness.
For some time the "women's caucuses" themselves had
accepted that their projects were subsumed within the "larger"
and "more important" one of student radicalism; and in their
anxiety to be taken seriously by their male comrades, these
caucuses rigorously studied the Marxist texts for material that
would justify their feminism and locate their female oppression
not in the "patriarchy" or "male supremacy" — Heaven
forbid! — but in capitalism and imperialism. Given the right
kind of analysis and leadership (it was written), given guns and
ammunition, given the acceptance of the absolute priority of
anti-imperialist struggles, women can be as heavy as men. To
fight "only" as women, to struggle for something as "limited"
as women's rights was unacceptable; for had not the male
comrades accused women's liberationists of being divisive, a
mere minority group, neurotic and, most importantly, "incor-
rect"? To the demand that the men of the new left examine
*In Huey Newton's thesis that racism is rooted in the white "adminis-
trator's attempt to bind the penis of the slave,"
24
 for instance, where is
the voice that mourns the devastated womanhood of the female slave?
THE RISING OF THE WOMEN 187
women's issues came the reply: "Tell Lady Astor's chauffeur
that Lady Astor is oppressed." To the challenge that revolu-
tionary politics include the demands of women came the reply:
"Imagine Chairman Mao at the siege of Peking and he gets a
call from his wife: Stop the taking of Peking! Women need birth
control first!" When women sloganeered that "participatory
democracy begins at home" and called on men to participate
equally in housekeeping and child care, to support wages for
housework and abortion on demand, they were dismissed as
"bourgeois" appellants. In any case such tasks were beneath
male dignity. When Juliet Mitchell came to Edmonton, forty
women were packed into a tiny living room, discussing
production, reproduction and sexuality while in the kitchen,
resolutely uninvolved, the men discussed the workers' occupa-
tions of factories in Turin, Italy.
"That whole period of time during 1968 and 1969 we
debated continually, men and women, whether or not it was
okay to fight in your own interests." If the men could not see
the exigency and momentousness of the women's revolution,
so much the worse for them. The debate was resolved the day
the women marched out into the streets, leaving behind the
typewriters and the soup pots, to take their liberation struggle
into their own hands.
PART V
TWO NATIONS,
ONE ENEMY
I
CREATE TWO, THREE,
MANY VIETNAMS
And best of all is finding a place to be
in the early years of a better civilization.
For we are a conquered nation: sea to sea we bartered
everything that counts, till we have
nothing to lose but our forbears' will to lose.
Beautiful riddance!
And some will make their choice and eat imperial meat.
But many will come to themselves, for there is
no third way at last and these will
spend their lives at war, though not with
guns, not yet — with motherwit and guts, sustained
by bloody-minded reverence among the things
which are,
and the long will to be in Canada.
— Dennis Lee
(from Civil Elegies and Other Poems)
1
When SUPA dissolved at the end of 1967 and the post-
mortems were undertaken, there was an acknowledgement that
the new left in Canada had failed to analyse its national
context. By this failure it had fallen victim to the idealist notion
that people could be mobilized around such niceties as
"participatory democracy" without reference to the realities of
national economic organization, national political structure
and national social stratification through which this "demo-
cracy" was to be processed. However admirable the inter-
nationalist urges of the peace movement (the canny mistrust of
the nation-state as the political embodiment of violence and
massive regulation; the will to transcend its unhappy borders
and to make contact with the peace-loving populations of the
world), these had turned SUPA away from investigating what
it needed to know about the specifics of its context — the
191
192 LONG WAY FROM HOME
nation-state of Canada. Just what sort of a state is it? who runs it?
whose interests does it serve? how is it like other Western capitalist
states and how is it different? how does it control us? In the last
analysis, "the fact that we are Canadians, colonials, has
worked to turn our attention away from our own nation."
2
The very fact that by 1967 the word "colonial" had entered
the radical's vocabulary of self-attribution not as a metaphor
but as a succinct and pointed description of the economic and
social reality of Canadian existence indicates that already the
movement had begun to come to grips with "the national
question."
It did so, with some preparation. The government of John
Diefenbaker (1957-63) had popularized the proposition that
the Canadian government spoke for interests that were definably
and exclusively Canadian: "We must decide," said Diefen-
baker, "that our role is to determine the right stand to take on
problems, keeping in mind the Canadian background and,
above all, using Canadian common sense. In effect, the time
has come to take an independent approach."
3
 The Progressive
Conservatives and the NDP had combined to oppose in 1956
the Liberal plan to loan $80 million to the American-controlled
Trans-Canada Pipeline. In 1957 the Report of the Royal
Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects (the Walter
Gordon Report) had warned that to "do nothing" about the
increasing measure of control of the economy that was passing
into foreign hands was to "run the risk that at some time in the
future a disregard for Canadian aspirations will create demands
for action of an extreme nature."
4
 By 1965, however, Walter
Gordon was out on his ear, having failed to win the support of
his Liberal party colleagues in cabinet for some very moderate
restrictions on the operations of foreign-owned business and
industry in Canada.
Also in 1965 the sociologist John Porter published his
monumental The Vertical Mosaic in which he demonstrated
that not only do a relatively small group of firms control a
disproportionate amount of economic activity
5
 (constituting in
effect an economic elite) but that these firms are no longer
contained within a national economic system and so neither is
the elite.
CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 193
Still in 1965, the slim volume Lament for a Nation: The
Defeat of Canadian Nationalism by George Grant had
posed the question that pierced the hearts of all those who felt,
seemingly irrationally, an attachment to their Canadian being:
if we believe that the "universal and homogeneous state" into
which we are all being inexorably absorbed by the industrial
civilization of the United States is a tyrannous state, then we
must resist with all the resources available to us that doleful
absorption.
6
 Your enemies will be legion, Grant warned, even
within the nation itself, and they are called "liberals." They
confuse the people with claims that what is good for the ruling
class of Canada is good for the nation as a whole. They enact
policies that reflect their belief that Canada is merely an
"undeveloped frontier" within the totality of North America.
The power of the American government to control
Canada does not lie primarily in its ability to exert direct
pressure; the power lies in the fact that the dominant
classes in Canada see themselves at one with the continent
on all essential matters. Dominant classes get the kind of
government they want.
7
In dissolving the "taboos" around corporate expansionism,
liberalism has become the "perfect ideology" of neo-capitalism
and continentalism. But nationalism stands in its way, arguing
as it does against the disappearance of Canada into the
continent.
It was from the lessons of its own experience that the
Canadian new left finally made its commitment not only to
describe the contours of Canada but to struggle for their
integrity. From the general turn toward Marxism in the search
for "ideology" came the revelation that political ideas are
rooted in a society's economic relations. If "continentalism"
and "liberalism" were plausibly rooted in Canada's peculiar
economic interrelationship with and dependency on American
capitalism, as Porter and Grant had indicated, then "nation-
alism" was conceivably the political idea of socialism.
George Grant himself, for all his Red Toryism, had argued
that it was only through a combination of socialist economic
planning and mobilization of the "electorate" with its griev-
ances against the (anti-national) elites, in support of such
194 LONG WAY FROM HOME
centralized planning, that continental absorption could be
resisted.
8
 The socialist Gad Horowitz, writing in Canadian
Dimension, unmincingly equated the socialist and nationalist
projects: the one was served by the other because through
nationalism the Canadian people could free themselves from
the Medusa-head of American ideology and finally awake n the
life of the nation to the rest of the world. It was not America as
American that must be challenged but America as capitalist:
If the United States were socialist, at this moment, we
would be continentalists at this moment. If the possibilities
of building a socialist society were brighter in the United
States than in Canada, or as bright, we would not be
terrified by the prospect of absorption. We are nationalists
because, as socialists, we do not want our country to be
utterly absorbed by the citadel of world capitalism.
9
A year earlier, in a seminal essay, "Conservatism, Liberalism
and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation," Horowitz had
argued that the very presence of an influential and legitimate
socialist movement in English Canada is an "un-American"
characteristic of Canadian society. So are, accordingly, the
notions that the national community is made up of classes, not
individuals, that the real social achievement is "equality of
condition" not mere "equality of opportunity," and that the
community "does more than provide a context within which
individuals can pursue happiness in a purely self-regarding
way." Such a community is incipiently socialist.
10
1963: the bombs of the FLQ. 1964: students and police in the
Saturday-of-the-long-sticks battle it out on the occasion of
Queen Elizabeth's visit to Quebec. 1966: Pierre Vallieres and
Charles Gagnon go to the gates of the United Nations in New
York to publicize the liberation struggles of Quebec. 1967:
Rene Levesque quits the Liberal party to found the sovereignty-
association movement. 1968: the Rassemblement pour l'Inde-
pendance Nationale organizes demonstrators against Trudeau
at the St. Jean-Baptiste Day parade. The demonstrators are
violently repulsed by the police. 1969: the McGill Francais
movement brings twelve thousand marchers out into the streets
and the protests against Bill 63 rally fifty thousand. The
CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 195
movement was as irrepressible as it was massive,* and
smouldering at its core was the indomitable urge of a nation to
realize itself, to be liberated as much from the federalists of
Liberalism and of resident corporations as from the agents in
situ of foreign capital. ". . . let us answer Quebec," said the
English-Canadian new left, "by developing our own equally
strong struggle aimed at freeing Canada from U.S. domination
by taking . . . our resources and industries out of U.S. hands.
Let us advise the profiteers that the plunder called development
is at an end."
11
 Let us advise them that as Quebec is being torn
from their grasp so shall Canada be. Two nations, one enemy.
For the Canadian new left, there was also the question of
what kind of society was being shaped by the peculiar mix that
was the Canadian economy, at once an industrial economy
seemingly at the very profitable centre of "advanced capitalism"
and yet also a "semi-peripheral" entity, controlled by interests
outside its borders and only semi-industrialized. At the same
time, this was the era of America's relative weakening
internationally when it was prosecuting the war in Vietnam. As
a new leftist was to argue a decade later, the Canadian
nationalism of the Sixties gained strength precisely as "American
imperialism was economically weakened and politically and
militarily under attack,"
12
 as the dollar was devalued, and as
the domestic consensus regarding foreign policy was broken by
the anti-war movement at home and abroad. Into these chinks
in the imperial suit of armour the Canadian new left inserted
and twisted the blades of its nationalist logic. And it was the
war in Vietnam that had handed them the knife.
We saw that there was a world imperial system, the U.S.
was at its centre, and the Vietnamese were resisting, not
only for themselves but for all people who were in the
process of becoming aware of that imperialism. Canadians
were at the beginning point of this process, just starting to
distance ourselves from the idea of Canada as an American
nation.
Granted, the people of Vietnam were in a bloody fight for their
*See Part V, Chapter II.
196 LONG WAY FROM HOME
lives, but if their stupendous national effort to throw the
imperialist beast out of their villages and their fields was one
instance of the thrust of national independence against American
capital, then the Canadian movement against the American
domination of national life was surely another, for it was all
connected. The material of the University of Toronto teach-in
in 1965 had first pointed to this, and then had come the
evidence of Canadian government and business complicity in
the war, the conscious identification of Quebecois militants
with the Vietnamese patriots, and the student power move-
ment's revelations of the involvement of American corporations
with the government of the university. Who was to say that the
anti-imperialist struggle should be engaged over there and not
here; that the helicopter gunships and the napalm and 2,4-D
dropping out of the skies of Vietnam would not one day
threaten the security of Canadians; that it was not the duty of
Canadian radicals, as it was that of Vietnamese guerrillas, to
expel Uncle Sam beyond the borders so the real life of the
nation could begin?
The left was preparing its case. From George Grant they
took the forebodings regarding the ideological intent of tech-
nology — technological advance entails the disappearance of
indigenous differences that give substance to nationalism
13
 —
but gave them an optimistic twist. If labour's target is the
Canadian state, and if working-class politics are anti-capitalist
and pro-Canadian,
14
 then clearly workers' control of tech-
nology would support nationalism. In any case, it was still
debatable just how technologized the Canadian economy was.
From the Marxist economist Andre Gunder Frank came the
intriguing argument that the very structure of world-wide
capitalism rests on the systematic underdevelopment of satellite
countries in relation to the "metropolitan" countries. Not only
that, but within the satellite country itself, metropolitan-
satellite relations are replicated in the underdevelopment of the
"hinterland." (One thought of Cape Breton, Manitoba and the
North in relation to southern Ontario.)
Not accidentally was there a revival of interest in the writings
of the University of Toronto political economist Harold Innis,
who showed how economic, social and political superstructures
CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 197
of Canada have been shaped by the symbiotic relationship of
"metropolitan-satellite" or "centre-margin."
In 1968 the Report of the Task Force on the Structure of
Canadian Industry, commissioned by the then finance minister,
Walter Gordon, and chaired by the political economist Mel
Watkins, was tabled. The report recommended among other
things that the government establish a special agency to
coordinate policies with respect to the behaviour of multi-
nationals. It was a mild enough proposal, considering the
dimensions of the problem. Nevertheless, the report was
received with great hostility both in government and out. As a
result, Watkins moved over to the left wing of the NDP, a move
that earned him the attention of the new left nationalists, for
this seemed to demonstrate again that only socialism could
contain the idea of national liberation.
Between 1945 and 1967 the percentage of foreign long-term
investment in Canada that was direct investment increased
from 40 percent to 60 percent; 85 percent of this direct
investment was American. Through this investment, two-fifths
of the Canadian economy, outside the sector of finance, was
owned by non-Canadians.
By 1963 non-Canadians controlled 60 percent of Canadian
manufacturing, 74 percent of the petroleum and natural gas
industry, and 59 percent of mining and smelting. Since these
are the most profitable, the most highly technological and the
most capital-intensive sectors of the economy, the degree of
their non-Canadian ownership was thoroughly alarming. As
the economist Kari Levitt wrote in the book Silent Surrender,
which represented in 1970 the culmination of all the disparate
studies and expressions of alarm and anxiety concerning the
meaning of the multinational corporation,
The brutal fact is that the acquisition of control by U.S.
companies over the commodity-producing sectors of the
Canadian economy has largely been financed from cor-
porate savings deriving from the sale of Canadian re-
sources, extracted and processed by Canadian labour, or
from the sale of branch-plant manufacturing businesses to
Canadian consumers at tariff-protected prices.
15
198 LONG WAY FROM HOME
What did it all mean? It meant, for instance, that when the
prime minister, faced in 1965 with a vast balance of payments
deficit with the U.S. in auto trade, had to choose between
continentalism and a protected market for Canadian-produced
cars, he chose the continentalist Auto Pact. It meant, in that
same year, when a bill was passed in the House of Commons to
cancel the tax-deductibility of expenditures on Canadian
advertising placed in Canadian editions of foreign magazines,
Time and Reader's Digest were exempted. It meant that
because the branch plants imported technology, in Canada
research and development languished and the country's tech-
nologists, scientists and engineers were underemployed or
forced to seek work outside Canada. And it meant that "to the
degree that Canadian business had opted to exchange its
entrepreneurial role for managerial and rentier status, Canada
has regressed to a rich hinterland with an emasculated, if
comfortable, business elite."
16
Sharing with a political elite the opinion that an autonomous
and self-determining nation-state thwarts the progressive ab-
sorption of the Canadian national community into the more
"efficient" transcontinental market of corporate production
and consumption, this business elite presides over the dis-
mantling of Canadian national sovereignty. Effective economic
decision making is transferred to the parent companies where
they are beyond accountability to the Canadian electorate.
Canadian government is then helpless to do much about
inflation, regional disparities, unemployment and industrial
stagnation. One may expect Canada to become "de-industrial-
ized" as there is ever more economic reliance on the extraction
and export of primary products (including energy), dependence
on the "metropolitan" country for machinery and manufactured
goods, and lack of resistance to even greater penetration by the
multinationals as local business and industry weaken and
collapse. One may say that this kind of country is an
underdeveloped country and not the much-touted advanced,
capitalist, industrialized nation of the continentalists' vision.
By the late Sixties, Canada, to the new left nationalists, for all
its privileges relative to the Third World and its "mini-
imperialism"
17
 practised by Canadian-owned corporations
CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 199
and banks in the Caribbean and elsewhere, was an economic
community uncertainly erected upon the shifting sands of
dependency and colonization.
The well-documented process of "Americanization" of
cultural and intellectual values of Canadians with the apparent
acquiescence of the population underscored the ideological, as
well as economic, penetration of the American multinational
corporation into everyday life. To the Canadian new left, this
was no more apparent than in their own milieu, the university.
Alarming statistics were coming in fast and furiously from this
sector of the "multinational" too, largely due to the thankless
efforts of Robin Mathews and James Steele, academics at
Carleton University. According to their research, between
1961 and 1968 the proportion of Canadians teaching at the
universities had diminished by 25 percent with some univer-
sities in particular showing a very high concentration of non-
Canadian faculty. A survey at the University of Alberta in
1968-69 showed that from a high of 60.8 percent in 1961-62,
the proportion of full-time Canadian faculty had dropped to
47.2 percent.
18
 Nationally, the situation was exacerbated by
the efficacy of the "old boys' network" in which non-Canadian
heads of departments favoured the appointment of other non-
Canadians of their acquaintance. In 1969 the political econ-
omy or political science departments in Glendon College,
York, McMaster and University of Toronto all had American
chairmen, and three out of five members of the University of
Toronto's promotion and tenure committee were American.
19
The non-Canadian (principally American) academics were
attracted to the rapidly expanding social sciences and humanities
faculties. For instance, almost 40 percent of the academic staff
at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, making
recommendations to the provincial Department of Education
on curriculum and teaching methods, were American.
20
Not surprisingly, of the seventy-nine undergraduate and
graduate courses offered by the University of Alberta's
sociology department in 1968-69, only one pertained to
Canadian society; in the political science department, only
seven of sixty-six.
21
 "Across Canada not more than half a
dozen courses appear to be offered in such important areas as
200 LONG WAY FROM HOME
the dynamics of federal-provincial relations, provincial politics,
the political sociology of Canada and the politics of French
Canada."
22
Alarmed at what these statistics gauged for the employment
opportunities for Canadian university graduates and for their
ideological development, Mathews and Steele proposed,
modestly enough, that Carleton University make it a practice
to employ enough Canadians to ensure that Canadians become
a clear two-thirds majority of full-time faculty in each depart-
ment and that no non-Canadians be hired before all reasonable
efforts to solicit applications from Canadians have been
made.
23
 The proposals were received as "immoral, illiberal,
racist, neo-Nazi, proto-fascist, chauvinist, anti-American. . .
intellectually obscene."
24
 No less than their American col-
leagues did many Canadian academics react as though their
very raison d'etre had been impugned, as indeed it had. Wrote
one such Canadian to the Globe and Mail, "Canadians should
be grateful rather than distressed that academics from other
parts of the globe have chosen to grace us with their presence in
Canada. How else are the students of Canada's universities to
acquire the research skills and knowledge which make them a
part of the international community of science and humanities
scholarship?"
25
Such justifications, as the student movement was quick to
point out, ignore the economic basis of intellectual "inter-
nationalism": that, where imperialist economic systems estab-
lish themselves, imperialist culture (or, euphemistically, "world"
or "international" or "universal" or "cosmopolitan" culture)
is sure to follow. As Peter Warrian, president of CUS argued:
the role of the intelligentsia within the "American imperium" is
to deny and mystify the cogencies of social class in the client-
state, to rationalize its colonial status and to train the
intellectual labour force that the "continental capitalist
economy" requires for its stabilization.
26
 It then becomes the
task of tile student movement, said an Ontario new leftist in
1969, to attack "American imperialization" of the economy at
its Achilles heel: the cultural imperialists at the university. In
this way are "class politics" unloosed at the university, for the
cultural imperialists are members of the resident bourgeoisie,
CREATE TWO , THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 201
and here may the socialist and national liberationist projects
again be conjoined.
Against the imperialism of the university — its authoritarian
structures, its concentration of decision making within an
administrative elite, its continentalizing curricula — the student
movement posed democracy, decentralization and Canadian
studies. It confronted in the classroom such "American" ideas
as behaviourism and micro-analysis and end-of-ideology
ideology and disrupted liberalism's symbolic occasions with
pamphleteering, guerrilla theatre and occupations of "strategic
targets."
As for the American faculty and graduate students who were
radical, here was a contradiction indeed. On the one hand they
played a very important part in the education of the radical —
in the classroom, where they introduced Marxist texts and
perspectives, and outside, in the student power movement
where they offered their bodies and voices to the campus
struggles.* But they were also Americans and it was as
American radicals they profoundly impressed the Canadian
undergraduates.
In the Political Science Department at Calgary (there was
one Canadian prof) we'd all get together in the coffee room
and talk about American issues. The war, the presidential
election, the American unions. I idealized the American
outlook. On one level, of course, I was glad I wasn't going
to get my head split open by a cop's truncheon; on the
other hand, I felt a little envious, a little sad that the
struggle wasn't here in Canada.
Who was there to tell him it was?
In November 1969, the students' council of the University of
Alberta sponsored a teach-in: "The American Domination of
Canada." About sixteen hundred people attended, mostly
*A personal note: I grew up in Social Credit Alberta and the influx of
draft-resisters and young Marxist professors from the States to the
University of Alberta in the mid-Sixties blew my young, wondering,
rebellious mind wide open.
202 LONG WAY FROM HOME
students, who, according to a student observer, were "groping
for a new definition of Canadian values and purposes, as
opposed to continental attitudes, and seeking politicians who
will be their spokesmen."
27
 Offered, among others, for their
consideration was Mel Watkins. He spoke for forty-nine
minutes, and there was hardly a rustle in the audience.
Mel Watkins at the teach-in:
There's the big question whether capitalists, who run the
show under capitalism, have the will or the means to
struggle for independence.... Even if it could be done, to
build an independent capitalist Canada hardly seems
worth the effort. The U.S. has given that option a bad
name. . . . With nationalism on the agenda of Canadian
politics... it is my function, as I see it.. . to work to put
socialist content into it. . . .
28
September 1970. The students' council of the University of
Alberta had decided to have a freshman orientation week
aimed at telling the students "what the university was really all
about" and to this end organized teach-ins and an acid rock
festival in the quad, and as headline speaker, invited the
American yippie Abbie Hoffman. (The council had agreed to
pay Hoffman $1,750 plus air fare from the students' funds.)
Several thousand people were packed into the Kinsmen
Fieldhouse the day of Hoffman's visit. Rock bands were on
stage, and the atmosphere was dense with marijuana. Hoffman
arrived, in a suede jacket and blue jeans, jumping up and down
and hugging his entourage. "It was supposed to be a total
happening. We hadn't told Hoffman what we wanted him to
talk about; we expected he would just do his thing."
When Hoffman took the stage, two figures appeared along-
side him: one was a local hippie radical, widely known to have
been recently busted on a possession charge, dressed as
himself, and behind him, prodding him along with the butt of a
rifle, was an activist from a street theatre group, dressed as
"Sergeant Sawchuk of the RCMP." When they reached the
microphone, "Sergeant Sawchuk," in a thick Ukrainian accent,
introduced himself and his hippie "captive" and, with further
prods of his rifle, "forced" the hippie to hand over to Hoffman
CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 203
the large roll of paper he held in his hand. This event, announced
the sergeant, was the second annual presentation of the
Imperialist of the Year Award. When the bewildered Hoffman
unfurled it, he and the audience saw this: a picture of a beaver
with a bandolier of bullets across his chest and " a funny look in
his eyes," and behind him, shoved up against his tail, an eagle
with its head up in the air and drool coming out the side of its
beak. The caption: YANK OUT! "Hoffman held it very
politely, as though it were an Academy Award, and asked,
'Can I keep it?' I'll never forget saying to him, 'Yeah, but it'll
cost you $1,750.'"
As it was Hoffman's style to begin his addresses in the
United States with a rip-roaring 'Fuck Amerika!" he took the
microphone in Edmonton and, mindful of where he was, yelled,
"Fuck Canada!" Stunned, shocked, resentful, the crowd
shifted gears and began booing and hissing. One man from the
audience shouted, "You're putting me on, Hoffman, you're in a
different nation now. You're in a colony of America named
Canada Nation." "Canada," said Hoffman, "is the only nation
that rolled over and died without firing a shot." And launched
into a stream-of-consciousness narrative about his travails at
the Chicago 7 trial.
He understood nothing. Neither that we were far from
wanting Canada to get "fucked" any more than it already
was nor that we shared his perspective on the trial. To him
it was a question of his personal, American, constitutional
freedoms; to us, it was the inevitable result of capitalism.
Because his concern was not with the external manifesta-
tions of imperial power vis-a-vis a nation like Canada but
rather with his own liberty vis-a-vis the American govern-
ment, you couldn't trust him, or any of the American
radicals, to have your Canadian interests at heart. We
came away with the impression that we were much more
serious radicals and that he was a bit of an asshole.
There was no doubt that the nationalist new left had a
constituency among students and that it ideologically distin-
guished its nationalism from simple "bourgeois nationalism"
(patriotism and anti-Americanism) as the radicalism of anti-
204 LONG WAY FROM HOME
colonialists and anti-imperialists. In a 1966 essay in Our
Generation two former SUPA activists, Art Pape and James
Laxer, dismissed the Liberal party, the NDP, the federal
Parliament, the civil service, the universities and technology
itself as all being incapable of undertaking the project of
national liberation. It was only around student activists that a
national liberationist program was emerging because it was the
students who were struggling for "radical democracy": grie-
vously alienated from a society reproducing itself as an
American province, students were imaginatively creating an
"un-American" one in which the rule of the elites would be
abolished.
29
 To be a student was to be a democrat was to be an
anti-imperialist was to be a liberator.
By 1968, when the student had been identified as an
intellectual "worker," the university, like the industrial plant,
was seen as a branch-plant workplace and the student within it
a "colonial." The way out was to repudiate liberalism,
embrace radicalism: "To attack Canadian liberalism becomes
therefore an attack on the colonialism of the Canadian market
society. . . ."
30
And by 1969 the New Left Caucus was arguing that "the
question of the specificity of Canada" was actually of strategic
importance if Canadian radicals are not to become, along
with every other intellectual worker in Canada, "branch
plants" of American radicalism. If higher education in Canada
has been "underdeveloped," if autonomous Canadian intel-
lectual traditions are difficult to discern, if throughout the
educational system are the texts and ideas of American
"liberal and reactionary scholars," it is because education
takes place within a "colonial economy," and one cannot
expect or hope that American radicals will see that or
understand its implications within a "bourgeois" state such as
Canada.
31
 CUS, in its position papers of the period, also made
the connections between the structural and ideological same-
ness of American and Canadian universities, the so-called
"interdependence" of the national economies, and the "emas-
culation" and "servitude" of the Canadian people.
32
It was through CUS, in fact, that very many students who
lived beyond the range of the new left or student power
CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 205
organizations of Montreal, Toronto, Regina and Vancouver,
made contact with the nationalist debate. At the Guelph
conference in 1968, for instance, Mel Watkins gave early-
morning seminars on American ownership of the economy.
In the summer of 1969 Mel Watkins, Giles Endicott, Gerry
Caplan and Jim Laxer, all in the NDP and committed to
transforming it into a genuinely socialist party, wrote and
issued what came to be known as the Waffle Manifesto, a
position paper on independence and socialism aimed at the
federal NDP convention to be held that October in Winnipeg.
The socialist nationalists were about to intervene in politics.
Posing the "very survival of Canada" as the most urgent
issue for Canadians, the manifesto called on the NDP to begin
a "process" and formulate a "program" that would replace
capitalism and dependence with socialism and independence.
The elements of the process and program, according to the
manifesto, are, inter alia, the extension of working people's
influence into every area of industrial decision making, "com-
munity democracy," extensive "national planning" of and
public control over investment and "nationalization of the
commanding heights of the economy," the encouragement of
"full expression and implementation" of Quebec's history and
aspirations, the unity of the two national groups as the only
"successful strategy against the reality of American imperialism"
and, finally, electoral success, of course.
33
Only a few months later, at the University of Alberta teach-
in on American domination of Canada, Watkins was to pose
"democracy at every level of decision making" as the demand
that separated the old left from the new left. With those
proposals in the Waffle Manifesto that called for workers' and
community control over the institutions that govern peoples'
lives, the new left surely had no quarrel. They had been the very
stuff of their own movements in the community and on the
campus. But with the substance of the manifesto (its involve-
ment in the policies and practices of a social democratic
parliamentary party), and with the manifesto's appeal, in the
name of anti-imperialism, to "national unity," the new left was
decidedly unhappy.
206 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Here in sheep's clothing was the old left. The new left,
committed to the notions of radical democracy, was profoundly
suspicious of notions of "planning" and "control" and"nation-
alization"as quasi-socialist clones of bureaucracy. Which
social class would be the planners? To whom would they be
accountable? How could government administration of industry
substitute for "workers' control" of the industrial workplace?
The new left, by contrast, visualized a socialism won only
through the "self-emancipation of activized masses in motion,
reaching out for freedom with their own hands.. . as actors on
the stage of history."
3 4
 And the new left, as national liberationist,
had allied itself in sympathy and solidarity with national
liberation struggles everywhere, including in Quebec. It rejected
as spurious any strategies of "unity" between English-Canadian
and Quebecois radicals as long as the Quebec national
liberation project had not been fulfilled in the independence of
Quebec.
Supporters of the Waffle Manifesto would refer to the
"Canadianism" of social democracy, that "Canadian" pro-
gression of Methodism to social gospel to CCF,
35
 and to the
necessity of situating anti-imperialist strategies in the "organic"
political traditions of Canada. The new left would take a closer
look at those traditions and conclude that in Fabianism (that
variety of socialism introduced "organically" into Canada by
British working-class and union militants) class struggle and
uprising and revolution were inanities, and "managerial,
technocratic, elitist, authoritarian, 'plannist' " solutions were
de rigeur.
36
 The new left had been there before, in the early
Sixties, when it had first made the distinction between itself as a
popular movement for social change and the NDP as a
reformist party so compromised as to be a collection of
"tinkerers" within the system. The NDP was not then, and was
not now, in 1969, even on its nationalist left, capable of
revolutionary politics.
The new left, on the other hand, was an international
movement of the student left which supported the national
liberation struggle of Canada because that's what was
anti-imperialist. We respected the possibility that people
who are engaged in local struggles just might be trying to
CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS 207
express an internationalist aspiration of solidarity with
each other.
The whole point of resisting the American domination of
Canadian life was to throw the unbearable weight of peremptory
structures off the backs of people so that, upright, they would be
free to fashion — not be compelled to hand over to a state
bureaucracy — who they were.
Unfortunately, this debate and others* were cut short. In
1970 Quebec was on the agenda. Dramatically, the question of
who owned Canada was overtaken by the questions of who
owned Quebec and who there was, in Canada, who would
gainsay the owners. Here, at last, was the national question.
*Also under discussion were the danger of focussing on imperialism
and not the "local class enemy," the need to investigate the anti-
capitalist traditions of the Canadian working class, the confusion
between economic colonialism and cultural and psychological malaise,
and the need to distinguish the dominated capitalism of Canada from
the Third World of classically imperialist capture.
II
LE QUEBEC AUX QUEBECOIS!
Dans la langue douce de Shakespeare
avec I'accent de Longfellow
parlez un francais pur et atrocement blanc
comme au Viet-Nam, au Congo
parlez un allemand impeccable
une etoile jaune entre les dents
parlez russe parlez rappel a I'ordre parlez repression
speak white
c'est une langue universelle
nous sommes nes pour la comprendre
avec ses mots lacrymogenes
avec ses mots matraques
Speak white
tell us again about Freedom and Democracy
Nous savons que liberte est un mot noir
comme la misere est negre
et comme le sang le mele a la poussiere des rues
d'Alger ou de Little Rock*
— Michele Lalonde (from "Speak White")
The Quiet Revolution, as Quebecois nationalists reminded
English Canadians, accomplished in ten vigorous years what
the Western world experienced in a hundred years of experi-
mental evolution. Within the decade of the late Fifties to the
late Sixties, the farming classes of Quebec resettled in the cities
as increasingly literate, skilled and disciplined workers. When
only 23 percent of students in the Fifties were finishing
*In the sweet tongue of Shakespeare
with the accent of Longfellow
speak a pure and gruesome white French
as in Vietnam, in the Congo
209
210 LONG WAY FROM HOME
secondary school, by the mid-Sixties more than 60 percent
were doing so. The nationalization of electricity, the beginnings
of a medicare program, and the extensive educational reforms
all provoked a "revolution of rising expectations" in the
population of Quebec: there was the possibility that the people
could realize themselves materially and culturally as Quebecois.
However, the Quebecois in 1965 were a people who, within
the borders of their own province, were the third lowest
income-earning group,* whose incomes, in the city of Montreal,
were $330 below the average, while Scottish-Canadian in-
comes were $1,319 above the average. The Quebecois were a
people who, when bilingual, still earned considerably less than
unilingual anglophones; and unilingual francophones, of course,
were at the bottom of the heap. Francophone representation in
the key positions of industry had not increased since 1931.
1
More than 53 percent of the labour force of Quebec worked for
Anglo-Canadian or foreign owners of industry. The "language
of command" in these enterprises was English.
In 1965 tuition and living expenses for one year of university
training were valued at approximately half the yearly earnings
of at least one-third of the family heads of Montreal.
2
 Almost
half the families and single people of metropolitan Montreal
were living on incomes of less than $5,000 a year, and their
speak an impeccable German
gnashing a Star of David in your teeth
speak Russian speak order speak repression
speak white
it's a universal language
we were born to understand it
with its tear-gas words
with its black-jack words
Speak white
tell us again about Freedom and Democracy
We know that liberty is a black word
just as misery is Negroid
and as blood mingles with dust in the streets of Algiers or Little Rock
*Only Italians and native Indians earned less.
LE QUEBEC AUX QUEBECOIS! 211
youth were not at university but in the work force, or
unemployed.*
Doctors working in the "inner city" districts of Montreal in
the late Sixties came across alarming rates of malnutrition,
physical retardation, bad eyesight and language difficulties in
the children.
3
 There were no subsidized day-care centres in the
city core nor, until the end of the decade, any health clinics. It
was by no means uncommon, in the housing in the east end and
in the St. Henri districts, to have neither bath nor shower, to
have no hot water nor, in many cases, any running water at all.
It was a mean life, this life of the Quebecois majority. It was a
life doled out on the cheap, cramped by fear and resentment It
was a cheapness and a contraction that generations of priests
and paternalistic politicians and vendu intelligentsia had
counselled the demoralized masses to accept as their destiny
as Quebecois. So they accepted it, more or less, until now.
Now, with the promises of vast social wealth and collective
pride of Quebecois being, this destiny was no longer acceptable.
In the Rassemblement pour l'Independance Nationale (RIN)
in the early to mid-Sixties and in the Parti Quebecois (PQ) of
the late Sixties, certain elements of Quebec society found the
expression of their frustration, impatience and resentment.
They spoke uncompromisingly of the need to throw off the
"Anglo" institutions and structures, and of the need to assert
the province of Quebec as the state of the French-Canadian
nation if the Quebecois were to progress towards mastery of
their own household. They drew into their ranks the thousands
of middle-class Quebecois — mid-level managers, engineers,
technocrats, university teachers, lawyers, accountants — who
had been engendered by the "bureaucratic revolution" of
the mid-Sixties. As urban institutions had expanded and
become specialized, as new channels in the public sector had
opened to upwardly mobile professionals, and as new intellectual
skills had been required to operate enterprises, this new social
class took its place as the managers of modern Quebec society
*Compared to Ontario's rate, 4.4 percent unemployment, 8.9 percent
of Quebec's labour force was unemployed, half of whom were under
twenty-five years of age.
212 LONG WAY FROM HOME
— and there they were stuck.
4
 Perceiving their mobility to be
constrained by the dead weight of Anglo ownership and
bossmanship, they called upon a nationalist political party to
shake loose the Quebec state from these constraints and to
expand its base of independent operations so as to secure the
role these workers hoped to play.
It was a call viewed by the union and student radicals with
odium. Where in the rhetoric of "self-mastery" was the
connection between colonialism and exploitation? The asso-
ciation with working-class and socialist elements? The denun-
ciation of U.S. capital and its domination of the Quebec
economy? The proposition to transform not jus t the nationality
of state management but the whole of political and economic
structures? All, all, of these conditions of Quebecois life must
be challenged, said the radicals; otherwise the PQ and its ilk
would simply deflect the consciousness and rage of the people
into party games of "moderate" programs to win the nationalist
allegiance of the "moderate" middle class. There was another
way of championing Quebec, said the radicals, and that was to
be a revolutionary.
The young radicals of Quebec had, along with the rest of the
continent's youth, witnessed against Selma in 1965; had, three
thousand strong, packed MacGregor Street in Montreal from
Guy to Simpson and sung "We Shall Overcome" in French;
had crowded around a truck on which James Foreman of
SNCC had stood, in his dungarees, fresh from the South, and
had spoken to them, in French, of the heroic labours of his
people; had made the connection between these labours and
their own as a people struggling for nationality. Of the tactical
possibilities of direct action and civil disobedience, they also
took note. They had marched, too, in the United States.
Starting off from Quebec City, students, peaceniks, labour
activists, independantistes, they had set off for Guantanamo
Bay in Cuba to touch base symbolically with the Cuban
revolution, but had got no further than the southern states, this
rag-tag collection of pacifists meandering to Miami.
They came to a town in Alabama and were told by the
cops they could not have an integrated march down the
L E QUEBEC AUX QUEBECOIS! 213
main street; they would be allowed to march only in the
black neighbourhood. The marchers said, "We're sorry
but we have to go down Main Street." So of course they
were attacked and brutalized and taken off to jail. They
were eventually paraded out, totally unresisting, of course,
and tortured with red hot cattle prods up their vaginas or
on their testicles by cops who were weeping as they did it.
That was the sum total of the non- violent philosophy: they
suffered and their torturers cried. Thank you very much,
Albert Camus.
It was Algeria that saved the young radicals from the pit of
self-abnegation: the war cries of Ferhat Abbas and Ben Bella
and the Front de Liberation Nationale; the battle of Algiers,
Arab women with bombs in their shopping baskets moving
among the French colonialists in the sidewalk cafes, intent on
murder; Arab youths dying on the rack, the will of emancipation
passed on to the next guerrilla in line, and the next, and the one
after that. It was Frantz Fanon, black Algerian psychologist of
colonialism, whose book Les Damnes de la Terre had been
published in 1961, who saved them: a colonized people is never
alone, the victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu is
no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory but belongs
now to the annals of all the oppressed in their violent efforts to
throw off the colonial master.
Goodbye to non-violence and to the negotiations around the
"green baize table" meant to forestall the inevitable: the
masses, listening to their own voices, take up arms. Decoloni-
zation, like colonization, is always a violent process, Fanon
argued, but in the process, violence pushes the oppressed to the
point beyond which they can no longer fall back into alienation
and helplessness. The terrorist sheds his/her inferiority complex
and is rehabilitated. The terrorist act is the first act of the
people's autonomous history, as Hubert Acquin, separatist
writer, put into the mouth of a Quebecois revolutionary
separatist: "Our history will begin at the unknown moment
when the revolutionary war begins. . . . That day, with open
veins, we will enter the world. . . . Actions will prevail."
5
By violence the guerrilla is not introducing a new element
into politics. (Quebec was conceived in the violence of colonial
214 LONG WAY FROM HOME
settlement and mercantile trade, was surrendered to the
English in violence, and lives violently in the modern conditions
of poverty, depression and dejection.) The guerrilla simply
"democratizes" the violence monopolized by the modern state
and its instruments.
6
In taking up violence, Fanon warned, the revolutionaries will
abandon all (false) hope of a decolonization undertaken by
their own bourgeoisie, for the nationalist bourgeois "loudly
proclaims he has nothing to do with these Mau-Mau, these
terrorists, these throat-slitters."
7
 Here was what the Black
Panther Huey Newton would call the "house nigger," the slave
a cut above the rest, granted privileges not accorded the "field
nigger" and terrified of losing them.
8
 And here was Leandre
Bergeron's description of the Quebec premier, Jean Lesage —
a "roi-negre" whose policies of nationalization of electricity
and road construction and a state mining authority and Labour
Code modernization were all designed to deliver an "efficient"
society to the foreign capitalists.
9
The culture of a colonized people, wrote Fanon, was a
culture condemned to secrecy and surreptitiousness, but
nevertheless, in the underground, there was still the refusal to
submit, to disappear. Given the power the colonialist exercises
through control of culture and personality, the role of the artists
in providing a counterculture and counter-personality cannot
be overestimated.
Accordingly, the combative artists of Quebec in the early
Sixties rejected Americanism and picked up the European
novels of Malraux, Camus, Sartre, the novels about colonialism,
fascism, communism, terror; refused any longer to "speak
white"; and revived in their literature the benighted language of
their people — joual — the language from the pavements,
alleyways and balconies. They put on record for the first tim e in
their history how they felt — angry and insolent and crazy and
immovable. Said Gerald Godin: "We appeared on the scene
and said, 'The language is in a mess and we're going to sit here
and write in it, make you listen to it, until the reasons for this
mess have been recognized.' "
10
 No longer would people be
encouraged to dream dreams; now they would be made to rub
their noses in the stuff of their lives. In their journals, parti pris,
LE QUEBEC AUX QUEBECOIS ! 215
Socialisme 64, Revolution Quebecoise, the writers and the
politicos reiterated the recrudescent themes of national liber-
ation struggle.
In 1968 all this came together in the "Songs and Poems of
the Resistance," a raucous and boisterous evening of music
and poetry: Quebec's best artists — Pauline Julien, Robert
Charlebois, Louise Forrestier, Georges Dor, Gaston Miron,
Jazz Libre du Quebec — yelling and stomping and howling
their rage and their joy in a benefit concert for Pierre Vallieres,
a revolutionary separatist recently convicted of involuntary
homicide. Two years later they would do it all again, in the
same place, the Jesuit-owned Gesu Hall, for "The Night of
Poetry," poetry up on posters, poetry on computer print-outs,
the poetry of joual, the poetry of resistance. Thirteen hundred
people witnessing a veritable assault of solidarity in a generation
finally rid of solitude and disjunction.
Before the Sixties, there was no revolutionary Quebecois left.
As Malcolm Reid, in The Shouting Signpainters, points out,
the radical youth of Quebec had no revolutionary tradition to
draw on from twentieth-century Quebec. While our English-
Canadian parents were caught and involved in the swirl of
events around the formation of the CCF and the Communist
party, the marches and strikes of the Depression, and the anti-
fascist war in Spain, the Quebecois were saying prayers for
delivery from such demons. The asbestos workers' strike in
Murdochville in 1957 and then finally the expulsion by the
electorate of Duplessis three years later broke the ground for
the revolutionary separatists of the Sixties.
1963. The first of four incarnations of the Front de
Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) is organized by a Belgian who
had been active in the anti-Nazi resistance. In March they
throw Molotov cocktails at Canadian army installations, paint
the dripping white FLQ on walls and hoardings, and send to the
news media their manifesto: "The Quebec Liberation Front is
a revolutionary movement of volunteers ready to die for the
political and economic independence of Quebec." In April a
bomb, apparently abandoned in a garbage can by two Felquistes
scared off by patrolling policemen, explodes and kills a night-
watchman.
216 LONG WAY FROM HOME
September 1963. The Armee de Liberation du Quebec
holds up a bank on Sherbrooke Street. In April the members of
the ALQ are arrested.
August 1964. The Armee Revolutionaire du Quebec, headed
up by a former paratrooper in the Foreign Legion and
composed of young working-class men "trained" at a camp in
the Laurentians, raid a firearms store on Bleury Street. The
store manager is shot dead and the police themselves accident-
ally gun down an employee. The five ARQiste s are arrested. Of
such spectacular actions, it has been said: "These members of
the revolutionary groups believed that the people of Quebec
would, at the sound of bombs, rise up spontaneously as one
single man and forthwith make their independence."
11
 No such
thing happens. The people remain stolid and the FLQ lies low.
In the meantime, the journalist Pierre Vallieres and a group
around parti pris form the Mouvement de Liberation Populaire
(MLP). They argue that it is necessary, in order to have a
political base for militant action, to politicize the workers. The
MLP distributes political tracts at the gates of the factories in
the St. Henri and Point St. Charles districts of Montreal.
May 1965. On the occasion of Victoria Day, large crowds of
youths in Lafontaine Park and in the surrounding slum districts
skirmish with the police.
A year later, members of the revived FLQ are successful in
stealing dynamite from a construction site, rifles and ammuni-
tion from a cadet corps, and money from a theatre.
5 May 1966. A bomb explodes in the strike-bound La
Grenade Shoe Company, wounding three strikers and killing a
union secretary. Shortly after, Vallieres and Charles Gagnon,
who are in New York publicizing the Quebecois struggle for
national liberation at the United Nations, are arrested by New
York police and held in the Manhatten House of Detention
before being deported to Canada and the RCMP.
Summer 1967. During Expo madness in Montreal, General
Charles de Gaulle, president of France, makes an automobile
trip from Quebec City to Montreal and is everywhere greeted
with enthusiasm. In Montreal he stands on a balcony and
exclaims: "Vive le Quebec libre!" The government in Ottawa
is horrified but the crowds exult.
L E QUEBEC AUX QUEBECOIS! 217
1968. Revolutionary separatists who have split from the
moderate RIN form the Front de Liberation Populaire.
Defining its struggle as part of a global movement of anti-
imperialism, the FLP calls for an independent, unilingual and
socialist Quebec, for workers' control and for direct democracy
in the factory and neighbourhoods. Taxicab drivers, to protest
the monopoly on airport traffic and prime downtown pick-up
space held by the Anglo firm, Murray Hill, organize as the
Mouvement de Liberation du Taxi and together with twenty-five
hundred students clash with police at the airport. The Ligue
pour l'Integration Scolaire, to protest the provisions for state
support of English-language schools in the government's Bill
63, contest the school board elections in the district of St.
Leonard, a mixed French and Italian east-end district. They
win, and two years of pamphleteering, meetings, demonstrations
and riots ensue.
February 1968. After two and a half years of incarceration,
Pierre Vallieres is brought to trial on charges of sedition and
murder in the La Grenade Shoe case. In March, Operation
McGill brings together student radicals and the Confederation
of National Trade Unions in a campaign to turn McGill into a
"working-class university integrated into Quebec society and
serving the majority of people in Quebec and not the ruling
corporations that exploit the Quebec people."
12
April 1968. Pierre Vallieres writes to his friends and
comrades from prison: "Even if violence is a phenomenon
detestable in itself, it is nonetheless true that for exploited and
colonized people like ourselves, freedom grows out of the
barrel of a gun."
13
24 June 1968. Against the "renegade" federalist Pierre
Trudeau, the RIN organize a demonstration on the occasion of
the St. Jean-Baptiste Day parade at which Trudeau is in
attendance. All night long, street battles rage between the
demonstrators and the police on horses and motorcycles, and
demonstrators fall beneath the policemen's nightsticks.*
Twelve years later, according to some conversations I have had, it
seems generally assumed in separatist circles and among those close
to such circles, that the St. Jean-Baptiste Day demonstrators were
218 LONG WAY FROM HOME
October 1968. Dynamite and detonators stolen from a
quarry are deployed in renewed FLQ attacks on industrial
enterprises, government buildings and the clubs of the Liberal
and Union Nationale parties. And students occupy their
CEGEPs.
13 February 1969. Twenty-seven people are injured by a
bomb explosion in the Montreal Stock Exchange.
28 March 1969. Government army troops are brought out to
contain the tens of thousands of demonstrators amassed by the
McGill Francais movement at the gates of McGill. In June,
construction workers, civil servants and teachers besiege the
Union Nationale's leadership convention in Quebec City to
protest the government's labour policies. The demonstrators
are driven back by police and by tear gas thrown at them from
helicopters. At the annual St. Jean-Baptiste Day parade there
is another riot. Ten to fifteen thousand working-class youths
form up behind the official parade in a clamorous parade of
their own. Charging down St. Catherine Street, they break
windows and loot.
7 October 1969. Montreal police go on strike for wage parity
with Toronto police. The Quebec Provincial Police and six
hundred men from the Fifth Combat Group of Mobile
Command at Camp Valcartier are brought into the city.
8 October 1969. The Mouvement de Liberation du Taxi
brings out 150 cabs to the depot of Murray Hill Limousine
Company. Somebody throws Molotov cocktails, and a Murray
Hill security guard fires a twelve-gauge shotgun erratically into
the crowd. A QPP officer, an agent provocateur among the
demonstrators, is killed.
10 October 1969. The FLP organizes a demonstration
calling for the resignation of Montreal mayor Drapeau. The
demonstration is declared illegal; the Riot Act is read and six
hundred troops with machine guns and tear gas surround the
city hall. The offices of dozens of left-wing and nationalist
incited by police agents provocateurs into the display of violence that
led to the demonstrators' arrest and to the widely publicized gesture of
"bravery" by Pierre Trudeau (then on a federal election campaign),
who resolutely refused to leave the viewing stand in the face of flying
Coca-Cola bottles.
LE QUEBEC AUX QUEBECOIS! 219
organizations are raided, including the Company of Young
Canadians, and declared subversive.
7 November 1969. Two thousand marchers demand the
release of Vallieres and Gagnon, who have been in jail for three
years. The crowd storms into St. James Street and smashes the
windows of the banking and financial establishments. A few
days later, Drapeau's city council passes an ordinance (of
disputed legality) banning all demonstrations. Political meetings
and leafleting are banned in all the schools, students and
teachers are expelled, citizens' and tenants' committees are
raided, and their books, papers and copying machines seized.
Early 1970. Several Montreal-based citizens' and union
committees for political action form an alliance, the Front
d'Action Politique (FRAP), to fight Drapeau in the upcoming
civic election in October. The slogan is "Les salaires au
pouvoir!" (Power to the Workers) and the program is for a
"true urban democracy" based on worker participation in
decisions made at all levels concerning housing, health care,
transportation and recreation.
February 1970. Postmaster-General Eric Kierans announces
that in the interests of "efficiency" the Montreal postal area is
to be divided up among four trucking companies, thus, in effect,
breaching the contract which had been held exclusively by G.
Lapalme Transport, whose workers, after bitter struggle, had
the year before won certification as a CNTU union and a
decent contract. The Kierans announcement threatens the
workers' contract, their job security and their union. "Les gars
de Lapalme" go on strike. Six months later the toll is: 662
postal trucks attacked, 104 postal workers' stations hit, 75
people injured, 102 arrested, 7 dynamite bombings and 1,200
postal boxes damaged.
14
 And there are still two years to go!
29 April 1970. Another provincial election. The Liberals
have engaged in a "scare" campaign, warning the population
that, in the event of a separatist victory at the polls, industries
and businesses will pack up and leave Quebec. Two days
before the election, Royal Trust of Montreal had made a show,
before TV cameras and reporters, of loading all their securities
into Brinks trucks and driving them in the direction of Toronto.
Election results: with 24 percent of the popular vote (34
220 LONG WAY FROM HOME
percent of the francophone vote) the Parti Quebecois wins 6
percent of the seats in the National Assembly. With 45 percent
of the popular vote (30 percent of the francophone and 90
percent of the anglophone vote), the Liberals win 70 percent of
the seats.
Summer 1970. The citizens of Cabano, a lumber town in the
Gaspe, form a Committee of Survival. At issue is the fact that,
although the lumber company of K.C. Irving had promised,
back in 1966, to build a lumber mill in Cabano in return for
cutting concessions from the government, it has now announced
that it "cannot afford" to build the mill. The unemployment
rate in Cabano is a disaster, and in retaliation the citizens
barricade the town, blow up the bridges leading to Irving's
lumber site, blow up the company trucks, burn the lumber and
threaten to burn the forest unless the mill is built.
21 June 1970. Montreal police raid a house in Prevost, in the
foothills of the Laurentians, and seize arms, ammunition,
disguises and revolutionary literature. They also come across
copies of a prepared statement to be distributed among the
news media in the event of the kidnapping of the American
consul in Montreal.*
There is first the humiliation . . . it's the problem of all
minorities and I do not accept the givens of the problem
There is also the fatigue, which goes hand in hand with the
*Although it wasn't until 1970, after the October Crisis, that a special
unit within the Security Service of the RCMP, called G Ops (for
Operations), was activated with the specific responsibility of surveil-
lance of, maintainance of files on, infiltration into and recruitment of
informers from among terrorist, separatist and unionist groups in
Quebec,
15
 such operations had been ongoing in Quebec throughout
the Sixties as part of the police's nation-wide repressive campaign
against "subversion." The military, too, according to Pierre Vallieres
in his The Assassination of Pierre Laporte, as far back as 1966 had
"systematically" infiltrated separatist groups, the labour movement
and student circles in Quebec. Vallieres goes as far as to suggest that
such police and military operations and particularly the use of agents
provocateurs in the demonstrations, strikes, et cetera, of the period
manipulated the developing "revolutionary consciousness" of the
Quebecois and distorted it into a "revolutionary threat."
16
L E QUEBEC AUX QUEBECOIS! 221
humiliation. Fatigue, humiliation, powerlessness.... It's
bizarre but I believe there is also joy.
17
So speaks a character in Pierre Gravel's novel of the first
"generation" of Sixties separatists, A Perte de Temps. By 1970
they had come a long way from such existentialism, had
advanced from the haze of their despondency, irresolution and
spasmodic adventures to the point where they had linked up the
national liberation struggle with that of the workers' movement
the two were indivisible. It was beyond the individual's choice
now, this motion in the streets, and "history" was no longer
executed by this or that combative intellectual or emboldened
terrorist. History was the process of hundreds of thousands of
anonymous compatriots envisioning together, en masse, the
desired, if improbable, future. It was not a simple vision. It was,
as Vallieres enunciated it, a program of expropriation of foreign
capital, nationalization of banks, resources and industries, the
disappearance of the parasitic classes, the socialization of
culture, the communalization of relations. It was not a simple
vision but at its heart was the most intelligible of ambitions: "It
is because I cannot bear to be a nigger. . . . "
18
There was, over the long haul of the liberation struggle in
Quebec, much that English-Canadian radicals, CUS among
others, could recognize of their own movement in the features
of Quebecois anti-colonialism. Recognizable were the rejection
of the path of electoralism and parliamentary democracy and of
the principle of non-violence. Recognizable too were the
emphasis on community action, the passionate attachment to
the accomplishments of the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Black
Panthers, and the nausea provoked by the ways and means of
corporate capitalism. And, by the end of the Sixties, the
English-Canadian radicals had "Canadianized" themselves,
sharing with their Quebecois counterparts acceptance of a
national, historical and cultural particularity.
In fact, by 1968, CUS recognized Quebec as a "sovereign
geo-political society," its right to national self-determination,
its "victimization" within federalism, and its oppression at the
hands of the anglophone society of the country.
19
 There were
also those, on the English-Canadian left, who hoped that from
222 LONG WAY FROM HOME
such mutuality of perspective could be forged an "anti-
imperialistic alliance."
Here were people who were obviously light years ahead of
everyone else in terms of political development, and for
them to turn their backs on the rest of us and the rest of the
country, I thought was a terrible waste. They had a
program of action which conceived of a socialist nation.
No one else that I ever talked to saw anything more than
maybe medicare or possibly singing songs about the
Spanish civil war. If we could just plug into it!
Pierre Gravel: "But since October or November, since one
had begun, one felt the words come: one must speak the city, for
it was for the idea of a city that one had struggled. The idea of
one's own capital city. The idea of a place."
20
 On this
adventure the English-Canadian national liberationists had
also embarked: the pursuit of the architecture of a place called
Canada and the naming of the streets in which its people lived,
and the meditation on how one was to fight and to make love
and to dream dreams in the new country. Adventuring, the
English-Canadians said to the Quebecois that, yes, it was at
this point a question of two different countries — two historical
experiences and two national possibilities — but that, when
"translated," it could be seen that in their efforts, the two
communities of contestants confronted the same political and
class adversaries for whom the escape of the French and the
English into nationality was insupportable. We share your
enemy, they said, if not your city. In October 1970, they had
their chance to test the mettle of this proposition.
Il l
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA
Trudeau: So long as there is a power in here which is
challenging the elected representatives of the people,
I think that power must be stopped. It's only weak-
kneed bleeding hearts who aren't prepared to take
these methods Well, there are a lot of bleeding
hearts around that just don't like to see people with
helmets and guns. All I can say is: "Go on and bleed."
But it's more important to keep law and order in
society than to be worried about weak-kneed people
who don't like the looks of an army.
CBC Reporter: At any cost? How far will you go with
that?
Trudeau: Just watch me. Ottawa
13 October 1970
On 30 April 1970 President Richard Nixon announced on
television that he was ordering U.S. troops into Cambodia. The
war in Vietnam had become ipso facto the war in Southeast
Asia. In a fury of loathing and reprobation, anti-war activists
throughout America escalated their resistance: they marched,
occupied their schools and burned down ROTC buildings. On
May 4, Ohio State National Guardsmen, who had been sent
two days before to occupy the unhappy campus of Kent State
University, shot and killed four students.
On May 9, a thousand people — hippies, yippies, draft-
resisters, new leftists, Maoists, women's liberationists and the
Vancouver Liberation Front — gathered at Peace Arch Park
on the U.S.-Canada border south of Vancouver, stormed
through the Customs crossing at Blaine and "invaded" the
United States of America. A thousand people flowed off the
highway and over and down the hill and into town, yelling,
screaming, "Gook! Gook!," throwing their fists at the local
"rednecks," smashing windows, hurling rocks at automobiles
223
224 LONG WAY FROM HOME
("We weren't just protesting, we were showing these people
something of what it's like to have your country invaded") and
raced back, the same wanton, insubordinate wave of crazies, to
Canada.* There they stood, in a line along the forty-ninth
parallel, nose-to-nose with the National Guardsmen who had
been in pursuit, there they were standing when up from the
United States along a coast-side railroad came a train loaded
with automobiles for Canada — "There it was, the whole
Canadian-American issue, chugging across the border." They
picked up rocks and smashed the cars, take that, General
Motors! In their own piece of theatre, they imitated the splatter
of Viet Cong rifle fire against the helicopters of the U.S. Army.
On May 11, i n Toronto, the May 4 Movement** spearheaded
a demonstration of fifteen thousan d at the American consulate
on the broad boulevard of University Avenue: "I remember
having been in tears about Cambodia and the Kent State
events, and then phoning people, saying, 'We've got to do
something.' I mean, when were they going to turn their rifles on
us?" It started peacefully enough. Church people, Quakers,
community organizers, kids in strollers, as well as the May 4
Movement people in black armbands, the Communists, the
Trotskyists, the Maoists. Banners, slogans, "Give Peace a
Chance" and "Escalate People's War," ill-aimed stones thrown
desultorily at the windows, a buzz through the crowd that the
police had boasted there might be somebody killed this day,
another buzz of May 4 Movement propaganda that the
consulate would be attacked.
I had said, in response to an inane question at a press
conference, that we would be attacking with Sherman
*Mourned a Blaine newspaper: "Saturday, May 9, 1970, may live in
the minds and hearts of this nation as a day of indignity. For what was
perpetrated on the United States-Canadian border is one of the
saddest and most degrading incidents suffered by the people of this
country since the Alamo."
1
**An ad hoc coalition of new leftists, radicals and student activists
named for the Kent State killings and the day in 1919 when students
and intellectuals in China mounted a mass protest movement against
the warlords, out of which came the Chinese Communist party.
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 225
tanks and bazookas. In fact, plans were vague. We weren't
keen on real violence but the mood was that if the police
were going to attack then people would not be restrained
from fighting back in self-defence.
By five o'clock the demonstrators were ready to disperse.
Suddenly there were hundreds of police, scores of them on
horseback, charging into the crowd. Packed shoulder to
shoulder for blocks, sealed off from the side-streets by more
police, the people could not move. Sitting ducks. Wham!
Thunk! Mass confusion. Frightened horses, rearing, their
studded hooves kicking out in all directions. Batons, hysteria
and mayhem. Police pulled off their horses, police attacked with
stones, pieces of sod and even apples. Demonstrators beaten and
pummelled and flung about. They scattered and ran to save
themselves as best they could, chased by cops all the way up
Yonge Street or up to the campus. Some ran over to city hall
square where a hundred motorcycle cops charged them again.
Swooped down on them with batons. "I was standing beside a
kid whose head was split open, he was gushing blood, I was
yelling, 'Somebody help! This boy's dying!' and a cop came
after me, flailing away. It was positively American."* But that
was before October.
Monday, 5 October 1970. The five members of the self-
designated Liberation cell of the FLQ, Louise Cossette-
Trudel, Jacques Cossette-Trudel, Jacques Lanctot, Marc
Carbonneau and Yves Langlois, kidnapped the senior British
trade commissioner, James Cross, from his home in West-
mount. They demanded in return for his release: the immediate
release of twenty-three "political prisoners" (Felquistes who
had been arrested and convicted of various illegalities over the
*On May 14, five hundre d National Guardsmen and numbers of state
and civil police converged on the girls' dormitory of Jackson
State University (the largest black college in Mississippi) where a
couple of hundred (unarmed) students were "hanging out " A seven-
second barrage of a thousand rounds of ammunition — from
automatic weapons, shotguns, rifles, pistols and hand-guns — left two
students dead, shot in the back.
226 LONG WAY FROM HOME
years) and their own transport to Cuba or Algeria; $500,000 in
gold; publication and broadcast through the media of their
manifesto; the cessation of the police manhunt; release of the
name of an informer; the rehiring by the government of 450
Lapalme mail truckdrivers who had lost their jobs as the result
of a reorganization in the post office.
October 6. The federal and provincial governments announced
they would not comply with the ransom demands, but that
some other deal might be possible.
October 7. Liberation cell refused any negotiations other
than those to do with their original demands but extended the
deadline on Cross's life to Thursday.
October 8. Premier Bourassa travelled to New York to
negotiate a sale of Quebec hydroelectric power. The French-
language network, Radio-Canada, broadcast the FLQ mani-
festo. The first army troops were moved down from Valcartier
to the vicinity of Montreal.
October 9. The Montreal police made several raids through-
out the city. La Presse newspaper printed the manifesto.
October 10. The four members of the days-old Chenier cell,*
Paul Rose, Jacques Rose, Francois Simard and Bernard
Lortie, kidnapped the provincial labour and immigration
minister, Pierre Laporte, and reissued the original demands of
Liberation cell.
October 11. Federal troops were moved into Ottawa and
some small units into Montreal. In the midst of the civic
election campaign, FRAP announced it was in agreement with
the objectives of the FLQ.
October 13. Michel Chartrand of the Montreal Central
Council of the CNTU announced his "unequivocal support" of
the FLQ manifesto.
October 14. At the University of Montreal, three thousand
students staged a boycott of classes in a show of support of the
manifesto. At the University of Quebec and at several
CEGEPs, students participated in mass assemblies to indicate
their approval of the manifesto and to call on the governments
*Dr. Jean Olivier Chenier was a rebel killed in battle with the British at
St. Eustache in the uprising of 1837.
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 227
to negotiate with the FLQ. Rene Levesque of the Parti
Quebecois, Claude Ryan, editor of Le Devoir, seven union
executives and several academics issued a declaration:
. . . the primary responsibility for finding a solution and
applying it must rest with Quebec We feel this urgency
all the more strongly because we fear, from certain
quarters outside Quebec especially, the terrible temptation
of embracing a political stance favouring the worst, i.e.,
the illusion that a chaotic and thoroughly savaged Quebec
would at last be easy to control, by any means whatsoever.
2
October 15. In response to Bourassa's request for federal
troops to "assure the security of the population," Hercules C-
130 troop and vehicle transport aircraft, helicopters, jeeps,
truck convoys, supply vehicles, ambulances and combat troops
moved into Montreal. That evening, at Paul Sauve arena,
Pierre Vallieres addressed a massive crowd of students. "We
cannot afford to encourage the police to take reprisals against
us. We must be solid." The students chanted: "FLQ! FLQ!
FLQ!"
October 16. At five o'clock in the morning the government of
Canada proclaimed the War Measures Act.* The provisions of
the act suspended all civil liberties, eliminated the need for
search warrants, suspended the right of habeas corpus for up to
six months, provided for stop and search, and declared that the
"FLQ and its sympathizers and any succeeding organization
and any other group or individual who advocates the forceful
overthrow of the government is outlawed and membership in
such organizations is punishable by up to five years in prison."
(Italics mine.) Likewise punishable were past membership in
the FLQ or similar organizations, and any action that might in
any way aid such organizations, if only by speaking well of
them. Sections 3 (1) (a) and 4 of the War Measures Act
imposed censorship. By the time dawn had broken, 242 people
were in jail: artists, lawyers, journalists, doctors, members of
*The War Measures Act was adopted by a vote of 190 to 16. The 16
opponents were all NDP MPs. The act expired in April 1971.
228 LONG WAY FROM HOME
FRAP, independentist groups and citizens' committees, pub-
lishers and teachers.
That evening the prime minister explained himself on
television. The kidnappers, he said, were people who "are
attempting to destroy the unity and the freedom of Canada."
They were "a handful of self-selected dictators" and "those
who gain power through terror, rule through terror." By
application of emergency measures, the government could
"root out the cancer of an armed, revolutionary movement."
3
The three major trade unions of Quebec, CNTU, QFL and
CEQ, expressed in a statement their concern that the suppression
of civil liberties threatened democracy more than did terrorism
or "anarchy."
October 17. The body of Laporte was found by radio
reporters in a car in a parking lot of St. Hubert air base.
October 30. Trudeau announced that the government had
"solid information" that an effort to form a "provisional
government" had been made by certain Quebec nationalists at
the height of the crisis. The inference was that the conspirators
were the signatories of the declaration of October 14.
October-November. Except for three batallions posted
abroad, the armed forces had moved virtually every infantry-
man and paratrooper under its command into Quebec (five
thousand men from New Brunswick and the West alone). Also
used were aircraft from Air Transport Command, three regular
and four reserve squadrons of 10 Tactical Air Group and even
a fighter-reconnaissance squadron from Bagotville with its CF-
5 jets. Police conducted 5,000 raids and made 465 arrests*
from Hull to Gaspe. In spite of the latitude provided them by
the War Measures Act, the police failed to find an y evidence to
support a criminal charge in 403 of these cases. Ultimately
some 30 persons were brought to trial but charges of "seditious
conspiracy" failed to hold up in court.
Outside Quebec, an American deserter was arrested in
Toronto because while in Montreal he had stayed at the home
*Among them: Pierre Vallieres, Charles Gagnon, Michel Chartrand,
Robert Lemieux, Gaston Miron, Pauline Julien, Gerald Godin and
Stanley Gray.
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 229
of FLQ sympathizers. The mayors of both Toronto and
Vancouver publicly stated that the War Measures Act might be
just the tool they needed to rid their cities of draft-dodgers and
hippies. A teacher in Vancouver was fired for reading the FLQ
manifesto to his class. In Winnipeg two people from a
bookstore were jailed for having posted a "Free Quebec" sign
in their window. Two University of Toronto students were
detained several hours by police for wearing the letters FLQ,
clipped from the headlines of the university paper, on their
jackets. In Guelph, police confiscated all copies of a special
edition of the student paper carrying excerpts from the FLQ
manifesto.
December 3. Surrounded by police, army transport heli-
copters, troops, ambulances and a fire truck, the members of
Liberation cell negotiated the release of Cross in exchange for
safe passage to Cuba. Three weeks later, the members of
Chenier cell were flushed out of their hide-out at St. Luc, thirty
miles out of Montreal. Both cells had been tracked down by
conventional police methods. No other active insurgents were
identified.*
Te n years later, certain additional facts and information about the
October Crisis must significantly alter our perceptions of that event.
For one thing, the kidnapping of Cross came as no surprise to
government and police: they had been waiting for something very
much like this. According to a Globe and Mail report of December
1971, the federal cabinet had decided, back in May 1970, to set up an
interdepartmental committee to consider "steps to be taken in the
event the War Measures Act comes into force by reason of
insurrection." According to CBC research, a Strategic Operations
Centre grew out of this committee. Comprised of officials from the
Prime Minister's Office and representatives from the RCMP, it
reported directly to Trudeau. For months the Centre amassed files on
the FLQ. The FLQ centres and operatives were all known to the
police. For another, the circumstances surrounding the kidnappings
of Cross and Laporte are more than ever perplexing. It was faulty
RCMP intelligence reports that linked the two cells in a conspiracy. In
fact they were not in communication with each other. For many years
speculation centred on a sixth member of Liberation cell. In July
1980 Nigel Barry Hamer, a married teacher living in Quebec, was
charged with kidnapping the trade commissioner. He pleaded not
230 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Popular resistance to the actions of the governments and to the
intimidating rhetoric surrounding and justifying those actions
was sporadic and fainthearted, especially outside Quebec. But
even inside Quebec, where the Mouvement pour la Defense
des Prisonniers Politiques Quebecois organized demonstrations
in front of the prisons holding people arrested under the War
Measures Act and the Quebec Committee for the Defence of
Civil Liberties called a few public protest meetings, the rage
and humiliation (and even the principled support of the FLQ's
objectives) did not erupt into mass resistance.
I didn't see any factory workers or office workers go off on
strike. I didn't see a single trade union call for a general
strike against the War Measures Act. I didn't see a single
school close down in protest. If people continue to go to
work, continue to go to school, if the public transportation
guilty. As for the Laporte kidnapping and murder, Chenier cell was
the beneficiary of some remarkable coincidences. Police protection of
Laporte, his family and his house was pulled just days before he was
kidnapped. He was hauled into a car in full view of his wife and his
neighbours and offered no resistance. The car carrying him happened
to be the very last one to pass out of the district before the police put up
roadblocks. The Rose brothers and Francois Simard had been under
surveillance since 1968, and their house on Armstrong Street was
known to police. It too was put under surveillance the day of the
kidnapping and in fact was raided several times while Laporte was
supposedly being held there. Yet Laporte was never discovered there.
Chenier cell has never been materially linked with the death of
Laporte. The communique announcing his "execution" was signed
by an unheard-of Dieppe Royal 22nd cell: the FLQ never did claim
credit either for the murder or the communique. The day of Laporte's
death, Paul Rose was in downtown Montreal, Bernard Lortie was
visiting friends and Jacques Rose and Francois Simard were in police
custody! The car containing his body had been driven completely
unnoticed in broad daylight onto the federal territory of the St. Hubert
air base in the middle of the general mobilization under the War
Measures Act. The "confessions" of Chenier cell to the murder were
never signed. In summary, writes Pierre Vallieres in his The
Assassination of Pierre Laporte, "the facts on record fail to prove
beyond a reasonable double that Laporte was in fact kidnapped,
sequestered and murdered by the four men who have been imprisoned
in connection with this case, or that they acted alone."
4
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 231
continues to function, that means that the occupier is
either being tolerated or supported.
In Toronto the Varsity, the University of Toronto student
paper, published a special issue, "Crisis in Quebec," which
delineated the history of colonialist conquest and exploitation
of Quebec, the manipulations and corruption that have passed
for the electoral process in Quebec, and the events of a decade
of protest leading up to the FLQ action. It told readers that,
under the War Measures Act, "all strikes can be banned.
Demonstrations, canvassing, meetings for peace can be banned.
All public meetings can be banned. Any newspaper declared to
be in violation of the act can be closed down" and so on. In other
words, all of the activities of the peace and anti-Vietnam and
draft-resistance and women's liberation and student power
movements into which people had entered as democrats and
citizens were suddenly, categorically and unilaterally declared
illegal. The paper editorialized: "When it becomes illegal to
organize and work for fundamental social change — as may be
the case in Canada at this very minute — a revolution will begin
to take shape." It printed the photographs of soldiers in full
battle regalia standing in the ordinary streets of the Canadian
city, an image that so many people were regarding with
disbelief. It did happen here.
Several meetings were held on the University of Toronto
campus: "The question wasn't why are there half a dozen
people willing to do a dumb thing like a kidnapping but, rather,
why, when they write a manifesto which poses that kidnapping
in terms of the national and class questions in Quebec, there's a
massive, popular echo?" A city-wide Committee for a Free
Quebec organized, not a demonstration, but a panel discussion
with a variety of points of view represented, including the
federalist. At York University, a "very cautious" civil liber-
tarian rally, called to protest the suspension of civil liberties,
was drowned out by two thousand students singing "O
Canada," and it was reported that some students were carrying
guns. "They were out hunting for 'frogs.' "
Up in Ottawa, Canadian University Press (CUP) news
service was "pumping out" material on the crisis and its
232 LONG WAY FROM HOME
background, which university papers across the country picked
up and reprinted.
There were tanks at the airport and soldiers everywhere
downtown where the CUP offices were. I was very afraid
because the act had said that it was illegal to publish the
FLQ manifesto and here I was pumping it over the wire
anyway. I was all alone and waiting for the cops to come
breaking down the doors to haul me away.
In Winnipeg, NDPers held meetings to discuss the Com-
munist Manifesto and the FLQ manifesto and "we were afraid
the whole time of the meeting we were going to be arrested.
Actually, we needn't have worried. Western Canadians didn't
see that the War Measures Act had anything to do with them."
To people in Calgary the act meant that "friends in Quebec
might get thrown in jail but Calgarians were probably safe. And
we were. We did our little bit, took the afternoon off and
marched downtown with placards. Someone took pictures of
us and that was that." In Edmonton the remarks of the police
chief that he might use the act to run the draft-dodgers out of
town created not a little paranoia: people huddled in their
houses, too frightened even to talk politics on the phone.
Radicals on the students' council of the University of Alberta
organized a protest rally but "there was a tremendous resistance
to the idea of doing anything. We had a hell of a time getting
anyone from the faculty to speak out against the act — even the
dean of the Law Faculty wouldn't touch it." In the end, about
two thousand people showed up to hear "a couple of left-
wingers" and the dean of College St. Jean. RCMP officers in
brushcuts circulated visibly in the crowd and the mood was in
fact hostile to the statements of the protesting speakers.
"Students by and large felt Trudeau was right."
A Friends of Quebec Committee in Vancouver had a
meeting on the steps of the courthouse and read out the FLQ
manifesto. Nothing happened. The Peak, the student paper at
SFU, ran the CUP material, the FLQ communiques, an
excerpt from Vallieres's White Niggers of America, a feature
from Last Post magazine ("The Santo Domingo of Pierre
Elliott Trudeau") and an editorial:
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 233
The Felquistes are taking on a very violent opponent, this
we must recognize. Self-defence is necessary, sure. But
there's got to be more to a revolution than that.
South American revolutionaries know this. In Argentina
last week four revolutionaries intercepted a truck carrying
2,400 quarts of milk and distributed them in a slum
district. The Tupamaros in Uruguay have done the same
thing with trucks carrying meat. And these groups are
gaining tremendous support.
All power to the imagination!!!
And the yippie paper, the Yellow Journal, came out at the
end of October as le journal jaune with material prepared in
cooperation with the Free Quebec-Free Canada Committee.
It reprinted the FLQ manifesto "as an exercise of our
democratic rights, unwilling to be intimidated by totalitarian
legislation and in support of the people of Quebec who are
fighting for their national liberation."
Brave words, brave gestures, and the least that self-respecting
radicals could do. But the resistance was riven with timorous-
ness as though the questions were not "How dare they do this?"
but "What if they do it to me?" Here was a revelation: the
movement which had so recently and so belligerently boycotted,
disrupted and intervened in the processes of the authoritarians
who governed their lives as students ground to a halt when that
same authority turned on the Quebecois. When forced to
choose between the well-being of the colonized people of
Quebec and the well-being of the Canadian state, for all their
anti-colonialist rhetoric, the English-Canadian radicals could
not choose Quebec. It was as though in the English-Canadian
heart of each and every one of the radicals was this: that the
federalist state, in all its baneful ways, was still their history,
their condition and their aspiration.
The Front de Liberation du Quebec is not the Messiah,
not a modern-day Robin Hood. It is a group of working
people of Quebec who are committed to do everything
they can for the people of Quebec to take their destiny in
their hands.
234 LONG WAY FROM HOME
The Front de Liberation du Quebec wants the total
independence of the Quebecois, brought together in a free
society, purged forever of its band of voracious sharks, the
patronage-dispensing "big bosses" and their servants who
have made Quebec into their private preserve of "cheap
labour" and of exploitation without scruple.
The Front de Liberation du Quebec is a movement not
of aggression, but of response to aggression — the
aggression organized by high finance through the marion-
ettes of the federal and provincial governments (the
Brinks "show," Bill 63, the electoral map, the so-called
"social progress" [sic] tax, Power Corporation, Doctor's
insurance, the men of Lapalme. ..)... .
We live in a society of terrorized slaves, terrorized by
the big bosses: Steinberg, Clark, Bronfman, Smith, Neapole,
Timmins, Geoffrion, J.L. Levesque, Hershorn, Thompson,
Desmarais, Kierans. (Beside these Remi Popol* the
gasket, Drapeau the "dog," Bourassa the Simard sidekick,**
Trudeau the faggot are "peanuts."). . .
Working people in the factories, in the mines, and in the
forests; working people in the service industries, teachers,
students, unemployed: take what belongs to you, your
labour, your determination and your freedom. And you,
workers of General Electric, it is you who make your
factories run; you alone are capable of producing; without
you, General Electric is nothing!
Working people of Quebec, begin today to take back
what belongs to you; take yourselves what is yours. You
alone know your factories, your machines, your hotels,
your universities, your unions; do not wait for a miracle
organization.
Make your revolution yourselves, in your neighbourhoods,
in your workplaces. And if you do not make it yourselves,
*Remi Paul, former Union Nationale minister of justice, used to
appear on campaign platforms with the Quebec Nazi party.
**A French-Canadian family with extensive corporate holdings and
into which Robert Bourassa, then Quebec premier, married, it is a
financial supporter of the Liberal party.
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 235
more usurpers, technocrats or others, will replace the
handful of cigar puffers we now know, and everything will
have to be done over again. You alone can build a free
society. . . .
Our struggle can only be victorious. Not for long can
one hold in misery and scorn, a people once awakened.
These are excerpts from the FLQ manifesto, which was
broadcast and widely disseminated, briefly, during the October
Crisis. This is the language of the "bandits," the "criminals,"
the insurrectionaries from whom the government of Canada
sought to defend the people of Quebec. Here they were in all
their iniquity: revolutionaries who acknowledged that no mere
spectacle of terrorism was sufficient to bring on a revolution,
that such change could only be wrought by the exploited and
humiliated masses themselves, in their places of collective
desolation; who named the agents of exploitation and aggression;
who drew the picture of what could be, down independence
road. Against this vocabulary the government posed its own,
an "official version" of events that, reduced to the simple
formula of law-and-order, precluded, it was to be hoped, the
"ideologization"
5
 of those events, that is, the transformation of
FLQ propaganda into a vision. Or, as a media wag put it, "This
is the first time in this country we've had a counter-revolution
before having had a revolution."
6
Thus, one heard from John Turner, minister of justice, that
the government had been placed "in a position of immobility
whereby all the action in terms of public opinion was left to a
bunch of renegades."
7
 The secretary of state Gerard Pelletier
stated that the FLQ "advocated" selective assassinations (it
had advocated no such thing) that "might well have" resembled
the Nazi's Night of the Long Knives in 1938.
8
 One heard from
"sources high in the provincial government" that there were at
least thirty-five hundred Felquistes armed to the teeth with
automatic weapons and ten thousand sticks of dynamite,
9
 and
from Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau that there was within
Quebec a group attempting "to set up the provisional govern-
ment that was to preside over the transfer of constitutional
authority to a revolutionary regime."
10
 Jean Marchand, minister
236 LONG WAY FROM HOME
of regional economic expansion, complained that the Criminal
Code was not instrument enough "to get those people [the FLQ
and its sympathizers] and question them."
11
 And Prime
Minister Trudeau asserted that "society must take every
means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a
parallel power which defies the elected power in this country,
and I think that goes to any distance."
12
 In this manner, nine
kidnappers, with only a handful of supporters providing direct
assistance, with very limited funds (the second day after their
kidnapping of Laporte, Chenier cell had exactly one loaf of
bread in their house) and with six firearms and twenty pounds
of dynamite among them — this was all they had, absolutely all
— became a cunning, ruthless and conspiratorial battalion of
desperados poised for a coup d'etat who could only be stopped
— they were, insidiously, everywhere — by the suspension of
the rule of law.
Such scenarios were, as FRAP pointed out at the time, the
hallucinations of men fearful, for good reason, of the vengeance
of those they had violated and terrorized for so long,
13
 the
people of Cabano and St. Henri and Lapalme and the textile
mills. They were, too, the rationale for moving against the
whole dissident motion of the Quebecois, for if it was not
simple criminals with which the government had to contend
(they had the Criminal Code for that), it was perforce all those
thousands in the labour unions and the Parti Quebecois and the
CEGEPs and the citizens' committees who represented adrift
of opinion
14
 away from the justification of a federalist and
capitalist state. The ideological monopoly of the state had been
contested and its monopoly of the means of violence counter-
vailed: "For Mr. Trudeau, that kind of challenge to established
authority was illegitimate, and justified a very severe official
response."
15
 In tne nakedness of the War Measures Act, the
government of Canada was on record that it need not derive its
authority from the consent of the body politic; simple preroga-
tive would do.
To a degree, the government was correct. A Gallup Poll
taken in late 1970 showed that 89 percent of English-speaking
and 86 percent of French-speaking Canadians approved the
deployment of the War Measures Act. This did not surprise
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 237
those pro-Quebec radicals who had been deeply disappointed
in their efforts to rally public opinion against the government's
rationalizations: they had come up against widespread antipathy
towards "the French," distaste for the "Communist"-sounding
rhetoric of the FLQ, horror at the kidnappings and murder, and
the conviction that however severe were the measures taken by
the state they were preferable to the disruptions and confusion
provoked by the separatists and were, in the end, "for our own
good."
In a sense the government had triumphed over the radicals
too. It had caught them by surprise ("Nobody saw it coming.
Nobody apprehended just how formidable a bourgeois leader
Trudeau was and that he really was absolutely willing to go to
the wall on the question of Quebec") and was able to capitalize
on the English-Canadian movement's isolation from Quebec.
Beyond Ontario it was, of course, a case of the isolation of
distance (in Edmonton, for instance, the radicals had difficulty
in getting hold of a copy of the FLQ manifesto), but it was also
the isolation of their unilingualism, of the general lack of
contact with the Quebec left and its movements, and of the
diffuse nature of their nationalism. "Explicitly we all supported
the right of Quebec to self-determination, but implicitly we
were pan-Canadian nationalists who feared that the separation
of Quebec would lead to the break-up and balkanization of
Canada. We failed to examine critically this idea." They had
also failed to examine the repressive capacity of the state so
that when the crunch came, they were frightened rather than
enraged. Intimidated by the provisions of the War Measures
Act ("Machine guns pointing at you in the streets are
intimidating"), by the arbitrary withdrawal of the freedom of
speech and assembly, by their alienation from their public,
Quebecois and Canadian, who were convinced at the discovery
of Laporte's body that the nationalist movement did breed
murderers and thugs, and by their own ambivalence about the
"adventurism" of the FLQ, they abandoned the streets to the
police who rounded up their comrades in Quebec with
impunity.
Perhaps in October, 1970, the Trudeau government and
the military accomplished more than just the neutralization
238 LONG WAY FROM HOME
of thirty people and the rescue of a captive, abandoning the
other to his fate. They profited from the isolated instance
of terrorism to intimidate all Quebecois nationalists and
the progressive left. Trudeau was not playing at just
catching some fish, he was after emptying the whole
pond. . . .
16
It was like a nightmare, as if it wasn't real. Repression had
always been something that happened somewhere else
and didn't immediately affect us. Now, as it sank in, it
crystallized my feelings about Canadian politics. Horror
at the lack of accountability. Then I began to feel very
isolated, from my own family even. A very lonely feeling.
In incredible loneliness and isolation, I began to question
my whole politics.
Into the vacuum created by the dispersal of the Quebecois
student left into the Parti Quebecois, the citizens' committees
and ad hoc mobilizations, and by the scattering of the English-
Canadian student movement into splinter groups, into the
Waffle, into women's caucuses, the state had successfully
inserted itself. The activists of the summer had been the last
gasp of the united new left; the campuses had been quiet that
fall of 1970.
Having said this, however, the story is not told. Within two
years, Quebec was convulsed by a general strike, the most mas-
sive general strike in the history of North America, with the ports
of Montreal and Quebec City shut down, major institutions
paralysed, radio stations occupied, plants, mills, factories and
mines abandoned, and whole towns taken over by the strikers.
"It had been building up over the whole Sixties. When you
have more than three hundred thousand people on strike, you
obviously have the culmination of a process which has
preceded them."
As for the English-Canadian radicals, there was to be no
such drama. Rather it was a process of disillusionment with the
state as they took the measure of its doleful mandate. Between
the First World War and 1970, the War Measures Act had
been in force no less than 40 percent of the time,
17
 beginning with
"arrest, detention, exclusion and deportation" of anti-con-
FREE QUEBEC, FREE CANADA 239
scriptionists, carrying through the eviction, dispersal and
defrauding of Japanese-Canadians on the West Coast, and
ending with the political imprisonments of 1970. There was an
undercurrent of understanding too that the English-Canadian
student movement had had its moment of truth about just what
it was prepared to put on the line. The sobering realization that
it had not picked up the tear gas cannister that was the act and
lobbed it back behind the lines of the state's menacing advance
persuaded a good many radicals that they had some hard
thinking to do so that, the next time out on the streets, they
would be very, very clear about what was happening and what
they must do.
"If we fight back," wrote le journal jaune in October 1970,
"and if we begin to be successful we too will be seen as an
'apprehended insurrection,' whether we use physical means or
moral suasion. At the point we become effective in challenging
their system, their values, all the power of the state will come
down on us. They do violence to us every day, in a million little
ways.... They have declared war. What should our response
be?"
18
 It was a question that went resonating down the
corridors of the new decade.
PART VI
THIS IS NOT A
REVOLUTION, SIR,
THIS IS A
MUTATION
MOVEMENT NATION
....who is it that is getting fed up? Who is it that is
getting disgusted with what Marx called "all the old
crap?" Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical
ways? All over the world — in the bloc, outside the
bloc and in between — the answer's the same: it is
the young intelligentsia.
— C Wright Mills
1
1962. Out they came, from out of the four cozy walls of
home, out into the streets, kids, eighteen-year-olds, twenty-
year-olds, kids, out into the public property of the city, the
polis, the political boulevards of citizenship, to sit down in
them, march through them, squeeze their bodies through the
iron grilles of the gates shut tight against their passage. They
were out there because they hated the Bomb and feared its
poison, feared it not just for themselves but for all people
everywhere (and for people still to be born) upon whose utterly
human flesh its radiation might throw a lethal heat, hated the
governments who grew fat with the transactions of the Bomb,
hated the policies carried out in their name against populations
with whom they ached to be in bonds of fraternity. They were
out because at the root of their hate was an idea that one could
live otherwise than in fear and confusion and solitude, that
against the institutions of war and propaganda and profligacy
one could erect imagination. Imagine: "alternatives to helpless-
ness." Imagine that the owners of these institutions could be
displaced. Where was it written that the fat men in the
boardroom were safe from the shifting winds of history?
The kids were out because they had been handed unfinished
business, and who were they to say, no thanks, it's not possible?
It was Paul Goodman who had drawn up the list: a humane
technocracy, community planning, workers' management,
243
244 LONG WAY FROM HOME
economic egalitarianism, democracy, justice and honesty.
That's all. Nothing less was worth their enterprise and nothing
less would save them.
By 1965 this was an international event, this heaving up of
the young from their haunches of resignation to grasp hands in a
collective moral commitment to peace and generous order, to
perform, finally, actions of self-emancipation. Studies would
show that these activists were "liberal, tolerant, humane,
intellectually democratic, truly autonomous, warm, rather
impulsive and thoroughly decent,"
2
 and so they were, young
Utopians who gave themselves over heart and mind to fantasy,
to that moral realm where "nothing is forbidden" (or where that
which is forbidden is the malign and the cruel) and where, out of
respect for another's integrity and for their own dream of
mutual charity, they would be non-violent. In their activity they
would be loving and in their politics very, very ethical, for
politics is that ethic written by action into history and one
would not pass this way again. In the name of this love, of the
possibility of kindness, tenderness and succour, each to each,
young people everywhere refused the givens of their situation,
refused the "false authority" of the attitudes, customs, values,
relations, institutions and culture that were the work of
warmongers, slave-traders and commodity-fetishists. In their
place — for the territory they had deserted was vast — they
proposed the "movement," the collecting point of freedom-
seekers in motion, freedom from war, from bigotry, from
privation, freedom from politicians and managers, freedom
from indoctrination, "public opinion" and television, freedom
from bad sex and Big Daddy. No doctrinal program here, just
everything that had to do with the struggle to live well and with
joy. "The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative,
not of their Utopian character, but of the strength of the forces
which prevent their realization."
3
1968. Their movement had carried them away from the
places where their forbears had struggled — the industrial
plant, the mines and the mills — and dispersed them wherever
life had been cheapened and threatened and despised in the far-
flung empire of the "system" and its minions, had carried them
beyond the pale of traditional politics to the "helpless," among
MOVEMENT NATION 245
whom they sought that "revolution from below" that would
sweep them all, all of them in their hundreds of thousands and
millions, up to the front gates of the citadels of Capital (within
which were those who were accountable). It was not exactly
clear what would happen next, and in any case the millions did
not attend, but in the clenched fists of challenge (of trying even)
the socialist project was recovered. In this they had the
inestimable assistance of the people of Vietnam, for it was
obvious from Vietnam, if from nowhere else quite so, that being
"upset" was not good enough. Only winning was good enough.
And one won through political action — up against the wall! —
based on a thorough and implacable understanding of what was
going on. "Once the policy critique of the war had been
supplanted by the structural critique of the empire, all political
therapies short of socialist revolution appeared to become
senseless."
4
 One could do worse than imitate the example of
the ineffably courageous socialist revolutionaries of Vietnam.
One could do worse by ignoring where the Vietnamese war
touched the connecting wires that pulled at the executors of
one's own existence, pulled at the bureaucrats in the university,
at the decadents in mass culture, at the racists in the social
sciences, at the woman-haters in the family: it was all
connected, for it was all one body of unconscionable authority.
God knows how many times there is a certain feeling that a
kind of liberation of the soul cannot occur without a really
cathartic event. How many times I wanted a revolution to
happen just so I could go into a Safeway store with a
sledgehammer and smash the shit out of it, smash all its
decadence and stupidity. With impunity.
Massive black rebellion, constant strikes, gigantic anti-war
demonstrations, draft resistance, Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, a
cultural revolution of seven hundred million Chinese, the FLQ,
occupations, red power, the rising of women, disobedience and
sabotage, communes and marijuana.
1970.
"It is not properly youth's role to bear so great a responsibility
for inventing or initiating for their society as a whole."
5
246 LONG WAY FROM HOME
The movement generated ideas, ideas on how to live, how to
examine things, how to make an organization, how to be a
revolutionary, and just as the movement was an international
phenomenon, scattered across borders and grounded in com-
munity after community, so too were its ideas flung abou t and
passed around, refined and honed and involuted by an
experience here and a debate there, until no one could say they
were not everybody's. This was not surprising. Sharing the
conditions of existence, the broad body of radical Western
youth shared too the ideas of what their situation was.
Everywhere they were in university, in the deadening circum-
stances of the classroom, being prepared for work they
despised (or for the army, if they were not lucky) and for that
mess of pottage called their comfort and their security.
Everywhere intruded the news that the order that propped them
up was not immutable, was indeed at this very moment under
attack by some band or other of subversives and guerrillas.
Their ideas took account of all this.
Praxis. The practice of the organization, the group, the
collective. The radicals must be prepared to answer the
question "What is the alternative?" with their own actions. The
alternative is embodied in their praxis: note, they said, that we
assume that people are capable of understanding their situation;
note that no solution that has not derived from their/our
participation in its determination is worthy of us. Without
consensus, openness and interdependence of the members
(you are my sister, you are my brother, we are in this together),
there is no democracy, and where there is no democracy, the
group breaks down into hierarchy, coercion and bureaucracy.
Into violence. "The praxis is politics (theory, practice) and
other acts. All tied together. The praxis rescues politics from
terrorism by always recalling the obvious, the daily needs that
make it necessary, and rescues daily things from nonsense and
dispersal."
6
Ideology. The separation of moral from political problems is
phony. Within the human being, within the human life, the two
are inextricable, for what power is and how it is to be negotiated
are questions deeply rooted in what is the good and what is the
ill. To separate out "politics" and to set it above all other
MOVEMENT NATION 247
inquiries is to separate out "politicians" (or ideologists) from
the community, to endow them with "science" and to transform
the brothers and sisters into "masses" in whom political life is
not quickened until the ideologists invoke it. No, ideology
evolves in the course of the movement meditating on its
collective experience; it is situated in the context of the
movement. "There has ultimately been no more worth or
cogency in any ideology than a man infuses it with by his own
action."
7
The extra-parliamentary opposition. It is not possible to
mount radical opposition within the political system because
the system, far from being transformed by conflict, manages it.
The movement places itself elsewhere. The movement is not a
political party; it is a coalition, a united front of oppositional
elements who seek to recover their power from below, from
within the cells of civil society — culture, social relations,
values — where social change occurs or not at all. The extra-
parliamentary opposition therefore not only criticizes existing
institutions of society and politics but also, by its activity,
proposes alternatives, a "counter-milieu" in which new kinds
of human relations are formed outside the existing apparatus of
control and management."It's very important to withdraw
from the established political institutions in our society and to
undermine their legitimacy in order to create a new climate
where people have the self-confidence to build new institutions.
Of course that is a revolutionary process."
Cultural revolution. "Talk about the colonization of every-
day life; they pull out of India to entrench themselves a little
more deeply in your skull."
8
 The human being is not just an
economic and political construct; the human being is also a
psychic and cultural event, and the revolution that will liberate
us is the one that will expel the oppressor not only from the
workplace but from the personality as well. The fact is we are
mutilated people, condemned to the intellectual, emotional
and spiritual life of the marketplace, and only the revolution
can heal us, the revolution that implicates all our comings and
goings, all our busy little doings, all the private fastnesses in
which we cower and make believe we are happy. "The more I
make love, the more I want to make the revolution. The more I
248 LONG WAY FROM HOME
make the revolution, the more I want to make love." The
cultural life of the revolution, then, is the imagining, in embryo,
of the personality and the life-style of the liberated future. In the
visionary surrealism and psychedelicism of the movement, in
its ecstatic epiphanies, its cooperative households, its reno-
vation of the ego, its playful arts, and in its acknowledgement
that every human has something to do with pleasure and beauty
as well as labour and struggle is the synthesis of poetry and
revolution. "But when their rhythms/mesh/then though the
pain of living/never lets up/the singing beings."
9
Student power. The radicals ask: What is a university for?
Their movement rises in the cleft between the demand of
industry that education be streamed along the needs of industry
and the social need to allow a certain amount of intellectual
freedom. The movement arises in the cleft between the fact that
students as the "new working class" represent the producers of
technocracy and the fact they are being restrained from
fulfilling the liberating potential of that technocracy by the
repressive regulations of neo-capitalism. What is the university
for? If the final goal of education is to organize and direct
consent for repression and regulation, then the radical students
would withdraw their consent. Happily the university cannot
be permanently policed (and still carry on its function); here,
where social control is just a little less thorough, a "Red base" of
anti-capitalist commotion can be organized and run on the
energy of a hundred thousand fellow students' antagonism to
what they must put up with in their daily lives and to what is
being prepared for them in the cubbyholes of intellectual toil.
Capitalism. Although they leaned heavily on the work of
left-wing or "oppositional" economists like J.K. Galbraith,
Harold Innis, Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, Ernest
Mandel and Andre Gorz (not to mention the originals: Marx
and Engels), it cannot be said the movement produced
anything very remarkable in the way of political economy. It
was, after all, made up of students. But from their readings and
their lessons and their lives, the radicals did become bottomlessly
hostile to capitalism and its pretensions. The "problem of
production," they said, had only apparently been solved. The
tremendous productivity of the industrial and service plants
MOVEMENT NATION 249
masked the social costs with which it was purchased: inequitable
distribution, exploitation of labour, manipulated consumption,
unemployment, waste, systematic impoverishment of women,
the old, the non-Anglo, monopolization of resources, price
rigging, growth for growth's sake, government by corporation.
"But every step forward entails some human sacrifice and
instead of being liberated man is being enslaved — ground up
by the wheels of progress."
10
 We categorically refuse all this,
said the movement; we have in mind instead another conception
of property and labour, we have in mind a world where work is
self-managed play and where people see, not their production,
but themselves as a social end.
The new left. In the 1960s, the world needed to be
understood again. The knowledge that had been passed along
from one generation of leftists to the next ever since the 1840s,
as precious and fundamental and ingenious as it was, no longer
explained enough. The world of the twentieth century had
undergone such radical transformations of the economy, of the
work force, of popular culture, of family relations, of education,
that the left had to take up again the responsibility of figuring
out what it was socialist revolutionaries had to deal with. By the
same token, the left could no longer assume that its inherited
structures of opposition and insurrection were equal to the task.
Think again. The Bolshevik model does not apply. Oh, yes,
its glorious moment of the overthrowing a semi-feudal order for
peace! land! bread! was an inspiration, still, but what then had
happened? Of course the revolution is not a tea party, but must
the post-revolution be a workhouse? Engels: "A revolution is
certainly the most authoritarian thing there is." But after the
revolution, what of that? Tomes of rules and regulations. A
vanguard party progressively so isolated from the people that
for the purposefulness and the self-generated activity of the
working class it substituted itself, its dismal, mechanistic
manipulative, terroristic self. This was a revolution? Eugene
Debs: " I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be
led out, you could be led back again."
What then of the social democrats, the gentlemen and ladies
of Parliament who observed the niceties of Roberts Rules of
Order so that the party might progress from one election to the
250 LONG WAY FROM HOME
next to — what? The nationalization of industry and govern-
ment by party hacks in the name of — who?
A plague on both these houses. "The bureaucratic forms of
organization shared by communism and capitalism were
embodiments of insult to the ideals of individualism, spontaneity,
mutual trust and generosity that are the dominant themes of the
new sensibility."
11
 For such ideals the new left was accused by
the old of naivete, infantilism and sentimentalism. So be it.
"Those who take their desires for reality are those who believe
in the reality of their desires" — scrawled on the walls of the
Sorbonne, 1968.
It was not possible, said the new left, that democracy in the
locale could be realized in undemocratic organization, in the
supercentralized, rigidly hierarchical, secretive and rigorously
disciplined vanguard party at the head of the working class.
Nor was it possible in the fetishism of technology and
"technique," that "brave new world" of the earlier socialists
and social democrats in which the agents of the workers, placed
at the gearbox of industry, would liberate society through
rational planning and scientific order. Remember, said the new
left, we were born in the shadow of the Bomb; and reason,
efficiency and progress are not everything. Democracy, if the
word still had any credibility, was by definition a function of
decentralized activity under local control, a function of overt,
diffused and flexible structures dispersed throughout society.
Modern industrial society had become much too complex and
differentiated, polycentric and polymorphous, for one to dream
again of seizing control of it by one fell swoop for power at the
top. Rather, society must be penetrated at all its levels by
"insurrectional cells" and "nuclei of confrontation" in all
those social areas where modern life has become intolerable
and the future a glimpse into the possible. Who would not want
to exchange the reality for the possible, in the schools, the
suburbs, the supermarkets, the bars, the bedrooms, as well as
the factories?
We have no scenario. We do not know what the revolution
will look like. We only know it is protracted, a "mounting fugue
of attacks on political crimes of all sorts, on all fronts, at all
levels of aspiration, from all sectors and classes, so that
MOVEMENT NATION 251
repression can never rest, never find a fixed or predictable
target."
12
 Who knows what waits for us at the end of this
adventure, what bizarre architecture of revolutionary community
we will have laid the foundation for? The end of action is not so
important as how the "now" is negotiated, for it is in the
moment here that choices present themselves. We would do
well to choose wisely for after us come millions for whom it will
not be possible to undo what we have done.
"I was enlisting. I think that's a great privilege."
The movement in Canada. Of Canada. An international event
situated in the specifics of a Canadian place. In its Canadian
particularity, reflecting the realities — both inspiriting and
dismal — of the nation as a whole. The Canadian movement:
seemingly overwhelmed by the American example yet fighting
for its native life.
It was said: "We thought like Europeans and acted like
Americans." In this there was some truth. The material of the
civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the
draft resistance and the countercultural movement was,
throughout the Western world but particularly in a country
bordering on the United States, sensational, arousing and
inspiring. There were lessons here, in civil disobedience, non-
violence, collectivity. In peace houses coast to coast, Cana-
dians sang the blues of the Southern blacks, re-created the
SNCC debates, practised curling up in a foetal position to ward
off the boots and sticks of the police, and summoned up the
courage to go out marching and get busted. In the hippie
communes they smoked and elaborated California metaphysics,
in the hippie streets they collected in the "liberation front" as
though by rhetorical analogy they were in the Southeast Asian
jungle, booby-trapping GIs. In the SDUs, they imitated the
American constellation of "action freaks" spinning around the
charismatic male leader, arrogant men who expected to be
waited on, who always arrived late, never thought twice about
inconveniencing others, publicly humiliated their "fellows" in
brutal mind games, men who were "leaders" because of this
power and not because they helped the group understand its
milieu. Yes, here were Americanisms and the Canadian
252 LONG WAY FROM HOME
radicals were both exalted and debased by them, exalted by the
example of their peers rising up in efficacious anger against the
American machinery that pressed against the lives of all
peoples, and debased by the self-contempt inherent in the
imitative actions and ideas through which they identified with
the syllabus of the "master race" of the United States of
America.
On the other hand there were the Europeans — the British
connection, the French connection, Aldermaston and the idea
of nuclear disarmament,* the British Labour party and Fabian
socialism, existentialism and Sartre and Camus, Fanon and
Celine and Malraux. "The widespread growth and success of
different revolutionary movements abroad has been the prime
factor in the increase in socialist thought in Canada "
13
 For
later would come the other Europeans, Gramsci, Debray,
Marcuse, and the Third World, most particularly Mao.
Countervailing influences, then, to the Americans. A pot-
pourri, an "undigested and perhaps undigestible" gourmet
dinner of radical thought. An international generation of young
intellectuals in search of roots and sources beyond the givens of
middle-class existence.
Between the two models, the American and European, was,
however, the real life of Canada. As early as 1966 the SUPA
newsletter was reminding the readership that a too-close
identification with the American left would obscure the
unhappy (but irrefragable) fact that Canadian radicals were
bred in the depressed culture of a colonized society.
The querulousness among us, the pettiness, the conflict
between personalities over non-issues. All of this showed
a tremendous insecurity. Fanon says the Algerian intel-
lectuals were afraid to write and to be criticized by their
peers. How true for us too! A person like Tony Hyde, very
articulate and insightful and an aspiring writer, was
terrified at the prospect of actually putting something
*"The American movement was never unilateralist (that is, unilateral
disarmament) to the extent that we were, and there was no American
equivalent of the concept o f positive neutralism' we had for Canadian
foreign policy."
MOVEMENT NATION 253
down and having somebody say, "Yeah, it's okay." How
much did Art Pape write, or Liora Proctor or Myrna
Wood or Joan Newman? We were scared.
It was important to face this condition, understand it, situate it
in the structural realities of Canadian society by which all
Canadians were defined. It may be, said the SUPA newsletter
in 1966, that the base of a Canadian oppositional movement is
not in a civil rights campaign, or in arguments with liberalism,
or in an anti-war movement, but in the popular nationalism of
Canada and Quebec and in a participatory democratic move-
ment in the schools and universities. In such a supposition, still
so tentative and suggestive, one can hear the creakings of the
Americanized stage flats as they are shoved aside to reveal the
scenario of Canada. After all, the struggle to be in Canada is
ongoing, is proceeding every day, but only now and then in
history is it given to people to answer to the very sharp
questions of the nature of the place and to take a stand. The late
Sixties were such a time. To say that the movement was
"imported" is to demean the consciousness Canadians have
had all along, however muted or mystified at times, that they
live in a place of their own making.
In 1970 Toronto Workshop Productions presented a play,
Chicago 70 (about the conspiracy trial of the eight American
activists arrested after the Chicago demonstrations in 1968),
both in Toronto and New York. "I am told," wrote a reviewer,
"that the two audiences responded quite differently to the
show, the Canadians laughing more and the Americans arguing
more."
14
 One can account for this by quoting, as did the
reviewer, Bertolt Brecht: "The man who laughs has not yet
been told the terrible news." Or one can discern in the laughter
the recognition that the situation was incongruous, out of place,
absurd. The "terrible news" was of another country. We are
not there, but here.
Americans seemed to have a real need to get their heads
bashed in, to do something, anything, to "escalate" the
confrontation — to what end none of them could really tell you,
but no matter. The point, they said, was to go to Chicago and
show the whole world that somebody in the godawful country
cared, that you couldn't write the whole nation off so long as
254 LONG WAY FROM HOME
there were even one or two who were willing to get their heads
bashed in, and so they did, thousands in Chicago. And then
things got freakier and freakier until, a few years later, it was
just one or two in an underground blowing up banks. That
didn't happen here. Neither that kind of estrangement from a
theoretical (intellectual) basis for their actions, nor that kind of
irrecoverable hatred of their home. "We read books and talked a
lot of theory. We weren't crazy." Listen, the Americans who
knew us thought there was something a bit strange about us:
their sensibilities were shocked by our, well, not quite Marxism
perhaps, but by our socialist assumptions, a certain vocabulary,
a new left stance, sure, but tempered with an ease with notions
of "labour" and "class struggle" and "exploitation" that had
come from the contact of the continentalist counterculture with
the living socialist traditions of the Communist party and the
CCF-NDP of Canada. They were there, the traditions, in the
everyday life of thousands and thousands of our compatriots,
and because of them there was something in the nature of our
national life we honoured and held precious. It was in these
traditions we were most un-American.
The charge that the identification with American issues cut
Canadian radicals off from traditionally radical sections of the
Canadian population
15
 is naive. For one thing, the Canadian
new left was never completely cut off from the old left (there
was a marked overlap in membership of the new left and the
NDP and Trotskyist parties, and there was continual debate
among them). For another, there is more to the "radical
tradition" in Canada than social democracy and the political
affiliation of trade unions, as is shown by the new left's
identification with the Wobblies, rural populism, the suffrage
movement, cooperativism, Louis Riel and the resistance of the
native people, the nationalist aspirations of Quebec and the
challenges of regionalism to the centralist administration of
Canada. For yet another, the charge fails to take into account
the fact that, if the new left was estranged from the procedures
of the NDP and the Canadian Labour Congress unions, they
were no more so than the working class itself. Given that
Canadian workers do not vote en masse for the NDP and were,
in the late Sixties, beginning to form autonomous, breakaway
MOVEMENT NATION 255
unions outside the CLC, who was the new left to contradict
them? For all their sympathy with the social democratic and
union history of struggle in Canada and their admiration for the
men and women who had gone before them, laying socialist
tracks in the ideological wastes of Toryism and Liberalism, it
was by no means obvious to the new left that the radicalization
of the NDP was the only "logical" point of departure in
building an anti-imperialist movement.
16
The NDP. One loved it and one decried it. Here precisely
was the agony of being in the Canadian movement, for at the
same time that one was not, thanks to the social democratic tra-
dition, sentenced like the Americans to rootless improvisations
of radicalism, one was by the same token forced to come to
terms with that tradition. To say the least, those terms were
problematical. In 1933 the CCF had committed itself to
"replace the existing capitalist system" with a new social order
of democratic self-government and economic equality and had
proposed disarmament, a humanized judicial system, the
socialization of industrial enterprises, and a publicly organized
medical system (among other proposals), all of which were
projects close to the movement's heart of the Sixties. "The
CCF was rooted in the Depression and the Depression had
shown Canadians that capitalism couldn't deliver the goods.
That's why it was important for us to make the link with the
CCF." By the Forties the CCF had shown it was capable of
winning political power, and by the Sixties it had struck a
political alliance with the CLC. These achievements could not
be sneered at by those with a sense of class.
A lot of us had come out of social democratic working-
class families and we knew that our parents had a belief, a
class belief, in social democracy. We might have hated
those NDP finks in Parliament but at the same time we
knew they represented the aspirations of thousands of
people.
And continued to do so, in spite of a record of retreat from the
Regina Manifesto. By 1956 the aim of the eradication of
capitalism had been set aside, replaced by the mere "subordin-
ation" of private profit and corporate power to "social
256 LONG WAY FROM HOME
planning" and the "working together" of public, cooperative
and private enterprise in the people's interest. And, finally, by
1961 in the Declaration of the NDP, the notion of "public
ownership" of enterprise had been replaced by "direct public
accountability," the "class struggle" by "frustration," and
"self-government" by "social and economic planning at all
levels of government" It had also, by this time, under the red-
baiting pressure of the Cold War, expelled its left wing into the
wilderness of sectarianism and cynicism.
The NDP. Political institutions, said the movement radicals,
can be as repressive as economic ones. Just look at this social
democracy: compromise and brokerage in Parliament; day-
dreams of social harmony and cohesion transacted, not in the
bloody, ungovernable mess of revolution, but in the fastidious
committees and commissions of legislation and planning;
schemes of labour bosses' co-management of the economy
with their erstwhile enemies, the politicians and the capitalists
("Everybody gets something here"), cosying up to the boys of
Bay Street like their American union superiors up to the boys of
Wall Street — the American union brass never could stomach
socialism. Compromise, daydreams, schemes, all of it slicked
over with unctuous moralizing on the misfortunes of the
"people."
Not that the movement itself had been precisely revolutionary.
It had had its moralistic moment of pious pronouncements on
the "alienation" of the poor and oppressed, had gone on at
some length about the need for new "sentiments" and new
"perspectives" (had, in fact, gone into the NDP to lecture there
about the "growing gap between the people and those who
possess power"),
17
 and had been generally, shall we say,
ambivalent on the subject of the assignment of socialism to the
working class. But by 1967 the movement was getting down to
specifics, was thinking that maybe at the root of everybody's
problems was "the problem of work" and that there was
organizing to be done in the workplace as well as in the home
and school and neighbourhood.
18
 By 1968 the events in Paris
had blown apart the radicals' complacent characterization of
the industrialized and modernized working class as "integrated"
and "conservative." "It was absolutely classic! We were
MOVEMENT NATION 257
sitting around reading Rosa Luxemburg on the mass strike and
there on our TV screens was the general strike in France." And
by 1969 the movement was theorizing about "workers'
control" and "workers' self-management," all the while — and
this was the genius of the movement — talking of participatory
democracy, the absolute right to self-determination, individu-
ally and nationally, the free development of personality, the
realization of ethics in action and all those other values by
which you shall know the new left from the old.
And what then of the NDP? Fetishists of electoralism. A
bureaucratic party, its decision-making authority centralized
in an executive, its membership passively relegated to the
manipulations of conventions. Silent on the nature of the
"structural factors" underlying contradictions between "haves"
and "have nots" and metropolis and hinterland, underlying
"unemployment, waste, political corruption and commerciali-
zation of taste and values"
19
 — name it! cried the move-
ment. Obsessed with strategies of state power, large-scale
government intervention, centralized planning: those hyperbolic
ambitions of middle-level managers finally coming into their
own. The nation-state as their very own sandbox. Blathering on
about "control of Canada by Canadians," while all the time
squelching that initiative to "assert ourselves by taking control
of our lives directly, in our own names and without vanguards
or representatives."
20
 For the movement to embrace this in the
name of a dream from the dust bowl of the Depression, in the
name of a spurious Canadianism scared to look in the face of a
new world, in the name of a perversely recalcitrant population,
was to embrace inconsequence. "For as long as Canadian
radicals persist in their commitment to the NDP . . . there
will be no radical politics that is relevant to basic social change
in Canada."
21
That was written in 1965. Four years later, when the so-
called Waffle Manifesto was issued, many radicals had still not
cut the umbilical cord, as it were, but rallied around the Waffle
on the left of the NDP, persuaded that a formation dedicated to
transforming the NDP into a "truly socialist party," to the
eradication of "alienation" and to "community democracy"
was the continuation of the new left project, was indeed the
258 LONG WAY FROM HOME
maturation of a movement into a political organization.
"People had become more serious, the Waffle seemed a
culmination of our experience and the call to struggle in the
trade unions an extension of our struggles in the community
and the university. We thought that a captured NDP, trans-
formed into a revolutionary party, was just what we needed."
Certain Waffle themes were reminiscent of the new left — the
democratization of the workplace, emancipation from American
corporate capitalism, the notion of socialism as a process of
socialist consciousness raising, and the construction of a mass
base — and when the manifesto received the support of one-
third of the delegates at the federal convention in October 1969
(four-fifths of its signatories were not academics!), it seemed it
was only fools and rarefied purists who would turn down the
opportunity to cultivate this base.*
Such "fools" and purists there were, however — new leftists
who could no more sanction the Waffle than their own
prehistory. They could see it coming: the debilitating battles
with the party machinery (fights to gain control of riding
associations, delegate selection, committees) would drain their
blood and ruin them for the urgent task of building a grass-roots
socialist movement throughout the cells of society. They
twitched and winced at the Waffle Manifesto's claim that the
"fundamental threat" to national survival was "external"
(what of the threats to autonomy from within, from within
liberalism and the bureaucracy and the corporate university?);
at the irresolute declaration that in the interests of national
unity Quebec's history and aspirations be "allowed" full
expression and implementation (as though the national libera-
tion of Quebec were not something that Quebecois would
simply take!); at the pusillanimous assertion that workers'
"influence" be extended into every area of industrial decision
making and that their "substantial power" determine the
nature of their productivity (were these just pseudo-radical
euphemisms for workers' co-management?). Not a word about
*More than 20 percent of Wafflers, by 1971, were students, half were
under age thirty-five and the ratio of men to women was 3 to 1,
compared to 7 to 1 in the party as a whole.
22
MOVEMENT NATION 259
the struggle for independent Canadian unions, for red power,
for the liberation of women. Much, however, about national
planning, public control and nationalization. We think, said the
die-hard new leftists, we've been through this movie before.
There must be some other way of being a Canadian patriot,
said the new left, some other strategems of liberation, than the
propping up, the tarting up of the Canadian state. It was the
intrigues of a technocratic imagination that required large-
scale bureaucratic intervention into the economy and that
insinuated that the critics of state institutions were "soft" on
American capitalism. "What we need," wrote a social demo-
crat back in 1964 (this was a very old tune), "is a strong and
purposeful national economic policy designed to build Canada,
to build it with native capital, to repatriate Canadian assets to
Canadian control, and to herd the provinces back to the
function of caring for local affairs."
23
 Interesting verb that: to
herd. The provinces, the regions, the peripheries, so many
categories of undisciplined eccentrics to round up in the corral
of the Head Office. To pull against the authority of the centre,
to insist first on the assignment of identity and purpose to the
immediate environs of experience was to be .. . un-Canadian.
Scratch a Waffler and you find an Ontarian, a petit bourgeois
centralist bereft of his employment, running the show. The
movement had not come all the way from peace and anti-war
work, denunciations of Canadian complicity in Vietnam,
support of liberation struggles against American imperialism,
revisions of confederation and celebrations of particularity —
of self-generated collective being — to end up here, in the
superannuated scenario of national superintendents.
Those who would not be Wafflers would be in the extra-
parliamentary opposition. Here their ongoing program was to
combat authoritarianism, to seek the national liberation of
Canada through an insurgency movement on the campuses, to
redefine the historic proletariat, to create new mobilized
constituencies among youth, students, workers, professionals
and farmers, to realize an independent Quebec, to accept the
ethnic self-determination of all minorities, to combat male
supremacy and to overcome psychological defeatism through
direct actions and civil disobedience.
24
 Now here was an
260 LONG WAY FROM HOME
agenda worthy of the movement, here was acknowledgement of
the base of all youthful radicalism — the belief that the young
were capable of bringing about the transition from repressive
industrial society to a libertarian post-industrial society — and
here was the vision that only active, expressive, demystified
and uncoerced people could make the revolution. Here was
love of country in love of neighbourhood and comrade,
socialism in the self-activating community of classes and
partisans, emancipation in the open-ended reconstruction of
everyday life.
In 1969 the New Left Caucus had six principles: to build
socialism in Canada, to support the anti-imperialist struggle
around the world, to reject the parliamentary road to socialism,
to build an autonomous revolutionary student movement and
to support an autonomous women's liberation movement.
25
 In
1969 the lines were drawn: one could choose the movement
and embrace the aggregate of one's experience and one's
wisdom, perpetually and inexhaustibly re-creating in the
process of struggle what was to be done, or one could slip into
the shelter of the party and embrace prescription and prede-
termination. Take your pick. One was never to know, however,
how the movement would have proceeded, and in what
measure its principles would have become its chronicle of
development, for within the year it had collapsed. 1970: after
the police, the beatings and the War Measures Act, the hardest
thing to bear was the nightmare that behind one's stumbling,
fatigued and frightened stride came no one at all.
II
PORTRAITS REVISITED
Gail Price Douglas:
She moved back to Edmonton, settled down with Ron, a potter,
and opened up a small crafts store so she could sell her weaving
and Ron his pots. It was a struggle. They had little money and
the large, ambitious pieces she made for a gallery show burned
her out. And these were hard to sell, they were so expensive.
Running a business has made her behave more, well,
conservatively, than she would have liked. The things she has
to worry about now go against the grain of the values she had
supported back in the Sixties, back in the communal house in
Vancouver. Worrying about profit. Making available the stuff
that will sell. Trying to satisfy middle-class taste. Carrying
more manufactured than handmade goods. Not even being able
to wear her jeans when she goes into the store!
She turned thirty and the desire to have a baby overwhelmed
her, taking her by surprise. Other things had always been more
important than the idea of a family — work, travelling,
relationships. She became pregnant and married. And now her
artist's creativity goes into mothering. She likes to think her
way of bringing up her daughter is freer than the way she was
brought up, with more emphasis on the child's natural creativity,
less on structure or discipline. And the child is being reared
with a father around the house because he doesn't have a nine-
to-five job. The mother, then, is not a full-time homemaker and
mother. Sometimes she feels guilty about that, but for her own
sanity she needs to be outside the house, among other stimuli.
And they need the money. She has to work in that store. She
didn't marry a doctor or lawyer. She married a potter.
So she expresses herself now in the store, and in their house,
renovating and decorating it This is not something her parents
would have done; they bought new houses. But she likes the old
houses, their workmanship and craftsmanship, the singularity
of each of their old spaces.
261
262 LONG WAY FROM HOME
The Sixties totally changed her life. Art is what keeps her
sane, lightens things, keeps her unglued from the status quo.
She had to go among the hippies to realize it, and what was
evoked then will always be with her. The Sixties made her an
artist.
Lydia Semotuk:
It was an invigorating time, the Sixties, but it was not a
comfortable time. The period was not a good "fit" for her.
Although it made her ask a lot of questions — if this isn't right,
then I wonder what is — she could not see the answers
anywhere. It was a testing time, a time when everything shakes
down.
Out of all that shaking down and that loss of confidence, she
had nowhere to go but up. Either that or become a basket case.
She had been thrown into a whirlpool and went 'round and
'round, but she couldn't find an y shore to land on because none
looked safe. The lifeline that was finally throw n out to her was
that of feminism. Feminism of her own making, the issues she'd
work with, her own choice — issues pertaining to professional
women and their work situations, because these were her own
concerns too. She still sees that the world is entirely political,
and what she means by that is that it all comes down to
"influence manoeuvring," to power and powerlessness, to that
insight of 1960 and the California gas chamber. So this is what
she teaches the women in her women and management classes.
If you're committed to working in the corporate world — and
what isn't corporate these days? — then you have to figure ou t
where the power is held and how to get a share of it. She doesn't
think that's cynical. It's a given of the real world. The big
question for women is: do you want to be part of that real world
or do you want to change it? She would answer that you have to
become part of it to change it. If you're not in, kid, you're out.
She doesn't know whether she'd still call herself a socialist,
not knowing what that means these days. She'd say, rather, that
she is a humanist. Justice and equality.
If the Sixties hadn't happened, she'd have ended up a
schoolteacher, uptight, fearful, non-questioning, conformist.
PORTRAITS REVISITED 263
Instead she asked a lot of questions. The period picked her up
and shook her like a dog will shake an old sock and then set her
down again in lots of painful pieces. And then it gave her a new
life.
Robin Hunter:
He had been an open CCFer, willing to believe that the
socialist commonwealth was going to be all sorts of different
things, intellectually and emotionally. Post-revolutionary
society was going to be a blank cheque they would write out
themselves. After the struggle there would still be self-
actualization to fulfill. When he first joined SDS, they had had
a slogan "Toward a Community of Love," and most of the
activists couldn't say it without blushing with embarrassment.
But the idea was there: spirituality is politically relevant. The
New Jerusalem on earth. Bill Irvine of the CCF believed that,
having been a Methodist minister. Heaven forbid he should be
ashamed of being like Bill Irvine.
The period of the Sixties had given him a chance to see a
mass movement being created — in other words, a society in
conscious process of change, people beginning to get new lives
for old and linking that achievement up with the political things
that had to be done.
He looks around. This society today is grinding people no
less thoroughly than it was fifteen years ago, even more so, in fact
But understanding that you can be free can only really come
about when you see other people getting free, and that's what
was happening in the Sixties. He could see the struggles and
partial gains of freedom. He could plug into the high energy and
the alternatives that hadn't yet been worn out. The fronts of
struggle have changed since then, and now, he says, it's a
question of the working class stepping forward. And the
housing situation. It's outrageous and people are beginning to
realize it doesn't have to be that way, that they can live in
housing co-ops, for instance. He lives in a co-op. A toehold, a
clearing house to direct people to more resources.
He practises Buddhist meditation. He rides a bike. He
delivers NDP pamphlets door-to-door and talks politics. He's
264 LONG WAY FROM HOME
thinking of doing a Ph.D. thesis on environmental law in
Alberta, the science and bureaucracy of the matter. He'd still
rather be a political scientist than anything else, although a
friend has tried to persuade him to become a potter on Denman
Island on the West Coast.
He'd like to marry again. He's getting a little old for it but still
he would like to raise children. If he doesn't it'll be one of the
great regrets of his life.
If only it hadn't taken so bloody long and so goddamn many
stupid accidents and blindnesses for him to get to feel, finally,
that he knows where he wants to be. It's almost as if the politics
has been something to keep him busy, to keep him distracted
from the real questions of existence. He doesn't want to believe
this because then he'd be forced to think that his fury of political
work was stupid, was beside the point, was dead-ended. His
Buddhist friends, and those who have been through psycho-
analysis, think this is precisely the conclusion he should come
to. But he resists them. Politics has been one of the most
emotionally gratifying parts of his life, has been rich and
profuse with passion and illumination, and he will not gainsay
it. When he is political, he is most human.
One step backward for every two forward. No more great
leaps into the bright, unknown future. Just keeping on keeping
on. His favourite song of the last few years is the Bee Gees'
"Stayin' Alive."
Ill
IT'S MY FIGHT, IT'S MY LIFE
Generations define decades and later decades
define generations, but there are some changeless
things we've come to depend on: maple sugar in
Quebec, White Spot hamburgers in Vancouver,
Moosehead in Halifax, Goldeye in Winnipeg and
John Diefenbaker in Prince Albert. As Dief goes, so
goes the nation. But who remembered that in the
Sixties? He was brought low, but he has arisen — and
he forgives us. "The rebellious youth of the Sixties
have gone back in the other direction," he told
Maclean's. "They've put on some years and there's
nothing like the change that comes with years." And
that's what the Seventies are all about.
— from "Getting on with the 70s"
(Maclean's, January 1975)
In performing the post-mortem on the period 1964-70, it is
important to sort out the errors and achievements of the
movement from the forces which attempted to derail it. "In
Canada the left is always blaming itself for everything that
befalls it." Bombarded by the powerful ideological agencies of
middle-class society* and interfered with by government and
the police, the movement spent a lot of time sidetracked by the
need to counter false information, to debate the pros and cons
of government money, to fight the sudden and arbitrary
application of repressive immigration, narcotics and assembly
*Even the middle class wasn't spared the effects of these agencies as
when, in 1966, the controversial, and popular, CBC television
program "This Hour Has Seven Days" was canned for attempting to
"create within a deadening corporation, a small area of freedom, a
breathing space."
1
265
266 LONG WAY FROM HOME
laws, and to smoke out informers and agents provocateurs.
("They were the ones in baseball jackets. They weren't Trots
so they had to be cops. The rule was: act as if everything you
were doing and saying was being watched and recorded.
Everything.")
At the University of Alberta, men purporting to be members
of the campus security staff hung around the doors of political
science classes and interrogated students about the instructors
and the course. There was a police attempt to keep Black
Panther Bobby Seale from attending the Montreal Hemispheric
Conference to End the War in Vietnam. "Disturbances on
Canadian university campuses were linked by the RCMP
yesterday to visits by militant agitators from the United States
... . 'At the present time with respect to the university milieu,
we have thirty-one of our [RCMP] regular members attending
Canadian universities, many of them in the field of sociology
and political science.' "
2
 As far back as the days of CUCND,
the RCMP had increased the activities of its Security and
Intelligence Branch (now the Security Service) within the
movement, going as far as paying university secretaries for
"useful" information.
3
 The Report of the Royal Commission
on Security, published in 1969, notes that the activities of
Communist subversives were "varied" and assisted by the fact
that "the communists are able to exploit and exaggerate
existing elements of social unrest and dissent... activities in
universities and trade unions appear at present to be of special
significance."
4
 Not surprisingly, the RCMP was "nauseated,
disgusted, harassed and disappointed"
5
 by such elements.
Nauseated and disgusted, the RCMP raided and ransacked
offices of draft-resisters' organizations, stationed patrol cars
outside their homes and photographed all who entered or left. It
turned information over to immigration authorities and the FBI
and even kidnapped and deported draft-resisters to the U.S.
The RCMP in fact established its own policy on deserters,
since the government did not give it any mandate to deport
deserters unless it had gone through the established
procedures of the deportation hearing and the deserters
were found to be in Canada illegally. In this respect, the
IT'S MY FIGHT, IT'S MY LIFE 267
RCMP was taking on a political role that displayed greater
loyalty to the American FBI than to the formal policy of
the Canadian government.
6
High school and university newspaper staffs were harassed
and, in some cases, shut down for material offensive to the
administration. (In St. Catharines a teenager was sentenced to
three months in reformatory for having the word "fuck" written
on his blue jeans.) In 1967 the Georgia Straight had its license
cancelled because it had allegedly sold copies to "children." In
1969 it was fined $1,50 0 and its editor $500 for "counselling to
commit a criminal offense" (the paper had run an article on
how to grow your own marijuana), and the judge put the editor
on three months' probation. By February 1970 the paper had
been subject to frequent searches and seizures, arrests (instead
of summonses) and twenty-one various charges. Youths were
actively harassed and sometimes arrested at rock concerts, at
sit-ins, for lounging around, for narcotics possession. Adding
insult to injury, the police made their charges on the basis of
surveillance, unannounced raids, paid informers, blank war-
rants and discrimination against "hippies."
. . . young persons view the sale of drugs as a service
rather than a hostile activity. . . . Since they believe
cannabis is harmless, youth scorn warnings and "establish-
ment" drug education programs. Young persons view
legal punishment and harassment for using drugs as
political punishment.
7
In Quebec, suspected Felquistes and their sympathizers
were held for days at a time incommunicado, interrogated,
beaten and humiliated. Although no direct link was ever proved
between Pierre Vallieres and the bomb that killed a union
secretary at a shoe factory, he was sentenced, in view of his
"clearly belligerent attitudes,"
8
 to imprisonment in perpetuity.
Groups and organizations contesting the Montreal civic elec-
tions in 1969 had their documents, files and printing machines
seized. Pamphleteers and leafleters were harassed, arrested,
thrown in jail. Anti-terrorist laws provided for the "illegalization"
and suppression, in advance, of marches and rallies. A new
form of search warrant came into use: "They're allowed to
268 LONG WAY FROM HOME
seize anything written or unwritten, or printing machines, that
could put into the head of someone or could lead him to
conclude that he should engage in actions which couId disturb
the peace. On that pretext, they've been seizing books, leaflets,
anything of the sort, any ideas or documents that oppose the
status quo."
9
 In 1970 the director of the RCMP Security
Service submitted to cabinet a twenty-one-page list of "Organi-
zations Which Are Likely to Promote Violent Confrontation
with Authority" — heading the list was the Parti Quebecois.
Burglaries, break-ins, mail tampering, acts of arson, blackmail
and frame-ups followed. Dirty tricks. The RCMP had suspected
the PQ was infiltrated by the FLQ.
10
October 1970: the War Measures Act. Without indictment,
hundreds of innocent citizens, because their names had been
recorded in police files, were arrested and held without charge
for days and weeks, their homes raided, their reputations
smeared, their jobs in jeopardy. Across the country, censorship
regulations were redundant intimidated, radicals kept their
silence, thereby censoring themselves.
It is said: the movement of the Sixties collapsed before the
exigencies of the Seventies, its brave words and bold gestures
smothered in the sludge of economic contraction and social
trepidation. It is said: the movement lost its nerve and forswore
its purpose. Look: the soft drugs of pleasure gave way to hard
drugs, gangs and violence; communes disintegrated; festivities
fell into the paws of hipster capitalists and community self-
help, into the bank accounts of OFY and LIP,* and many were
the countercultural mutineers who were snatched by suicide or
jail. Sexuality: rapes, abortions, unwanted pregnancies. One
was supposed to smash monogamy — to smash bourgeois
property relations — but in the censure of confessions of
ambivalence and suspicion, confessions that it hurt to be
violated, used and abused, pilloried between male egos in the
last-ditch stand of male supremacy in the movement ("This
wasn't politics, it was anything but politics"), it was the
*Opportunities for Youth and Local Initiatives Project, federally
funded.
IT'S MY FIGHT, IT'S MY LIFE 269
movement itself that was almost smashed. And, of course,
there were no homosexuals in the movement, no, absolutely
not, revolution was a man's enterprise, well, maybe there was
one but as soon as he came out of the closet, he quit the
movement
Look around: the heavy duty revolutionaries couldn't keep
their personal lives together at all; at home they were martinets
and Punchinellos; how was one to admire and emulate them
while, in the meantime, one had babies now to feed and the
tomatoes were ready to be picked? The choice: repression and
bootless anger, or "cooling out" in therapy and sensitivity
training, the self and its projects filling the available space
defected by community; trapped in privacy, our loneliness is
legitimized, and our mythologies of security in the isolation
wards of the ego solace us. Who would not want to retreat
there? Away from depression, bad trips and ennui.
Movement burn-out. Resources badly, stupidly used up. Out
of the fastidious anxiety that "democracy" would be under-
mined by bureaucracy and discipline, four or five people did all
the work. The decadence and degeneration of the leadership:
the emigration of the membership into professions and academia.
In the United States a mass student movement split into an old
left faction and a terrorist faction, sharing between them the
illusion of people's involvement and the frustration — one was
at the end of one's radical tether — that the war was still not
stopped, and still the police were murdering the black leader-
ship and the CIA was plotting. In Canada the struggles for
student control of the university had been bought off with co-
administration and the new cadres never showed up: economic
stagnation, cut-backs, over-population of graduates. Radicalism
was apportioned between those who strode without a break into
the strategies of social democracy and those who huddled
closer together, poring over elaborate blueprints of social
transformation both far in advance of and years too late for any
social movement that would require them. But anything to stay
out of the cold.
"If you're a socialist you must find yourself a political
organization. Otherwise you're just a critic." And so they
gravitated to the Waffle, to the Lii/
270 LONG WAY FROM HOME
and to the autonomous women's movement. Well, what were
they supposed to do? Their base among the students had
collapsed, and in any case many of them were no longer
students themselves. And one must guard against that phantasm
of political struggle where a clash with the police is said to be an
"advanced political objective" when it was merely a fight, and
a pause in that clash is thought to be a strategic defeat for the
movement when it is merely the surcease of battering and
bashing.
11
 So here they were, the Wafflers in the civil service of
social democratic governments, the Marxist-Leninists in demo-
cratic centralist covens of structure! discipline! program! and
the feminists in the women's movement where, because it had
the "franchise" on the woman question, the question became
ghettoized. So it all has been said. One can leave it at that, or
think again.
Bertolt Brecht: "To him who does not know the world is on fire,
I have nothing to say." The movement knew it. Knew it for the
future as well as for its past, knew it in the accomplishments it
laid down like a track to the fire line. This is what the movement
had done:
On acid one had had a glimpse of a paradise lost, had taken
the sounding of a joy a thousand times stronger than what one
had ever felt before. It was the same joy, the same illumination,
as that fantasy of marching to Parliament Hill under a thousand
red flags, and in this com-passion, this sharing of passions in
the hours of hallucination and meditation and analysis around
the circle of fellow devotees, one had undertaken to match
within one's person that explosion of consciousness that had
detonated within the generation. You could say that the
attention to, the reverence for, the inner life and the vitality of
the spirit was an attempt to "decondition" the personality, strip
it of the excrescence of joyless, morbid bourgeois culture, and
render it worthy of the revolution. You could say that such
regenerated personalities socialized their perceptions in the
escalating movement to defend the physical environment from
the pollutions of industry. Here was a movement with an
assignment that would take people up against the fences and
gates of the very same enterprises they had already challenged
and held accountable for the Bomb and the war in Vietnam.
IT'S MY FIGHT, IT'S MY LIFE 271
The oppressed constituency of women organized themselves
in a broad sisterhood of insurgency and called into question —
such questions, unheard-of questions! — the totality of assump-
tions from which the body politic of capitalist society derived
its legitimacy. You who would be powerful and maintain your
power must answer to the women; you who would be liberators
must count the women among yourselves. This too would be a
movement for decades to come. And the gays, the women and
men living outside the internment camp of heterosexual
relations, they too would be answered to, for, along with the
women's liberationists, they were impugning the bourgeois
transactions of property, sexuality and family — the "holy
trinity" of social chastisement.
From within the movement's concern to decentralize, to
localize and to particularize unfolded the twin impulses of
regionalism and ethnicity — the sensibility of the place and the
person outside the English-French duality and the critical
commentary upon that duality. They too are community, they
who are rooted in the local and the native; there is a political
and cultural authenticity in the devolution away from the
nation-state and the capital city into the autonomous settlement.
It is here, under our feet, that we have identity and purpose, it is
here we know who we are, what needs to be done and where
home is. And it is from this place that we will hold back the
barbarians.
It was the Quebecois, rising up angry, who threw into
disequilibrium the ethnic stratification of the country and who
posed for all minorities the questions of survival in the face of
assimilation. The Quebecois showed that that assimilation
could be reversed through political mobilization around the
demand for access to the resources by which the ethnic
community could sustain its particularity. It was time to
repudiate the "gratitude" of the immigrants for whom it had
been enough that they be left in peace. It was time instead to
challenge the insipid Anglo domination of Canadian life and to
demand the social and political power due the immigrants
for the prodigious labour with which they had paid for citizen-
ship. And from the movement too had come the optimistic
expectation that the technological society had humane as well
272 LONG WAY FROM HOME
as infernal capacities, that, under pressure, the "modern
environment" could be made to generate the "inefficient,"
non-standardized ethnic other.
12
If it was the "historical task" of the international students'
movement to end the war in Vietnam,
13
 then it was successful,
for in the face of violent censure abroad, massive sabotage at
home and the demoralization of the army, the United States
could not prevail against the people of Vietnam and would be
compelled to pull out before it had accomplished what it had
meant to do. In the world-wide actions against the draft, against
the purveyors of munitions and defoliants, against the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and the president, in their actions of champion-
ship, succour and esteem of the Vietnamese, the youth of the
movement broke the climate of ideological consensus in the
mainstream of Western society and reversed the defection of
their generation from political life. The generation was back
now in the thick of it, fighting fo r the lives of those who at the
edges of the empire were undermining the domination of the
imperialists, and fighting fo r their own lives, struggling to come
clear of how they had been reared and by whom and with what
ideas, struggling with the consummate burghers of the Western
world for the right to a different kind of citizenship. And when
they had done so, they said it had been the best of their lives that
had been invested and that they were very, very grateful to have
been young in 1965.
"There's no such thing as 'Come the revolution ' It's not
true that one day you are not in the revolution, the next day you
are and the day after that it's all over. That's not the way it
works." It works, said the movement, first at the level of
individual moral revolt ("This is stupid and evil and morbid")
and the refusal to conform ("I will not and you cannotmake me
do it or say it or believe it"). From there, in the laboratory of
collective action, it assumes the proportions of human freedom,
the liberation of us all, in civil society, right here and now:
politics. The system has invaded every aspect of our lives, and so
to say we have the inalienable right to realize ourselves and to
control our development is to say the system must withdraw and
give way to a new order. The reordering is radical, for it is total.
Down with political monotheisms, delegated authority, exclu-
IT'S MY FIGHT, IT'S MY LIFE 273
sivity and the division of political labour. From now on we are
involved in a multiplicity of structures and actions, direct self-
government, coalitions and collaborations.
14
 From now on, we
know something we didn't when we started out "I'll never be
fooled again." So this too the movement had accomplished.
And, of course, the unfinished business of the movement
required that it regenerate itself when the conditions were ripe:
some would say in the Eighties. The very incompleteness of the
business meant that the struggles were ongoing, if only in an
attenuated manner compared to the massiveness and univer-
sality of the movement in the Sixties — but ongoing nevertheless.
Student protest, student action, student mobilization in Iran,
Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique, Soweto,
Brazil, have rolled back imperialist encroachments or at least
have stalled them. Students in Canada have protested fee hikes
and joined with unions in the fight against wage controls.
French, British, Canadian, American students have been at the
sites of resistance to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, uranium
mining and 2,4-D spraying.
What is to be done? Get one step ahead of the boys and girls
who, busy and unremarked, are computerizing the economy
and culture of the technological society finally come into its full
flower. Escalate the pressure on the energy corporations to
divulge their operations, expose the shabby economics of
Canadian dependency, reverse the pillage of the Third World,
victim of our consumerism. Politically revitalize the working-
class movement wherever it shows itself, for without such
revitalization no serious opposition is possible, as even the
most dramatic of the confrontations had shown in the Sixties.
Devise a strategy, ah, yes, that again, and still: how to get from
here to there, knowing what we know now. After the demon-
stration — what? and why? Finally, render radicalism ordinary,
liberate it from the false achievement of eruptions into the
extraordinary, ground it rather in the patient labour of working
with the undramatic and unheroic realities of ordinary life:
radicalism's "realism and sanity would be grounded in nothing
more than the ability to face whatever comes."
15
 To face, for
instance, the likelihood that we will always be tempted to walk
the line of least resistance — accepting reforms to the status
274 LONG WAY FROM HOME
quo — because it is so hard, so wearying, so dispiriting to
sustain in great loneliness a vision of society that no one else
discerns: we are the crazies, seeing ghosts. To face the truth
that it is not given us now to make the revolution, except in our
imagination, for the situation does not present itself— it is not
our fault! — until such time as a thorough collapse in the system
of production means no one can sell, no one can buy, no one
can be paid, as in the Thirties, nearly — as in the Eighties? At
which point our world will have to go to war or make the
revolution. '"But no will, no courage, no ingenuity can force
this eventuality."
16
In the meantime there is much work to be done and there are
opportunities to be secured to broadcast the good news about
the revolutionary possibilty to come. In the meantime let no
one be cheated of her and his sense of loss, the grievous
deprivation in the life of the woman, the Indian, the Quebecois,
the immigrant, the file clerk, the fisherman, for it has been said
that it is this pain of the irreparable and the irrevocable — you
have taken what is mine and you have squandered it — that
drives people to the barricades. In the meantime it is important
not to forget what we have done, not to let the power-brokers
erase from our thinking the images of our resistance and our
inventions, for in that blank space they write in accommodation
and assent.
Do not forget that at a time when the political parties of the
opposition, the workers' movement, the arts and the media all
declined the assignment to shove the system up against the
wall, it was we, the kids and the students for God's sake, who
showed up for the dress rehearsal, who were present at the crisis
of modern capitalism, and routed its assumptions: how and for
what we would be educated, for whom and why we would work,
how we would be sexual and with whom we would build a
family, what modes of logic and reverie we would employ and
to what ends. "The experimental patrimony of psychological,
social and political liberation which enriches the .. . New Left
is only the vanguard of the base from which the forces of
freedom will grow in the coming decades."
17
 Remember! Like
the person who says the glass is not half-empty but half-full, let
us emphasize not the ways in which the ruling class prevailed
IT'S MY FIGHT, IT'S MY LIFE 275
but the ways in which its hegemony was circumscribed.
18
Remember! The system can wage a war but it cannot control
the consequences, political and social, of that war; it cannot
reverse the fact that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; it
cannot eradicate sexism, racism and Anglo chauvinism, be-
cause upon these processes it structures its authority. It can
only in the very short run control us ideologically: in the
ruptures of liberal education we become "conscious" of what is
really going on and from there become contestants. By what we
did and what happened to us in the Sixties, all of these
limitations were demonstrated.
The period was the "peak" experience of our generation, and
it is important, while all about us insist that we failed and were
absorbed into the consensus, to remember that there was a
moment, an hour, a day when we were successful, when the
system could not, even though just for a day, proceed with
impunity. When, in the years to come, all about us say it cannot
happen, we will know, it did happen.
Fidel said that what made the revolution in Cuba possible
was all of the rebellions that had failed. That in those
rebellions people had had a glimpse of what liberty might
be and kept this secretly in their minds and hearts. So that
when the revolution did occur there were people to go into
its service who knew they had a part to play, who knew
they were not hapless objects of history but its conscious
subjects. That's the kind of "failure" the Sixties move-
ment was.
Photographs. Ranks of soldiers thrust their bayonets at people
in blue jeans and coloured stockings. Tanks roll down a street
past a mailbox and a stop sign. Above the simian heads of
soldiers with snouts of gas masks, a young woman floats a
balloon. Another young woman, with a rifle of her own, step-
marches a GI down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Like the motion of
a field of grain in the wind, a mass of students dances down the
boulevard, their red banners floating like ribbons. In a non-
descript room in a village in the Andes, men dressed as officers
of the army point at the holes in the chest of the cadaver from
276 LONG WAY FROM HOME
which the life of the revolutionary bled. Che. Even dead, a
countenance of incorruptibility. "Let me say at the risk of
seeming ridiculous," he had written, "that the true revolutionary
is guided by great feelings of love." And so we had been
ridiculous with love, with joy, with the first free labour of our
young lives. We should be so ridiculous again.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. "Previewing the 1960's," Maclean's, November 1959.
2. Canada Yearbook 1965-66 (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1965), p. 104.
3. Ibid., p. 151.
4. Philip Resnick, The Land of Cain (Vancouver: New Star Books,
1977), p. 59.
5. Massimo Teodori, The New Left: A Documentary History (Indian-
apolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 4.
6. Ibid., p. 81.
7. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York:
Anchor Books, 1969), p. 15.
8. Resnick, Land of Cain, p. 133.
9. Albert Goldman, "The Emergence of Rock," in Theodore Solotaroff,
ed., New American Review #3 (New York: New American Library, 1968),
p. 121.
10. Allen Ginsberg, "Howl," Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1966), p. 17.
11. C. Wright Mills, "The New Left," in Irving Horowitz, ed., Power,
Politics and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 251-52.
12. Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Unger,
1963), p. 107.
13. "Report of Scientists' Committee for Radiation Information," in
Seymour Melman, ed., No Place to Hide (New York: Grove Press, 1962),
p. 98.
14. Philip Resnick, "Canadian War Industries and Vietnam," Our
Generation, vol.5 no.3, p. 16ff.
15. Robin Hunter, untitled, unpublished paper, Edmonton, 1978.
16. Robert Scheer and Maurice Zeitlin, Cuba: An American Tragedy
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 245.
17. John Warnock, Partner to Behemoth (Toronto: New Press, 1970), p.
196.
18. Gary Moffatt, History of the Canadian Peace Movement until 1969
(St. Catharines: Grape Vine Press, n.d.), p. 96.
19. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1968), p. 99.
20. Scheer, Cuba: An American Tragedy, p. 118.
21. Che Guevara quoted in Regis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution ?
(New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 107.
22. Hunter, p. 5.
277
278 LONG WAY FROM HOME
PART I
CHAPTER I
1. "The Alliance System," Report of the CUCND Seminar, Queen's
University, Kingston, February 1964, p. 120.
2. "The University and Social Action in the Nuclear Age," CUCND
pamphlet, Toronto, 1964, p. 5.
3. Tony Hyde, "The Student Union for Peace Action: An Analysis,"
unpublished paper, n.d., p. 7.
4. John W. Foster, "You Gotta Do When the Spirit Says Do,"
unpublished paper, Toronto, 1965, p. 5.
5. James Harding, "An Ethical Movement in Search of an Analysis,"
Our Generation, vol.3 no.4 / vol.4 no.l, p. 22.
6. "SUPA Says No to the Cold War and to the Society It Creates,"
SUPA pamphlet, n.d., unpaginated.
7. "SUPA: A Statement of Purpose," SUPA pamphlet, n.d., unpaginated.
8. Pat Uhl, "The Student Radicals and Community Organizing,"
Canadian Alternatives, vol.1 no.l, p. 80.
9. Foster, "You Gotta Do," p. 4.
10. "SUPA: A Statement of Purpose."
11. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New
York: SDS, 1962), p. 62.
12. SUPA Newsletter, June 1965, p. 2.
13. Jim Mayor, "Society Endangers a Way of Life," Freedom Now
(Canadian Friends of SNCC newsletter), vol.1 no.5, p. 10.
14. Peter Boothroyd, "Report on the Kootenay Project," unpublished
paper, Edmonton, 1965, p. 9.
15. Foster, "You Gotta Do," p. 8.
16. Margaret Daly, The Revolution Game (Toronto: New Press, 1970),
p. 6.
17. Ted Folkman,"Phase Two of SUPA," SUPA Newsletter, n.d., p. 19.
18. SUPA Newsletter, vol.3 no. 1, p. 25.
19. Jim Harding, "We Take Ourselves Too Seriously," SUPA Newsletter,
n.d., p. 30.
20. Folkman, "Phase Two of SUPA," p. 19.
21. Anatol Rapaport, "Have the Intellectuals a Class Interest?" Our
Generation, reprint, n.d., p. 37.
22. Harding, "An Ethical Movement in Search of an Analysis," p. 28.
23. James Harding, "Values, Analysis and Action for the NDY," report
to the National NDY Convention, 1966, p. 5.
24. SUPA Newsletter, vol.3 no. 10, p. 3.
25. Folkman, "Phase Two of SUPA," p. 21.
26. New Left Committee Bulletin, vol.1 no.l, p. 1.
27. Hyde, "Student Union for Peace Action," p. 13.
NOTES PART I 279
28. James Laxer, "The Americanization of the Canadian Student
Movement," in Ian Lumsden, ed., Close the 49th Parallel Etc. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 281.
29. "The Dissolution of SUPA," New Left Committee Bulletin, vol.1
no.l, p. 6a.
30. Dimitrios Roussopoulos, "Who We Are," SUPA Newsletter, vol.3
no.l, p. 17.
31. Malcolm Reid,"... And a Tale about Their Anglo Friends," McGill
Daily, 5 April 1979, p. 9.
32. Hyde, "Student Union for Peace Action," p. 13.
PART I
CHAPTER II
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Genocide," in Mitchell Goodman, ed., The
Movement Toward a New America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), p.
160.
2. Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York: Doubleday,
1967), p. 198.
3. Daniel Ellsberg, "The Curious Case of the Tonkin Gulf Telegrams,"
in Lynda Obst, ed., The Sixties (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone,
1977), pp. 128-29.
4. David Halberstam, "The War Will Be Over by Christmas," in Obst,
ed., The Sixties, p. 90.
5. John Gellner, "Canadian Business as Usual in Saigon," Saturday
Night, May 1968, p. 23.
6. Fall, Last Reflections, p. 200.
7. Len Giovannitti, The Man Who Won the Medal of Honor (Toronto:
Popular Library, 1976), p. 45.
8. Richard Boyle, GI Revolts (San Francisco: United Front Press,
1973), p. 36.
9. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books,
1977), p. 21.
10. Philip Resnick, "Canadian War Industries and Vietnam," Our
Generation, vol.5 no.3, pp. 22-23.
11. Ibid., pp. 28-29.
12. Globe and Mail, 6 November 1967.
13. Resnick, "Canadian War Industries," p. 24.
14. James Steele, "Canada's Vietnam Policy: The Diplomacy of Escala-
tion," in Stephen Clarkson, ed., An Independent Foreign Policy for
Canada? (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1968), p. 76.
280 LONG WAY FROM HOME
15. Ibid., p. 72.
16. Renee Goldsmith Kasinsky, Refugees from Militarism (New Bruns-
wick: Transaction Books, 1976), p. 59.
17. Ray Davie, "Th e Military-Industrial Complex, the Defence Research
Board, and You," Carillon, n.d., 1969.
18. Steele, "Canada's Vietnam Policy," p. 71.
19. Claire Culhane, Une quebecoise au Vietnam (n.p.: Editions
Quebecoises, n.d.), p. 19.
20. Charles Taylor, Snow Job (Toronto: Anansi, 1974), p. 83.
21. Steele, "Canada's Vietnam Policy," p. 74.
22. David Lewis Stein, "The Night of the Little Brown Men," City Boys
(Ottawa: Oberon, 1978), p. 99.
23. Dennis Lee, "Civil Elegies," Civil Elegies and Other Poems
(Toronto: Anansi, 1972), p. 48.
24. Ian Adams, "How We Win Their Hearts and Minds," Maclean's,
February 1968, p. 14.
25. Gary Moffatt, History of the Canadian Peace Movement until 1969
(St. Catharines: Grape Vine Press, n.d.), p. 5.
26. Richard Price, "The New Left in Alberta," in Dimitrios Rousso-
poulos, ed. The New Left in Canada (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1970),
p. 43.
27. Moffatt, Canadian Peace Movement, p. 166.
28. Charles Hanly, Revolution and Response (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1966), p. 33.
29. "That Was a Teach-in That Was — Or Was It?" Maclean's, 15
November 1965.
30. Hanly, Revolution and Response, p. viii.
31. Ibid., p. 51.
32. Ibid., p. 65.
33. "Open Letter to the 27th Parliament and the Government of
Canada," Our Generation, vol.3 no.4 / vol.4 no.l, p. 93.
34. Robert Mahood, "The SUPA Sit-In," Canadian Alternatives,
vol.1 no.2, p. 54ff.
35. Tony Hyde, "The Student Union for Peace Action: An Analysis,"
unpublished paper, n.d., p. 12.
36. Mahood, "SUPA Sit-in," p. 55.
37. "Open Letter to the 27th Parliament," p. 97.
38. Robin Murray, ed., Vietnam: No. 1 in the Read-In Series (London:
Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 147.
39. Fall, Last Reflections, p. 186.
40. Ibid., p. 187.
41. Herbert Aptheker, Mission To Hanoi (New York: International
Publishers, 1966), p. 63.
42. David Gathier,"The New Left's View of American Imperialism,"
Commentator, February 1969, p. 17.
43. Allen Ginsberg, "From these States," in Theodore Solotaroff, ed., New
NOTES PART I 281
American Review #11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 9.
44. From the Vietnamese national poem by Nguyen Du (1765-1820).
45. Resnick, "Canadian War Industries," p. 27.
PART I
CHAPTER III
1. "Vietnam, Professors and Draftdodgers: An Interview with Morton
Brown, PSA Department," Student Advocate, Simon Fraser University,
n.d., p. 1ff.
2. Renee Goldsmith Kasinsky, Refugees from Militarism (New Bruns-
wick: Transaction Books, 1976), p. 64.
3. Ibid., p. 294.
4. Ibid., p. 86.
5. Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, ed., Manual for Draft-Age Immi-
grants to Canada (Toronto: Anansi, 1970), p. 46.
6. Kasinsky, Refugees, p. 81.
7. Roger Neville Williams, The New Exiles (New York: Liveright,
1971), p. 363.
8. Ibid., p. 107.
9. Red, White and Black Newsletter, 26 February 1970.
10. Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants, p. 10.
11. "War Resisters in Exile: The Memoirs of Amex-Canada," Amex-
Canada, vol.6 no.2, p. 16.
12. "Police Raid Vancouver Homes," BC Newsletter, no.6, p. 14.
13. Williams, New Exiles, p. 330.
14. Lorne and Caroline Brown, An Unauthorized History of the R CMP
(Toronto: James, Lewis & Samuel, 1973), p. 112.
15. Ibid., p. 113.
16. Toronto Star, 7 May 1969.
17. Kasinsky, Refugees, p. 128.
18. Williams, New Exiles, p. 346.
19. Ibid., p. 352.
20. From the film by Anthony Bannon et al, Citizen of What Country?
(Toronto, 1970).
21. Dennis Lee, "Civil Elegies," Civil Elegies and Other Poems
(Toronto: Anansi, 1972), p. 19.
282 LONG WAY FROM HOME
PART II
CHAPTER I
1. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (New York: Harper & Row,
1966), p. 87.
2. Ibid., p. 124.
3. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New
York: SDS, 1962), p. 9.
4. The Trouble in Berkeley (Berkeley: Diablo Press, n.d.), p. 65.
5. Mario Savio, "An End to History," in Seymour Lipset and Sheldon
Wolin, eds., The Berkeley Student Revolt (Garden City: Doubleday,
1965), p. 219.
6. Robert Favreau, "The Quandary of UGEQ," in Tim and Julyan Reid,
eds., Student Power and the Canadian Campus (Toronto: Peter Martin,
1969), p. 108.
7. Situationist International, On the Poverty of Student Life (Berkeley:
Contradiction Press, 1972), p. 23.
8. Donald McKelvey, "The State of SDS," SUPA Newsletter, vol.3
no. 10, p. 15.
9. Philip Resnick, "The New Left in Ontario," in Dimitrios Rousso-
poulos, ed., TheNewLeftin Canada (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1970),
p. 96.
10. Dimitrios Roussopoulos, "Towards a Revolutionary Youth Move-
ment and an Extra-Parliamentary Opposition in Canada," in Roussopoulos,
ed., New Left in Canada, p. 133.
11. Julyan Reid, "Some Canadian Issues," in Reid, ed., Student Power,
p. 7.
12. John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1965), p. 95.
13. Varsity, 17 January 1968.
14. Jim Harding, unpublished paper to 32nd CUS Congress at the
University of Guelph, 1968.
15. Resnick, "New Left in Ontario," p. 106.
16. Jean-Louis Ferrier, "Marcuse Defends His New Left Line," in
Harold Jaffe and John Tytell, eds., The American Experience: A Radical
Reader (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 137
17. James Harding, "From the Midst of a Crisis," in Gerald McGuigan,
ed., Student Protest (Toronto: Methuen, 1968), p. 99.
18. Noam Chomsky, "Knowledge and Power: Intellectuals and the
Welfare/Warfare State," in Priscilla Long, ed., The New Left (Boston:
Porter Sargeant, 1969), p. 177.
NOTES PART II 283
PART II
CHAPTER II
1. Gateway, 22 November 1968.
2. George Reamsbottom, "Student Motion in B.C.," Our Generation,
reprint, n.d., p. 91.
3. "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book," Realist, May
1967, p. 18.
4. Paul Rockwell, "How We Became Revolutionaries," in Tariq Ali,
ed., The New Revolutionaries (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969), p.
294.
5. Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, "The Battle of the Streets," in Carl
Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p.
259.
6. R. Gregoire and F. Perlman, Worker-Student Action Committee:
France May '68 (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970), p. 11.
7. "The Appeal from the Sorbonne," in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader,
p. 269.
8. Andrew Wernick, "Blowin' in the Wind: CUS in Winnipeg,"
Canadian Forum, September 1968, pp. 132-33.
9. Cohn-Bendit, "Battle of the Streets," p. 265.
10. James Harding, "What's Happening at SFU?" Our Generation,
vol.6 no.3, p. 63.
11. Editorial, Our Generation, vol.6 no.3, p. 8.
12. Gene Marine, "Chicago: The Trial of the New Culture," in Rolling
Stone, ed., The Age of Paranoia (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p. 243.
13. The Quebec Liberation Movement (Toronto: Hogtown Press, n.d.),
p. 12.
14. Stanley Gray quoted in Andrew Porter, "The Night the Quebecois
Took On McGill," McGill Daily, 5 April 1979, p. 8.
15. Jim Harding, "The Strike at SFU," reprint, n.d., unpaginated.
16. Kathleen Gough, "The Struggle at SFU," Monthly Review, May
1970, p. 36.
PART III
CHAPTER I
1. Nat Hentoff, "The Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan," in Craig
McGregor, ed., Bob Dylan, A Retrospective (New York: Morrow, 1972),
p. 39.
2. Mitchell Goodman, ed., The Movement Toward a New America
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), p. 374.
284 LONG WAY FROM HOME
3. Henry Malcolm, Generation of Narcissus (Boston: Little, Brown,
1971), p. 166.
4. Robert Hunter, The Storming of the Mind (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1971), p. 87.
5. Ibid., p. 124.
6. Leonard Wolff, ed., Voices from the Love Generation (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1968), p. 76.
7. Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, eds., BAMN: Outlaw
Manifestos and Ephemera (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 72.
8. "Final Report of the Slocan Valley Community Forest Management
Project" (no other information available), p. 4:41.
9. Jack Batten,"The Dread Hippie Menace," Maclean's, August 1967,
p. 51.
10. Ibid., p. 50.
11. Bill Usher and Linda Page-Harpa, eds., For What Time I Am in This
World: Stories from Mariposa (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977), p. 191.
12. Countdown: A Subterranean Magazine (New York: New American
Library, 1970), p. 21.
13. John Sinclair, Guitar Army (New York: Douglas Book Corp., 1971),
p. 32.
PART III
CHAPTER II
1. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York:
Anchor Books, 1969), p. 168.
2. Robert Hunter, The Storming of the Mind (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1971), p. 84.
3. It's Your Turn: A Report to the Secretary of State by the Committee
on Youth (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1971), pp. 39-41.
4. John Sinclair, Guitar Army (New York: Douglas Book Corp., 1972),
p. 179.
5. John and Margaret Rowntree, "The Political Economy of Youth,"
Our Generation, reprint, n.d., p. 170ff.
6. Ibid., p. 184.
7. Herbert Marcuse, "On Revolution," in Alexander Cockburn and
Robin Blackburn, eds., Student Power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969),
p. 372.
8. Gary Snyder, "Why Tribe," in Harold Jaffe and John Tytell, eds.,
The American Experience: A Radical Reader (New York: Harper & Row,
1970), p. 259.
NOTES PART IV 285
9. Irwin Silber, The Cultural Revolution: A Marxist Analysis (New
York: Times Change, 1970), p. 35.
10. Irwin Silber, "The Great Middle-Class Cultural Revolution," in
Times Change Press, ed., Hip Culture (New York: Times Change, 1970),
p. 42.
11. Leonard Wolff, ed., Voices from the Love Generation (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1968), p. 269.
12. Larry Haiven, "Festival Scene II," Varsity, 26 September 1969, p. 6.
13. Ibid.
14. Ritchie Yorke, Axes, Chops and Hot Licks (Edmonton: Hurtig,
1971), pp. 219-20.
15. Ibid., p. 206.
16. Jack Batten, "Canada's Rock Scene," Maclean's, February 1968,
p. 42.
17. Kaspars Dzeguze, "What 'Hair' Is Doing to a Bunch of Otherwise
Ordinary Canadian Kids," Maclean's, April 1970, p. 51.
18. Hunter, Storming of the Mind, p. 23.
19. Henry Tarvainen, "Che. . . Just Doing His Thing," Varsity, 27
October 1967.
20. Hunter, Storming of the Mind, p. 166.
21. Warren Hinckle, "A Social History of the Hippies," Ramparts,
March 1967, p. 26.
22. Silber, Cultural Revolution, p. 31.
23. Pat Uhl, "In Response to Stan Gray," Canadian Alternatives, vol. 1
no.l, p. 60.
24. James Harding, "Hippies and the New Left," unpublished paper,
n.d., p. 14.
PART IV
CHAPTER I
1. Stokely Carmichael, "What We Want," in Harold Jaffe and John
Tytell, eds., The American Experience: A Radical Reader (New York:
Harper & Row, 1970), p. 82ff.
2. "Program of the Black Panther Party," in Mitchell Goodman, ed.,
The Movement Toward a New America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970),
p. 212.
3. Stokely Carmichael, "A Declaration of War, " in Goodman, ed., New
America, p. 178ff.
4. Eldridge Cleaver," Soul On Ice," in Jaffe and Tytell, eds., American
Experience, p. 54.
286 LONG WAY FROM HOME
5. Ian Adams et al., The Real Poverty Report (Edmonton: Hurtig,
1971), p. 69.
6. Dick Fidler, Red Power in Canada (Toronto: Vanguard, 1970), p. 4.
7. Ibid., p. 3.
8. Edgar Dosman, Indians: The Urban Dilemma (Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart, 1972), p. 15.
9. Fidler, Red Power in Canada, p. 4.
10. M. Patricia Maichak, Ideological Perspectives on Canada (Toronto:
McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975), p. 29.
11. Howard Adams, Prison of Grass (Toronto: New Press, 1975), p.
191.
12. Heather Robertson, Reservations Are for Indians (Toronto: James,
Lewis & Samuel, 1970), p. 14.
13. Richard Price, "The New Left in Alberta," in Dimitrios Roussopoulos,
ed., The New Left in Canada (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1970), p. 46.
14. John Ferguson and Barry Lipton, "Exploitation and Discrimination
in the Alberta Beet Fields," CUS National Supplement, 20-24 October
1969, pp. 4-5.
15. Dosman, Indians: The Urban Dilemma, p. 179.
16. Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1969), p.
139.
17. Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, eds., BAMN: Outlaw
Manifestos and Ephemera (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 185.
18. Howard Adams, Prison of Grass, pp. 204-5.
19. Cardinal, Unjust Society, p. 108.
20. Duke Redbird quoted in Marty Dunn, Red on White (Toronto: New
Press, 1971), p. 115.
21. Jon Ruddy, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Half-Breed," Maclean's,
June 1970, p. 41 .
22. Fidler, Red Power in Canada, pp. 8-9.
23. Howard Adams, Prison of Grass, p. 210.
PART IV
CHAPTER II
1. Sojourner Truth quoted in Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
(New York: Dell, 1963), p. 88.
2. Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada
(Ottawa: Information Canada, 1970), p. vii.
3. Judy Bernstein et al., "Sisters, Brothers, Lovers. . . Listen. . . ,"
Women Unite! (Toronto: Canadian Women's Educational Press, 1972), p.
31ff.
NOTES PART V 287
4. Judy Gill et al., "Sexual Myths," Women Unite!, p. 164.
5. Report on the Status of Women, p. 263.
6. Bob Bossin, "My First Real Honest-to-God Big-Time Campus Sit-
in — We Win!" Maclean's, June 1970, p. 26.
7. Women's Liberation News Service, "University of Toronto Women
Win Daycare," Pedestal, April 1970, p. 2.
8. Eleanor Wright Pelrine, Abortion in Canada (Toronto: New Press,
1972), p. 32.
9. Women's Liberation Movement, "Brief to the House of Commons,"
Women Unite!, p. 117.
10. Bonnie Kreps, "Radical Feminism," Women Unite!, p. 75.
11. Report on the Status of Women, p. 154.
12. Ibid., p. 65.
13. Ibid., p. 309.
14. Wynton Semple, "They'll Have to Start a War or Something...,"
unpublished paper, n.d., p. 5.
15. Report on the Status of Women, p. 21 .
16. M. Brady et al., "Working Women's Association: A Short History,"
Vancouver, n.d.
17. Yellow Journal, vol.1, no. 8.
18. Jerry Rubin, We Are Everywhere (New York: Harper & Row, 1971),
p. 109.
19. "Redstockings Manifesto," in Mitchell Goodman, ed., The Move-
ment Toward a New America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), p. 50.
20. Ernest Mandel, The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and
Practice (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), p. 12.
21. Jerry L. Avorn. Up Against the Ivy Wall (New York: Atheneum,
1968), p. 118.
22. Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, eds., BAMN: Outlaw
Manifestos and Ephemera (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 141.
23. Manifeste des femmes quebecoises (Montreal: Editions 1'Etincelle,
1971), p. 53.
24. "A Prison Interview: Huey Newton," in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New
Left Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 232.
25. "Does My Liberation Mean Not Your Liberation?" Off Our Backs,
reprint, Detroit, n.d., unpaginated.
PART V
CHAPTER I
1. Dennis Lee, "Civil Elegies," Civil Elegies and Other Poems
(Toronto: Anansi, 1972), p. 56.
288 LONG WAY FROM HOME
2. Tony Hyde, "The Student Union for Peace Action: An Analysis,"
unpublished paper, n.d., p. 14.
3. Charles Taylor, Snow Job (Toronto: Anansi, 1974), p. 24.
4. Philip Resnick, The Land of Cain (Vancouver: New Star Books,
1977), pp. 106-7.
5. John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1965), p. 231.
6. George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart [Carleton Library], 1965), p. 96.
7. Ibid., p. 41.
8. Ibid., pp. 15-16.
9. Gad Horowitz, "On the Fear of Nationalism," Canadian Dimension,
vol.5 no.6, pp. 8-9.
10. Gad Horowitz, "Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism: An Inter-
pretation," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol.32
no.2, p. 147ff.
11. Barry Lord, " 'mericans," in Al Purdy, ed., The New Romans
(Edmonton: Hurtig, 1968), p. 150.
12. Resnick, Land of Cain, p. 41.
13. Grant, Lament for a Nation, p. 76.
14. Daniel Drache, "The Canadian Bourgeoisie and Its National Con-
sciousness," in Ian Lumsden, ed., Close the 49th Parallel Etc. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 17.
15. Kari Levitt, Silent Surrender (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 63-64.
16. Ibid., p. 77.
17. Resnick, Land of Cain, p. 70.
18. James Steele and Robin Mathews, "The Universities: Takeover of
the Mind," in Lumsden, ed., 49th Parallel, p. 171.
19. Robin Mathews, "The Americanization of Canadian Universities,"
Canadian Dimension, vol.5 no.8.
20. Ibid.
21. Mathews, "Takeover of the Mind," p. 172.
22. Robin Mathews and James Steele, eds., The Struggle for Canadian
Universities (Toronto: New Press, 1969), p. 4.
23. Ibid., pp. 19-20.
24. Ibid., p. 7.
25. Ibid., p. 125.
26. Peter Warrian, "From Colonized to Colonizer," in John Redekop,
ed., The Star-Spangled Beaver (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1971), p. 77.
27. Dave Godfrey and Mel Watkins, eds., Gordon to Watkins to You
(Toronto: New Press, 1970), p. 130.
28. Ibid., p. 135ff.
29. James Laxer and Art Pape, "Youth and Canadian Politics," in
Dimitrios Roussopoulos, ed., Canada and Radical Social Change (Mon-
treal: Black Rose Books, 1973) p. 53.
30. Philip Resnick, "The Dynamics of Power in Canada," in Rousso-
poulos, ed., Radical Social Change, p. 183.
NOTES PART V 289
31. New Left Caucus," Statement of Purpose," unpublished paper, n.d.
32. Resnick, Land of Cain, p. 169.
33. Godfrey and Watkins, eds., Gordon to Watkins, p. 103ff.
34. Hal Draper, "The Two Souls of Socialism," Our Generation, vol.6
no.3, p. 69.
35. Gerald Caplan and James Laxer, "Perspectives on Un-American
Traditions in Canada," in Lumsden, ed., 49th Parallel, p. 313.
36. Draper, "Two Souls of Socialism," p. 82.
PART V
CHAPTER II
1. M. Patricia Marchak, Ideological Perspectives on Canada (Toronto:
McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975), p. 26.
2. Evelyn Puxley, Poverty in Montreal (Montreal: Dawson College
Press, 1971), p. 5.
3. Ibid., p. 16.
4. Hubert Guindon, "Social Unrest, Social Class and Quebec's Bureau-
cratic Revolution," in Samuel D. Clark, ed., Prophecy and Protest: Social
Movements in Twentieth Century Canada (Agincourt: Gage, 1975).
5. Hubert Aquin, Prochain Episode (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart
[New Canadian Library], 1972), pp. 70-71.
6. Daniel Latouche, "Violence, Politique et Crise dans la Societe
Quebecoise," in Laurier LaPierre et al, eds., Essays on the Left (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1971), p. 179.
7. Joyce Kolko, America and the Crisis of World Capitalism (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1974), p. 49.
8. "A Prison Interview: Huey Newton," in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New
Left Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 225.
9. Leandre Bergeron, Petit Manuel d'Histoire du Quebec (Montreal:
Editions Quebecoises, 1971), p. 231.
10. The Quebec Liberation Movement (Toronto: Hogtown Press, n.d.),
p. 229.
11. Bergeron, Petit Manuel, p. 232.
12. Ivan Avakumovic, Socialism in Canada (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1978), p. 5.
13. Pierre Vallieres, White Niggers of America (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1971), p. 269.
14. Robert Chodos and Nick auf der Maur, eds., Quebec: A Chronicle
1968-72 (Toronto: James, Lewis & Samuel, 1972), p. 43.
15. Jeff Sallot, Nobody Said No (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1979), p. 16.
290 LONG WAY FROM HOME
16. Pierre Vallieres, The Assassination of Pierre Laporte (Toronto:
James Lorimer, 1977), p. 135.
17. Pierre Gravel, A Perte de Temps (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), p. 40.
18. Vallieres, White Niggers of America, p. 281.
19. Philip Resnick, The Land of Cain (Vancouver: New Star Books,
1977), p. 192.
20. Gravel, A Perte de Temps, p. 26.
PART V
CHAPTER Ml
1. Leonard Mayers, "Lawlessness in Lotusland," Commentator,
September 1970, p. 16.
2. Denis Smith, Bleeding Hearts. . . Bleeding Country (Edmonton:
Hurtig, 1971), p. 81.
3. Ibid., pp. 56-57.
4. Pierre Vallieres, The Assassination of Pierre Laporte (Toronto:
James Lorimer, 1977), p. 156.
5. Daniel Latouche "Violence, Politique et Crise dans la Societe
Quebecoise," in Laurier LaPierre et al., eds., Essays on the Left (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1971).
6. Robert Chodos and Nick auf der Maur, eds., Quebec: A Chronicle
1968-72 (Toronto: James, Lewis & Samuel, 1972), p. 50.
7. Smith, Bleeding Hearts, p. 47.
8. John Gellner, Bayonets in the Streets (Toronto: Collier-Macmillan,
1974), p. 116.
9. Chodos and auf der Maur, eds., Quebec: A Chronicle, p. 51.
10. Ibid., p. 68.
11. Ibid., p. 56.
12. Smith, Bleeding Hearts, p. 85.
13. Women's Liberation Movement Quebec Collective, "Les Patriotes,
les Revoltes, les Quebecois: A History of the Quebec Struggle," in Victoria
College SAC and University of Toronto SAC, eds., Quebec in Crisis,
October 1970, p. 9.
14. Chodos and auf der Maur, eds., Quebec: A Chronicle, p. 67.
15. Smith, Bleeding Hearts, p. 86.
16. Marc Laurendeau, "Les vrais evenements d'octobre," L 'Actualiti,
November 1978, p. 92.
17. Richard Fidler, RCMP: The Real Subversives (Toronto: Vanguard,
1978), p. 15.
18. Le journal jaune, vol.1 no.9, p. 16.
NOTES PART VI 291
PART VI
CHAPTER I
1. C. Wright Mills, "The New Left," in Irving Horowitz, ed., Power,
Politics and People (New York: Oxford Unviersity Press, 1963), p. 257.
2. Stanley Rothman, "Intellectuals and the Student Movement: A Post
Mortem," The Journal of Psychohistory, vol.5 no.4, p. 555.
3. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press,
1964), p. 4.
4. Carl Oglesby, "Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin," in
Mitchell Goodman, ed., The Movement Toward a New America (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), p. 737.
5. Theodore Roszak, "Youth and the Great Refusal," in Goodman, ed.,
New America, p. 86.
6. Paul Chamberland quoted in Malcolm Reid, The Shouting Sign-
painters (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972), p. 142.
7. Roszak, "Youth and the Great Refusal," p. 88.
8. Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, eds., BAMN: Outlaw
Manifestos and Ephemera (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 148.
9. Denise Levertov, "Let Us Sing Unto the Lord a New Song," To Stay
Alive (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 73.
10. Ellory Popoff, "The Divergence of Radicalism: The Old and New
Left," Canadian Alternatives, vol.1 no.l, p. 10.
11. Murray Bookchin, Listen, Marxist! (New York: Times Change,
1971).
12. Oglesby, "Notes," p. 743.
13. Norman Penner, The Canadian Left: A Critical Analysis (Scar-
borough: Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 249.
14. Paul Levine, "Theatre Chronicle: Chicago 70," Canadian Forum,
July-August 1970, p. 175.
15. James Laxer, "The Americanization of the Canadian Student Move-
ment," in Ian Lumsden ed., Close the 49th Parallel Etc. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 275ff.
16. See Gerald Caplan and James Laxer, "Perspectives on Un-American
Traditions in Canada," in Lumsden, ed., 49th Parallel, p. 305 ff.
17. James Harding, "Values, Analysis and Action for the NDY,"
unpublished report to the National NDY Convention, 1966.
18. "Outline for the Working Place of the Left," New Left Committee
Bulletin, vol.1 no.l, p. 13.
19. From the New Party Declaration, 1961.
20. Dimitrios Roussopoulos, "Towards a Revolutionary Youth Move-
ment and an Extra-Parliamentary Opposition in Canada," in Dimitrios
Roussopoulos, ed., The New Left in Canada (Montreal: Black Rose Books,
1970), p. 149.
292 LONG WAY FROM HOME
21. Stanley Gray, "Old Left, New Left," Youth Revolt and the New Left,
Canadian Dimension Kit #2, n.d., p. 18.
22. Philip Resnick, The Land of Cain (Vancouver: New Star Books,
1977), p. 230.
23. H.C. Pentland, "Is Canada Possible?" Canadian Dimension, vol.1
no.8, p. 5.
24. Roussopoulos, "Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement," p. 138ff.
25. Andy Wernick, "A Guide to the Student Left," Varsity, 24 September
1969.
PART VI
CHAPTER II
1. Robert Fulford, "The Lesson of Seven Days," Canadian Forum,
May 1966.
2. Dorothy Eber, The Computer Centre Party (Montreal: Tundra
Books, 1969), p. 282ff.
3. Lome and Caroline Brown, An Unauthorized History of the RCMP
(Toronto: James, Lewis and Samuel, 1973), p. 107.
4. Ibid., p. 109.
5. Ibid., p. 125.
6. Renee Goldsmith Kasinsky, Refugees from Militarism (New Bruns-
wick: Transaction Books, 1976), p. 227.
7. "It's Your Turn," A Report to the Secretary of State by the
Committee on Youth (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1971), p. 47.
8. Malcolm Reid, The Shouting Signpainters (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1972), p. 286.
9. Stanley Gray, "The Struggle in Quebec," unpublished paper delivered
at Glendon College, Toronto, October 1969, p. 8.
10. Richard Fidler, RCMP: The Real Subversives (Toronto: Vanguard,
1978), p. 12.
11. Vittorio Rieser, "The Struggle Against Capitalism in Italy: A
Political Manifesto," in Tariq Ali, ed., The New Revolutionaries (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1969), p. 207.
12. W. Roman Petryshyn, "The Emergence of a Generation Entelechy:
The Ukrainian Canadian Student Movement," unpublished paper, p. 32.
13. Jerry Rubin, Growing (Up) At 37 (New York: Warner Books, 1976),
p. 94.
14. Massimo Teodori, The New Left: A Documentary History (Indiana-
polis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 37.
15. Tom Hayden, "The Ability to Face Whatever Comes," in Harold
NOTES PART VI 293
Jaffe and John Tytell, eds., The American Experience: A Radical Reader
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 441.
16. Carl Oglesby, "Notes On a Decade Ready for the Dustbin," in
Mitchell Goodman, ed., The Movement Toward a New America (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), p. 145.
17. Teodori, New Left, p. 90.
18. Monthly Review editorial, "The Old Left and the New," Youth
Revolt and the New Left, Canadian Dimension Kit #2, n.d., p. 42ff.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Unlike the Americans, Canadian writers and publishers have
not exhibited the capacity to be endlessly fascinated with the
recent history of their own society, not even with the period
known as "the Sixties" — the most turbulent period since the
Thirties. American material on this period has been produced
in an unbroken stream of memoirs, anthologies, scrapbooks,
novels, plays and poems, oral histories and photo-essays, as
well as the to-be-expected journalistic accounts, theoretical
essays, critical interpretations, scholarly treatises, and social
and cultural histories. Canadian material, on the other hand, is
patchy.
If one goes looking in people's basements, through back
issues of newspapers and magazines, and on the shelves of used
book stores, one can find a hodge-podge of contemporary
material (speeches, pamphlets, newsletters, correspondence,
news clippings, short articles and ephemera) that fills in some
gaps or illustrates a point. There are some books (mostly out of
print now) that were written in response to some of the more
sensational events — the influx of the draft-resisters, the
occupation of the Computer Centre at Sir George Williams
University, the phenomenon of the CYC. There was the heroic
effort of the people around Our Generation magazine and
Black Rose Books to anthologize the theoretical and analytical
writing being done by Canadian movement activists of the
time. There are two or three recent broad reviews of left-wing
politics in post-war Canada — in which an account of the "new
left" takes up a few pages. And there are a number of fine
anthologies collected around specific themes — the American-
ization of Canada, radicalism in Quebec, the women's liberation
movement — as researched by academics, some of them ex-
activists of the Sixties.
But there is not to be had any sustained and generalized
interpretive and analytical treatment of the period (it is
indicative of the "insecurity" of colonized intellectuals, I
suppose, that they confine themselves to essays and anthologies),
almost nothing in the way of social and cultural histories (as
294
295
opposed to theses in political economy), and disappointingly
little said in literature (Quebec literature excepted). As for a
socio-economic theory of the period, I like to think it may yet be
generated by some of the people who had much to say at the
time, in speeches, meetings, newsletters and magazines; for
Canadian movement activists, no less than their American and
European counterparts, were creative and innovative in thought
and deed, and have not forgotten.
The bibliography which follows is a selection (from among
150 titles) of the most useful and/or historically important
books that I consulted in the course of my research. As for the
more than 150 articles, pamphlets, essays, et cetera, that I also
consulted, I refer the reader to the footnotes for details.
CANADIAN SOURCES
Adams, Howard. Prison of Grass. Toronto: New Press, 1975.
Adelman, H., and Lee, Dennis, eds. The University Game.
Toronto: Anansi, 1968.
Aquin, Hubert. Prochain Episode. Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart (New Canadian Library), 1972.
Avakumovic, Ivan. Socialism in Canada. Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart, 1978.
Bottomore, T.B. Social Criticism in North America. Toronto:
CBC, 1966.
Brown, Lorne and Caroline. An Unauthorized History of the
RCMP. Toronto: James Lewis & Samuel, 1973.
Canadian Dimension Kit No. 2. Youth Revolt and the New
Left. Winnipeg: Canadian Dimension, n.d.
Cardinal, Harold. The Unjust Society. Edmonton: Hurtig,
1969.
Chodos, Robert, and auf der Maur, Nick. Quebec: A Chronicle
1968-72. Toronto: James, Lewis & Samuel, 1972.
Clark, Samuel D., et al., eds. Prophecy and Protest: Social
Movements in Twentieth Century Canada. Agincourt:
Gage, 1975.
Daly, Margaret. The Revolution Game. Toronto: New Press,
1970.
Eber, Dorothy. The Computer Centre Party. Montreal: Tundra
Books, 1969.
Fidler, Richard. RCMP: The Real Subversives. Toronto:
Vanguard, 1978.
Godfrey, Dave, and Watkins, Mel, eds. Gordon to Waikins to
You. Toronto: New Press, 1970.
Grant, George. Lament for a Nation. Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart (Carleton Library), 1965.
Gravel, Pierre. A Perte de Temps. Toronto: Anansi, 1969.
Hunter, Robert The Storming of the Mind. Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart, 1971.
Kasinsky, Renee Goldsmith. Refugees from Militarism. New
Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1976.
296
297
LaPierre, Laurier, et al., eds. Essays On the Left. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1971.
Lee, Dennis. Civil Elegies and Other Poems. Toronto:
Anansi, 1972.
Levitt, Kari. Silent Surrender. Toronto: Macmillan, 1970.
Lumsden, Ian, ed. Close the 49th Parallel Etc. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1971.
Marchak, M. Patricia. Ideological Perspectives on Canada.
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975.
McGuigan, Gerald, ed. Student Protest. Toronto: Methuen,
1968.
Moffatt, Gary. History of the Canadian Peace Movement
until 1969. St. Catharines: Grape Vine Press, n.d.
Moore, Brian. The Revolution Script. Richmond Hill: Pocket
Books, 1972.
Penner, Norman. The Canadian Left: A Critical Analysis.
Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
Porter, John. The Vertical Mosaic. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1965.
Purdy, Al, ed. The New Romans. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1968.
Reid, Malcolm. The Shouting Signpainters. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1972.
Reid, Tim and Julyan, eds. Student Power and the Canadian
Campus. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1969.
Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in
Canada. Ottawa: Information Canada, 1970.
Resnick, Philip. The Land of Cain. Vancouver: New Star
Books, 1977.
Roussopoulos, Dimitrios, ed. Canada and Radical Social
Change. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973.
The New Left in Canada. Montreal: Black Rose Books,
1970.
Smith, Denis. Bleeding Hearts... Bleeding Country. Edmonton:
Hurtig, 1971.
Stein, David Lewis. Scratch One Dreamer. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1967.
Taylor, Charles. Snow Job. Toronto: Anansi, 1974.
Teeple, Gary, ed. Capitalism and the National Question in
Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.
298 LONG WAY FROM HOME
Toronto Anti-Draft Programme. Manual for Draft-Age Immi-
grants to Canada. Toronto: Anansi, 1970.
Vallieres, Pierre. White Niggers of America. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1971.
Warnock, John. Partner to Behemoth. Toronto: New Press,
1970.
Women Unite! Toronto: Canadian Women's Educational
Press, 1972.
Yorke, Ritchie. Axes, Chops and Hot Licks. Edmonton:
Hurtig, 1971.
OTHER SOURCES
Ali, Tariq, ed. The New Revolutionaries. Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart, 1969.
Bourges, Herve, ed. The Activists Speak. London: Jonathan
Cape, 1968.
Cliff, Tony, and Birchall, Ian. France: The Struggle Goes On.
London: Socialist Review Publishing, 1968.
Cockburn, Alexander, and Blackburn, Robin. Student Power.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel and Gabriel. Obsolete Communism: The
Left-Wing Alternative. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Debray, Regis. Revolution in the Revolution? New York:
Grove Press, 1967.
Dickstein, Morris. Gates of Eden: American Culture in the
Sixties. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
Fall, Bernard. Last Reflections on a War. New York:
Doubleday, 1967.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove
Press, 1966.
Free. Revolution for the Hell of It. New York: Pocket Books,
1970.
Gobin, Richard. The Origins of Modern Leftism. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1975.
Goodman, Mitchell, ed. The Movement Toward a New
America. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970.
299
Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd. New York: Vintage,
1960.
Jacobs, Paul, and Landau, Saul. The New Radicals. New
York: Vintage, 1966.
Jaffe, Harold, and Tytell, John, eds. The American Experience:
A Radical Reader. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. New York: Harper &
Row, 1966.
Lipset, Seymour, and Wolin, Sheldon, eds. The Berkeley
Student Revolt. New York: Doubleday, 1965.
Long, Priscilla, ed. The New Left. Boston: Porter Sargeant
Publishing, 1969.
Mairowitz, David Zane. The Radical Soap Opera. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1974.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964.
Murray, Robin, et al., eds. Vietnam: No. 1 in the Read-In
Series. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965.
Obst, Lynda, ed. The Sixties. New York: Random House/Rolling
Stone Press, 1977.
Oglesby, Carl, ed. The New Left Reader. New York: Grove
Press, 1969.
Rolling Stone, ed. The Age of Paranoia: How the Sixties
Ended. New York: Pocket Books, 1972.
Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. New
York: Anchor Books, 1969.
Sale, Kirkpatrick, SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.
Sinclair, John. Guitar Army. New York: Douglas Book Corp.,
1972.
Solomon, David, ed. LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding
Drug. New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1966.
Stansill, Peter, and Mairowitz, David Zane, eds. BAMN:
Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera 1965-70. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1971.
Students for a Democratic Society. Port Huron Statement.
New York: SDS, 1962.
Teodori, Massimo. The New Left: A Documentary History.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
Watts, Alan. The Joyous Cosmology. New York: Vintage,
1962.