Long live the Sixties

The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left
by Jim Harding [ed.]

Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2026
$29 /  9781773638034

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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By the time I got to Simon Fraser University in the early 1970s, Jim Harding had already left campus but his legacy lingered as SFU continued to fester with student unrest after the historic strike in 1967. That event labelled SFU a “radical” campus and Harding was part of the cohort of students and faculty that openly challenged and defied the actions of the university administration. It was a bold, exciting, and educational moment. Harding was among the leaders.

“We helped democratize admission policies,” Harding recalls in The Long Sixties, as a result of 114 students occupying the SFU administration building. “And ‘student power’ was now associated with pursuing class, ethnic and gender justice in higher education.” It was an illegal act of civil disobedience that also resulted in $28,000 in fines for the “non-violent guerillas.” 

“The sixties revolt was primarily a call for participatory democracy,” writes Saskatchewan-born Harding.  He hopes that new activists can generate “a renewed catalyst for transformation.” Originally a social gospeller, he soon expanded his activism to the disarmament and peace movements the fight for Indigenous rights, and as a founder of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA).

Harding tracks his activism to a speech he made at 15 when he spoke at a Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, now NDP) conference. It was the start of a dizzying life of social and political action that is exhausting to read about never mind live day after day since the late 1950s.

Short memoirs of the other six social activist contributors to The Long Sixties, some of them in their 80s now, are equally exhausting. Did these early left “influencers,” as they would be called today, make positive and sustained differences in how society is organized? If we judged from the current undoing of democracy in the United States and elsewhere, the answer is a decisive no. But hold on a second.

Reading these passionate memories of the fight for social justice and the quest to replace capitalism suggests to me that the seeds of what we need to fuel fire-in-belly activism today, almost 60 years after the 1960s, can be found partly in these pages. The goals have not changed. The challenges that faced the seven are still here.

Ontario’s Joan Newman Kuyek, a writer of four books, wins praise from some of the others for her life-long efforts as a community organizer working with indigenous and other poor communities in Sudbury where she helped organize Women Helping Women. “Our ability to help angry, frustrated people understand the structural causes of their oppression is key to overcoming it,” Kuyek argues.

Musician Bob Bossin writes about Toronto’s radical co-operative housing experiment gone awry. In 1968, at 22, he moved into Toronto’s Rochdale College where he fell in love twice and met Marie-Lynn Hammond his co-founder of Stringband. “As an institution, Rochdale failed spectacularly,” he writes, but his Rochdale was “an unqualified success,” mostly because he met poet and children’s story writer Dennis Lee (Alligator Pie) who “taught me to write.” Rochdale was also where Theatre Passe Muraille, Coach House Press, and House of Anansi got their start. A young lawyer named Clayton Ruby, later a prominent defence lawyer, was on hand to assist with court cases associated with Rochdalians.

Ontario theatre artist-activist Lib Spry cut her teeth on the left with parents Graham and Irene Spry being prominent CCF and then NDP activists and academics. She believes that “the traditional Indigenous ways of looking at the world, symbolized linguistically by the importance of verbs rather than nouns in Indigenous languages, is where the world needs to go politically, culturally and spiritually.” She names seven understandings. “Laughter, movement, joy and kindness have become key elements in my political toolkit.” 

British Columbia labour organizer Cathy Walker, like Harding an SFU radical, joined the staff of a union started by the late Jess Succamore that eventually merged with the Canadian Auto Workers Union (now Unifor). In that role, she honed her knowledge and skills as a workplace health and safety activist. She believes in the interconnection between health and safety and environmental protection. She also believes that “class struggle is at the heart of the contradictions of capitalism and by standing on the side of the workers, justice for all will be achieved.”  

Ontario labour and political activist Peter Warrian shaped his activism around his involvement in the Dorothy Day wing of Catholicism and the Catholic Worker. He moved from there to the presidency of the Canadian Union of Students, research director at the United Steelworkers union and later the chief economist in Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government. “The ongoing devastating effects of that financial crisis (2008-09) require a rethinking of left politics and fundamental issues of economic growth, capital accumulation and sustainability,” writes Warrian.

Montreal peace activist Dimitri Roussopoulos hailed from “[a] bourgeois family of Greek liberal republicans” and was inspired by Bertrand Russell to become an anti-nuclear advocate and founder of the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CUCND) in Canada. “The long-term goal and vision of the new left was transforming patriarchal colonial capitalism in Canada,” he writes. He sees no point in engaging in the reform vs. revolution debate. “Immediate needs and long-term transformation are both needed, in this case to deal with the poverty embedded in capitalism.”

All of the activists agree that the goal is to replace capitalism with a more humane, compassionate, and fair system. Their continuing journey to achieving it, with all its bumps and potholes, forms a roadmap for future activists. It is a journey filled with disappointments as well as joyous moments of love and camaraderie.

I came away from The Long Sixties feeling the greatest respect for the author-activists. Their enduring commitment to social change of various kinds is inspiring. Up against seemingly hopeless odds, they devoted their lives to challenging the greed-driven giants of the world. The corporations, the compliant governments, the churches and city councils all hungry for more profits, social consequences be damned.

Right now, with Trump’s attempt to undo what the children of the 1960s have cultivated and nurtured over the past six decades – a humane, caring, cooperative society – we need that dedication more than ever.  The Long Sixties carry on and we dismiss its activist goals at our peril.

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Ron Verzuh is a writer, historian and the author of Underground Times: Canada’s Flower-Child Revolutionaries (Deneau, 1989). [Editor’s note: Ron Verzuh wrote about Tom McGauley and has recently reviewed books by Steven Scanlan, Joline Martin, Patricia E. Roy, Lisa Anne Smith, Charles Demers, and Graeme Menzies for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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