10 Learning Marxism from Tom Flanagan

Left-Wing Activism at the University of Calgary in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s

Larry Hannant

Guerrilla theatre galvanized the city of Calgary in the spring of 1967, inadvertently revealing the depth of the city’s conservatism. The visiting San Francisco Mime Troupe had earned a reputation in the United States for biting political theatre. The Minstrel Show—or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel was its 1967 satire about state repression of the civil rights campaign. The activist-actors had clashed with police often enough in San Francisco and had seen cracker justice in the American South. Invited to Canada by the U of C students’ council and the student newspaper, The Gauntlet, the troupe got a taste of cracker justice northern style. And Stampede City gave them the bum’s rush.

Arriving on 14 March, the actors landed in trouble even before they spoke their first lines. At the U of C campus, someone called city police to report a member of the troupe using marijuana. Orlin Vaughn was arrested and charged with possession of the drug. Two fellow mime troupe members were arrested the next day and, unlike Vaughn, were denied bail. Citing the first arrest, the U of C administration banned the performance planned for the evening of 15 March. The students’ council—Good Uncle Ernies—dutifully seconded the closure.¹ When the troupe strode into the U of C dining hall at noon on 15 March to give an impromptu show promoting an off-campus production of the play, campus and city police were called to eject them. Police applied the same force the next day to a meeting that brought together two hundred students and faculty to condemn the ban. A philosophy professor, Zeno Vendler, was manhandled by a campus cop who thought he was one of the actors. “What are you doing?” Vendler demanded. “I lecture here.” “Sure, sure,” was the reply. “I’ve heard that one before. Get your instruments and let’s go.”² He and five other professors were taken into custody when they did not obey quickly enough.³

Authorities in Calgary clearly did not regard protest as a sacred right. Indeed, the contempt for freedom of assembly by powerful authorities across the province was brutally spelled out in April 1969 by Alberta Supreme Court Chief Justice J. V. H. Milvain. Speaking at a ceremony marking, ironically, Respect for Law Week in Calgary, Milvain condemned the “noisy clamorers after what they call civil rights.” Weighing in on the issue, he continued: “The clamorer after civil rights wants the freedom to break your head with his stick. But it is your duty not to go on freedom marches, camp outside legislatures or preach insurrection.” A citizen’s responsibility, Milvain insisted, was not to protest, and media were negligent when they “played up” complaints about police abuse of human rights.⁴

Calgary had not always been bereft of open demonstrations by dissidents. In the 1930s, like many cities in the West, the city had been the site of frequent and spirited public actions. Usually they were led by the Communist Party of Canada or its various popular-front organizations of married and single men, ex-servicemen, and women. A strike of city relief recipients in the fall of 1934, for instance, was described in the Communist Party’s newspaper, The Worker, as “the biggest strike of unemployed ever to take place in Canada.”⁵ But post–World War II prosperity based on oil exploitation and the Cold War suppression of the Communist Party, among other factors, made public demonstrations a relic of the dirty thirties. Scanning Calgary newspapers in the 1950s and early 1960s yields no sign of citizens acting on their right of public assembly. The centuries-old customary right had fallen into abeyance.

A conservative trend also prevailed at U of C, which had gained its autonomy from the University of Alberta only in 1966. In August 1973, as part of an assessment of all university campuses in Canada that was requested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service, two Calgary RCMP intelligence officers offered this trenchant summary of the U of C political environment: “As a whole it is reasonable to state that the U. of C. campus is probably the least radical campus in Canada.”⁶ Those RCMP officers had clearly never visited campuses in the Atlantic region and small Ontario cities, where they would have encountered even less sympathy for progressive causes.⁷ Nonetheless, their judgment of U of C seems to be an early affirmation of what has come to be the standard tale about the conservatism that reigned at the campus.

Student conservatism was one thing. Yet by the 1990s, students’ right-wing political orientation appeared to have been eclipsed by the ultra-conservative views of a handful of faculty members, who came to be called the Calgary School. Today, the Calgary School has faded from media prominence, so perhaps a word of background is in order. Those who were fortunate enough to sleep through the nasty partisanship of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which was perhaps the heyday of the Calgary School, will need to be reminded that the unofficial group is composed of like-minded U of C professors who have been remarkably successful in injecting US-style conservatism into politics in Alberta and Canada. Harper, their most eminent protégé, was in on the ground floor at the construction of the Reform Party, was instrumental in merging it with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada to create a new entity, the Conservative Party, and led that party to a minority and then majority government in Ottawa between 2006 and 2015. Throughout that era, Calgary School co-founder and U of C political science professor Tom Flanagan was the Harper-whisperer. Right-wing commentator Ezra Levant called Flanagan “Don Tomaso,” Harper’s “master strategist, the godfather.”⁸

Now here’s the confession that is implicit in the title of this paper. I attended U of C from 1967 to 1974, with the exception of 1969–70 and 1971–72, when I was working and travelling away from Calgary. I completed a Bachelor of Arts in history in 1973 and began the first year of post-graduate work under Calgary School partisan David Bercuson, before leaving the program without completing it. So I was shaped intellectually by two members of the Calgary School. Just not the way Stephen Harper was.

Call it early-onset dementia or advanced nostalgia, but my recollection of the university differs from that of the RCMP. During the time I attended the university, conservatism undeniably was an influential political sentiment among its students. With two exceptions, in 1967–68 and 1969–70, successful candidates for student union elections were invariably youthful conservatives, some of whom would go on to political careers with provincial and national Conservative Parties.

Yet the campus was also marked by two contrary trends. One was a thriving, if small, progressive academic community with a healthy optimism about making change for the better. The second was leftist activism that challenged the status quo and promoted the ideas and practices that we believed would lead to a more just, democratic, and equal world. And that hardy band of U of C activists was engaged not only in trying to change the political views of students. We also set out to sway the political sentiments of the people of Calgary. Seeing ourselves as pretty well red, we were intent on wiping a different streak of red from the back of Calgary’s neck.

In his comprehensive history of the generation who came of age in the post–World War II years, Doug Owram contends that university students were the “most privileged of this privileged generation.”⁹ His generalization is an accurate description of university students in the country and the province at the time. In Alberta in 1966, full-time university student numbers totalled only 16,000, making up 1 percent of the population of 1.5 million. So we did enjoy some advantages not shared by most of the people of the province.

But if we were among the 1 percent, New Leftists at U of C were very different from today’s elite. Like me, most leftists came from modest family backgrounds. My family was poor. We survived only thanks to extraordinary labour on the part of my mother. She cooked, cleaned up, and did the laundry for sometimes as many as five male boarders in addition to five kids, did child care for neighbours, and in her spare time sold Regal cards door to door. This supplemented—in fact, probably exceeded—my stepdad’s severely constrained income as a lower-level manager in the post office. My fellow leftists at U of C often came from families who also struggled financially. Tom was the son of a widowed rural schoolteacher; Bill a recent immigrant who still retained a slight accent from his childhood in Holland; George, Jim, and Margaret, as well as Bob and Mary Lee, from large families of modest incomes; Pat a former worker in a grocery store who was raising a toddler. Just two or three of some thirty Gauntlet staffers owned cars. We walked or bused to school and social events.

Another significant characteristic of the New Left in Calgary was that we were overwhelmingly local; we had sprung from a Calgary upbringing. U of C could not be accused of being a hotbed of “foreign agitators”—radical international students from dangerous places such as Berlin, Birmingham, or Brooklyn whom the media, politicians, and even university administrators like U of A president Walter Johns persisted in blaming for activism.¹⁰ Having grown up in politically conservative Calgary, our radicalism was all the more remarkable. We were children of our times, not of our parents. And we were fortunate that in the half-decade before we graduated from high school the province had created a bona fide—if small—university in the city. The fact that we could walk or bus to classes, faced no dormitory or significant transportation fees, and could live at home (or in improvised co-ops of three to five like-minded folks) made university education possible for children of less-than-prosperous backgrounds.

The university showed some signs of being in tune with the broader progressive academic environment of the day. A scan of the U of C academic calendar from 1967 to 1974 reveals a rising presence of courses with an alternative focus. Beginning from the late ’60s, the academic calendar lists courses in the departments of history, political science, philosophy, economics, and sociology and anthropology, among other departments, that reflect the worldwide intellectual shift of the day toward the political left. New history courses in 1970–71, for instance, included “Movements of Social and Economic Protest in Canada,” taught by David Bercuson (before he donned, intellectually, a military uniform). Another course dealt with the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and was taught by the Briton David Whitefield, whom the RCMP identified in a 1975 report as a Communist Party of Canada member and “definitely a leading light within the subversive element at the U. of C.” (It seemed a surprise to the reporting Mounties that Whitefield’s openly communist status—he had run for the party in three elections by 1975—“has not apparently affected his employment.”)¹¹

Courses in the philosophy department in the 1972–73 calendar included “Marx and Engels” and “The Marxist Tradition.” In the Department of Political Science, the course that students had long relied on to let them catch up on lost sleep, “Canadian Political Institutions,” was augmented in 1970–71 by new ones guaranteed to catapult them directly to the barricades: “Socialist Theory,” “Revolution and Reform,” and “Politics, War and Revolution,” the last of which included a component on Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution. The times they were a-changin’.

The socialist theory course was introduced by—and, in 1970–71, co-taught by—a political science professor who, from 1968 to 1976, was intellectually and politically inclined toward the progressive side of the political spectrum. This youthful firebrand was Tom Flanagan. He was, at age twenty-six, four years younger than Berkeley Free Speech leader Jack Weinberg, who coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” In class, Flanagan wore a button proclaiming “Stop at Two,” announcing that he had heard of the population time bomb. So we thought he might just be a fellow traveller on the road down Highway 61.

In a 2004 Walrus magazine article titled “The Man Behind Stephen Harper,” Marci McDonald writes that unlike other members of the Calgary School, Flanagan “appears never to have strayed from a conservative path.”¹² Flanagan, like me, remembers things differently. About socialism, he recalled in an interview, “I was very intensely interested in the topic [and] read quite widely on it.” His leftist book collection of “hundreds of volumes” included the collected works of Mao Zedong. Moreover, while this was, in his words, “partly just an intellectual interest,” progressive politics “was also a personal political orientation for a few years.”¹³ Indeed, the period that for Flanagan ended around 1976 included at least one active foray into Alberta provincial politics. In the March 1975 provincial election, Flanagan helped to distribute campaign literature for the NDP candidate in the Calgary Foothills riding. Alas, Flanagan’s assistance did not help Ken Gee much. Taking just 8 percent of the vote, he was decisively beaten by a Conservative.

In 1970–71, I took “Socialist Theory,” a political science class co-taught by Flanagan and Bob Ware, a Marxist philosophy professor. Significantly, Ware recalls that Flanagan suggested, perhaps in 1969, that they teach it together, reflecting Flanagan’s left-curiosity.¹⁴ I began the year-long course when I was twenty, having had before then only a rudimentary introduction to alternative political theory. Like several other budding leftists at U of C, some of my early introduction to socialist ideas came from one of the founders of the Calgary School.

Now, I’m hardly a brilliant Marxist. Still, you can imagine my shock recently when I checked my U of C transcript. I got a C in “Socialist Theory”! (There are some, I admit, who would consider that to be a pretty accurate assessment of my grasp of Marxism.) And that grade might actually have exaggerated my knowledge of socialism. We’ll never know, because Flanagan and Ware took to heart one of the then-current challenges to academic convention. This related to the always-sensitive question of grading. On the first day of classes, they set out the conditions of the course. The deal was that the entire grade for the course would be determined by an essay—but even if you didn’t submit one, you’d be guaranteed a C. You could do more work and improve your grade. Of course, only keeners would do that. I was no capitalist-lackey keener. I militantly submitted no essay and got a C. It pulled down my grade point average, but I knew revolution would erupt before any of us graduated anyway.

But let’s probe into what lay beneath that grading innovation. It was a concession to leftist criticism of one of the fundamentals of the education system. We viewed the grading structure in universities as a perverse reflection of the inequities of the capitalist system. It pays workers according to a class-biased hierarchy. The hidebound university grading system that distributed marbles according to an A+-to-F pattern mimicked capitalist wage inequity. It had to go. In “Socialist Theory,” it did go. In a small way, both students and professors in the class saw themselves as raising a little hell.

At this point you are probably thinking that the introduction at U of C of courses in Marxism, protest, and revolution sprang from the same phenomenon that allowed the Calgary Stampeders to get to the Grey Cup game in 1968 after an absence of two decades—that’s right: imports. Like many universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, U of C was hiring professors as fast as cash could make its way down the highway from Edmonton. In Calgary’s case, the need to acquire new faculty was made even more intense by the fact that in 1960 the campus had just two buildings perched out on what one graduate of 1962 described as “a blasted plain” where “whenever you opened your mouth outside you got grit in your teeth.”¹⁵ From that hapless start, U of C expanded energetically (and also laid down a lot of sod to cut the grit). Enrolment at U of C almost doubled from 1968 to 1971 (5,000 to 9,200). Acquiring faculty was urgent, and there were not many to be had in Canada. By the early 1970s, 45 percent of all U of C profs were born outside of Canada. Some 46 percent of the full professors were either American or British. Inevitably, those profs brought with them cutting-edge political perspectives and theories from the world. They used those ideas to assault what the radical U of C sociology professor Clement Blakeslee described as “the rigid fundamentalist mentality of the Bible belt” that still prevailed in Alberta.¹⁶ So although the troublemaking students who stirred things up in Calgary were rarely “outside agitators,” some faculty members were.

Certainly the RCMP intelligence officers who wrote the comprehensive 1973 report thought that foreigners were the source of radicalism at U of C. They argued that “the main instigators of radicalism are usually ‘import’ to this locale.” The authors added, “Whenever any activity becomes apparent it usually involves basically one of the same individuals.”¹⁷ They then named Ware, the American-born philosophy prof who had co-taught “Socialist Theory.”

It might be tempting to conclude that while at least some U of C profs—many of them foreigners—were radicals, the U of C students themselves were conservative. The idea has some merit. In the spring of 1973, U of C students elected a born-again Christian student union president who assembled a slate of candidates for executive positions based entirely on students who had Found Jesus. Yet, radical candidates were at times successful in student politics. Pat Pattison, who describes himself now as “one of the long-haired guys that talked about things that were off campus and . . . international,” was elected student president in 1969.¹⁸ Partly because of Pattison’s influence, U of C students remained within the Canadian Union of Students (CUS), the national student organization that was damned by authorities in 1968–69 as a hotbed of anti-war and Marxist-inspired student agitators. U of C’s membership in CUS ended only with the organization itself, in late 1969.

It should also be noted that by the time the RCMP issued its comprehensive report on the U of C campus in August 1973, much of the heat was gone from the youth revolution everywhere. Owram’s Born at the Right Time argues that already “by the beginning of 1970, the great national movements were either gone or on their way out.” By 1973, when the RCMP conducted its national survey of student radicalism, Owram adds, “the number of incidents of protest occupations [on university campuses had] sank into insignificance.”¹⁹ Little wonder that a Christian fundamentalist could become student president at U of C that year.

Given the conservative bent of so many elected student politicians, the organizational home of most radical students at U of C was The Gauntlet. Newspaper radicalism represented a pattern duplicated at many campuses across the country.²⁰ The RCMP understood and made use of that tendency, keeping files on student newspapers, rating them according to their political tendency—“moderately radical” for the University of Toronto Varsity; “Maoist” for the McGill Daily—and using them as a key source of information to keep tabs on activists.²¹ New Left–inspired students dominated the U of C paper from 1967, when the leftist Kevin Peterson became editor, through to 1975, with a break of part of one year when the student union closed the paper and brought in a temporary replacement edited by a council member who set out to correct what council claimed to be the paper’s inflammatory leftist content. That brief moment aside, through the late 1960s and early 1970s The Gauntlet was the U of C headquarters of both oppositional journalism and oppositional politics. That political influence was felt on the campus, into the city, and even nationally. Gauntlet writers were well regarded for their competence and leftism by other student papers, who elected Peterson as Canadian University Press president in 1967, George Russell as national bureau chief in 1969, and Mick Lowe as Ontario regional fieldworker in 1973. Indeed, it was Russell who stamped CUP’s radicalism on the minds of a wider public in February 1970, when he delivered the organization’s statement to the Special Senate Committee on Mass Media. A Globe and Mail reporter disparaged it as “a long Marxist-toned dissertation” that annoyed the senators.²²

As one of those activist-journalists, I recall two cases that illustrate the nature of the political engagement that either was rooted at The Gauntlet or was initiated by Gauntlet staffers. One occurred on 16 October 1970, when U of C students spearheaded one of the very few protests in the country against the government of Canada’s use of the War Measures Act (WMA) to suppress Québec nationalism. Early on that morning, the federal government had declared the WMA in effect and outlawed the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). In Calgary, agitation against that decision began at Speaker’s Corner in the U of C Students’ Union Building. By mid-morning, just hours after learning the news, students were engaged in a spirited debate about the justice or injustice of invoking the WMA. The government claimed it was necessary to prevent an “apprehended insurrection” by the FLQ, aimed at the takeover of the governments of Québec and Canada. But many students weren’t buying it, and an intense debate over the WMA and Québec nationalism erupted. The animated discussion raged, at times with pushing and shoving over control of the microphone; one former student went so far as to call them “fistfights,” but argument rather than violence was the norm.²³ Students on campus sent competing telegrams to politicians and authorities in Ottawa that alternatively deplored and praised the use of the WMA.²⁴

The democratic roughhousing went on until early afternoon, when several of us took over the desks and copy tables at the Gauntlet office to prepare signs slamming the use of the WMA and commenting on politics in Québec and the country. Our signs were direct, often blunt, maybe a bit over the top. One displayed the demand for “Québec Libre.” Others read “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, The FLQ Is Gonna Win”; “The FLQ Are the Outlaws, but Trudeau Is the Bad Guy”; “We Support the FLQ”; “Welcome to Canada, the Friendly Police State.” We set out to take our outrage over the use of this extraordinary legislation into the city streets.

At that time, students could borrow megaphones from the audiovisual office of the university, and I signed one out. We spread the word at the university and beyond, piled into cars about 2:30 p.m., and arrived at the centre of Calgary, the Eighth Avenue Mall, for a demonstration. The Calgary Herald had been alerted, as had the police. Under the conditions of martial law, which applied across Canada, we expected that police would suppress our demonstration. Expressing agreement with the FLQ was illegal. Arrest was possible, and as we made our way downtown, when one of us mentioned that she had a bag of marijuana in her pocket, we urged her to dump it. Sure enough, plainclothes and uniformed police were already in place when we arrived on the mall.

About thirty students had set out from the campus. For a few moments we milled about indecisively. Finally, armed with the megaphone, I stood up on a cement planter and declared myself in support of the FLQ. (My reckless assertion was based on little knowledge, but I had heard the FLQ Manifesto read on CBC radio a couple of days before, and the sheer anti-capitalist bravado of it was utterly exhilarating.) Remarkably, the expected police shutdown did not happen. What had begun as a small demonstration quickly flared into a spontaneous mass democracy event that, according to the Calgary Herald report, included three hundred people. Among the crowd were youth and high school students who happened to be on the mall on a Friday afternoon and who took up our rambunctious anti-authoritarian impudence. Bob Mercer spoke about political activists Pierre Vallières and Charles Gagnon, jailed Felquistes who had been joined by the many lawyers, academics, poets, singers, labour leaders, and other Québec activists arrested early that morning. (Mercer, born and raised in Calgary, lived at that time in Vancouver, where he was one of the radicals with the New West Co-op, a founder of the FART Party [Front for Anarchist Revolutionary Terrorism—slogan “FART Now”] and co-founder of the Vancouver Street Theatre Company.) After more than an hour on the street, and with darkness approaching, on Bob’s suggestion we concluded with what he called a Yippie Parade Drill. We formed a circle and, on the order “Forward march,” proceeded to advance on one another, laughing uproariously.

Rough as it was, with elements of simplistic analysis, emotional excess, and opéra bouffe, the anti-WMA demonstration in Calgary was a singular event in Canada. Looking at newspaper accounts, there appear to have been only two other anti-WMA demonstrations on 16 October: one at the University of Ottawa, and the other at York University in Toronto. But only in Calgary did university students take their anger at the use of the WMA from the campus to the heart of their city. In a small way, U of C students engaged the city of Calgary in a mass democratic exercise that dared to take on repressive government power.

The demonstration was remarkable also because it took place in a city where the right of public assembly was, in 1970, still rarely used and where police power was arbitrarily exercised in public and private. In 1967, for instance, I was sitting in a downtown coffee house with a fellow longhair, trying to look as cool as possible drinking rank coffee from a Styrofoam cup, when plainclothes police swept through the place, demanding identification from everyone. When they came to me, I refused, saying I did not have to provide it. A cop lifted me by the front of my jacket, marched me outside to a waiting patrol car, and took me to police headquarters, where I was searched and interrogated for an hour before being released. No charge, of course.

In 1968, journalist-activists at The Gauntlet were involved in another public act of oppositional journalism and civic political involvement. Calgary in the 1960s was growing rapidly, and development was particularly intense in the downtown core, where high-rise office towers and apartments were increasingly pushing out the single-family homes of relatively poor people in core districts such as Eau Claire, Victoria Park, and Beltline. Taking on the issue, The Gauntlet published a special edition to expose a cozy arrangement, with the land-owning corporation Eau Claire Estates Ltd. at the heart of it, working in conjunction with the city to carve out an exclusive park for the rich.

As part of their journalistic investigations, several reporters at the Calgary Herald, some of whom had been student journalists at The Gauntlet, had come across a disturbing plan to reshape the downtown core. The proposal by developers was to get official approval from the city to create a multi-lane freeway-style road on the north side of the downtown, cutting through the long-established neighbourhood of Eau Claire and separating Prince’s Island in the Bow River from the city. (At that time there was no pedestrian overpass across the Bow on the north side of the island, so the island could not be accessed from that direction.) The developers would then build luxury accommodation on the park edge of the new freeway. Wealthy residents would enjoy exclusive access to the park, the riff-raff kept isolated on the south side of the freeway. The scheme would generate huge profits for land-owning corporations, especially Eau Claire Estates Ltd. What was being called urban renewal, The Gauntlet editorial in the supplement charged, “is nothing less than rape.”²⁵ Rape of the poor, that is, by both private developers and the city.

The Herald refused to publish the material, so it was brought to The Gauntlet, and with additions and photos by Gauntlet staffers, the paper printed an eight-page “Urban Renewal” supplement. More than that, in order to maximize its effect in the city, we published several thousand extra copies of the supplement and took it to the streets at the Eighth Avenue Mall, where staffers handed it out free to passersby to bring the issue to the attention of citizens. In the supplement, The Gauntlet appealed to Calgarians to support “a broad public examination of urban renewal.” At least for the fourteen named directors of Eau Claire Estates Ltd.—including Max Bell, publisher of the Calgary Albertan, the city’s second daily newspaper—it was a wake-up call about the power of the press. Even if this press was run by students.

While assembling in the Gauntlet office before setting out for downtown with our bundles, the staffers who had volunteered for the public distribution felt more than a little apprehension. Was it legal to gather on the mall and hand out provocative material such as this? Should we be ready for arrest? We were the most engaged activists in the city, yet few of us had put ourselves on the line in this way before. And most of us had never seen anyone else using public space to advance a political cause. Calgary was happy once a year to have the Stampede parade take over the streets but not keen on seeing oppositional political ideas voiced there.

Initiatives by young people and students in the late 1960s broke that taboo. This is one of the overlooked legacies of the New Left in Calgary. Those demonstrations and public actions of 1968 and 1970, coupled with events such as the twice-yearly anti–Vietnam War marches that began in late 1967, helped to advance a popular right to take to the streets. In the era before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the 1960s Bill of Rights had proclaimed that “freedom of assembly and association” existed in Canada.²⁶ But authorities and police in the city cared little for legislated rights. Indeed, the chief justice of the Alberta Supreme Court believed that a dutiful citizen shunned demonstrations, parades, marches. In challenging this official contempt for a long-held customary right, young people reminded Calgary of its own militant history and reaffirmed a right that had been neglected for over twenty-five years.