Introduction

Alberta barely surfaces in the histories of dissident political activism in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Montréal, Toronto, and, of course, Vancouver take pride of place, augmented by a few accounts of radicalism among draft dodgers or community organizers in smaller locales.¹ Historians of that time seem to regard Alberta as having missed the tumult of these decades, with the one substantial political change being the replacement, in 1971, of one conservative dynasty (which had ruled the province for thirty-six years) with another conservative one (which would rule it for nearly forty-four).

Many decades of conservative ascendancy in the province, coupled with a unique Alberta self-righteousness about the role of its conservatism in the country, have spawned an Alberta Angel Complex.² Ernest Manning’s sermon to Alberta doctors in 1965, quoted in the opening to this section, illustrates that while liberal Canadians might pride themselves on their superiority when compared with Alberta’s reactionary persistence, ideologues in this province have also taken pleasure in striding to the pulpit to issue their own warning, this one about the country’s liberal sins. Manning was warning Albertans about the “direct challenge to individual liberty and responsibility” represented by the implementation of compulsory state health insurance. Alberta, he maintained, was single-handedly erecting a barrier to prevent the country from a dangerous slide into a tyrannical modernist trap.

Manning’s habit of preaching against progressives outside the province is a practice taken up by more recent premiers, including Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney. In both cases, they directed their thunder against perceived enemies of Alberta’s bitumen economy. In her 2015 election night victory speech and again at her first news conference the next morning, Notley reassured her “partners in the energy industry” that “they can count on us to work collaboratively with them.”³ This “Alberta Inc.” approach was reiterated the next year, when she issued a full-throated attack on federal NDP representatives. When the federal NDP descended on Edmonton for a national convention, their agenda included a proposal that might be seen as a twenty-first century form of bucking conservatism, the Leap Manifesto. The manifesto was, as its subtitle declared, “A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another.” Along with wide-ranging social reforms, it proposed to swiftly phase out the production of fossil fuels and halt the pipeline projects intended to facilitate export of them. The document suggested a shift towards clean energy and “energy democracy.”⁴ Notley dismissed the manifesto as “naïve,” and “ill-considered” and “very tone-deaf” to Alberta’s “economic realities.”⁵ In this and other attacks, she reverted to a trope that goes back at least to William Aberhart in the 1930s. She portrayed herself as a defender of a province misunderstood and unjustly damned by outsiders who have little grasp of Alberta’s uniqueness.

For his part, Kenney has energetically taken up Notley’s lead in his expressed contempt for environmentalists, whom he claims are determined to sabotage the development and export of petroleum from Alberta. In announcing a public inquiry in 2019 into what he condemned as “foreign meddling,” largely by foundations based in the US, Kenney took pains to emphasize that Alberta was waging this necessary war on behalf of the entire country. These enemies of development, he warned, “focused on Canada because they saw us as the easy target, as the pushover, as the kid in the schoolyard most easy to bully.”⁶ Virtuous angel though it is, Alberta will not be a bullied one. Canadians, he implied should adopt some of this province’s conservative grit.

Alberta’s conservatism is nothing if not tenacious, but the articles in this section illustrate that dissent was simmering in the province in the 1960s and 1970s, even if it didn’t always register on the national consciousness or in the minds of subsequent historians. The political unruliness in Alberta is illustrated by a series of clashes between students and the administration at the University of Alberta in the mid-1960s. The events were separated in time by no more than months. But that brief interval witnessed a transformation in political thinking and practice.

On 12 February 1964, Premier Ernest Manning brusquely reminded U of A students of their political impotence when, with a single phone call, he stifled a protest planned for the opening of the legislature the next day. The U of A Residence Committee for Lower Rents had organized a march across the High Level Bridge to the legislature to make their case against rising dormitory fees. Learning of that plan, Manning telephoned U of A president Walter Johns on the afternoon before the march with a simple message. The action would “prejudice the students’ chance of getting government cooperation in the future,” reported the U of A student paper, The Gateway. By evening, the protest had been cancelled.⁷ Seven months later, Johns would reassert his fundamental rejection of the entire notion of academic activism when, in response to a faculty-student demonstration at city hall against the return to power of the corrupt Mayor William Hawrelak, Johns declared, “I don’t agree with the idea that the academic community should be a centre of vocal protest.”⁸

Yet in December 1965, the first New Left group at the university put Johns on notice that they intended to turn U of A into precisely what he rejected. A confrontation flared up when the board of governors and the deans’ council refused to allow what has been described as Canada’s first New Left organization, the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), to use a booth on campus to distribute information against the US war on Vietnam because it violated the university’s rule against solicitation and canvassing. (In its fundamental causes, the standoff was remarkably like the University of California, Berkeley campus free-speech fight, which students had won a year earlier after they occupied the administration building, leading to eight hundred arrests.) SUPA representative Peter Boothroyd defied the administration. He declared that he intended “to keep this booth open until it is physically removed or until we are physically removed.”⁹ SUPA’s determination rallied supporters from campus and outside, forcing the U of A administration to back down.¹⁰

Matters rapidly escalated. In the summer of 1968, with the world in turmoil, Johns felt it necessary to warn publicly that the university was “not an instrument for direct social or revolutionary action.”¹¹ The university was preparing to take “prompt and decisive action” against any student who acted outside of “the due process of the law.”¹² The message was reinforced that fall when forty members of the Students for a Democratic University (SDU) subjected the dean of arts to an assertive questioning about the lack of student representation on university decision-making bodies. He responded by cautioning them that the university had files on every one of them.¹³

The moment of intensity would pass. By 1972, Boothroyd would lament that the campus was “apolitical.”¹⁴ Yet the capacity of the premier to short-circuit a student demonstration with a phone call—to say nothing of the premier’s conviction that suppression was appropriate and necessary—had dissolved. Over a remarkably short period, youthful activists had mounted a democratic challenge to at least some of the coercive authority vested in politicians and university administrators.

Doing politics in a new way, Anthony Hyde asserts, was the primary legacy of the New Left. Indeed, in that blissful dawn, youthful activists redefined politics—its content, who could do it, and how it was practised. In particular, he argues, the New Left “attacked the stasis of the Cold War”—static thinking and conceptualization that had so stultified political discussion and practice in the West for two decades prior.¹⁵ Nothing was more shocking to me than, in 1967, at age seventeen, walking into The Gauntlet office at the University of Calgary and having George Russell (yes, that George Russell, later editor-at-large at Fox News) pin a red armband on me to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. “Was this possible?” I marvelled. To say openly that an event in the Soviet Union, which I rather imagined as a mirror image of Alberta—a sclerotic blob of political conformity—had changed the world for the better? The same amazement came when I heard Bob Cruise, standing in the students’ union building behind a table of Internationalist pamphlets praising China, deride a heckler as a “mouthy anti-communist.” Here were people who actually defended communism. And in Calgary! The notion was not in my ken before I encountered the new politics. Soon I was doing the unimaginable myself: standing in the snow on a Christmas Eve condemning the US empire’s assault on the Vietnamese people as a crime, dismissing as a fraud its claim to be defending me from communism.

In some New Left circles, the formation of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961 was more of the same old zombie politics featuring dead White men calling voters to resurrect them from the grave. But as Myrna Kostash has correctly observed, “the Canadian new left as a whole was never as alienated as the American from its socialist antecedents.”¹⁶ In Alberta, the creation of what was optimistically called the New Party had both positive and negative impacts, as Ken Novakowski and Mack Penner document in this section. For those youths tempted by adults’ political organizations, the NDP offered a drive to the legislature down an avenue of dreams. The youthful Novakowski enthusiastically hopped into the car and, from the back seat, urged the old man to put the pedal to the metal. Alas, the NDP proved to be an Edsel, a debility that, Penner points out, was probably secretly predicted and even cheered by the socialists who remained old-guard Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) stalwarts. They much preferred the trolley in any case. Meanwhile, for Alberta conservatives, the fact that a CCF/NDP government ruled Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1964 provided a near-to-hand bogeyman to warn Albertans of the dangers of the left-liberal welfare state and all its abominations. Those included, as Manning told the Alberta Division of the Canadian Medical Association in 1965, the “direct challenge to individual liberty and responsibility” represented by compulsory state health insurance.¹⁷ Medicare made Manning’s skin creep, as it should ours, he insisted.

But ultimately, for a variety of reasons, the NDP in Alberta would not be a home to most of the energetic New Leftists in the province in the 1960s and early 1970s. Instead, as PearlAnn and Baldwin Reichwein and Larry Hannant illustrate, non-party dissidents acted on their own initiative to address issues they saw as pressing. These included the need to accommodate thousands of indigent young people—some Canadian, others seeking refuge from the US war machine—who took to the roads in the late 1960s. Other actions initiated by the left in the 1960s and 1970s included University of Calgary student ventures into the community to challenge repressive and corrupt government schemes and the courageous stand of churchgoers, unionists, students, and internationals who acted locally to oppose the global scourge of racist authoritarianism represented by South African apartheid. Never the wasteland that it was too often seen to be, Alberta in that decade proved it had more than a little of the right stuff to hold its leftist head high.

Larry Hannant