THE POLITICAL FERMENT OF THE late-1960s and early-1970s was global in scope, and New Brunswick was not exempt from the radicalism of the era. The New Brunswick Waffle was a group that represented one of the more prominent and significant manifestations of leftist radicalism in the province during the period, and it served as a catalyst for some of the most dramatic events in the province’s political history. The group was a New Brunswick variation on Canadian, continental, and global political trends of the time and sought to introduce New Left and radical socialist critiques to the specific circumstances of New Brunswick; it also fused the Old Left and New Left in the province for the first time.[1] During its short lifespan (1970-71), the NB Waffle also managed to precipitate a split within the New Brunswick New Democratic Party (NDP) that had a host of ripple effects on the province’s leftist community as well as anticipating several trends that would emerge on New Brunswick’s political scene during the 1970s such as increased environmental concerns and skepticism about prevalent economic development schemes. Finally, the group made a small but important contribution to the province’s leftist community via generating awareness about the New Left within the provincial NDP. Until recently, however, the NB Waffle has been neglected as a topic of historical inquiry, as almost all of the previous work on the Waffle has focused on the organization in Ontario with some mention of the Waffle in Saskatchewan.[2]

The NB Waffle had its roots in Fredericton’s small but persistent left-wing community during the 1960s, a community that was centred around but not exclusive to the University of New Brunswick (UNB) campus. The first half of the decade witnessed the slow introduction of the New Left to Fredericton, beginning largely with the peace movement and reflected most significantly in the local chapter of Voice of Women, one of the most prominent VOW locals in Atlantic Canada.[3] The mid-1960s also saw a flurry of concern at UNB over such matters as nuclear weapons, racial prejudice (particularly in apartheid South Africa), and the Vietnam War.[4]

What distinguished the New Left philosophies that emerged in many places during the 1950s from the socialism of the Old Left? Members of the New Left can be seen as taking the Old Left’s concerns about oppression, exploitation, and inequality and expanding upon them as these ills were viewed as manifesting themselves in myriad forms – not just in class relations and economics. These broadened notions of oppression helped create an emphasis on racial, gender, sexual, and colonial liberation, which were championed as just as fundamental to the wholesale change of society as economic justice.[5] Indeed, many New Leftists placed these new struggles ahead of labour struggles because they doubted the revolutionary potential of workers enjoying post-war affluence.[6] New Leftists were also skeptical of both post-war social democracy and Soviet-style communism (the latter discredited by the revelations of Stalinist brutality and imperial actions that had occurred during the 1956 invasion of Hungary).[7]

New Left radicalism at UNB received a boost in 1967 with the arrival of an American physics professor named Norman Strax, who would become a national figure during the 1968-69 academic year in a series of events that became known as "The Strax Affair."[8] While Strax was often the central figure in coverage of these events, he was hardly the only figure involved. Strax was simply the most senior member of a loose confederation of radicals known as Canadian Struggle for a Democratic Society (CSDS), formed in late 1967 after he led a contingent of 150 UNB students to Washington, DC, for the March on the Pentagon.[9] Inspired by the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), CSDS was the most notable manifestation of New Left politics in Fredericton and represented an influx of American New Left ideas into UNB.[10] As such, CSDS represented an assortment of radicals united around a mutual but vague anti-capitalist and countercultural ethos. Former CSDS member Dan Weston summed up the ideological moorings of CSDS as follows:

Basically we were anti-capitalist. . . . Our objective was to turn on as many people as we could to the questions that we were asking and ask these questions in public about how the system runs and the justifications for this system and its worldwide connections and what this is doing to people in general. . . . We felt that the state was covertly fascist and that it was overtly democratic, at least in terms of its façade, and basically organizing was effective when you could force the state to have to live up to its democratic façade.[11]

As the only major left-wing organization at UNB, CSDS became a magnet for radicals and leftists of many stripes who normally would not associate with each other. And by November 1969 this influx of new members into CSDS produced a political schism within the group – a schism initiated by a small collection of Trotskyists. Trotskyism, a variant of communism that stressed that socialism could only be achieved through the use of armed force by the working class, also emphasized that workers were led by a workers’ party, that the revolution was global in scale, and that the creation of a socialist society could be achieved via an uninterrupted "permanent revolution." This approach enjoyed a rise in popularity on campuses throughout the Western world during the late-1960s.[12] UNB was not exempt from this trend.

The most prominent Trotskyist within CSDS was a member of the UNB physics department named Eustace Mendis, who entered the organization in the summer of 1969. Originally from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Mendis was an experienced Trotskyist, having been involved with the strong Trotskyist movement in Ceylon as well as the Young Socialist Alliance in Madison, Wisconsin, prior to his arrival in Fredericton. Upon his entry into CSDS, Mendis began to expound Trotskyist ideas within the group and he developed a small but vocal base of support among some CSDS followers. The eclectic composition of CSDS, though, became unsustainable and by mid-November an open split had developed between the Trotskyism and ideological socialism of Mendis and his supporters and the more anarchist and socialist-libertarian views of the group’s original backers who rallied around Strax.[13]

The Mendis camp of CSDS decided in early December 1969 to form a new organization that would be overtly socialist. The new organization was called the New Brunswick Socialists (NBS). The NBS had a stated objective of building "a strong Socialist movement on the [UNB] campus and simultaneously to direct the campus activists into the larger left-wing community" and was regarded by local Trotskyist observers as "a central socialist grouping, containing within it left-liberal, social-democratic, ultra left and even Stalinist tendencies in addition to a solid core moving towards Trotskyism." Indeed, Trotskyists quickly consolidated themselves as the leaders of the group.[14]

While the NBS drew some members away from CSDS, the NBS remained small. Approximately 15 people were initially involved in the organization to varying degrees, with about eight of them being actual members. Despite their small numbers, the NBS quickly established a presence within UNB’s student political scene as 1970 began. Literature tables were set up, potential speakers contacted (including prominent Ontario Waffler Mel Watkins, who was unable to make it to Fredericton), and position papers were written and even published in The Brunswickan, UNB’s student newspaper. The Trotskyist leadership of the NBS (namely Mendis and Terry Hamilton-Smith, a student from Ontario) sought to recast the group along Trotskyist lines. To help achieve this goal, Mendis contacted the League for Socialist Action (LSA) headquarters in Toronto in January 1970.[15] The LSA was the most prominent Trotskyist organization in Canada at the time, founded in 1960 as a formal fusion of independent Trotskyist branches in Toronto and Vancouver.[16] The LSA’s youth wing was known as the Young Socialists (YS), and Mendis expressed a desire to convert the NBS into a YS local.[17]

The process of transforming the NBS into a YS local, though initially met with resistance on the part of some members, was complete by April 1970. For a few months afterwards the Fredericton Young Socialists (FYS) and NBS co-existed with almost identical membership lists, though by July 1970 the NBS had effectively ceased to exist as an actual organization. Just before that, in the spring of 1970, FYSNBS members had shared a mutual interest in involvement within the NDP. Some members, most notably a young married couple Bill and Maxine Ross, were attracted to the NDP by the release of the socialist and nationalist Waffle manifesto the previous year by prominent left-wing party members in Ontario and the increasing activity of the Waffle in that province.[18] The Trotskyists in the FYS, meanwhile, were keen to join the NDP out of a commitment to the LSA policy of "entryism."

Entryism was a popular strategy amongst much of the Trotskyist movement in the Western world, and was developed largely as a response to what one observer of Trotskyism, Peter Shipley, called "the problems created by the weakness of Trotskyism and its lack of direct appeal for the working class." The rationale behind entryism was that in the absence of mass support for their cause, Trotskyists should attempt to reach the largest number of working class people as possible by entering into and working within their biggest political party, usually a social democratic party. Through entryism it was hoped that Trotskyists could exert some influence over the political opinions of workers and their political organizations.[19] The LSA held to entryist tactics and regarded the NDP as the political party by which the largest number of workers could be reached. Upon the creation of the New Party – the name of the interim organization that replaced the old Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and which soon become the NDP – the LSA rallied around the slogan of "win the New Party to a socialist policy."[20]

The decision on the part of the FYS and NBS to enter the local NDP would initiate the formation of the NB Waffle. This move, however, faced one major obstacle: there was, for all intents and purposes, no NDP organization in Fredericton in the spring of 1970. The local NDP riding association was moribund, having not met in two years and no more than five members.[21] If the FYS and NBS were going to become involved in the local NDP, they would have to build it first. They set out to contact the few party members in the federal riding of York-Sunbury, the constituency that encompassed Fredericton and its surrounding communities. The most prominent member of the York-Sunbury NDP was Pat Callaghan, who would become a major figure in the NB Waffle. Callaghan, a Scottish-born small business owner in his early-forties, had immigrated to Canada in 1954 and soon after settled in Fredericton. His politics were nurtured in the staunchly left-wing town of Dumbarton on the western end of greater Glasgow and, as he put it, "I was a socialist all my life."[22] Callaghan joined the CCF after arriving in Canada, was among the founding members of the New Brunswick NDP in December 1962, and ran as a federal NDP candidate in 1965 and 1968. It was Callaghan whom the FYS and NBS members approached in late April 1970 expressing an interest in joining the NDP.[23]

As a committed socialist, Callaghan was energized by the young leftists who displayed an interest in the NDP. Such was Callaghan’s enthusiasm that FYS member Carol Hamilton-Smith was pleased to report to an LSA colleague in Toronto that he "seems fairly good: he supports Watkins and feels there are too many right-wing elements in the NDP now." The first NDP meeting in York-Sunbury in two years was held almost immediately after the meeting with Callaghan. Callaghan became president while FYS and NBS members secured the other executive positions. The prospect of forming a Waffle group in New Brunswick was also soon discussed. Non-Trotskyist members made the initial push for forming a local Waffle, but the Trotskyist members soon saw a Waffle group as the perfect vehicle for entryism into the NDP and intended to promote Trotskyist policies within the NB Waffle. With the entire membership of the York-Sunbury NDP largely in agreement, the New Brunswick Waffle was unofficially formed in the spring of 1970.[24]

For the remainder of its existence, it is accurate to divide the NB Waffle into two tendencies. One tendency was Trotskyist – those NB Waffle members who were members of the YS within New Brunswick – while the other tendency can best be described as non-Trotskyist simply by virtue of their lack of allegiance to the LSA or YS. The political differences between the two tendencies were rather minimal; what distinguished them were tactics and the degree to which each side could be swayed or not swayed by an outside ideological force. The Trotskyist tendency was dominant within the FYS local in particular and Terry Hamilton-Smith was its most prominent member, especially following the departure of Eustace Mendis from Fredericton in July 1970.[25] The non-Trotskyist tendency was led by Pat Callaghan, the Rosses, and eventually a Scottish UNB student and former UNB student council president Alastair Robertson.[26]

During the summer of 1970 the NB Waffle was not yet a distinct group within the New Brunswick NDP, and the group’s members were preoccupied with building the organizational structure of the party in Fredericton. But they were also doing other things. They sought out of Waffle sympathizers in other parts of the province. Bill Ross informed prominent Ontario Waffler Mel Watkins about the NB Waffle’s formation and authored a small article announcing the group’s founding in the July 1970 edition of The Waffle News entitled "You Remember New Brunswick."[27] The FYS segment of the NB Waffle involved themselves in Fredericton’s anti-war and feminist movements and at the local high school.[28] And the FYS worked to establish YS locals elsewhere in New Brunswick, which laid the founation for the geographic expansion of the NB Waffle beyond Fredericton. A YS local in Charlotte County, centred around Black’s Harbour and Beaver Harbour, grew out of a small collection of socialists initially interested in the NBS in May 1970.[29]

The increasing and open involvement of the FYS in the NDP attracted the attention of Ross Dowson, the LSA’s national secretary. A veteran of the Canadian Trotskyist movement since the 1930s, Dowson was concerned that the extensive FYS involvement in the NDP would result in their expulsion from the party. Dowson communicated this concern to the FYS in June 1970 in a letter advising them to not intervene in the NDP at either the local or provincial level. Indeed, this was the only communication Dowson had with the FYS prior to the summer of 1971. FYS members regarded Dowson’s fears as misplaced and ignored his warnings.[30] The disagreement over the degree of caution to be used in the practice of entryism would come to define relations between the FYS and the LSA leadership.

The NB Waffle rejuvenated the NDP in York-Sunbury, and party membership in the riding rose to about 25 by September 1970, making the riding home to the second largest NDP membership base in the province (after Northumberland County, where the party had a small base of labour support). By August 1970 the NB Waffle decided to make its official debut. The NB Waffle was officially launched at the NB NDP convention on 12 September 1970 in Fredericton.[31] This debut by the NB Waffle came just as the New Brunswick NDP as a whole was preparing for its debut as a political force in the province. The NB NDP had been founded in 1962, yet financial and organizational difficulties, coupled with weak public support, prevented the party from seriously contesting a provincial election (no candidates were run in 1963 while only three ran in 1967). The party had also been leaderless since 1968.[32] In 1970, however, the party felt ready to make a full-fledged effort in the next provincial election, which came that fall.

At the same convention where the NB Waffle made its debut, J. Albert Richardson, a 33-year-old woods contractor from the Miramichi, was elected as party leader. The election of a new provincial council saw Wafflers win several important positions in the party, including Pat Callaghan as president and Maxine Ross as executive secretary. The NB Waffle also presented several policy resolutions to the convention that won support, including a call for a $2.00 minimum wage, limits on media ownership, the creation of Crown corporations for the natural resource sector, and a resolution in favour of women’s liberation. A Waffle resolution on industrial democracy, however, received a less enthusiastic response and was referred to the new executive for further study. A resolution supporting the Waffle manifesto was defeated by a vote of 24 to 18, with 10 abstentions.[33]

The NB NDP ran 31 candidates in the 1970 election (there were 58 seats in the province in total), almost all of them in anglophone ridings and primarily in areas where the party had a degree of union or Waffle strength. Richardson campaigned on a moderate socialist platform and confidently predicted that the NDP would win seven or eight seats. The results on election night, 26 October, proved disappointing as the party won only 2.8 per cent of the popular vote and failed to come close to winning any seats.[34] In spite of the NDP’s poor electoral showing, though, the party did establish itself as a minor political force in anglophone New Brunswick after the 1970 election.

The NB Waffle spent the next few months after the election building itself up in the province and assisting the Waffle elsewhere, namely through helping James Laxer, one of the authors of the Ontario Waffle manifesto, in his campaign for federal NDP leader in early 1971.[35] NB Waffle members also became involved in a union-organizing drive at the Connors Brothers sardine plant in Black’s Harbour. By November 1970 the YS local in the Black’s Harbour area had become the nucleus of a local Waffle group, which won control of the Carleton-Charlotte NDP riding association. The NB Waffle was attracting new members to the NDP in the province at a relatively rapid pace, and by February 1971 the two Waffle-dominated ridings had the first and second highest number of party members in New Brunswick. That the building of both the NDP and NB Waffle in these ridings occurred simultaneously indicates that in many parts of New Brunswick the NDP was an empty shell of an organization and the NB Waffle was effectively filling in many of the gaps. Waffle supporters were also identified in Moncton and Saint John, and in early 1971 YS locals were also established in Saint John and Sackville (though the latter was short-lived).[36]

The NB Waffle’s ability to attract new members to the NB NDP offers insights into the nature of the NDP in provinces where the party was weak during the 1960s and the first few years of the 1970s. The NDP and its predecessor the CCF were ideologically rooted parties, and within such parties there is always a tension between those who demand ideological purity at the cost of electoral success and those who advocate ideological flexibility within the larger aim of enacting change through victory. As Robert Hackett suggests in his study of the Ontario Waffle, there is a "general tendency in the CCF/NDP for a ‘movement’ orientation to prevail in regions or periods of scanty electoral success." Hackett adds that this movement-orientation is aided in such regions by two factors: the absence of a strong party apparatus (namely elected NDP politicians, who are often wary of a movement-oriented party) and the absence of a NDP organization that is a contender for power and thus more likely to attract political opportunists with political ambitions that supersede ideological conviction.[37]

New Brunswick in 1971 was just the sort of region and time period to which Hackett refers, and almost all New Democrats in the province could be said to have had a movement vision for the party (although there were significant differences among their visions). Even trade unionist NB Waffle opponents within the party were still committed to idea of a labour movement party. The excitement of long-time party members like Pat Callaghan towards the influx of radicals into the NDP, and the support that certain NB Waffle policies had among the bulk of the party membership, serve as testimony to the general movement-orientation of the NDP in New Brunswick.

Though the NB Waffle expanded into other parts of New Brunswick, Fredericton remained the movement’s geographic centre. By early 1971, local Wafflers were becoming a permanent fixture in the city’s activist scene. In February 1971 alone, the group participated in a local pro-choice march and a protest against the American invasion of Laos.[38] Fredericton Waffle members were meeting on a regular basis, often at Pat Callaghan’s home. According to Callaghan, these meetings were often accompanied by the drinking of homemade beer and the smoking of marijuana, and he recalled "there was quite a few meetings where you didn’t have to bring any [pot] with ya. All you had to do was inhale."[39] Among those new Waffle members who were attending these meetings was the aforementioned Alastair Robertson, who soon became a prominent member of the group.[40]

The growing strength of the NB Waffle did not go unnoticed by moderate party members. The president of the Chatham NDP, Ray LeBreton, commented in an open letter in March 1971 that "it would appear that we have a Waffle movement within our party ranks. This, I feel, we will have to contend with." He also stated that he would "fight tooth and nail against anything that would hinder the party’s chances of electing New Democrat MLAs" and called upon J. Albert Richardson to "take a strong step in coming to grips with the tension that is building up within this party."[41] This tension became evident that same month at a policy meeting held on 14 March in Renforth, outside of Saint John.

The meeting produced the first open split within the party. A Waffle resolution calling for the removal of marijuana possession from the Narcotics Control Act and for the government-administered sale of the drug was passed by a vote of 20 to 8. A subsequent motion to table the resolution to allow for more debate and discussion was defeated by a similar margin. The meeting’s coordinator, Waffler Gary Zatzman, declared that all resolutions passed at the meeting were to automatically become party policy. J. Albert Richardson, who was unable to attend the meeting due to snow conditions, stated upon hearing this that only resolutions passed at conventions became party policy. The resolution on marijuana possession was later ratified at a council meeting in Fredericton, but the others were not recognized by Richardson and other moderates, who accused Wafflers of manipulating the party’s constitution. The split within the party became public and both Callaghan and Richardson called for each other’s resignation. This division, however, was resolved by the end of March 1971, with both sides concluding that any disagreements were of "a minor nature" – though it was more of a ceasefire than a peace treaty. It had become obvious that a struggle for control of the party had emerged and that it would have to be addressed and settled at the party’s next convention, which was scheduled for late September.[42]

The Trotskyist section of the NB Waffle sought to increase its influence over the rest of the group during the spring of 1971, perhaps in part because the recent conflict within the NDP was initiated by non-Trotskyist members (as most of the Trotskyists had been attending a conference in Halifax on the weekend of the Renforth meeting). They also feared that the non-Trotskyist Wafflers would lose the will to fight for control of the party and thus tried to prepare the NB Waffle for a battle with the moderates over NDP party policy and executive positions at the September convention. The Trotskyists also encouraged the NB Waffle to make a foray into municipal politics by running candidates in the June 1971 civic elections. Nine NDP members, six of whom were YS members, ran for positions in Fredericton and Charlotte County.[43]

These activities on the part of New Brunswick Trotskyists did not go unnoticed by LSA national secretary Ross Dowson. Having already expressed his concerns the previous year to the FYS about the risks of operating too openly, Dowson reiterated these concerns in a letter in July 1971. Dowson was convinced that a "wave of radicalization" was sweeping across Canada, that this was reflected within the NB NDP, and that any expulsion of Trotskyists from the party would "constitute a serious rupture in our work to further radicalize the NDP." Dowson urged the FYS to adopt a more cautious policy of working within the NB Waffle and NB NDP.[44] But Dowson’s concerns met with little sympathy in New Brunswick. New Brunswick Trotskyists claimed that they were strong enough to withstand any expulsion attempt. They thought that Dowson did not understand the situation of the left in New Brunswick, which was assessed by Terry Hamilton-Smith as being small enough and radical enough to make "formulations which would be anathema in Ontario" acceptable in the province. Dowson was regarded as trying to force a strategy designed for Trotskyists in Toronto upon Trotskyists in Fredericton, and he was simply ignored.[45]

By late-August 1971, the NB Waffle was preparing for a victory within the NB NDP at the party’s convention (scheduled for the weekend of 25-26 September 1971 in Saint John).[46] The group would seek the election of a full slate of Wafflers to all party offices and the passage of their manifesto and platform, which was crafted on the eve of the convention.[47] The NB Waffle manifesto, entitled "For a Socialist New Brunswick," presented an uncompromising assault on the political and economic status quo in the province as of 1971. Previous provincial governments were attacked for maintaining low wages, pitiful welfare provisions, and using tax dollars to entice capital to locate in New Brunswick. Corporations, both local and non-local, were accused of exploiting New Brunswick’s labour force and natural resources and of wreaking environmental destruction. Ottawa-inspired regional economic plans were derided as plots intended to promote planned capitalist underdevelopment. The manifesto called for these economic and political wrongs to be remedied by socialism, defined as "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange under workers’ control, with production for need rather than profit." The NDP was to play a key role in the introduction of socialism by unifying the powerless and exploited with a socialist analysis and program. The manifesto then presented a synopsis of the NB Waffle’s resolutions and a declaration of solidarity with Quebec nationalists and various "national liberation struggles." The manifesto concluded: "We call upon all the oppressed and exploited people of our province to join with us and our sisters and brothers elsewhere in Canada and throughout the world in this struggle for a government of the working class. Its achievement will be a world in which the dominion of the many by the few, that blight of all times past, is ended."[48]

The manifesto was augmented by seven policy resolutions that articulated in greater detail the recommendations of the manifesto in addition to other concerns. The economic resolutions were aimed at creating a fusion of state-directed socialism with workers’ control and industrial democracy. The nationalization or bringing into common ownership of essentially the entire economy was advocated and, in all cases, was to be done without compensation.[49] Co-operatives were also celebrated for their "anti-capitalist, socially-oriented nature."[50] This blending of top-down socialism with grassroots collectivism was also present in the group’s resolution on housing, which called for a massive program of public housing along with the encouragement of housing co-operatives and the democratic control of housing projects.[51]

The resolution on trade unions and the organization of labour was certainly reflective of its Trotskyist author. It emphasized trade unions as a major vehicle for working class political action and called for the leadership of unions by a socialist party as well as "the formation within unions of a militant, politically-conscious and socialist leadership" and the affiliation of trade unions and their members with the NDP along with the unconditional support of the party for all strikes.[52] While the resolution on women’s rights also had a Trotskyist author, its content had broad left-wing appeal. It promoted equal pay for equal work and an end to sex-based pay discrimination, the provision of maternity leave with full pay, 24-hour childcare centres, and free abortion on demand.[53] The planks contained within the women’s rights resolution were actually accepted by most party members, part of a larger trend within the NDP at the time in which the party became the political vehicle of much of the feminist movement.[54] One Waffle opponent recalled that the group’s abortion stance was the NB Waffle policy most embraced by the party following the group’s demise.[55]

The resolution on cultural affairs called for government support of artists, the "elimination of all private profit-making and entrepreneurial exploitation" of artists, common ownership of cultural enterprises and institutions, and an end to all censorship.[56] It was in the resolution on education, though, where the left-libertarian and counter-cultural influences in the NB Waffle were most evident. The resolution on education advocated the abolition of compulsory education "except for the requirement that children complete, at some time between the ages of five and ten years, a program of appropriate length, not to exceed three years, suitably designed to develop basic language and mathematical skills." The elimination of all forms of grading, streaming, and competitive evaluation in educational institutions was also demanded.[57]

The content of the NB Waffle manifesto set it ideologically apart from the Ontario Waffle in some significant ways. The Ontario Waffle manifesto, officially entitled "For an Independent and Socialist Canada," called for major state ownership and planning in the economy; thus, while it clearly sat on the left of the Canadian political spectrum, it could hardly be described as Marxist or revolutionary. Moreover, apart from its tirades against the American empire and acknowledgement of political changes in Quebec, it was primarily an economic document focused on foreign ownership of the Canadian economy and its implications for Canadian sovereignty. The Ontario manifesto’s call for worker participation in the workplace was a common practice in Western Europe, and the blending of Canadian political and economic independence was a major theme in traditional Canadian conservatism of the Tory sort; the Ontario Waffle was merely giving this conservative tradition a socialist reorientation. Indeed, some of the concerns raised by the Ontario Waffle, particularly in regards to foreign ownership, became widely accepted concerns among a cross-section of Canadians during the 1970s and even made their way in a muted form into some of the economic policies of Pierre Trudeau.[58] While the manifesto cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric, and while it did advance a plan for a democratic socialist Canada, it paled in comparison to "For a Socialist New Brunswick" – both in terms of the latter’s scope and its extreme positions. Moderate New Brunswick New Democrats who thought they would be contending with an NB Waffle manifesto similar to the one introduced in Ontario would be surprised.

As the convention approached, however, the Trotskyist wing of the group was thrown into confusion. On 1 September 1971 the Central Executive Council (CEC) of the YS, based in Toronto, suspended "from all rights of membership but not from any of the obligations of membership," the members of the Fredericton and Halifax YS locals, with an investigation by a YS-established commission to follow. The most serious charge against the FYS was that the nature of the local’s work within the NDP went against LSA/YS policy.[59] Upon hearing news of its’ members suspension, FYS officials were not sure whether working within the NDP constituted a "right" that was to be abandoned or an "obligation" that was supposed to be continued. The FYS sought clarification on the matter in a letter sent to the CEC on 22 September 1971, the urgency of the matter intensified by the approaching convention.[60] Uncertain as to what to do, the FYS began to withdraw from involvement in the NB Waffle. Non-Trotskyist Wafflers resented this move, and one Waffler described the FYS’s actions as "coitus interruptus."[61] Still uncertain of their role in regards to the NDP, a few YS members attended the NB NDP convention in Saint John.[62]

All of the leading figures within the non-Trotskyist wing of the NB Waffle were among the 89 delegates who attended the NB NDP convention.[63] On the morning of 25 September, four Waffle resolutions were voted on first, with mixed reactions from the delegates. The resolution on labour and workers’ organization was referred back to the party’s committee. The resolution on education was narrowly defeated, while the resolutions on housing and women’s rights were passed by wide margins. After a lunch break and votes on a few non-Waffle resolutions, there was the vote on the NB Waffle manifesto itself. The manifesto was passed by a vote of 41-40, with four abstentions.[64]

Both Wafflers and non-Wafflers expressed shock following the vote. Alastair Robertson admitted to members of the media present that he was "surprised" and that they "didn’t expect the support that [they] got."[65] NB Waffle opponents were also caught completely off-guard by the Waffle manifesto victory. Barrie Hould, a railway union organizer from Moncton, recalled that while everyone knew that the NB Waffle would make a showing at the convention, they expected that the group would be nothing more than a mild irritant. As he stated: "We felt that everything was secure and that we were going to be able to do our thing and this group would have a voice and the rest of it but they would never reach the point at which they could organize and throw a convention. So ‘whoops’– it happened."[66]

For NB Waffle opponents, the passage of the manifesto transgressed the limits of social democracy. Moncton and District Labour Council President David Webster claimed that the manifesto "crossed the line" between socialism and communism while J. Albert Richardson denounced the manifesto as "totalitarian" and maintained that it would be revoked. Those who opposed the NB Waffle manifesto expressed their dissatisfaction further with their feet. Nine labour delegates immediately walked out of the convention and others soon joined them, and the convention was soon denied enough delegates for quorum. With the convention in shambles, an NB NDP provincial council meeting was hastily organized that included those delegates who originally walked out.[67] It was agreed that the convention should be postponed and continued in Fredericton on 16 October.[68] With the NB NDP convention postponed, both sides left determined to secure a final victory within the party.

Anti-Waffle forces sought assistance from the federal NDP, which was informed of what happened in New Brunswick by the convention’s guest speaker, Saskatchewan New Democrat Member of Parliament A.P. Gleave.[69] A petition signed by 28 anti-Waffle party members expressing their grievances was sent to the federal party within a week of the Saint John convention.[70] Federal NDP secretary Clifford Scotton became entangled in the split within the NB NDP when he attended an anti-Waffle meeting in Moncton on 3 October with about 30 other party members. Scotton scolded trade unionists in attendance for failing to prevent the Waffle victory and expressed concern over what sort of repercussions the events in New Brunswick might have on the NDP’s performance in the Ontario election, which was to be held in mid-October.[71] The impact of the NB NDP split on NDP prospects elsewhere in Canada appeared to be the federal NDP’s primary concern, as the NB NDP was urged to wait until after the Ontario election and a federal by-election in Saskatchewan before resolving the dispute.[72]

Scotton offered to act as a mediator between the two sides of the NB NDP split, and suggested that the 16 October convention be suspended so that the federal NDP executive could hear submissions from all parties involved in the dispute.[73] Non-Wafflers were comfortable with this proposition, but Wafflers felt otherwise. Pat Callaghan, now party leader according to the Wafflers, defiantly declared that the NB NDP convention would continue on 16 October as planned and that "provincial matters should be referred to [the] provincial president, not [the] federal secretary."[74] Upon hearing Callaghan’s response, the non-Waffle members of the party executive decided on 10 October in Moncton that the scheduled 16 October meeting would be converted from a convention into a provincial council meeting. Callaghan rejected this move and held that any decisions reached at this meeting would be illegal.[75] The split within the NB NDP deepened, with both sides agreeing that a meeting would be held on 16 October while disagreeing over what type of meeting it would be.

Maintaining that the meeting scheduled for 16 October would be a continuation of the NB NDP convention, non-Trotskyist Wafflers were making preparations to complete their victory within the party at this meeting. The NB Waffle recruited into the NDP people in the Fredericton area who were supportive of their aims in the hopes of winning over the meeting with raw numbers.[76] Pat Callaghan also announced that he would run for the party leadership at the meeting as well.[77] The Trotskyist wing of the NB Waffle, meanwhile, was still uncertain as to how to deal with the emerging split within the party. The FYS disagreed with LSA national secretary Ross Dowson’s fear that the NB Waffle would precipitate a split within the NB NDP and thus ruin the party as a vehicle for Trotskyist influence.[78] Dowson communicated with the local in the week after the Saint John convention yet offered little in the way of concrete advice on how to proceed. The FYS decided to err on the side of caution and cease all involvement in the NDP.[79]

From early October onward the NB Waffle ceased to function as a united entity. The group was effectively split into Trotskyist and non-Trotskyist factions. The split was based almost entirely upon the willingness of each faction to continue or cease the intensifying battle with the moderate wing of the NB NDP as well as the federal party leadership. Moreover, the Trotskyist influence within the NB Waffle had completely evaporated. The non-Trotskyist wing of the group was frustrated by what they saw as the Trotskyist’s bending to LSA/YS dictates to the detriment of the NB Waffle. When Dowson instructed the FYS to intervene in the NB Waffle on 11 October (in the hopes of steering it away from a battle with the rest of the NB NDP), the animosity between the two camps within the group became open warfare. The non-Trotskyist wing of the NB Waffle suggested that the FYS members either break ranks with the LSA/YS or face reprisals. This threat was made clear on 15 October at a Waffle meeting in Fredericton, where the main item of business was the removal of Terry Hamilton-Smith as the York-Sunbury constituency representative on the provincial council. The rationale for this move was to prevent Hamilton-Smith from intervening against the NB Waffle at the provincial council meeting scheduled for the next day.[80]

The NB NDP meeting of 16 October in Fredericton (held at the University of New Brunswick’s Carleton Hall) went ahead as planned, though it became a series of meetings. The first meeting, held in the morning, was an ad hoc provincial council meeting called by Pat Callaghan himself, which was attended by about 10 members and only recognized as legitimate by Waffle members. All those in attendance adjourned the meeting to participate in what they saw as the continuation of the convention, which was scheduled for the afternoon.[81] Following this brief ad hoc gathering, though, the non-Waffle wing of the party held a provincial council meeting that they recognized as legitimate, with about 45 party members in attendance (including some Wafflers – presumably as observers). A motion was voted on and passed at this council meeting that called for a special party convention to be held in Chatham on 27 November, the vote tally being twenty-nine in favour, ten against, and two abstentions. The purpose of the special convention would be to settle the dispute sparked at the Saint John convention. With a special convention scheduled, the meeting adjourned.[82]

The NB Waffle, however, regarded this meeting as invalid, and proceeded with what they asserted was the continuation of the NB NDP convention – in the same room as the previous provincial council meeting. The resumed convention was essentially a large Waffle meeting, attended by 74 people, which reflected the recent recruitment drive by Fredericton Wafflers.[83] The meeting featured a heated exchange between several Waffle members and Peggy Prowse, a Nova Scotian member of the federal NDP executive, during which she attacked the "Communist Party" members who were infiltrating the NB NDP. The meeting concluded with Pat Callaghan being elected as party leader with 63 votes compared to two votes for J. Albert Richardson (who was nominated in absentia). Alastair Robertson was acclaimed as party president.[84] As a result of the events of 16 October, the NB NDP was completely split, with both Richardson and Callaghan claiming to be party leader and possessing rival party executives. Both the non-Waffle wing of the NB NDP and the federal NDP declared that the reconvened convention had no validity.[85] The non-Waffle wing requested that the federal NDP do what it could to assist them at their next federal council meeting, which was scheduled for 12-14 November in Ottawa, and the federal NDP agreed to do so.[86]

As the NB NDP split apart, so too did the NB Waffle. The FYS was effectively cut out of the group, and Terry Hamilton-Smith told the LSA/YS leadership that their decision to suspend the FYS represented "the single largest setback" to the work of the Trotskyist movement in New Brunswick. The FYS viewed the LSA/YS leadership as having acted in such a manner as to nullify the progress that the local had made within the NB NDP during the previous year and a half. In a letter to the Political Committee of the LSA, Hamilton-Smith stated:

The only effects of the application of this line have been to pluck us out of the leadership of the Waffle, to undercut our work in the Waffle, to diminish our influence in the N.B. labour and student movements and to alienate a number of contacts from us who are potential recruits to the LSA/LSO or YS/LJS. With our diminished influence we can predict that the application of this line will have a totally insignificant effect on the present struggle in the NDP except to render our own role ineffective. As long as this particular line remains in force we will be crippled in New Brunswick.[87]

The position of the FYS was clear: the LSA/YS leadership was taking an approach towards the NDP that was killing the Trotskyist movement in New Brunswick. According to the FYS, the Trotskyist leadership itself aborted an impending victory.[88] It was obvious to many in the FYS, and indeed in the LSA/YS elsewhere in Canada, that the veteran leadership of the movement was more interested in preventing an expulsion of Trotskyists from the NDP than they were in forwarding a more radical program for the party.[89]

Fears of a wholesale expulsion of Trotskyists from the NDP were exacerbated at the 12-14 November NDP federal council meeting. Five NB NDP members made the trip to Ottawa to be at the meeting: Pat Callaghan, Alastair Robertson, and Ronald Lees represented the pro-Waffle side while J. Albert Richardson and John Boyle represented the anti-Waffle side.[90] Prominent members of the NDP in attendance were not sympathetic to the NB Waffle. Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis blamed the NB Waffle for generating bad press that had contributed to the party’s disappointing showing in the recent Ontario election.[91] Federal NDP leader David Lewis launched a passionate attack upon the NB Waffle manifesto, stating that it "may be Maoist, or Trots or simply old-fashioned Communism, but whatever it is, it isn’t New Democratic."[92] Following Lewis’s tirade, the following motion was passed by the federal council by a vote of thirty-nine to five, with three abstentions: "That until such time as the New Brunswick NDP can produce evidence satisfactory to the federal NDP officers, that they have conducted a proper convention, that we do not have a New Brunswick NDP."[93] With the passage of this motion, the NB NDP was suspended until the special convention scheduled for 27 November in Chatham.

The non-Trotskyist wing of the NB Waffle was outraged at the decision made by the NDP’s federal council. Pat Callaghan claimed that the party’s constitution had been violated, as it provided for fully autonomous provincial sections. He did not keep his displeasure with the federal NDP secret either, telling the provincial media that it was up to the people of New Brunswick "to decide whether to accept or reject our policies, not David Lewis or the union brass of Ontario." Callaghan was not optimistic about the NB Waffle’s future within the NB NDP, as he expected the non-Waffle forces to muster enough strength at the Chatham special convention to overwhelm the group. Sensing that the end of the NB Waffle’s position within the NB NDP was near, non-Trotskyist Wafflers considered the alternatives. Some members entertained the possibility of forming a separate party, and Callaghan talked about reviving the CCF in New Brunswick. The future of the NB Waffle would be decided at a meeting scheduled by group members for 21 November in Fredericton.[94]

The Trotskyist wing of the NB Waffle, meanwhile, was trying its best (and failing) to convince the members of the NB Waffle to recognize the authority of the NDP federal council, to remain within the NB NDP "at all costs," and to attend the 27 November special convention. In response to the Trotskyists’ insistence that peace be made with the moderates within the party, an active "Trot-baiting" campaign, by which those in sympathy with these aims were sought out and exposed, was launched by non-Trotskyist Wafflers following the NB NDP suspension. Having been so instrumental in creating the NB Waffle, the Trotskyists of the FYS now felt as though they had created a monster that they could no longer control. The FYS prepared to force a split of the NB Waffle at the 21 November meeting. Their plan was to then form a new NB Waffle that would attempt to remain within the NB NDP. The new Waffle would adopt the Ontario Waffle manifesto with a modified labour resolution, and would attend the Chatham special convention in the hope of making amends with the rest of the NB NDP and thus avoid an expulsion.[95]

When the NB Waffle met on 21 November in Fredericton to determine its future, the demoralization of the group was evident in the fact that just over 30 people were in attendance, less than half the number who attended the 16 October meeting. Following an exchange of views concerning what to do as a group, the FYS presented a motion that called for recognition of the federal council’s authority and its decisions as well as for Waffle members to attend the special convention. The motion passed by a vote of 17 to 14.[96] The FYS had managed to gain control over the remains of the NB Waffle while the non-Trotskyist Wafflers accepted the vote and retreated from the group.

There were 17 Wafflers, including 6 Trotskyist members, among the delegates at the NB NDP special convention in Chatham on 27 November. None of the prominent non-Trotskyist Wafflers such as Pat Callaghan attended. The primary aim of the Trotskyists in attendance was to avoid the expulsion of any Waffle supporters, an aim that compelled Trotskyist members to cut deals with non-Waffle members. J. Albert Richardson was acclaimed as party leader and the newly elected provincial council featured no Trotskyist members and only two Waffle supporters. Former Ontario NDP leader Donald MacDonald, now a member of the NDP federal council, observed the convention for the federal NDP and declared the gathering to be valid. At an executive meeting held immediately after the convention, it was decided that the leading NB Waffle members ought to be expelled. Seven names were put forward, including Pat Callaghan, Alastair Robertson, and Bill Ross. MacDonald suggested that the matter be handled "like we do it in Ontario" by simply allowing the membership of those in question to expire and not be renewed. With the adoption of this move, the split within the NB NDP came to an end.[97]

The month after the Chatham special convention witnessed the complete unraveling of the NB Waffle. The two Waffle-dominated riding associations (York-Sunbury and Carleton-Charlotte) were in shambles.[98] The prominent non-Trotskyist members of the group largely removed themselves from political activity. Pat Callaghan, having denounced the Chatham special convention as "a sham and a fiasco," resigned as president of the York-Sunbury NDP in February 1972 and considered leaving the NDP to join the newly formed Parti Acadien.[99] Alastair Robertson withdrew entirely from the NDP and, as a student from Scotland, would soon be leaving New Brunswick anyway. Two Wafflers, Jay Baxter and Gary Zatzman, formed a small "revolutionary" group in Fredericton, but it attracted limited support. The FYS, meanwhile, were never able to put their plans for the truncated NB Waffle into action. The battle between the LSA/YS leadership and the FYS had all but obliterated the Trotskyist movement in New Brunswick. By the end of 1971, only the Fredericton local of the YS remained in the province and it had no more than nine members.[100] Any mention of the NB Waffle at FYS meetings ceased by mid-December, as the local became preoccupied with work at Fredericton High School and appealing the censure of the local.[101] By the beginning of 1972, the NB Waffle was dead.

Following its brief and caustic life, the NB Waffle left a varied mark upon the NB NDP. The most obvious change initiated within the NB NDP by the NB Waffle was in the shift in terms of composition of the party. The end of the NB Waffle reduced Fredericton and Charlotte County as major bases of NDP activity and shifted geographic control of the party to Moncton, Sackville, Saint John, and Miramichi. This geographic shift within the party was aided in part by the movement of many trade unionists into the NB NDP, very few of whom lived in areas of Waffle strength. The bulk of New Brunswick’s labour movement had little interest in the NDP prior to the 1970s, but the dispute with the NB Waffle prompted many trade unionists to take a more active role in the party – in part to prevent a similar radical takeover in the future. The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) pressured the New Brunswick Federation of Labour (NBFL) to participate more actively in the NB NDP, and the CLC sent a staff person to organize support for the party in the heavily unionized Bathurst area. The party executive elected at the Chatham special convention included more trade unionists than ever before, and there was a slight movement of NBFL officials into the party and an increase in the number of NDP-affiliated locals in the province.[102] Simply put, the NB Waffle contributed to further rooting the provincial labour movement in the NB NDP by scaring its senior leadership into more active support for the party.

The NB Waffle had mixed results when it came to the role of the New Left in the NB NDP. The New Left in New Brunswick had little use for the NDP prior to the NB Waffle. The NB Waffle sought to make the NDP a relevant political vehicle for New Left radicals and encouraged many anglophone New Leftists in New Brunswick to pay attention to the party for the first time. The chaotic events of late 1971, however, eradicated the notion of the NB NDP as a useful political vehicle among many New Leftists for some time.

The NB Waffle did, however, force the NB NDP to become more aware of and acknowledge the existence of the New Left and its concerns, namely feminism, the environment, and the negative impacts of societal institutionalization. Prior to the NB Waffle, the NB NDP was rather oblivious to New Left concerns or analysis, and the group gave the party a crash course in New Left radicalism. The popularity of NB Waffle policies on such matters as women’s’ liberation, as demonstrated by the wide support that certain resolutions received at the Saint John convention, suggest that the group was capable of influencing a cross-section of the established NB NDP membership in some areas. While New Left radicals may have been disappointed by the outcome of the NB Waffle episode, the group may have paved the way for more moderate New Leftists to find a permanent political home in the party as the 1970s progressed. Non-economic concerns championed by the NB Waffle, namely women’s issues[103] and environmentalism, became centrepieces of NB NDP policy after John LaBossiere, a teacher from Kent County, replaced Richardson as party leader in 1976.[104]

The impact of the NB Waffle on the Canadian Trotskyist movement was more immediate and severe than on the NB NDP. The nascent Trotskyist movement in New Brunswick was fully discredited by the actions of the LSA leadership in the fall of 1971, and the YS had disappeared from the province by the end of 1972.[105] Fallout from the manner in which Ross Dowson and the LSA leadership handled the NB Waffle victory extended beyond New Brunswick, as the NB Waffle episode became a reference point for Canadian Trotskyists who were skeptical of the LSA’s entryist strategy towards the NDP. Debate about the LSA actions towards the NB Waffle emerged in Ontario in particular in 1972 and 1973 as the Trotskyist movement suffered further setbacks in their interventions within the NDP in general and the Waffle in particular.[106]

One of the first tirades about the LSA leadership’s treatment of the NB Waffle and the province’s Trotskyists, for instance, was penned by Walter Davis, a member of the Toronto West local, in November 1972. He accused the LSA Political Committee of practicing a failed line towards the NDP that "led to a debacle that has set back the left in [New Brunswick] for years to come." He concluded: "The tailism of the leadership caused the LSA to miss important opportunities for adding to the forces of Trotskyism in Canada. How many times will this be the case? The 1971 repression of the New Brunswick Waffle was led by the united forces of [David] Lewis-[Mel] Watkins-Dowson. The first two stand historically convicted of crimes against the revolution. The last must answer to the future."[107]

Davis was joined by another Toronto West local member, Bret Smiley, for a co-written assault on the entryist policy of the LSA. They argued that the LSA’s policy towards the NDP was "criminal" as it made the Trotskyist movement vulnerable to absorption by reformist social democrats.[108] Don Van Wart, a member of the FYS, took the mounting criticisms of the LSA’s policy of entryism towards the NDP a step further, suggesting that it was not about "winning the NDP to socialism" at all, but solely about seeking shelter within the NDP. Van Wart implied that the stated aims of entryism were a sham and stated "the LSA/LSO policy is one of political liquidation into the NDP in exchange for minor areas of organizational control (i.e., Left Caucus) and security (i.e., not being expelled). The actual content of ‘Win the NDP to socialism’ is the loss of the LSA to social democracy."[109]

The Canadian Trotskyist movement had always had those who doubted the value of entryism – who worried that it would reduce Trotskyists to paying lip service to revolution while living in constant fear of offending social democratic forces. The NB Waffle episode offered a real-life case study for opponents of entryism to which they could now point. The events provoked by the NB Waffle thus caused an intensification of the debate around entryism within the LSA, the ultimate impact of which was to discredit Dowson and other veteran LSA leaders among many Canadian Trotskyists and thus contribute to the fracturing of the LSA itself in 1973.[110]

The NB Waffle reflected the unique role of the NDP in Canadian leftist and radical politics during this era. For such a radical organization to become actively and eagerly involved in the machinery of a political party, and in many cases having to construct that very machinery, is something that certainly separates the Canadian New Left from its American counterpart. There was a parliamentary socialist tradition in Canada, represented in the CCF and NDP, that made party politics a more attractive option for Canadian radical leftists. As Myrna Kostash puts it, the Canadian New Left "was not, thanks to the social democratic tradition, sentenced like the Americans to rootless improvisations of radicalism."[111] The NDP ended up providing a common forum where various generations of leftists gathered. This was particularly the case in provinces like New Brunswick, where the NDP was weak and thus lacked a professional institutional apparatus – as it had elsewhere in Canada – that may have dissuaded more extreme radicals from joining the party. This combination of a Canadian parliamentary left tradition and the weakness of the primary left party (the NDP) in New Brunswick greatly helped to determine both the path chosen by the NB Waffle and its ultimate fate.

Although it can be said to have been less than a success, the NB Waffle’s efforts at least made possible the idea that the NDP could become a bridge between the Old Left and the New Left in anglophone New Brunswick. The NB Waffle attempted, albeit in a rather hasty and unsophisticated manner, to marry the NB NDP to the growing social and radical ferment emerging in New Brunswick during the late-1960s and early-1970s, and in doing so paved the way for the broadening of the NB NDP’s left-wing base by the late-1970s (albeit not as far to the left as the NB Waffle would have preferred).

The NB Waffle was part of the larger continental and global political ferment of that era, and it represented an attempt to develop a New Brunswick-specific variation on existing radical movements, analyses, and strategies. While their prescriptions for the province were generic ultra-left fare, the group still sought to understand the particular nature of the problems facing New Brunswick. The introduction of the NB Waffle manifesto, for instance, denounced explicit features of capitalism in early-1970s New Brunswick, rather than offering a more standard radical attack more suited to the problems of an industrial and highly urbanized economy. This fact is one of the major differences between the manifestos of the New Brunswick Waffle and the Ontario Waffle.

The Ontario Waffle, on the pretense of speaking for all of Canada, was really addressing the problems facing the industrial and urban economy of southern Ontario – an economy that was intimately tied to the American industrial economy and one that still operated as the central pivot of the pan-Canadian economy. New Brunswick’s economy, on the other hand, was still dominated by agriculture and resource extraction and processing, and it had little heavy industry. It was also an economy that was in a hinterland relationship with the central Canadian metropolis. Therefore, it would have made little sense for a New Brunswick-based group to adopt wholesale the Ontario Waffle manifesto as a mission statement that was relevant to the province. Indeed, the tailoring of the Ontario Waffle manifesto to suit the reality of hinterland regions was a common theme within the movement across Canada. As Robert Hackett observes, everywhere outside of southern Ontario the Waffle’s focus on "Canada Firstism," or Canadian nationalism, was mediated by regional/hinterland concerns.[112] The NB Waffle, therefore, represented a partial "New Brunswickization" of the radical left during the period. The NB Waffle also provided a radical socialist and New Left critique of New Brunswick that anticipated the growing skepticism towards the status quo, particularly in terms of regional economic development policy, that emerged in the Maritimes during the 1970s.[113]

The story of the NB Waffle adds much towards our understanding of New Brunswick’s political history and culture. The group places anglophone New Brunswick within a larger stream of the leftist radicalism of the late-1960s and early-1970s yet also reveals the degree to which there was a unique New Brunswick variation on this radicalism. The group marks a shift in New Brunswick’s larger leftist community, in which the Old Left-dominated NDP came into contact with the New Left and in which the extra-parliamentary left was brought closer to formal party politics. The group inadvertently contributed to debates within both the NDP and the Canadian Trotskyist movement – debates that reflected a mix of ideological, tactical, and regional tensions. Finally, the story of the NB Waffle demonstrates that there is still much to be gained in our understanding of New Brunswick’s political history from a deeper and more thorough examination of the province’s leftist community.